Snape thoughts of Harry

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 177190

jbmwfb69 wrote:
>
> Severus Snape always said Harry was an arrogant mediocre wizard.
Does Harry have mediocre or great powers?

Carol responds:
Setting aside Snape's charge of arrogance, which is at least partly
his subjective response to seeing James in Harry (though often our
expectations shape a person's response to us and Harry does, IMO,
become more arrogant toward Snape as the books progress), I want to
look simply at Harry's "mediocrity." 

I think we can take for granted that Snape honestly regards Harry as
mediocre since he expresses that view not only to Harry himself but to
Dumbledore and to Bellatrix. Snape's view is first formed by Harry's
inability to answer what he probably considers to be elementary
questions about potion-making. (Harry is so far off the mark that he
expects to find information on Bezoars in "One Thousand Magical Herbs
and Fungi.") To be sure, Harry has had only about two months to study
his books and he's been raised by Muggles, so Snape's expectation that
he might know at least a bit about potion-making is, at best,
unrealistic, but it's possible that Snape is judging Harry's knowledge
based on his own at the same age. He's also, I think, checking to see
whether there's any truth in the DE speculation that Harry is a Dark
Wizard in the making, a prodigy. Clearly not.

This first impression is reinforced by Harry's less than stellar
performance in Snape's class, where he is easily distracted and
frequently omits steps or adds ingredients in the wrong order, as
Snape himself would never do (unless he was conducting an experiment).
So neglecting to follow directions carefully (not to mention rule
breaking outside of class) contributes to Snape's view of Harry (he
tells slughorn that he's not aware of having taught Harry anything,
meaning not aware that Harry has learned anything in his classes).

Occlumency, in which Harry fails to clear his mind of emotion or
practice and keeps having the very dream that Snape wants him to block
is more evidence (for Snape) that "[Harry's] magic is mediocre" (DH
Am. ed. 684), as is Harry's failure to cast nonverbal spells in
Snape's DADA class. (At least, unlike Ron at the same point, he can
Apparate half an inch across a room.)

In terms of schoolwork, Snape is right. Harry is an ordinary student
who values Quidditch (or finding out what Draco Malfoy is up to) more
than his lessons. His marks seem to be average though his OWL grades
(one O, with Es in all the key subjects, even Potions) show that Harry
has learned from his classes in spite of himself. Harry earns an O in
DADA not, perhaps, through innate ability, but through his unusual
education in that subject. He has had the advantage of private lessons
in casting a Patronus, not to mention having a Dementor Boggart to
practice on (which earns him a bonus point on the OWL but also enables
him to deal with real Dementors, at first from a distance and then up
close). He also has to learn spells not taught by his current DADA
teacher, Crouch!Moody, to compete in the TWT tournament (odd, that,
considering that Crouch!Moody wants Harry to win. Maybe he doesn't
want any other students to learn useful spells?). Hermione, who looks
up the spells and understands the theory, nevertheless somehow gets an
E on her DADA exam, either because she's not practicing them with
Harry or because she messes up badly on the Boggart portion of her
exam, never having been given a chance to practice the spell by Lupin.
In short, Harry's DADA expertise is not so much a matter of talent as
of the opportunity to learn and practice spells that most of his
classmates have not been taught. And, of course, he actually uses
Expelliarmus against Voldemort himself, with highly unusual results
that have more to do with his wand than with Harry himself. In HBP,
his dislike and distrust of Snape seems to block him from further
progress in that subject: he never learns nonverbal spells (except the
Prince's own Levicorpus/Liberacorpus; ironically, the only new spells
that Harry learns in HBP are the ones invented by the teenage Severus
Snape).

While Harry is by no means incompetent and Snape's label of "mediocre"
is slightly off the mark, he seems to be what Americans would call a B
student in the subjects that matter (worse than that in History of
Magic and Divination). He has to struggle to learn certain spells
(IIRC, he had a hard time with Impedimenta) and, except for his
unexplained ability to block an Imperius Curse, spells that require
concentration--whether Charms, Transfiguration, or DADA--don't come
easily for him, nor do mental skills like Occlumency and nonverbal
spells. (As for Legilimency, probably his excursions into Voldemort's
mind make it unlikely that he'll ever want to learn that skill.) If
Snape compares Harry's power of concentration with his own, or his
ability to deflect spells with his own, or his complete inability to
invent Potions improvements or charms and hexes with his own
brilliance, then Harry certainly is mediocre. He's no match for Snape,
and if Snape were a loyal DE, Harry would be dead.

Many readers (and filmgoers), based on Harry's spectacular Patronus
and his survival of multiple confrontations with Voldemort, expected
Harry to be a brilliant spellcaster as of DH and thought that he would
defeat Voldie through skill or power. Harry's friends, notably Ron and
Hermione, seem to think the same thing. Ron keeps repeating that the
Elder Wand would enable Harry to defeat LV and that it was a mistake
to throw it away; Hermione thinks that it's Harry's own power, not his
wand acting on its own, that causes the wand to attack Voldemort early
in the book. To his credit, Harry knows otherwise. He knows, and has
told Dumbledore, that he has no extraordinary powers (other than
Parseltongue and the scar link). He knows that the wand is acting on
its own and that he has nothing to do with it (aside from an affinity
with the wand that he knows nothing about). When his wand is broken,
he feels as powerless as a Muggle. He doubts even the power DD kept
telling him that he has, Love.

In the end, it isn't skill or power that defeats Voldemort. It's
self-sacrificial love, a drop of blood, and pure luck--not to mention
the help of his friends and of an ally he didn't even know he had
until it was too late, Severus Snape, whose one hope for the defeat of
Voldemort rested in the "mediocre" boy he thought was being sent as a
pig to the slaughter.

In assessing Harry's skills as a wizard, I agree with Snape. Harry has
mediocre powers, not great ones. But courage and love triumph over
power in the end. 

Carol, who thinks that Auror training and a normal life probably
enabled Harry to develop the skills that Snape (and others) mistakenly
thought he needed to defeat LV