Snape and Harry again.

[Nora Renka]

No: HPFGUIDX 113263

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> 
wrote:

> Pippin:
> 
> The trouble is, there's already been a reversal. Harry went from 
> seeing his father as the man who represented (much as he did 
> for Snape) everything he wanted to be, to someone whom even 
> his friends admitted was an arrogant little berk. It seems to me 
> what you suspect is an un-reversal, something that will put 
> James, Lupin and Sirius back on the pedestal, leaving only Peter  
> to have fallen from grace.  
> 
> Sirius and James are dead, so the only point I can see in giving 
> Harry more back story about them is so that Harry can 
> understand himself better.  Does he need to see himself as as a 
> saintly being who can do no wrong, or as a struggling mortal, 
> guilty of sin and error, but not beyond redemption all the same?

Eh, I was actually thinking more of there being at least something of 
a Snapely reversal, in this regard: he has, in OotP, been set up as a 
character who carries the authorial imprimitur of sympathy--and I'm 
certainly not saying that it's undeserved, acolyte of Faith that I 
am.  I just *suspect* that with Snape, having set him up as the 
oppressed one, the abused one, the wronged one, that she's going to 
smack us upside the head with a reversal in that respect--or at least 
a severe complication.

There's also the question of simply trying to fill out the picture of 
MWPP and contemporaries' schooldays.  The two halves of the data (the 
two+ perspectives we have, so far) don't talk to each other 
particularly well right now, as there's something we're missing in 
the middle.  And, unlike the quest to make Schenker talk to 
resurrected Riemann, there *is* something that's already there that 
makes everything fit.  We just don't know it yet.

In that regard, finding some more good out about MWPP doesn't entail 
putting them back on a pedestal, as once you've been kicked off it's 
pretty much impossible to get back on.  It involves fleshing out the 
characters even more, and getting a fuller picture of them in both 
good and bad.  Same thing applies for Snape--we'll have a fuller 
picture, whether good or bad, when we find out more.

But I could be wrong.  You all have started to lure me into 
speculation.  Full of shame, all around.

-Nora sulks after having been evicted from her natural habitat