Childhood values v Adulthood values in Potterverse WAS: Re: Power vs. Trust

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 143168


> Valky:
> Oooh - Valk Polishes her In Defense of James Shield - Dubious? Could
> you please elaborate on that adjective. it just caught my eye and I
> couldn't in good conscience leave it's interpretation wholly to
> variable discretion. :)

'Dubious' as in, they were teenage kids who did not have complete
control over Lupin.  Any teenagers' stewardship over the situation I
would label as 'dubious'.  Especially one including Peter, who
presumably woudn't care what happened, and Sirius, who thought it
would 'serve Snape right' to get mauled or killed, I would call it
particularily dubious.  I cast no aspersions on James, on whom I don't
have enough information.

 
> Sydney:
> > In PoA, Lupin states pretty clearly
> > that they were 'close calls, many of them' when he nearly attacked
> > somebody when they were running around, and that he shudders to 
> > think now what could have happened.  
> 
> Valky:
> Oh but that's exactly the point, *Remus* can only imagine what might
> have happened. The Stag and the Dog were far more compos mentis than
> him, it's to *their* credit that nothing did happen.


Lupin says he didn't think of what might happen AT THE TIME, which
indicates that it wasn't lurid imaginings, but maturity, that brought
him to his present realization that their boyhood actions could easily
have killed somebody.  By 'close calls', I assume that people were
endangered but the situation was averted in the nick of time. 
Responsible people in charge of dangerous animals do not involve them
in 'many close calls'.  I take it JKR meant it WAS a dangerous thing
to do, but to write in Lupin actually biting something would open up a
can of worms.  That it wasn't dangerous at all, is really taking a
good, complex situation and flawed characters and turning into Happy
Golden Schooldays or the Perfect Boys scenario, for no particular
reason except to purify James.


> 
> Sorry, Sydney, I do not want to assume that by 'dubious' you imply
> that James and Sirius were uncaring in nature, blanketly drawn from
> the pensieve scene, it's just that I have seen that assumption many
> times before. 

My reaction was identical to Hermionie's, and obviously came well
before the Pensive scene, that it was a dangerous, careless thing to
do and absolutely typical of overconfident teenage boys.  


> Valky:
> I really disagree with the analogy of Drunk Driving. You see we have
> close calls in canon according to Remus, obviously not the kind of
> things that a teenage werewolf can hold himself back from turning into
> all out disasters. It's a bit of a push to call James and Sirius
> heedless of the danger that they put other peole in when it's fairly
> clear they must have heeded it or else who kept the close calls in
> reign? 

And who got them into the 'close calls' in the first place?  I can
imagine them whooping and laughing 'that was a close one', just as I
can, and have in fact seen, drunk teenagers do in cars.  Plenty of
teens drive drunk without ever hitting somebody, and it's just plain
luck, not their pure hearts, that prevented it.

> 
> My objection is not essentially with the label of reckless for J and
> S, because they *were* reckless, but with the flow on effect coming
> from it that labels them on the scale closer to indictable for
> heartlessness. I just don't think that's applicable at all.

See, I really don't see characters that way, that if I think they were
reckless they must also be heartless and therefore also probably evil
child abusers who don't do their taxes on time.  I'm perfectly capable
of understanding that not too abnormally self-absorbed teenagers can
recklessly endanger people's lives without being monsters of
heartlessness.  It happens every day. And they grow out of it.  And
then they look back from a mature viewpoint and say, "Good times...
thank god we didn't kill anybody."

-- Sydney,