student!Snape keeping Lupin's secret (was Re: Sirius as a dog)

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 181176

Leah:
> The fact that they don't give Harry those sort of explanations 
> suggest that they're not true, and to their credit, Sirius and Lupin 
> are being honest with Harry.  Harry actually says '"he just attacked 
> Snape for no good reason..."' and neither Sirius or Lupin give a 
> reason like I've suggested above.  What we get from Lupin is the 
> comments I quoted in my earlier post, about never telling James and 
> Sirius to lay off Snape, and never telling them they were 'out of 
> order' and Sirius' comment that Lupin sometimes made them ashamed of 
> their treatment of Snape.

Magpie:
I'm going to go with Leah on this one. The way the situation comes 
across to me is this--Snape doesn't come across as some innocent 
picked on kid like Neville at all. There's no indication that we're 
talking about Marauders bullying Snape into crying fits and that's it.

However, we also have a clear pattern of him being outnumbered, and I 
think that's actually an intentional theme. Not that he never had any 
allies, but that the Marauders, particularly James and Sirius were 
*friends* and from the get-go the two of them would go after Severus--
who gave as good as he got, surely, but did not have a Sirius, nor a 
Remus or a Peter. He did eventually go around with a gang--that's 
canon too. But it seems to me the idea is still that Snape never 
really had friends like the Marauders. He had people he "went around 
with" not people who were loyal to him the way most of the Marauders 
were to each other. 

The closest he actually seems to come to somebody who really cared 
about him was Lucius, actually. As per DH and HBP, the one saving 
grace of the Malfoys (which I doubt is true of Mulciber or Avery) is 
that they are capable of truly caring about other people--even if it's 
mostly each other. Lucius is really the only person in canon that I 
would say is linked to Snape as something like a same-age friend--
except for Lily, of course.

But we've got lots of references to the Marauders being friends and 
targetting Snape--hell, I always thought that was the way it worked 
starting in PoA when the MWPP gang up on Snape in map form. As you've 
mentioned, the Marauders themselves talk about Sirius and James going 
after Snape together, Lupin regrets not stopping the two of them. We 
see it in SWM. Snape furiously refers to them going after him 4 on 1 
(it probably seemed that way to Snape even when Sirius and James were 
the ones doing the hexing). He seems to have some true actual pain 
about the unfairness of that part. The one time we see somebody on 
Snape's side it's Lily.

So yeah, I think loneliness is a big part of Snape's character and 
don't really see any evidence of true gang fights between his friends 
and James friends. I wouldn't be surprised if there were times when 
the two groups fought, but it still seems like we're often talking 
about MWPP vs. Snape and Snape seeing himself as on his own. SWM seems 
far more like business as usual, and the people standing around even 
make it look to Harry as if Snape isn't very popular, not that they're 
afraid of him in that big of a crowd. (I could easily imagine they're 
afraid of him individually.) He seems like he's supposed to be both 
vicious and lonely, and the lonlier he gets (especially after Lily 
drops him) the more vicious he gets, hanging around with an evil bunch 
of boys without seeming to find actual friends in them.

-m