The Huge overreactions from a five minute time span.

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 150150

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Kemper <iam.kemper at ...> wrote:

> Kemper now:
> The truth is that James and Sirius were the cool crowd, and Snape 
> was gigantic nerd.  Jocks against the D&D kid.  No where in the 
> scene do we see status as equal.

As I've brought up before, I'm wary of projecting the whole "jocks 
and nerds" paradigm wholescale onto Hogwarts' social structure.  You 
do that and you start getting people making statements like "The 
Marauders are the kids responsible for Columbine", which strikes me 
as...slightly hyperbolic.

For one thing, the poor D&D geeks don't usually have any means of 
recourse: they *can't* fight back.  Certainly not Snape's situation 
in all aspects, because he's the one who does the most physical 
damage with a toned-down use of the very nasty cutting curse he seems 
to have invented.  When all the kids are running around with wands 
and everyone can do magic, the scales are potentially much more 
equal.  (And there's always more equality present amongst classmates 
than between students and teachers.)  A situation that strikes me as 
*genuinely* unequal is Neville in the earlier books versus his 
tormentors.

I also don't know that we've seen the kinds of privilege usually 
associated with 'jocks', or even the general type, for sure.  James 
and crew are cited as being very smart, so we don't have the 'dumb 
jock' stereotype.  And while Quidditch is popular, I'm not sure it's 
a guaranteed or proven thing that it thus brings the kind of high 
social status associated with American jockdom.

> Kemper, who's wondering where all the detention/punishment forms are
> for Snape in Filch's filing cabinet. 

I wonder where they are; they certainly may be there, or they may 
not, as we can't prove either way at the moment.  But surely all of 
us have known some types in our lives (since we've pulled in 'I was a 
geeky youngster' into the argument already) who managed to 
continually get away with evading their eminently merited official 
punishment.  Tended to be the sneaky passive-aggressive types...

-Nora was, herself, eminently well-behaved, and even avoided the 
temptation of misuse of the chem lab