Bullies and Heroes (Was Re: Snape's Worst Memory..., Was Re:Hyperbolic chapter)

[persephone_kore]

No: HPFGUIDX 81545

Hannah wrote:
> 
> I'm so glad for the penseive scene because it makes me interested in 
> how Harry is eventually going to deal with how he feels toward Snape: 
> how can he reconcile Snape's rudeness and his responding anger with 
> the sympathy/guilt he feels for Snape being tormented as a child by 
> Harry's father? How can a reader reconcile it? I, for one, cannot,  
> and that makes me all the more eager for book 6. :)

Now PK: 

I think we must be using "reconcile" differently here, because I found
this very puzzling -- I admit that Harry is certainly feeling
contradictory emotions, but I don't see any particular logical
difficulty -- and not being quite as stuck in Harry's viewpoint as
Harry naturally is, /I/ don't have any real emotional difficulty
observing that both all parties involved have behaved abominably to
each other and that in at least Harry's and Snape's cases this is
emotionally understandable, though still not justified. 

So. Harry can sympathize with what Snape went through as a child; he's
been there, or somewhere similar, and it makes him sick to think what
part his father took in it. He can probably recognize that Snape's
anger with him for prying is justified -- and still be angry in return
for the way Snape expressed it and the assumptions Snape made about
him and the cessation of the Occlumency lessons. 

In fact, I hope that what Harry will figure out is essentially what
Geoff said in a different reply -- that a person can be extremely
unpleasant and even hate you and still be on your side, that doing
wrong in one area or on one occasion doesn't constitute the whole of
your character, and that you can understand why someone behaves as
they do and feel sympathy without thinking they're right -- not to
mention that feeling sympathy in one area also doesn't mean you have
to sympathize with everything. ;) There can be jerks on the right
side, and the same person can be an abominable bully in one context
and a hero in another. People are often inconsistent and contradictory. 

One good way to do this, I suspect, would be for someone to tell him
about admirable things James did (instead of just generalities)
without excusing the not-so-admirable ones.....

PK