Snape's Psychology

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187462

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47 at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> > Carol:
> >  (She also owes us an explanation for why kids were using Levicorpus, a *nonverbal* spell written in Severus's *NEWT* Potions book at the end of *fifth* year, but I suppose we can supply our own explanations--Severus was practicing advanced potions at home and making notes in his mom's old book long before sixth year, and some Slytherin that he'd told the Levicorpus spell to couldn't do nonverbal spells and so gave away both the incantation and countercurse by speaking them out loud--but I do wish she pay attention to what she's written elsewhere. Consistency in a fiction series is a virtue.)
> 
> 
> Montavilla47:
> I think there's a much simpler explanation.  Snape could have taught the spell to Lily, who was, he thought, his best friend.   When first used it, Harry and Ron thought it a fun and essentially harmless spell. It would be natural for Snape to want to share a fun joke with Lily.
> 
> If Snape then discovers James using it (in the SWM), he has even more reason to snap at Lily, because it would mean she had taught it to James (or possibly, to one of her friends, who passed it along).
>
Carol responds:
It *is* an essentially harmless spell unless it's used to humiliate and abuse people (Severus in SWM and the Muggle Mrs. Roberts, who, in addition to being levitated like her family, is flipped upside down to expose her "voluminous drawers"). It's certainly less dark than, say, a hex that makes the victim suffer from painful boils. It can be useful (McGonagall uses something like it to leave the Carrows hanging after she's tied them up). But, like most of the spells in the books other than Dark curses, it can be abused.

That aside, your explanation works as well as any, but, still, Levicorpus and its countercurse Liberacorpus are nonverbal, so JKR ought to have provided *some* explanation as to how they could become a fad during Snape's and Lupin's fifth year, not to mention why he's using a sixth-year Potions book during his fifth year. I really think that she just forgot the chronology, just as she forgets that James is sixteen, not fifteen, during those scenes. (If she wanted him to be fifteen, she should have given him a summer birthday, not a March one.) We readers shouldn't have to invent explanations to explain real or apparent inconsistencies.

BTW, can anyone figure out an explanation for Harry's detentions with Umbridge, assigned on Monday for "every day this week," beginning on a Tuesday? On Monday night, he goes to dinner with Ron and Hermione and then heads up to Gryffindor Tower, but on Tuesday, which ought to have been the second day, he gobbles a bite of dinner before 5:00 (has the dinner hour also changed? Since when have they eaten dinner at 4:30 or 4:45?) and hurries off to his *first* detention!

Sure, it's a small thing, but it annoys me, just as it annoys me that the Gryffindors-only DADA class suddenly has thirty students instead of ten (of whom only a familiar five or six speak up).

Carol, sorry to be hypercritical but still in copyeditor mode after a long project with a tight deadline

Carol, who finally remembered to put the "h" in "psychology" in the thread title