Severus's memories and schoolyard curses (Was: Huge overreactions .. . .)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 150325


>   kchuplis:
> 
>   Someone posted it. I guess interviews are considered canon
(although, I"m not sure I agree with that. Once something leaves an
artist, part of it's life is it's own two feet).  However, I still
think everything was portrayed exactly, but I cannot say that seeing
an incident in isolation is not bias in itself. We still think of it
without connection to anything else. I still wonder if there isn't a
memory somewhere of Snape bullying a first year with something really
evil and James coming across it and stopping him, for instance, which
makes the pensieve scene look completely different. I can actually see
even another level where Snape, who is pretty brilliant, and obviously
an unhappy child (ok, there are only two scenes supporting this but
still, I would guess that makes it pretty canon or JKR would have
given us a look see at least at ONE happy Snape memory);  crying as
his parents fought and alone in a room shooting flies out of the air
(which, sorry but to me that is not real far off from pulling wings
off butterflies just because of the description - he was bored, not
being annoyed by them), and maybe he caused nasty things to people he
didn't like even without trying or meaning to (ala Tom Riddle minus
the intention) and James caught him at it or was the recipient of it.
That's, IMO, a type of bias when you see a pensieve scene.

Carol responds:
Yes and no. The Pensieve scene itself is an objective recreation of
the incident in which Harry can walk around and see and hear more than
Severus himself did. But, yes, we're seeing only one memory out of
many, evidently the one that the adult Snape finds most painful.
Still, that memory is complete in itself, and the point of it appears
to be that Severus did nothing to instigate that particular attack. It
was two on one, unprovoked, for the entertainment of Bored!Sirius.

I would say that the third memory, of the unknown girl laughing at the
boy Severus (who at a guess is about eleven years old) riding what
appears to be a hexed broomstick is not indicative of a happy
childhood, either.

I object to the comparison of the magical equivalent of swatting flies
to pulling the wings off butterflies, however. One is done out of
boredom (flies are annoying pests that even Muggles kill without a
thought), the other out of sheer cruelty. I'm guessing that he's
stunning the flies (IIRC, Harry does something similar to a wasp in
Trelawney's class), not AKing them. Or maybe the WW has a bug-killing
curse that's not illegal. Surely they don't let flies settle on their
food or buzz annoyingly around their heads any more than Muggles do.

And it's James, not Severus, whom Lily pointedly accuses of hexing
people in corridors when they annoy him or just because he can.

On a sidenote about James and Sirius, we keep hearing (from Lupin)
that they kept him company on full moon nights out of friendship, but
we also hear from Black that "the risk would have made it fun." Sirius
himself wishes it were a full moon night, to which Remus grimly
replies that he doesn't. Sirius, IMO, wants adventure and is
completely indifferent to the suffering he undergoes during his
transformations, and the guilt he feels at all the near-misses. And
note that he arrogantly refuses to help Remus study Transfiguration,
stating that *he* already knows that stuff.James's joking about the
werewolf question, in a voice loud enough to cause Remus concern, and
his dismissal of Remus's lycanthropy as "your furry little problem" do
not connote compassion in my view.

So while I don't deny an early interest in the Dark Arts on Severus's
part, rather odd on the part of a half-blood with a Muggle father if
that father had any part in his upbringing, I see the memories as
objective indicators that Severus was unhappy, that he hated James
with good reason, and that James and Sirius really were arrogant,
thoughtless little berks with no consideration even for the friend
they ran with on full moon nights. And again, there's no indication
that the curses Severus came to school knowing are any darker than,
say, the Leg Locker curse or Ron's "Eat slugs!" But knowing those
hexes, being placed in Slytherin, and having the attention of the
older Slytherin gang members may have added up to "an interest in the
Dark Arts" from age eleven. We know that he excelled in *Defense
Against* the Dark Arts, but the only really Dark curse that we know he
invented is Sectum Sempra, and he invented (or discovered) a
thoroughly unDark countercurse to that. (I still think, for reasons
posted earlier, that the cutting curse in the Pensieve scene, which
does *not* cause James to bleed unstoppably, is only a precursor of
Sectum Sempra, which was invented for use against "enemies," IMO
because those "enemies" had tried to murder him--at least in his view,
an opinion no doubt helped by the fact that Sirius Black remained
unrepentant for the rest of his life. Only Severus knew the
countercurse to Sectum Sempra. Does anyone *really* think that he sang
that countercurse to stop James's bleeding or that the bleeding could
have been stopped in any other way if it really was Sectum
Sempra--"cut *always*"?)

Carol, agreeing that we're seeing only snippets of Severus's past but
noting that he seems more unhappy than evil whereas James and Sirius
look like inconsiderate, self-centered, arrogant bullies--perhaps, as
you indicate, only one side of their otherwise charming personalities