Snape, Hagrid and Animals

[lagattalucianese]

No: HPFGUIDX 144097

> 
> But again, I want to ask you directly: are you accusing Dumbledore 
of 
> knowing and not doing anything?  You argue below that Molly knows 
and 
> that's why she acts the way that she does.  
> 
> I'm talking about cold hard canon plausibility here, because if you 
> want to connect this to the books and not simply have it floating 
in 
> the realm of fairly distasteful fanfiction, there are a lot of 
> hurdles to jump.
> 
This is one of those embarrassing gray areas. I can't prove it, but I 
think Dumbledore *didn't* know about the Marauders/Snape conflict 
initially, or perhaps he did know and felt that as long as the 
showdowns didn't go beyond a certain point it was better to let the 
kids sort things out for themselves that to be overprotective. 
Somewhere about the time of the Prank and Sirius almost getting Snape 
killed, I think Dumbledore or somebody must have intervened (or maybe 
the kids themselves did sort it out, James versus Sirius e.g.) 
because after the Shrieking-Shack incident, I don't think we hear any 
more about it. I certainly hope that there was some sort of 
resolution. You can make a case for the Prank being an innocent stunt 
(sort of), but allowing one student to get another student into a 
situation that will very likely get him killed is *way* out of line, 
as I *hope* even Sirius' staunch defenders will agree.
> 
> But again, we find out in book 6 that Snape is indeed the creator 
of 
> the implement that he's become the victim of; we also find out that 
> everyone has used it.  I'm leery of constructing this into 
> Marauders=always the bullies/Snape=always the victim.  We do have 
> Sirius' statement that Snape gave as good as he got, which Lupin 
> doesn't challenge.  And again, if you want to dismiss *everything* 
> that Sirius says as biased, you're going to have to be evenhanded 
and 
> cut out Snape's take on events as well.  That finally leaves us 
with 
> Dumbledore, who seems not to have thought that Sirius deserved 
> expulsion, for whatever reason.  Doesn't fit with the nasty deeply 
> sick deviant picture you're trying to extrapolate here.
> 
I think the reason Sirius is so nasty to Snape is precisely *because* 
Snape fights back. Even in the Prank scene, with three against one, 
Snape goes down fighting. See remarks by other listies, and my own 
most recent post, about what happens to kids who stand up for 
themselves against bullying control freaks. Much as we'd like to 
believe that they win their abusers' respect, the most usual outcome 
is that they just make their situation worse.

As for Dumbledore, I think he should have intervened, and I hope that 
at some point he did, because I'd hate to think Hogwarts is no better 
than that high school I taught at, where the only recourse the 
victim's parents had against a gang of socially favored bullies was 
to remove her to a private girls' school.

Let me add in passing that I personally don't think Snape was ever a 
Death Eater in sober reality. I think he's been DDM from the get-go, 
and went where Dumbledore sent him. But if he was a Death Eater in 
his misspent youth, I understand exactly where he was coming from, 
just as, on the basis of what I've observed of the behavior of our 
gilded youth, I can understand where the kids who shot up Columbine 
were coming from.
> 
> Or it can be her generally Molly-ish territorial instincts 
regarding 
> Harry, which lead to her probably not intentionally so but rather 
> spiteful comments about Sirius as guardian.  Dumbledore, again, 
> reinforces that Sirius is a genuine and profound loss to Harry, and 
> they should have had a long time together.  Oh, I know--just 
sparing 
> the boy's tender feelings.
>  
> -Nora suggests taking some deep thoughts about the spirit of canon 
as 
> opposed to all the possibilities 'possibly' open by the fine details
>
Well, the problem as I see it is that the fine details are there, and 
you can argue about them till you're blue in the face, but they're 
still *there*, whereas the "spirit of canon" is pretty much dependent 
on how each individual chooses to interpret it.

And that is *absolutely* all I am going to say on the subject.

--La Gatta, who went to university teaching to get away from little 
creeps like Sirius Black, and is now going to go and look for some 
aspirin...