Snape trying to warn James redux (WAS: Re: Life Debt)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 154179

Patricia wrote:
> > I don't recall ever seeing anything about Severus being the one to
change James' mind about his secretkeeper. This would of course
drastically change everything, because it would mean that Snape
coerced James into switching his secretkeeper from loyal Sirius to
Pettigrew whom Snape must have known was a traitor because Snape was
himself playing on both sides (on orders or not). If you could let us
know where you thought you saw this info, please do.

Carol responds:
Oh, dear. I've seen people interpreting the quotation to mean that
young Snape tried to warn James against Sirius, thinking he was the
traitor who was informing on Order members (not knowing it was Peter).
Now we have the opposite interpretation, based solely on hopes that
Snape is evil.

At any rate, here are the words in question, which certainly do not
state that Snape tried to trick James into switching from loyal Sirius
to Rat!Pettigrew. What Snape actually says is:

"Like father, like son, Potter! I have just saved your neck; you
should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served
if he'd killed you! You would have died like your father, too arrogant
to believe you might be mistaken in Black1" (PoA Am. ed. 361).

The implication does seem to be that Snape (or Dumbledore?) warned
James Potter against Sirius Black (perhaps suggesting that he was the
traitor who was betraying the Order's secrets to Voldemort), and that
James didn't listen, whether out of "arrogance" or distrust of Severus
Snape or certainty that Sirius was his friend (or all of the above).
But whether he was warned or not, it was James, on his own (or with
Lily), who refused Dumbledore's offer to be Secret Keeper and chose
Sirius in his place, whether or not Severus (for whatever reason) had
tried to warn James against Sirius. And it was Sirius who, by his own
confession, persuaded James to switch to Peter. 

Let's not leap to conclusions just because they happen to fit our
wishes regarding where Snape's loyalties lie, whether we think he's
ESE! or DDM!. We don't even know whether Snape knew about the Fidelius
charm. He may have known only that someone close to the Potters was a
traitor and a spy, without knowing that that person had also been the
Secret Keeper who betrayed their whereabouts to Voldemort. And if he
did know it, he may have learned about it after Black's arrest, not
before. After all, Pettigrew was only SK for a week, and it's unclear
whether Black was ever the SK at all.

And please present your evidence that Snape knew that Pettigrew was
the traitor. "Must have known" is an assumption. (Bellatrix seems to
have known; Black heard her screaming about it in Azkaban. But that
doesn't mean that Snape did.)

Carol, who just noticed that Snape does wandless magic in that scene,
clicking his fingers to bring the ends of the ropes binding the
soon-to-be-transformed Lupin into his hands