Lack of re-examination SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana

[mesmer44]

No: HPFGUIDX 186599

"pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
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> A_svirn
> > Honestly I'd take a murderer at heart who abides the law in practice over an innocent at heart who's running all over the place plotting and executing murders with various degrees of success any day.
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> Pippin:
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> It would take courage to put your trust in Draco's nascent and wavering sense of human dignity rather than in The Establishment. But laws seldom protect everyone equally even when they are supposed to, and they would have to be draconian laws indeed for your murderer to fear them more than he fears  Lord Voldemort. Nor will laws to protect human life endure  if people cease to believe that life is worth protecting.
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> Snape is a sadist with a lot of self-control, Harry is a non-sadist with much less -- whom do you trust more?
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> A_svirn:
>  I also think that when a non-sadistic person like Harry indulges in sadism --it's just plain wrong. It feels even worse somehow than when a sadistic person does it. Precisely because Harry can restrain himself, but chooses not to. And because it rather blurs the line between those two types of persons, if only momentarily. What baffles me is that no one in the series apparently thinks so. 
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> Pippin:
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> I didn't get the impression from canon that Harry could restrain himself but was choosing not to. The blood was "thundering through his brain." It was "pounding in his veins" when he was considering transfiguring Dudley. And I get a sense that this is what Snape feels much of the time when he is confronting Harry. How many times have we been told that Snape's temple is throbbing or that he is turning dark red?
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> But despite this Snape does not ever use the cruciatus curse, or ever punish anyone in any way that is forbidden by law or Hogwarts rules. So he may be a sadist at heart, in the sense that his cruelty has become habitual,  but he has more self-control than Harry,  who is not habitually cruel but is capable of extreme behavior when provoked and was not able to keep himself from  using a curse that he ordinarily considers abhorrent. He wanted to use it *because* it was abhorrent, the worst thing he could think of, much like Snape calling Lily "the unforgivable word."
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> But I think what Harry understands from The Prince's Tale is that Snape's habits of cruelty were formed in childhood, before he had any control over them, forged out of the same kind of trauma that  provoked Harry to be cruel, ie, seeing someone he loved being abused, and feeling powerless to do anything about it. 
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> Does that make sense?
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> Pippin
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Steve replies:

It does make sense.  I don't agree that Harry was provoked to "be" cruel as much as he was provoked to do an act of cruelness, but that's nitpicking, so I'm just briefly mentioning it.  I would like to say though that Harry also has had a childhood full of abuse by the Dursleys and yet most of his behavior is not sadistic or cruel, but rather gentle and brave and even noble at times.  True he has a hard time controlling his emotions at times, but he does usually control them all the same.  I am just saying that when you consider he was raised by the Dursleys, had his parents murdered by an evil wizard and his Godfather murdered by a follower of that evil wizard, he's had a lot of trauma in his life that would have resulted in a lot of children becoming very sadistic bullies or worse. Childhood trauma and abuse is not in and of itself a valid excuse for being cruel or sadistic, but it has nonetheless been a contributing environmental factor unfortunately in many cases.  Harry's ability to love in spite of all that happened to him IMO prevented him from going in that dark direction. Harry's personality was such that he did give in to his anger in times of stress and provocation, but did this rarely and even then didn't like in Star Wars go over completely to the Dark Side. He still made choices of sacrifice to protect those he loved and still gave LV a chance for remorse even at the very end.

Steve, who thinks considering his childhood, that Harry turned out pretty well.