Snape's minor memories (Was: Snape and Dumbledore on the Tower)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 165381

Pippin wrote:
<snip>
> 
> As for Snape, I think it would make clear that Snape really has
> changed profoundly from the youth who practiced killing flies,
> invented sectumsempra and joined the Death Eaters. <snip>

Carol responds:

This is just a small aside. I'm not sure that Teen!Snape is practicing
killing flies in the sense of practicing killing people. There's no
green flash, for one thing. He could simply be Stunning them. Or,
since no light at all is mentioned (Stupefy give off a red light),
maybe he's using a spell especially designed for flies. Surely wizards
and witches kill flies just as Muggles do, and I doubt that they use a
fly swatter. I wouldn't want flies in my room, either. My sense in
that memory is that he's just bored, a teenage boy with nowhere to go
and nothing to do.

And BTW, I don't think, as some posters do, that the memory of the boy
Severus on a bucking broom being watched by a laughing girl indicates
that he's not good at flying. He does fine the one time we see him
fly, as referee in a Quidditch game. If he were a bad flyer, he'd
never have volunteered for that job. Brooms don't normally buck off
their riders. Even the school brooms, which sense an inexperienced and
timid rider, send Neville fifty feet into the air, where he falls off.
The boy in the memory strikes me as determined, not timid, Snape
through and through. I think the broom is hexed. If it weren't for the
age difference, I'd think she was Bellatrix.

Carol, thinking we shouldn't leap to conclusions from those minor
memories and hoping we'll learn more about them