Boggart Snape (was:Re: Snape Wars vs Ship Wars...)

[hekatesheadband]

No: HPFGUIDX 144709

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214"
<dumbledore11214 at y...> wrote:
>
> > Betsy Hp:
> <SNIP>
> It's that what Neville is taught in the boggart 
> > scene is not only wrong, if Snape is ESE or OFH, it's down right 
> > dangerous.  Because while it's good to teach children to laugh at 
> > their relatively empty fears, or fears that can't really hurt 
> them, 
> > you don't teach a child to laugh at something that *should* scare 
> > them. <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> 
> Do you doubt that JKR intends Voldemort to be really dangerous then?

I'm with Alla on this one (no surprise there;). The trouble with
Boggarts isn't that they look scary. It's that they embody fears that
can by absolutely paralysing, cripple you with terror so that you
can't do anything about it. Laughter is sort of a necessary first step
- it won't do much on its own, but without it, there's rarely any
possibility of even starting on anything better. If you can't overcome
a fear, you can't cope with the threat behind it.

I would further add that many of the fears aren't funny in the
slightest. Harry is afraid of Dementors, which are described as evil
and want to cannibalize human souls, innocent and stained alike.
There's nothing funny about that. Seamus is afraid of banshees. To
Muggles, they're a scary story round the hearth. In Potterverse (given
that hags, leprechauns, etc., are real and behave largely as they do
in folklore), they are probably a real harbinger of imminent,
unpleasant, difficult-to-avoid death. Something similar may be at work
with Parvati and the mummy. I don't want to wade too far into the
murky waters here, and I don't know how much JKR knows about world
religions (my own field). At any rate she knows more about Parvati's
particular religious observances, cultural background, and family
history. But in many strains of Hindu belief, failing to cremate a
corpse, manhandling and mutilating it to make a mummy
(pyramid-obsessed schoolteacher back in the day; the things you
learn), and leaving it to sit and fester above the ground, is one of
the most despicable acts imaginable. The mummy Parvati sees could be
light years from a childish fear for her; it could be an abomination
of the worst sort (though we don't know: all we've got for certain is
the likeliest religious affiliation of some of her more immediate
ancestors).

There's Remus' full-moon boggart as well. When the moon's full, he
loses his humanity. He goes through agonising transformations that are
sufficient to kill a child, as we learn in OotP. He is filled with an
irresistible, overpowering desiring to kill and eat his human fellows,
and there is a very real risk he will do just that. The full moon
makes him chronically ill and makes him an outcast. So why laugh?
Because he will always be afraid of the moon, and he can't change what
it does to him. But if the very idea of the moon overwhelms him with
fear, he's lost what little normalcy and power and humanity he's got.
It's the only way he has even the faintest chance of winning.

Not that any of this is always so: Ron's just got 
Childhood!Trauma-induced arachnaphobia with no real rational basis,
probably at visceral enough a level that nothing will ever change it.
But - and this sort situation goes for any character - if an enemy (a
DE who knows that fear, etc.) can send him into a helpless panic by
conjuring a spider, he's dead. So he _must_ learn to laugh, no matter
what, and so must everyone else. This is probably the most important
application of the boggart lessons, practically speaking at least. 

For what it's worth, I would guess that some people's boggarts
probably do change over time. Molly's might have been very different
when she was a schoolgirl; I doubt she'd have offered to tackle it if
she knew she'd be looking at her children's corpses. And Hermione's
got bigger worries now than McGonagall failing her at everything.

Um, so the point was... boggarts seem to take the form of whatever
gut-level fear is wired closest to your brain at any point in time. I
don't think it can be taken as thematic in terms of whose side anybody
is on, or in terms of any other predictive factors on that grand a scale.

Also, I really, really wonder how Luna's boggart would appear.

Feeling for Ron,
hekatesheadband

Because the Sorting Hat is really Bono.