Ungrateful Werewolf ( Was Re: Character Given A Reprieve)

[srpripas]

No: HPFGUIDX 175832


> Mim:
> But does Remus know one way or the other? When he says that bit 
> about "height of dishonour" he's trying to get Harry to see that he 
> should be a little less trusting. Using James as an example, good or 
> bad always works with Harry. Until Harry uses it against Remus in 
> the end, that was fun. I'll give you that it's possible that James 
> didn't know and it had been all Sirius but we truly don't know one 
> way or another. James certainly didn't tell Remus and if Remus would 
> have expected Sirius to have told him, the same applies to James.
> > 

Maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't.  Possibly he discussed it with
Sirius, who probably would know the answer to this question.  I do
think Remus probably wondered about it a lot, though, and I don't
think he would have worded his rebuke to Harry in quite the same way
if he knew or suspected that James had once suspected him.  Maybe he
would have said something like "James put his faith in the wrong
people."  What he actually said gives off a different message, though,
IMO.

> > 
> Mim:
> Of course Tonks shares responsibility for the pregnancy but we're 
> talking about the woman who had been pursuing Remus relentlessly no  
> matter what. She was even stalking him in the middle of the battle 
> of Hogwarts. I bet she would want the kid regardless. She doesn't 
> seem to have any problem with it but Remus throws a hissy fit about 
> it. So if wolfie doesn't want little wolfies around (and it was a 
> crap shoot, they really didn't know what the kid would be) all 
> forgetful wolfie had to do was cover it up. It's simple. He did get 
> Tonks pregnant, her responsibility doesn't matter here.

1. Sort of an unrelated point, but I do wonder if lycanthropy is even
a genetic trait.  To me it doesn't make sense that it would be,
because it's not an acquired trait.  It's like saying that someone who
lost a limb in an accident might produce a child with a missing
limb--it doesn't make sense.  So I'm not sure whether Remus' ramblings
about the child ending up like him were truly rational, or whether he
was just so upset and unsettled by the whole situation that he wasn't
thinking rationally at all.  Possibly he feared passing lycanthropy on
via the bite, not through inheritance.  Of course Rowling doesn't
really seem to have a terribly good grasp on genetics, so this may all
be a moot point.
2.  I think you're selling Tonks a bit short here.  Just because she
seems clearly devoted to Remus doesn't mean she wasn't anything but
thrilled about having a kid right then.  I don't think we know enough
about the relationship, or the circumstances surrounding the
pregnancy, to draw any conclusions from it.  I just think it's a leap
to use the pregnancy *itself* as evidence of Remus' "irresponsibility"
when there's so much we don't know.  (Then again, I admit that my
opinion of his character is also relatively unaffected by his
forgetting the Wolfsbane in PoA.  I don't weight events which clearly
had to happen for the sake of the plot as much as other things, but
that's my personal preference.  Certainly Remus does act irresponsibly
on occasion (most particularly including the early chapters of DH),
but I don't see him as an irredeemably irresponsible person, due to
his various rather admirable actions.  Perhaps this is because he is
one of the few people in the Potterverse who habitually admits his
mistakes.  YMMV.

> Mim:
> They were deliciously ambiguous and when it comes to Snape, he was a 
> bully to his students which is almost worse. But we're talking about 
> fandom here, not the most rational reaction to everything. Yes, 
> Snape did follow them about and try to get them in trouble but they 
> were bullying him and others, looking for any chance to jump him if 
> they outnumbered him. 

I don't agree with these conclusions.  We have one documented instance
of MWPP ganging up on Snape, but we don't really know the frequency of
the bullying, either against Snape or others.  But we have some
secondhand reports of what went on:

