JKR and Inconsistency (was:Re: Sirius and Prank again? Fools Rush...)

[magistera_coi]

No: HPFGUIDX 130025

Betsy Hp:
<snip>
> Hmm, I know others on the list think Snape should have made the 
> connection between his werewolf studies and Lupin.  But I disagree.
> For one thing, Snape's battle seems to have been mainly with Sirius 
> and James.  They're the ones he would have been snooping around 
> after.  Lupin, as prefect and as someone who obviously saw little 
> amusing in the way James and Sirius treated Snape, would have 
> garnered very little notice from Snape, IMO.
<snip>


Mags (jumping in because this is one of my hobbyhorses):

Speaking as one of those people, albeit a newbie - It's not just that
he was studying werewolves. It's also the things that James, Sirius &
Remus say in the Pensieve scene. I mean, even if you posit that Snape
didn't actually hear the comments (which personally I think is
problematic, unless Pensieves aren't all that accurate and the memory
is colored by Snape's later discovery of Remus' secret) - they make
three references to it in - what? twenty minutes, maybe? They're just
not that careful about keeping it quiet - Remus does shush James once,
but he jokes about it even more openly himself (and in a crowd, no
less). 

So even if Snape didn't overhear that particular conversation, if he
was really following them around (and in particular, trying to find
out where Remus went "every month", as Remus says), it seems like he
would have overheard similar exchanges. A couple of references like
that, and noticing that the person in question disappears once a
month, and it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to put it together.

It just seems to me that there's something odd about the whole
sequence of events. I'm torn on whether I think that a) Snape knew
what was up when he went to the Shack, b) Pensieves are only as
accurate as human memory, or c) the Prank actually happened before the
Pensieve scene; but it seems to me that one of those things must be
true, and (a) strikes me as the most likely.

-Mags