JKR and the boys/ Dark Magic and Snape

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 161457

> Miles:
> My main point is that Hermione is described much more detailed, 
and that her
> character has much more depth than Ron's or even Harry's. Which is
> surprising - we have an insight in Harry's thoughts, but still 
Hermione's
> emotional and social profile is more exact.
> The question is not so much whether the girls and women in the 
Potterverse
> are like women and girls in real life are or should be - the point 
is, that
> there are much more details and shades of grey in the description 
of the
> female Hogwarts students we know compared to the male ones.
> JKR knows girls better than she knows boys, yes, but as an author 
she should
> be able to write about both in an appropriate way - especially 
when her main
> character is a boy.
> We see lots of girls chatting in groups, talking about whatever, 
giggling
> and so on. Quite realistic, right? Hermione does not care too much 
about
> these groups. But do we see groups of boys hanging around, talking 
or
> fighting, like in the PoA film scene mentioned? Rarely - but real 
boys do
> have social interactions with their peer groups, not only girls. 
The film
> makers seem to have realised that problem and added some "boys 
scenes" to
> the films that are not in the books.

Magpie:
Ah--I think I see what you mean now. And yes, I think it's 
particularly odd that we don't get this when Harry lives in a dorm 
with four other boys.  We really don't get a lot of scenes of the 
kind of cameraderie you'd get in that situation.  Harry doesn't seem 
to know the other boys any more than he would if they didn't live 
together.  With girls we do get some sense of groups hanging out 
together.  Mostly JKR's main characters are only ever concerned with 
the plot.  I found Hermione in OotP to be, actually, especially odd 
this way.  I felt like her character just moved from one plot scheme 
to another with not a second for normal life: she was organizing 
Harry's romantic life, solving mysteries in the paper, coming up 
with the DA, handling Hagrid's issues, writing to Viktor--then when 
she had a moment to herself she was knitting hats to free the house-
elves.    

I would suggest that we might see more of the regular boy type stuff 
in the Pensieve scene, where the Marauders seemed to have a more 
easy-going relationship with each other. Not that we got a detailed 
look into their relationship, but we did get a sense of it, I 
thought.



> Sydney:
> 
> Yes, but we're talking about a guy who joined a violent anti-gay
> organization calling himself 'the Queer'.  I think JKR has 
something
> up her sleeve with that, I just don't know what.  Snape's descent 
and
> return function pretty much require him to have bought into the DE
> ideology.  But the HPB thing complicates everything.  Not so much 
the
> fact that he IS a half-blood, which plays into Snape's duality and
> self-loathing in a very cool way, but the fact that he has this
> bizarre nickname that JKR thought was so amazing that she called 
the
> whole book after it.  She flags the oddity of it with "if he'd 
been a
> budding Death Eater he wouldn't have been boasting about being
> "Half-Blood", would he?"

Magpie:
Heh--I know, isn't it great?  Because I've seen more than once after 
HBP people assume that now that Snape's a Half-blood we know he 
couldn't have really bought into the Pureblood stuff, nor could he 
be allied with any Slytherins--he must have been miserable in the 
house really etc.  Or it's suggested he had to hide who he was, but 
that doesn't seem practical either.

It seems like one thing we've learned about Purebloods is that they 
know who they all are. They're almost a family more than a race. 
Ernie knows he's Pureblood back 9 generations, and that doesn't seem 
to put him on the level of the Blacks, Weasleys, Prewetts, Bones and 
Malfoys. I don't recall any Princes on the Black's tree, nor have we 
heard of any current students with the name.  

What I think we do know is that Snape's background probably would 
have been known at school, and any Pureblood who cared about such 
things would know perfectly well he wasn't one of them. The fact 
that Snape uses that nickname shows both that he's claiming the 
title for himself and that Blood did mean something to him.  I mean, 
he could have called himself the Potions Prince. So was his 
bloodline made something of by the Princes?  

And then look at his relationship with the Blacks in Spinner's End.  
These people, even if they don't know his father was a Muggle, would 
I'd think know Snape wasn't a Pureblood family, yet he seems to have 
worked his way into an important position with them--Narcissa goes 
to him when she's in trouble.  (In that scene is role is almost what 
Sirius' would have been had he stayed with the family--he's 
protecting the Black family.)

I could even imagine--and obviously this is pure speculation--but I 
could imagine Lily encouraging him to be defiant about his Half-
blood status (like if the Prince's rejected him as a Half-Blood he 
turned their name for him around to make himself the Half-blood 
Prince) and then later he wound up going overboard. He's better than 
the other Prince's despite being a Half-blood.

-m