1. Sirius (in OotP) tells us that Snape never missed a chance to hex
James even in their seventh year.  By that point James had stopped
"hexing people for the fun of it" (according to Remus), but Snape
still persisted in hexing James on occasion.  Sirius also tells us
that Remus, despite his cowardly silence in SWP, did sometimes make
James and Sirius feel ashamed of themselves.
2. Snape tells us (at the end of HBP) that James and his friends never
attacked him unless it was "four against one."  (which was a truly
cringe-worthy moment for me when I first read it, but I also have to
point out that if the SWP scene is any indication, these "attacks"
weren't really four against one.  Peter clearly enjoyed the show and
Remus watched with disapproval but was too afraid to speak up, but
neither actively participated.  James and Sirius seem to have done the
bulk of the actual bullying.  (Not that Remus' sin of silence is
excusable, mind, but we don't see him or Peter actively bullying
Snape.  It's hard to speak of MWPP as a monolithic group for these
reasons.)
3. We have the many detention records which Harry looked at in HBP. 
Most of these were from James and Sirius; only occasionally did Remus
and Peter obtain detentions, too.  The problem with this record is
that it's hard to say whether the bulk of James and Sirius' misdeeds
were truly malicious, mostly harmless pranks, or something in between.
 JKR draws a parallel between the J&S duo and Fred and George in the
text, but it's hard to say how accurate the parallel is.  Of course I
realize some fans are disturbed by some of F&G's pranks, but I think
Harry, JKR, and the bulk of the Hogwarts student body see them as fun
pranksters, not bullies.  Which category S&J fall into is less clear.
 I tend to think that they were *sometimes* bullies and *sometimes*
"fun pranksters."  I note that McGonagall--who I suspect has very
little tolerance for bullying--fondly recalls S&J as likeable and
talented troublemakers (like F&G). 

>Mim:
>For better or for worse, the books never gave 
> us one scene of young Snape himself bullying others or using that 
> awful dark magic to hurt others in school. 

Well, yes, but the fact remains that he invented the "Levicorpus"
spell and it gained quite a lot of popularity during MWPP/S' time at
Hogwarts.  Surely Snape must have *used* this spell (probably more
than one time) for it to catch on, as it were.  Young Snape wasn't
merely a victim, he was also something of a trendsetter in hexes.  S&R
also tell us that Snape did sometimes hex James first.  You're free to
disbelieve them, but I don't, at least not entirely.

>Mim:
>Except for James from 
> what we hear from Remus and Sirius, not the most reliable narrators 
> out there. 

Fair point, but I think Snape's an equally unreliable narrator. 
That's part of what makes it hard to discern what actually happened
and who the real victims were.  Sirius and Remus tell us that Snape
persisted in hexing James; Snape tells us that MWPP only attacked him
when it was four against one--though we now know that Snape had his
own "gang" of sorts.  What to make of this?  I'm not entirely sure,
but I tend to think that there is at least some truth in both
accounts.  That's why I'm not comfortable in reducing MWPP/Snape
relations as a simple bully/victim relationship.  (And I also note
that cannon shows us it wasn't generally MWPP against Snape so much as
 James & Sirius vs. Snape or James vs. Snape.)

> 
> Mim:
> 
> I'm sure that Dumbledore and everyone else could have tried harder 
> if they truly believed in Sirius. But we'll never know one way or 
> another.

I don't know about that.  The books indicate that Dumbledore's power
in political affairs was always somewhat limited.  In a world which
had just seen a terrible war, in which Barty Crouch Sr. was shipping
people (including Sirius) off to Azkaban without a trial, I'm not sure
how much Dumbledore could have done for Sirius even if he believed his
innocence.  And when there were tons of eyewitnesses who thought they
saw Sirius kill thirteen people, and when Dumbledore believed that
Sirius had been the Potters' Secret-Keeper, how could he believe in
Sirius' innocence?  Was he really supposed to imagine that Sirius,
Peter, and James had become illegal Animagi without his knowledge,
switched Secret-Keepers, and that slow, untalented Peter had faked his
own death before casting a very powerful curse?  It is a rather
fantastical story.

> Sarah
> As
> > for Remus, it's not clear what Dumbledore *could* have done for him
> > during the "missing years" gap.  
> 
> 
> Mim:
> 
> He could have hired him. In a position other than a cursed one, that 
> is. 

Assuming that there was an available position to which Remus was
suited for, that is.  We don't know whether he's qualified to teach a
position other than DADA, and besides it seems like job turnover at
Hogwarts is pretty slow.  I also assume that it probably wasn't easy
to convince the rest of the Hogwarts staff/the board of governors to
hire a werewolf--especially before the invention of the Wolfsbane potion.


> > Mim: 
> 
> I was referring merely to the fact that he believed Sirius to be 
> guilty. And so did Remus. That's a big deal. But I guess you have a 
> point, Dumbledore was such a user that we can't really draw 
> conclusions from his behaviour. He was probably glad that he had had 
> Sirius out of the way so that Harry could grow up miserable among 
> Muggles and I'm sure that Sirius' death was a relief too because 
> then he could continue grooming Harry to march to his death without 
> any distractions.
> 
> Gads, I hate Dumbledore but that's a different story.

I don't hate Dumbledore as much as you do, but I agree that he was so
consumed by his Grand Plans that actual concerns about people--Harry,
Sirus, Snape, Remus--took a bit of a backseat.  

Sarah