Lupin as a teacher/Snape as teacher

[houyhnhnm102]

No: HPFGUIDX 138714

Laura Walsh:

> But, given that Neville's boggart will be Professor Snape
> and given that, in order to master the boggart, you have to
> somehow make it so that you can laugh at it, what are the
> choices of what he could have had Neville do?  How can
> he make Professor Snape amusing to the students?  You
> certainly don't want to follow James' method and dangle
> him upside down and threaten to take off his pants.   You
> don't want to give him the characteristics of a disgusting
> animal, say a slug or a pig.  I think making the boggart into
> an old woman is relatively mild - at least it is human and
> not degrading.  Neville's grandmother is obviously from
> a very well respected family - there is no implication that
> Snape as Neville's grandmother is debasing himself.  It
> is just funny - a bit embarrassing from the cross-dressing
> point of view, but people have gotten laughs from that for
> years.
> 
> How else WOULD you have made Snape into something
> funny?  Snape is not a funny person.  And making him
> forget how to make a potion is both too complicated to do
> in boggart circumstances and also not obvious enough to
> make it funny.  Stuttering?  Doesn't work for me.

Carol responds:

> I'm not sure how to respond to Lupin with regard to 
> Boggart!Snape.
> Quite possibly you're both right.

> But my take on Snape's role in the incident has 
> always been that he's reminding Lupin that the "class contains 
> Neville Longbottom," whose parents were Crucio'd into 
> insanity by Death Eaters. (Don't they exchange glances there, a 
> possible bit of mutual Legilimency or mental
> telepathy?) At any rate, Snape would logically assume 
> that the Death Eaters Neville saw in infancy would be 
> his greatest fear, especially given his parents' fate, 
> and IMO he is warning Lupin to be careful.

houyhnhnm:

Nah, I don't think he's that good, Snape apologist though I may be.  
I see Neville/Snape!boggart/Grannie as part of a Snape-Lupin feud 
paralleling the confrontaion between Snape and Sirius which takes 
place in the kitchen at 12 Grimmauld Place.

Why carry out this lesson in the staff room?  Lupin didn't take Harry 
to Filch's office for the patronus lessons. Why not remove the 
boggart to a classroom?

Lupin marches his entire class into the staff room during what just 
happens to be Snape's free period.  Snape reacts churlishly because 
his territory has been invaded (Students aren't allowed in the 
teachers' lounge at my school under any circumstances).  Lupin 
retaliates by choosing Neville to demonstrate the riddikulus charm.

Would Neville's boggart have been Snape on a different day in a 
different place?  He's seen plenty of horrors at St. Mungo's whether 
he actually saw his parents being tortured or not (or remembers it).  
If Snape had chosen another student to bully in front of Lupin, would 
Lupin have picked that student instead of Neville.

Lupin didn't have to turn Snape into an old woman.  He could have 
suggested something less humiliating.  The lesson is a set-up from 
the get-go, IMO.  

I know this scene has been argued over before.  I guess what caused 
me to think of it again is the fact that so many of the threads 
lately have dealt with the nature of good and evil.  Is Slughorn 
really good?  Is Snape really evil?  What I am beginning to see, 
though I don't know if Rowling is going there, is an exposition of 
the banality of evil.  Evil having its genesis, not in superbads like 
Valdemort and Grindelwald, but in the petty sins of commission and 
omission carried out by "good" people--Slughorn giving Tom Riddle 
information about horcruxes out of indolence and vanity, Dumbledore's 
mistakes, the bully behavior of James and Sirius.  And Lupin, in this 
instance.  

I like Lupin, but I think he was out of line this time.   Snape 
undoubtedly had already provoked him.  Snape's treatment of Neville 
was deplorable.  But if Lupin's concern is really for Neville, why 
not just make a decision to take the boy under his wing for the whole 
term?  Maybe you would set up a colleague for public ridicule because 
you didn't like the way they treated students, Laura, but I 
wouldn't.  I would try to find a better way to handle it.