James as head boy (Re: Voldemort's Intentions & Snape's Expectations (Hagrid))

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 189892

 
> Geoff
> snip 
> > Actually, we've drifted OT. I stand by my observation that James would have 
> > had to be a prefect to be Head Boy. We are looking at the situation when he 
> > was at Hogwarts and he would have been in the Upper Sixth in 1977/78 
> > when that set up would have been almost universal.
> 
<snip>
Potioncat:
> Here's my question. Given Geoff's information, do you now consider Head Boy itself to be a flint and no longer relevant to the story—that is, James was not a Head Boy? Or do you consider it canon anyway, and James was a Head Boy. Does this change your perception of events?
>

Pippin:
I don't think it's Flint. Hagrid's statement invites both reader and Harry  to imagine that James was always a model student, despite what we learn about him in PoA.  This is crucial to the disillusionment that takes place when Harry views Snape's Worst Memory. For the alert reader it foreshadows the revelations later in OOP: IMO, we're meant to be asking how James could have gotten to Head Boy if no one would even consider him prefect material? For Harry, of course, by the time the question could arise it's overshadowed by a bigger one: how did James ever get to be Lily's husband?

You can see that if Harry had thought to question Sirius and Lupin about being Head Boy  at the first opportunity,  it would spoil JKR's carefully orchestrated plot development. Instead we get an answer by implication later on: James changed his ways. 

We don't have to speculate to know that Dumbledore believes that people who have made bad choices in the past can learn to make better ones. We know that he's willing to break with precedent. We know that he appoints the prefects, and presumably the Head Boy as well. We know the Head has the authority to make exceptions to the rules and that Dumbledore will do so when he thinks it is wise. In sum, it doesn't matter what the rules are (except to set up the reader's expectations) because Dumbledore regards the rules as a guide to making intelligent choices, not a substitute.

 Ordinarily perhaps, that would not be enough to explain what Dumbledore did. I'm sure it created some bad feeling to promote James over whoever expected to be named Head Boy, just as it did when Gryffindor won the House Cup in Harry's  first year. But there was going to be bad feeling anyway. No winner would have been popular with all the Houses.

Now consider the circumstances in James's 7th year. The wizarding world is at war with Voldemort, and itself deeply divided about how to oppose him. Those tensions, we know, had seeped into the school.  Anyone trying to keep order would have to face not only Death Eaters and sympathizers, but Crouchists ready to do whatever to confront them and loose cannons like Sirius and Snape, as dangerous to their friends as they are to their enemies.  (If Bella or Narcissa had come to Snape's defense as tactlessly as Lily did, he might have mortally insulted one of them instead, and the whole course of the war might have been different.)

As we saw, this was not  a good time to have an ineffective person as the Gryffindor prefect. Dumbledore could not always be at the school to defend it -- we've seen what Hogwarts would have become had he let the Ministry  fall into Voldemort's hands. James had proven leadership ability, and he'd shown that he could act on his own initiative and protect a student he loathed, even at the possible expense of getting his best friend expelled. 

So, provided Lupin was willing to step down, and I'm sure he was, why not appoint James in his place? And why not make James Head Boy? Those who had misgivings about giving James that much responsibility might be asked to consider that it was better to have James as Head Boy, responsible to the teachers and desperate to keep his access to Lily, than James as a prefect, responsible to a Head Boy from a rival house. 

Pippin