Snape and Marauders WAS :Draco and Intent

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186934


> Potioncat:
> I find it hard to believe a bully could turn out good---but I'm open to RL proof. Maybe Pippin is right and James just grew out of it over time. 

Pippin:
Well, that's what Sirius says. "Your father was the best friend I ever had, and he was a good person. A lot of people are idiots at the age of fifteen. He grew out of it." -- OOP ch 29

I don't think this is so unusual, or something that only happens in fiction. Plenty of people get along famously with older siblings who picked on them as kids. 

 And would you say that Sirius also was not a good person? He did bully Kreacher as an adult, but I wouldn't say that he was always picking on weaker people. He was protective of them generally, and I think that was true of James as an adult as well.

 Although James and Sirius made fun of the Muggle policemen in JKR's drabble, it's clear that they would have fought to the death to save them from the Death Eaters. And they didn't have to -- either of them would have been welcome to join Voldemort.

But James and Sirius always had Gryffindor values, they just took it for granted that they were living up to them, and so it never occured to them that they weren't, except when Lupin told them so. But he never had the gumption to put teeth in what he was saying.

That's a very different  behavior than we saw from Draco or young Snape. They fight bravely for the people they love, but they don't trouble much about strangers, never mind enemies. 

It wasn't that Snape became braver than he was before, after all Snape had been a great personal risk from the moment he defected.  It was that Snape came to consider it cowardice to leave Hogwarts to face the Dark Lord while he saved himself, even though there wasn't anyone at Hogwarts whom he cared for personally. 

Potioncat: 
> Perhaps whatever it was that motivated James to use his magic against others was channelled into use against DEs. Sort of changing his bullying into socially acceptable behavior.

Pippin:
I think this is  true. The Marauders, and Sirius at GP, are shown as having literally nothing better to do. They're not abnormally bad-tempered or aggressive but they need a lot of stimulation, and if their circumstances don't provide it, they'll engineer their own. It doesn't help that Kreacher reminds Sirius of the bad old days when he was the one being pushed around by his parents, just as Harry reminds Snape of the bad old days when he was being bullied by James.

I think McGonagall  and Dumbledore only knew about the sort of stuff that Harry found in the files he had to copy, hexing other students in the corridors and such. And that sort of mischief is pretty common in young wizards whose powers sometimes grow faster than their sense of responsibility.

McGonagall and Dumbledore didn't know  about becoming  animagi, or running with Lupin, or making the Marauder's map. It would be incredibly far-fetched  to suppose that four teenaged boys could pull all of that off month after month under the nose of the most powerful wizard in existence -- if you didn't know that they had a super powerful invisibility cloak, and didn't imagine that any such thing existed outside of legend. 


Pippin