Political positions of the characters/James reacting to Remus' lycanthropy.

[M.Clifford]

No: HPFGUIDX 150448

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "a_svirn" <a_svirn at ...> wrote:
>
> > Valky:
> > a_svirn, huh? <snippage> "and James -- whatever else 
> > he may have appeared to you, Harry -- always hated the Dark Arts." 
> > I can't think of anything that it looks less like than a hastily 
> > cooked up excuse. Sirius really seems to believe in the virtue of 
> >  this POV.
> 
> a_svirn:
> No he does not. He did say that he was not proud of the episode, 
> didn't he? He simply couldn't come up with a better explanation at 
> the time and threw in this "hated the DA" excuse. 

Valky:
LOL, we are on completely different wavelengths us two when it comes
to reading context a_svirn :)

Again I find that, for me, Sirius's statement that he's is not proud
of what he did couldn't look less like a contradiction to his belief
in virtue. It seems to me that he is admitting the paradigm has
shifted for him, and especially because this one comment cannot wipe
away for me all the many other interactions between him and Snape such
as in the Shrieking shack and Christmas at Grimmauld place, where
Sirius displays genuinely and passionately his distrust of Snape is
not a fake or a cover for anything, he really does think he smells
something rotten. To me, that Sirius has idealogical issues with
Snape, is too consistent a characteristic of their relationship for
this one uncomfortably guilty comment to change. 

 

> 
> > Valky:
> > Okay I could concede that Sirius hastily pieced together his first
> > impulse in reaction, and I think that the whole -Snape was a 
> > baddie and that was what mattered to James- story is lame enough 
> > to be both impulsive and *true* at the same time. So we really 
> > don't have to leap into speculating that it was all made up to 
> > cover more nefarious tracks, don't you think?
> 
> a_svirn:
> I don't understand this logic at all. If the justification 
> is "lame", how can it be "true"? In what sense it is true? In a 
> sense that Snape was a baddie? He might have been at that, so what? 


Valky:
It's true in the sense that it's true, plain and simple, they were a
couple of vigilante brute teenagers in the middle of a war who
believed they were taking on the enemy, The Dark Arts. But that's
lame, too,because they targetted Snape their symbol of Dark Arts and
Snape wasn't *the enemy*, he was just another kid.  Does that clarify it?


> It is also *true* that James was a bully, and that's what mattered 
> to Harry.
>

Fair enough. I think Harry is missing a lot of the context of the
scene, because he's a teenager too, he's acting typically teenage and
thats alright because he is standing by his principles and that
matters. He also idealised his father and godfather beyond a level
that they could humanly live up to and was more shocked for it than he
otherwise might have been if he hadn't expected them to have been
perfectly saintly boys who took in werewolves as friends fell in love
with benevolent witches AND never got in an unfair fight or got full
of their own wind.

Valky