Ending the DA (Was: Suspension of disbelief )

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 182357

Montavilla47 wrote:
<snip>
> But, I went along with it until Harry blew off the D.A.  That was
the  straw that did me in.  The D.A. had been sold to its members as
being really important because V-voldemort was back.  Well, he was
backer than ever in HBP, but suddenly Harry doesn't see a need to help
his fellow students learn to defend themselves.  Nope, he'd rather
captain the Quidditch team.
> 
> It made no sense from a compassionate point of view (since his
friends needed his skills more than ever) or a strategic point of view
(if he was supposed to rid the world of Voldemort, he was going to
need allies).  And, character-wise, it made Harry seem like a stuck-up
prig.

Carol responds:
IMO, most of the students didn't join the DA to oppose Voldemort (some
of them didn't even believe he was back), Most of them, even Ernie
Macmillan and definitely Zacharias Smith and the Ravenclaws, were more
interested in passing their DADA OWL (and undermining Umbridge).
Granted, by the time of HBP, they knew that Voldemort was really back,
but they had also learned everything that Harry had to teach them.
(Only Neville and Luna continued to check their coins, hoping that the
DA would resume.)

The main reason, though, that the DA was disbanded, was that Umbridge
was gone and they were no longer forced to learn theory from a
worthless book. They had, for the first time since Lupin, a DADA
teacher who knew what he was doing. Snape didn't just teach them to
cast nonverbal hexes, jinxes, and countercurses (a skill that Harry
could have learned as well as Hermione, given that he could cast
Levicorpus and Liberacorpus, if he hadn't closed his mind to Snape's
teaching), he taught them about Inferi and fighting the Imperius Curse
and an alternate approach to fighting Dementors, which, unfortunately,
we don't get to see. The glimpses that we get of his class show the
students (other than Harry and Ron) interested in what Snape has to
say, following his every move with their eyes and listening to every word.

In short, they no longer needed the DA or Harry. They had the DADA
teacher that they'd needed all along. (Only the deluded Draco
considers DADA useless because "we" don't need it, but he doesn't say
that in class.) Nobody except Harry and Ron (and Lavender when she's
sympathizing with Ron) minds Snape's sarcasm and unfairness because he
knows his subject and, unlike Potions (which only a few students care
enough about to learn well), all of them see its importance. Snape, of
course, is not denying that Voldemort is back: quite the contrary.

Now, if they'd had yet another incompetent DADA teacher, I'd see the
need for the DA to continue. But even Harry, much as he hates Snape,
acknowledges that with Umbridge gone, it's no longer needed.

Carol, thinking that Snape's surviving to teach Harry nonverbal DADA
spells in a belated seventh year (as headmaster or otherwise) would
have made more sense than having us believe (via interviews) that
Harry became an Auror without even finishing school (based on his
defeat of Voldemort through luck, love, and shared powers he no longer
has) and not yet knowing how to cast a nonverbal spell other than
Levicorpus