Does Snape need to be grateful to James? WAS :Draco and Intent:

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186830

Note from Carol:

My apologies if an earlier version of this post appears. Yahoo ate it twice, so I'm posting the amended version on the assumption that the others are really gone.

Carol earlier:
>
> I'm saying that Severus has no reason to befriend or even be grateful to James, who is still his enemy and follows up his "noble" rescue by publicly attacking and humiliating Severus one on one. Unlike Draco, Severus has little reason to be grateful. True, his life was saved, or he was prevented from becoming a werewolf, but not because James cared about *him* in any way or even valued his life as a fellow human being. 
> 
Alla responded:
> 
> But does it matter why James saved him?

Carol responds:
It does to Snape. :-)

Alla:
> I mean,  to me the fact that James saved him pretty much means that he valued his life as a fellow human being, even if  he could care less about Snape as a  *person*. He did not have to do it. He could have just let Snape die.

Carol responds:
Could he? He himself might not have gotten in trouble, but Sirius would certainly have been expelled and perhaps arrested, and Remus, the werewolf who bit and killed Severus, would probably have been put to death himself or even soul-sucked, sixteen years old or not. I'm pretty sure that in this instance, James realized the potential consequences to himself and his friends if Severus was actually bitten and Sirius, who had initiated the Prank, did not. Otherwise, he would have gone in himself to rescue Severus, realizing that what he had done was actually dangerous and could get him and Remus in very serious trouble.

Alla: 
> What I am trying to say is that to me saving somebody's life, for whatever reasons just goes to show something about the person who saves the life.
> 
> So, no I would not say that Snape should have had befriended James.  But did he have any reasons to be grateful? In my opinion - yeah, his life was just saved. That to me also says plenty about a person, if the person cannot acknowledge such an act.
> 
> If somebody saved my life, I do not care if this person my bitterest enemy, you bet I would acknowledge the act of such tremendous value to me.

Carol responds:

Any gratitude that Severus may have felt initially (which would, in any case, have competed with his resentment against Sirius and his belief that James was in on the Prank and was only saving his own skin and that of his own friends) would have been instantly undone, IMO, by James's and Sirius's unprovoked attack on him a week later. How can he possibly be grateful to James after that?

If the events had occurred in the opposite order and James had shown any indication that he had saved Severus's life because he valued his existence as a human being, I could see your point. But, as it is, for me, there's all the difference in the world between Harry's rescue of Draco, which is wholly selfless and altruistic, and James's rescue of Severus, which is neither, as demonstrated by James's subsequent behavior in SWM. And the rescued victims react differently as a consequence. (Draco, of course, has additional reason to be grateful to Harry, who not only saved his life twice but defeated Voldemort as well. For the boy Severus to treat the boy James, who remains a bully and subsequently humiliates him publicly, as the adult Draco treats the adult Harry, who saved the Wizarding World, is simply not comprehensible, IMO.

With regard to Harry being grateful to Snape for saving his life (mentioned in your next post), he wasn't at first. Only when he understood Snape's love for his mother and the terrible risks he had taken was he ever grateful. He knew in his first year that Snape hated him but didn't want him to die (Quirrell had told him that much), and he knew that Snape hated his father and had (supposedly) saved him to pay off that life debt, but he never felt any gratitude toward him. Only when he had entered the Pensieve and understood who Snape really was did he feel gratitude for what Snape had done. That's very different from feeling gratitude to a boy who, a week after he saves your life for selfish reasons that have nothing to do with the worth of your life (and Snape, who hates Harry, is well aware of the worth of his life, not as a human being but as the "one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord").

Ultimately, Harry arrives at the wisdom to understand and forgive. Snape, though he's a grown man and does many brave and brilliant things, never reaches that level of understanding. I think he finally begins to understand who Harry is at the end and sees Lily in Harry's eyes instead of seeing only James, but to understand and forgive James and be grateful to *him*? I think that's too much to ask of a man whose emotional development has been stunted, and certainly too much to ask of the boy Severus, especially after SWM.

Carol, who, of course, meant "two on one," not "one on one," in her response to Shelley