Lupin's resentment : An inside to Snape's resentment

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 94398

Pippin wrote:
Okay. It seems to me that you've fallen for one of JKR's clever 
bits of misdirection (haven't we all?) The lesson "imagine that 
bully in his underwear" is  plainly and powerfully conveyed *to 
the reader.* Unless you're paying very careful attention to that 
one line that says Neville's problems with Snape are worse than 
ever, you won't see that Harry and Neville didn't get it.


Carol:
I'm not sure that I've chosen the most appropriate post in this thread
to respond to, but I do want to throw in my opinion. Here's what I
think happened. Snape was waiting in the classroom for Lupin, knowing
that he would be teaching Boggarts that day. He wanted to warn Lupin
(without blowing his anti-Gryffindor cover) that Neville Longbottom,
whose parents were driven insane by Death Eaters, was in that class:
The point? To prepare Lupin that Neville's boggart might be a Death
Eater, which would terrify not only Neville but the entire class. So
Lupin, taking the hint, asks Neville what he's most afraid of.
Ironically, it turned out to be the very professor who had just tried
to help him! No wonder Snape is angry afterwards--his help is
unacknowledged and he gets laughed at--a highly unusual experience for
Snape, who makes sure in the next few lessons that it doesn't happen
again.

Meanwhile Lupin is thrown a curve. The boggart is not a DE but a
professor, and he has no choice but to help Neville find a way to make
his boggart ridiculous. It would have been better for staff relations
to let him use his grandmother instead, but Lupin probably didn't want
to undermine Neville's relationship with his grandmother, either.
(BTW, Gran isn't as terrible as people think she is, either, but
that's a topic for another post.) So Lupin helps Neville with his
boggart, coming back to him at the end of the lesson and having him
finish off his boggart--not at all the same thing as finishing off
Professor Snape!--but he applies Snape's advice in a different way.
Who else has a boggart that we might not want the class to see? Harry,
of course. So rather than having the boggart turn into Voldemort (as
he wrongly anticipates), he skips Harry's turn. He even kindly
prevents Hermione from being laughed at for having fear of failure as
a boggart--though how he knew that in his first lesson, I don't know,
unless Dumbledore had told him about her.

Anyway, I don't think that Snape *or* Lupin should be blamed here.
IMO, they were both trying to help. And Neville did benefit by
learning to vanquish a boggart, one of the first things he's done
right in any lesson other than herbology.

Carol