Why Do You Like Sirius?

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 122452


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Magda Grantwich 
<mgrantwich at y...> wrote:

<snip>

> For me the big issue was the Prank: not so much what it would have
> done to Snape (I can accept that teenage boys do dumbass things) but
> what would have happened to Lupin.  That after five years of
> friendship Sirius was capable of seeing Remus as a monster (rather
> than a boy with a terrible affliction) when it was convenient for
> Sirius to do so, really caused me to write him off as a positive
> force for Harry.

I have this problem with Prank discussion.  It almost always ends up 
in some kind of circular reasoning, because we lack the actual 
information for what happened and why (and make no mistake, we do--
unless you have some version of the books that I don't?).  To 
elaborate: Sirius is the kind of person who doesn't think about his 
friends, we know this because he didn't think about Lupin, and he did 
the Prank the way that he did because Lupin wasn't really important 
to him.  This is self-validating: if you are inclined to think of 
Sirius as not caring for his friends, the reading of the situation 
becomes straightforward.  If you are inclined to go "something here 
doesn't quite add up--why would he do that?", the situation is more 
complex.

And I say unto y'all--there is no canon to set us firmly upon one 
side or the other.  When there IS, I, for one, welcome our new 
canonical overlords.

[Everything can be read towards multiple ends in this scenario: 
Snape's perception, Dumbledore's enigmatic reply to Snape's voicing 
of his perception, Sirius' description, Lupin's own 
description...does it add up?  None of you have convinced *me* of a 
scenario that accounts for all the facts yet.]

But I also don't think Sirius is a perfectly 2-D character, as I 
think Draco Malfoy is.  There's certainly tension going on there: the 
pull of family expectations versus some motivation that considers 
that just not quite right, the capacity for petty cruelty and for 
selfless concerns, the growing up in a time when things are steadily 
becoming more than a little scary.  [The comments about his family 
remind me of Jessica Mitford's about her sister Diana--and that is 
something that Rowling absolutely surely knows of.]

Why, if you should have occasion to put his better qualities together 
with those of Severus Snape, you would have a remarkably well-rounded 
hero.  My little internal structuralist says that's not accidental.

-Nora sits herself firmly in the empiricist camp of the school of 
recovery