bullies? twins, padfoot and prongs

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 118982


Carol earlier:
> > And there's no indication that anything terrible has yet happened
in his [James'] young life to stir him up and start him thinking about
serious issues like VW1. 
> 
> SSSusan:
> This is true--we've no backstory for James' early life yet.  OTOH,
we do know that Sirius wanted to escape his pureblood, DA-leaning 
> family, and where did he choose to go?  To James' family.  *Maybe* 
> that was because James was his best buddy by then.  Or *maybe* it
was that James and his family were *known* to Sirius to offer up a
home  where the Dark Arts were detested.  
> 
> Because we can't know this one way or the other, I just don't see any 
> reason to believe that Sirius was misremembering.  Yeah, James was an 
> ass here.  But maybe he was just an ass.  A truly DA-hating ass.  I 
> don't see any compelling reason to not read the scene this way.


Carol responds:
And I don't see any compelling reason to view the fun-loving,
thoughtless, egotistical James as holding any serious convictions at
this point. No doubt he took his parents' teachings for granted, and
no doubt Severus did the same, but I can see no evidence that their
running conflict is anything but personal. "Because he exists" is not
an indication that James opposes the Dark Arts or anything else about
Severus's philosophy. It's Severus as a *person* that he seems to dislike.

It's *Sirius* who clearly has an anti-Dark Arts bias based on his
hatred of his home life. James shows no such *active* and *vehement*
aversion to the Dark Arts per se. There's nothing serious in his
attitude until the "Mudblood" remark, and again, the reaction is
personal; Severus has insulted Lily, using what James has been taught
is a bad word. I'm sure he would have reacted in exactly the same way
if Severus had called Lily a b**ch. And again, although Nora has
postulated a connection between pureblood elitism and the Dark Arts,
we don't have any proof that those two ideas are connected in
*James's* mind though I grant that they're connected in *Sirius's*
because of the emphasis on both Dark magic and genealogy at 12
Grimmauld Place. So again I think that Sirius may be projecting *his*
values onto James or at least exaggerating the extent of James's
opposition to the Dark Arts, etc., in the Pensieve scene.

Surely you don't think he's bullying Severus *on principle*?

Carol