School! Snape the bully? (was: Is Draco worse than James Was?)

[princesspeaette]

No: HPFGUIDX 77921

Margaret: 
> <lots of snipping> 
>I think Sirius and James were both majorly at fault here.  The only 
>person who came out of that smelling like a rose is Lily.
> 
>~Margaret, still firmly in the pro-Snape camp, and was just trying 
>to see the other side


 
> Laura replied:
> 
>Now wait a minute.  We read in canon more than once that James and 
>Sirius were popular.  Bullies tend not to fit that description. So I 
>would deduce that their bad behavior was directed at people who were 
>out of line in some obvious way.  And we know that James 
>straightened up by the time he was 16 (or else he couldn't have been 
>a candidate for Head Boy when he was 17).  Once he did that, Sirius 
>would probably have cooled out himself, since he held James in 
>greater esteem than anyone else (and he would have lost his favorite 
>co-conspirator).  
> 
>We just don't have the whole picture of the James/Sirius-Snape 
>relationship.  And now it looks like we never will.


Margaret again: 

I have known many popular bullies over the years.  It's all in WHO 
you bully. In school I saw people who were totally off the social 
radar *become* popular after publicly picking on the right person.  
And those people were not 'out of line in some way' unless you 
consider not being a part of the "in-crowd" being out of line.  They 
were the people who's parents didn't have a lot of money, the people 
who were too smart, too quiet, too short, too tall, too fat, too 
skinny, too "weird" (whatever the hell that means).  Anything that 
deviated from the people who prided themselves on being 'normal', 
never realizing what sheep that made them into. 

Some of those former bullies eventually grew up and some of those 
became very nice people.  Others never grew up, and always thought 
they had been justified in what they had done, and I'm afraid Sirius 
may fall in this catagory.  That may be because I was never a big 
Sirius fan, I like what he represented to Harry, but that's about it.

Most of the people who were treated like this, the ones I've talked 
to at least, didn't forget.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the James & Sirius 
vs. Severus relationship fits into this dynamic.  


~Margaret