James, a paragon of virtue? Snape, a paragon of virtue?

[vmonte]

No: HPFGUIDX 123453


Valky replies:
Sorry bout the snip. I agree James didn't really choose his friends
all that wisely, and hence not so much a thinker in that respect.
I attribute that flaw to another knightly quality, ego. This is
something that James and Snape shared. Part of their fearlessness
comes from a sense of outright superiority of the foe, invincibility
if you please. Harry, is slightly less proud and arrogant than his
father, but nevertheless he has it too.

vmonte again:
I like your chess game inferences by the way. But Harry plays the 
Bishop, not the Knight in chess. I like the scene in OOTP where Harry 
notices that Ron is behaving very much like his father did in the 
penseive. 

Page 704, GoF U.S. edition

"I thought--you can do this! And I had about a second to decide which 
way to fly, you know, because he looked like he was aiming for the 
right goal hoop--my right, obviously, his left--but I had a funny 
feeling that he was feinting, and so I took the chance and flew left--
his right, I mean--and--well--you know what happened," he concluded 
modestly, sweeping his hair back quite unnecessarily so that it 
looked interestingly windswept and glancing around to see whether the 
people nearest to them--a bunch of gossiping third-year Hufflepuffs--
had heard him...
... The truth was that Ron had just reminded Harry forcibly of 
another Gryffindor Quidditch player who had once sat rumpling his 
hair under this very tree. 

Ron is the Knight, not Harry.

Vivian

"Those who don't play chess may tend to think of it as a tedious game 
best suited to idle eccentrics and the elderly - people with vast 
patience and plenty of time to waste. This is only partly true, for 
chess also requires uncommon energy and childlike mental vivacity. If 
players are sometimes portrayed as old men with furrowed brows, that 
is merely a symbolic depiction of an activity that consumes days, 
years, and even lifetimes in a single, unquenchable flame. Players 
relish the paradoxical compensation: time is forever frozen in a loop 
of the eternal present, while life away from the board comes to seem 
unbearably fast-paced. They therefore constantly seek to rediscover 
that state of grace, that nebulous yet limpid condition of dominion 
that comes from concentrating the mind on the game. Boredom? The 
chess player doesn't know the meaning of the word." – Paolo Maurensig