[HPforGrownups] Re: Snape's the Rescuer - Really?/Justice to Snape/ some russian history

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 170800

Alla:

Stretchers **by itself** are associated with hospitals and 
paramedics, most definitely. Stretchers in Snape's hands levitating 
Sirius to the dementors - are not associated with anything healing 
in my mind in any way, shape or form.

Magpie:
Okay, I don't remember the scene well enough, but isn't he just bringing
Sirius in? He's not literally bringing him to a waiting Dementor, he's
captured him and is bringing him back to the castle, isn't he? Along with
Harry, Ron and Hermione, none of whom are being taken to Dementors? 

Okay, let me try again to explain my way of thinking and then I will 
probably bow out, I think I tried more than hard to explain myself.

I just had the wierdest idea, which may at first sound completely 
off topic, but bear with me and I will get back to Potterverse just 
fine at the end.

Please take a look at this link in wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streltsy_Uprising.

I am not sure how familiar you are with russian history or russian 
paintings, or both, so I apologise if you know all that.

So Streltsy rebelled against Peter the Great and it did not end well 
for them, poor guys :(

A lot of them were executed as article says, so please take a 
careful at the painting by Surikov in the article, I am pretty sure 
you can see the better reproduction online somewhere else.

Do you see how another soldier supports one of the condemned 
soldiers and leads him to the execution?

Long time ago I remember reading about that painting and the writer 
was thinking that this projects the image of brotherhood - one 
soldier supports another wounded soldier.

And I remember screaming at the book - WHAT brotherhood?

This soldier leads another one to death, that's not how you treat 
your brother to me.

Magpie:
Thanks for the link--that was interesting! 

As for where it fits for Snape, I'm not sure. He's got four people, right?
Three of them he's literally taking them to an infirmary to recover. The
fourth guy he isn't showing any brotherly affection at all, and the guy
isn't a fellow soldier, as far as he knows. He's a murderer who's all year
been trying to hurt the kid. He's now also unconscious, and he's bringing
him to the castle too.I know it's ironic that he's taking him to a place
where he will be captured again. But I don't see how that makes him a
hypocrite. That's what happens to escaped criminals in the real world,
isn't it? If one were shot, let's say, paramedics would bring him to a
hospital and heal him, and if he was then sent back to Death Row.

So to me on one hand you've just got Snape handling stretchers and injured
people, which makes me think that it's part of a lot of healing stuff for
Snape in the books. What he's doing for Sirius specifically doesn't seem
all that significant to me at all. I mean, he's not being especially nice
to him, nor is he taking the opportunity to do anything particularly bad to
him. He's captured the bad guy everybody's been chasing the whole book and
taking him in. I imagine Peter would be taken in the same way by Lupin, but
I wouldn't much think of it as hypocritical.

Alla:
Even though ordinarily one soldier supporting his hurt comrade 
normally is associated with the brotherhood, sure, to me **not** in 
this situation at all. Why? Because I know the end result and I 
cannot separate them at all. This to me is hypocrisy, not 
brotherhood.

Magpie:
That's interesting, because it seems like you're saying that if you're
taking someone to their execution or to jail or whatever, compassion
immediately becomes hypocrisy so you're not really showing compassion. But
I would suspect that combination appears a lot. In Snape's case, of course,
it doesn't seem like he's doing the same thing with Sirius. The Trio he's
taking to the infirmary, so there's no problem there. With Sirius I think
he's more like the cop bringing somebody to jail and making sure he doesn't
hit his head on the door. Yeah, he could decide that since the guy's going
to get the chair anyway it doesn't matter, but nobody wants to hit their
head on the car door either.:-) 

Julie:
So has Harry been right all along? Or has he seen Snape
through his own misperceptions, and perhaps on some level
through Snape's own misdirections? (Don't freak, I am NOT
saying Snape has been faking it, only that he has never 
disabused Harry of any conclusions Harry has made--"That's
your job, isn't it?!" "Yes, Potter, it is.")

In any case, I don't think there's any *again* about it.
Either Harry and Snape have both been wrong about each
other from the beginning, or only Snape has been wrong
about Harry. For me, a pairing always makes for a much more 
interesting story ;-) 

Magpie:
Yes, the thing is, it's not like Harry has a technical theory about what
Snape's doing. He doesn't really claim to understand him any more than
Snape understands "how a werewolf's mind works."  He doesn't give a lot of
thought to Snape's personal strategy in a big picture way--only when it
becomes immediately important to what he's doing.

In HBP, even with Draco, Harry was right that Draco was up to something,
right to think they should check out what he was doing in the RoR. He was
right about certain things that he truly understood about Malfoy through
his own experience--that he wanted to take his father's place, that
Voldemort wouldn't care about his age, that his plan wasn't going well,
that the girls were Crabbe & Goyle. But Malfoy's revelation was still a
surprise to him. Harry's right about certain things about what Malfoy's
doing, but Dumbledore is also very right about Draco. So at the end of the
day Harry has actually *changed* his view of Draco to be more like
Dumbledore's. (Granted, Dumbledore also must have changed his view to be
more like Harry's in terms of realizing he overestimated his ability to
control the young.)

What's the equivalent with Snape? Well, Harry was right about Snape in PS
as well as wrong. He was correct in thinking Snape hated him even when
people wouldn't confirm it until the end. He was just wrong about his being
the one who was stealing the stone. 

In HBP...well, Snape did kill Dumbledore as far as I can see. Beyond that
Harry's supposed to be right just because he never trusted or liked Snape.
Snape was never really remorseful. He was really a DE. At this point
everybody already thinks Harry's right--it's just not much of a triumph.
It's hard for me to imagine that's the big revelation about Snape. I mean,
Harry doesn't claim to have a real understanding of Snape even though he
supposedly instinctively gets him more than others. He loved him when he
met him as his teenaged self, and continued to defend him until he found
out--oops!--it was Snape. For Harry to be right in HBP, he also has to be
wrong in HBP--either he was right all along to believe Snape is bad through
and through, or he was wrong to believe the Prince was an okay guy. 

Harry doesn't have any real answer for how Snape could fool
Dumbledore--except for the DE story which is that Dumbledore is a moron.
Harry doesn't put it in those terms, but that's the idea. Which means that
what we'd probably learn in DH, if Harry was right and Snape is ESE, is
that Snape did dupe Dumbledore, only Dumbledore's mistake wasn't as lame as
it seems now. So Harry would still have to learn things that showed where
he was wrong any way you look at it, because Harry just doesn't know stuff.

-m