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

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 165394

Carol earlier:
> >
> > This is just a small aside. I'm not sure that Teen!Snape is
practicing killing flies in the sense of practicing killing people.
> <snip> My sense in that memory is that he's just bored, a teenage
boy with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
>
> Pippin:
> That may have been how Snape felt at the time.
>
> But Snape wasn't extracting random memories from Harry, he was
extracting memories that would make Harry feel humiliated, and that
was the spell that Harry turned back on him with protego. So
regardless of how Snape felt when he was actually shooting down the
flies, I don't think it's a memory he is comfortable with now.
>
> Similarly, Harry certainly didn't feel humiliated when Cho kissed
him, but he's frantic not to be forced to share the memory with Snape
-- ewww.
>
> We don't know what spell Snape was using in the memory and we
don't know whether there was any light, red, green or polkadot, but
why would Snape feel humiliated or ashamed to recall it if he was just
using the WW equivalent of a flyswatter?
>
> Pippin
>
Carol responds:
Harry's acidental Protego just deflected the Legilimens spell that
Snape was using onto Snape because Harry didn't want Snape to see
anything related to Cho--which, as you say, was not a humiliating
memory, just one he didn't want Snape to see. That in itself is proof
that Snape wasn't casting a spell to extract humiliating memories. The
same is true for Harry's memory of Petrified!Hermione--not a happy
memory, but not humiliating.

I don't think that a Legilimens spell can be that specific. I think
that both Snape's spell and Harry's accidental Protego extracted
random memories. That they were mostly unhappy ones probably results
from the fact that both Harry and Snape had (mostly) unhappy
childhoods. Think how much trouble Harry had coming up with a happy
memory to use for his Patronus in PoA.

And, IMO, the absence of light in the fly memory *is* significant. If
it were green, an AK, surely the narrator would have pointed that out
and Harry would have noticed. He has, after all, seen Fake!Moody
murdering a spider in GoF, and I don't think he'd have been as
sympathetic toward the crying child in the first memory if he thought
that the teenager in the third memory was a budding DE practicing
Unforgiveable Curses for later use on people. (We have no evidence
that Snape killed anyone before the tower and the testimony of
Bellatrix that he frequently "slithered out of action.")

Carol, who hopes that next time someone sees her swatting a fly, they
don't assume that she's practicing on flies as a prelude to murdering
people