Lack of re-examination SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186579

Alla:
> > Here is how I see it. At first Harry sees a teacher punishing a boy who **deserved to be punished** IMO for something wrong that he did. Said teacher used a punishment, which was a bit over the top. He did not use an unforgivable on him, he did not make him bleed, he did not cause him any permanent injury. He caused him a humiliation and probably some pain.
> 
> Pippin:
> Hmmm...well, if Harry does not have any problem with that, then we can understand why he didn't have any lasting  problem with the way Snape treated him once he understood that Snape believed sincerely that Harry deserved to be punished. 
> 
> When a sadistic person punishes, he is going to punish sadistically, because he doesn't know what it's like *not* to be sadistic. He has a choice about whether to punish or not, he doesn't have a choice about liking it.

Carol responds:
I'm not sure that Snape's punishments qualify as sadistic. He enjoys embarrassing and humiliating certain people (mostly Harry--I don't think he *enjoys* yelling at the incompetent Neville), but his detentions, while no fun at all (they are, after all, supposed to be punishments) are never dangerous or painful. If we compare, saying, sorting rotten Flobberworms from good ones with Umbridge's horrible, blood-drawing quill or the Carrows' Crucios, his detentions seem almost as mild as Lockhart's supposedly enjoyable but actually boring detention in which Harry helps him (IIRC) mail out his autographed photos.

But if you mean that Snape doesn't know what it's like not to be sarcastic and unpleasant to people he dislikes (possibly a defensive mechanism that he developed to keep from feeling "weak"), I might agree with you. He's capable of civility to a few people, notably Dumbledore and Narcissa Malfoy, but he treats Peter Pettigrew and Bellatrix Lestrange with as much contempt and sarcasm as he treats Sirius Black.  Snape, BTW, *can* act and often does, but I think that sarcasm is or has become the milieu in which he feels most comfortable and, perhaps, most in control.

Even if the sadistic teacher you have in mind is Fake!Moody rather than snape, I disagree that he had no control over his sadism. I think he was finding "safe" outlets for it, punishing the son of a Death Eater in front of Gryffindors knowing that they'd think he deserved it and, more important, knowing that they and any teachers who witnessed the bouncing ferret would attribute his malice to the real Moody's known abhorrence of DEs. Imperioing the students (and a spider), Crucioing the spider for longer than necessary to illustrate the curse in front of the very boy whose parents helped torture into insanity with the intention of upsetting him so that he'd need to be invited for tea afterward (all as part of a plot to help Harry win the tournament so that he could be turned over to Voldemort to be killed, and AKing a spider in front of Harry, whose parents had been killed by Voldemort using that same curse--all that is sadism for a purpose combined with self-indulgent sadism disguised as education. (I hate to say it, but Barty Jr. is brilliant. What a sad loss that he became a Death Eater.)

Umbridge, too, keeps her sadism under control most of the time, using it for a purpose (to "teach" Harry not to tell "lies," for example). She considers a Crucio (sadistically trying to figure out which spot would cause the most pain) when she becomes desperate, but even then she's careful to turn Fudge's photograph face down so he won't know what she's doing. Her use of sadistic punishments, like Fake!Moody's, is calculated, not beyond her control.

I do agree, however, that Harry, after encountering real sadism in another teacher (not to mention hearing about the Carrows) found Snape's detentions to be more unpleasant than sadistic, especially when he realized, through the Pensieve memories, that Snape really believed that he deserved them (in some cases, he knew that himself). I'm not so sure, though, that Harry ever recognized Fake!Moody's sadism for what it was. He may actually have thought that, DE or not, the man who put his name in the Goblet of Fire and turned the TWT cup into a portkey to send him to Voldemort and killed his own father and Imperio'd Krum to make him Crucio Cedric really was a good teacher.

I agree with the posters who are saying that Harry never had second thoughts about Draco's being turned into a ferret or any of the other signs that some readers saw that "Moody" was something worse than a paranoid old Auror. In fact, the only evidence he consciously reexamines that I can recall is anything he can think of that "proves" Snape is evil near the end of HBP.

To return to sadism, I think that even Bellatrix, insane as she is and much as she enjoys inflicting torture, can normally control her sadism. The exception appears to be when she's desperate for information, either from the Longbottoms or from Harry and Ron regarding the Sword of Gryffindor (and her vault) when she's torturing Hermione in DH. Even Voldemort controls his sadism when it comes to the Cruciatus Curse, using it either to punish or to force information out of people (though he's starting to fall apart, IMO, in DH). His torture of, say, Bertha Jorkins before killing her is calculated. He enjoys it, but it's not something he can't help doing because of his sadistic nature. (And when Voldemort loses control, it's the Killing Curse, not Crucio, that he "can's help" using.)

Carol, who does agree that Harry had no problem forgiving Snape for his detentions and point docking or even for hating him because those things no longer had any significance once Harry understood Snape