[HPforGrownups] Re: Nice vs. Good, honesty, and Snape: Was Snape, Apologies, and Redemption

[Peggy Kern]

No: HPFGUIDX 153216

Houyhnhnm:  I
think Lupin had a pretty good idea at that moment what form Neville's
boggart might take.
But this is where it should have stopped if Lupin really is the better
man. Instead he escalated the conflict, by at least an order of
magnitude.
Lupin had the whole year to work on raising Neville's self-esteem  if
he really cared that much about the kid. He stopped Harry from
confronting the boggart; he could have stopped Neville, too. He should
have, if he really thought that turning Snape into an old woman was
the *least* humiliating way Neville could have defeated his boggart.
He used a student to get back at a colleague and make him a figure of
ridicule in front of students.  It's wrong.  I don't care what his
reason was.  There's no good reason.

Peggy now:  I don't think Lupin's goal in the boggart lesson was to raise 
Neville's self-confidence or to humiliate Snape.  I think he wanted to teach 
the class how to handle boggarts.  Snape's comment about Neville gave Lupin 
a way to start the lesson, perhaps differently than he otherwise would have. 
I think Lupin accepted Neville's honest admission of his fear of Snape, 
rather than putting him down for it or telling him to think of something 
else.  If they're going to learn how to tackle a boggart, they can't be 
picky about what fears they're going to use to practice;  otherwise they 
really haven't learned anything.  I wonder if perhaps Lupin knew Neville's 
grandmother, and was just helping him to find a funny image to picture when 
Boggart Snape came out.  I honestly don't think he planned the lesson to 
humiliate Snape, and used the students to do it.  As for not letting Harry 
have a chance at the boggart, I think that because of the general attitude 
toward Voldemort, to the point that almost everyone was afraid to say his 
name, having a boggart Voldemort come out would have been more than the 
class could realistically have been expected to handle.  It's kind of 
interesting to wonder just what Harry would have experienced if he'd had a 
turn, and maybe he should have been given the chance.  But I don't think 
Lupin's actions were about humiliating Snape;  I think they were about using 
something someone feared as an object lesson to teach them how to handle it. 
It would have been no big deal if Snape hadn't gotten so upset about it.  I 
do wonder about Dumbledore's handling of the bonnet or cap or whatever it 
was (can't remember off the top of my head) that came out of the cracker at 
Christmas.  I wonder if Dumbledore was trying to show Snape by example that 
the whole thing was no big deal;  but perhaps Snape was so sensitive that he 
took this as a further insult.

Peggy