[HPforGrownups] Re: OoP: I'll do it: In defense of James

[pjuel13 at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 62744

Jens says regarding Snapes use of Mudblood and Lily's recation to it:

>She was especially stung because he hadn't ever showed signs of racism 
>before and retaliated.

Where in the text do you find anything supporting this humble opinion? 

I could just as easily claim that Snape intiated the war between James and 
himself, maybe with a blood traitor crack and one of those nasty little scalpel 
curses he appears to be adept at, back on their first day at hogwarts but 
there'd be nothing to back it up. 

I'm honestly baffled by the postiviely gymnastic attempts I've seen the past 
couple of days to craft Snape into the eternally misunderstood innocent 
goth-boy who's smacked around by the jocks because he wears eyeliner and has a Hot 
Topic frequent buyer's card. 
Were James and Sirius complete berks (and the UK folks will tell you this 
epithet is, well, well beyond git and prat) at the age of 15? Yes! and Sirius 
says just that and says he regrets it. I'd like to believe him, others, for 
various reasons would not like to.   
But from the bulk of the other information we have they grew out of it. James 
became a man deeply mourned by those who knew him (with the exception of 
Vernon and Petunia, who have appearently become for some, sources of accurate 
assesments on James' "real" personality) and Sirius became a man who people were 
stunned to believe had betrayed his friends. 
Does their maturation justify what they did as 15 year olds, of course not. 
But what happened Snape at that age doesn't justify his sometimes highly 
questionable actions now and in the not too distant past. James and Sirius were 
jerkwads there in The Infamous Pensive Scene but those who wore the death eater 
brand slaughtered whole families, tortured muggles for fun, and sought to bring 
a monster to domination of the wizarding world. No amount of teenage teasing 
justifies or excuses that. And though Snape has now repented his death eater 
ways, it dang sure doesn't excuse physically assualting Harry either. No matter 
how shamed he was or how much having Harry see that hurt, adults don't 
physically assault kids like that. They just don't. Being abused is no excuse for 
becoming an abuser. 
>From what the information we got in the early chapters of OotP it looks as if 
Sirius' childhood up until he was able to escape to the Potter's house was 
pretty throughly awful. You don't cut all ties with your immediate family unless 
you've got a good reason to. That presumed rotten childhood in that vile 
house with that mad, bigoted, cruel family most certainly doesn't excuse what he 
did to Snape. So why should it be different with Snape and his actions towards 
Harry and Hermione and most particularly Neville? Or futhermore, with his 
joining the death eaters? 

As tempting as it is to break down The Infamous Pensieve Scene to its 
simplest level, evil jocks versus weak and misunderstood goth-boy, as JKR has taken 
pains to show us, the world doesn't quite work that way. It's never that 
simple. People are much more complex and the reader should always be careful about 
what might seem obvious on the face of things. There are literally years of 
interaction between Snape, James, Sirius, and the others on each side that we are 
not seeing and have only the vaugest information on. 
Even the "because he exists" line requires context for honest evaluation. If, 
for example, James and Snape had been at each other's throats since day one, 
each attacking the other in the manner most suited to their particular skills, 
James from strength and Snape from stealth, with alternating success; then I 
suspect that after 5 year each boy would justify their actions against the 
other with that very line.  
It the absence of true context, of someone giving an unbiased chronology of 
the 7 years of James and Snape interaction, the line simply means whatever the 
reader wants to percieve it as. If you believe that Snape was an unalloyed 
victim from the first and that James and his friends were never more than the 
Hogwarts version of the jocks you hated in school then you will read it a certain 
way. If you are wholly sympathetic to MWPP then you'll read it another, and 
if you think that both sides have responsibilty for the feud then you'll read 
it another way still. Context matters and right here and now we have precious 
little. 
What we know for certain is that on this one day after the DADA OWLS, James 
and Sirius went after Snape. What started badly enough, with casual tormenting 
escalated into something quite awful. Did James and Sirius intend it to go 
that far? We don't know. Would it have gone to that point if James hadn't been 
cut or if Snape hadn't dropped the M-bomb? We don't know that either. 
We know it was a shameful act. But we don't know what else happened over the 
course of 7 years. We've got hints but not much more. 
We do know that Dumbledore, who seems a pretty good judge of people, 
Mundungus Fletcher being the possible exception along with Peter Pettigrew, accepted 
James and Sirius into the Order (and is remarkably neutral about the Shrieking 
Shack incident, possibly indicating that Snape's version may not be the wholly 
accurate one). Would he have have done that if they hadn't changed? 
And if Dumbledore was just fooled by their charm and slickness (as some 
people have suggested D'dore and McGonnigal were fooled while James and Sirius were 
at school) then what does that say about Dumbledore's ability to assess 
Snape's conversion and trustworthiness?  
Good men can do bad things, they can even chose to become good men after 
having been bad boys. Good boys can become horrible men. Oddball boys with a 
fascination with the dark arts can become bad men and then chose to become good. 
The world isn't divided into good people and death eaters and it's also not 
divided into jock bullies and geek/goth victims, as tempting as it is to sometimes 
believe that. 
 
I would hate to be judged by the one incident that the person who hates me 
most in the world is so pained by that they try as hard as they can to hide it. 
Particularly if that incident is shown by itself in the abscence of any real, 
meaningful, context. I know I'd come off looking nearly as bad as James and 
Sirius did. And I suspect the same can be said of pretty near all of us. 

I don't excuse what they did but I suspect the totality of their lives would 
show them much better men than who they were at 15. And I suspect that Snape 
would look just as bad at various points in his life. And so would we all. 

-Stripedog, who, for the record was a geek and a loner and an outcast, before 
such things required a dress code.  



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