Sirius' motivation for breaking with his family

[ericoppen]

No: HPFGUIDX 154099

While I'm sure that Sirius liked attention and standing out in a 
crowd, that alone might not have been his motivation for breaking so 
completely with his family.  The Wizard World operates on patronage 
and family influence (it's pre-Victorian, almost Regency, sometimes, 
at least that's how it feels to me)and turning one's back on a 
powerful source of influence such as the Black family would not be 
something done lightly.

I think that we may have seen a clue to Sirius' motivation in our 
first minutes in his family mauso--er, his family _mansion._  What 
if Little Sirius had had a house elf that he really, really loved, 
that was his favorite playmate---and one day he comes downstairs to 
find out that Mama has had that elf's head cut off and mounted on a 
plaque?  

That would be the sort of thing to turn a boy against his mother 
forever---at least it would be for me, and for the kids I knew when 
I was that age myself.  And it goes double and triple if that house-
elf was the only source of warmth and unconditional love that Little 
Sirius ever got as a child.  Mama Black does not, to put it mildly, 
strike me as a likely sort of person to be a comforting presence for 
a little child.  (Although I may be doing her an injustice here; 
that portrait could date from a later period in her life when she 
was going 'round the bend from age; I've known some real nice people 
who were impossible to deal with when Alzheimer's hit)

If Sirius had been forced to deal with the death of a house-elf that 
he loved, the trauma could have affected him in all sorts of ways, 
ranging from breaking with the Black family tradition of Dark Magic 
and begging for Gryffindor instead of Slytherin to lashing out at 
Kreacher when trapped in Grimmauld Place, partly because Kreacher 
was a horrible reminder of that other, _nice_ house-elf.

Comments?  Howlers?