Chapter Discussion: Prisoner of Azkaban Ch 18: Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Pron

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 190528

 
> > Potioncat:
> <SNIP>
> .> It's the same situation that happened in the first year. Draco tricked Harry into a duel. Harry was going to meet Draco in the dead of night out of a sense of honor (11-year-old boy honor). But it wasn't going to be Draco he met, but Filch. And it's much more like the year Harry was following Draco, trying to prove what a danger Draco was. That's the same thing Severus was doing.
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> So I thought about it and decided that I have a better analogy, even though I again totally agree that Harry did not have to go meet Draco and the choice to go there was his and only his alone. The difference for me is that before Draco challenged him, Harry had no desire to go there, while Snape was trying to figure out Shrieking Shack way before Sirius told him.
> 
> So I suggest Harry's Hogsmead excursion and Twins' help as better analogy for Harry's behavior being similar to Snape's, not for Twins being similar to Sirius.
> 
> Harry REALLY wanted to go, REALLY, no matter how dangerous and selfish it was, so he leaped at first possible help and went no matter what danger may have happened to him.
> 

Pippin:
What's really similar  is the Ton-tongue Toffee incident. The Twins think Dudley deserves some payback for bullying Harry. But they aren't killers and no one  entertains the idea that they even thought Dudley might've suffocated, though he comes close to it. It was a cruel and malicious joke, but it wasn't supposed to be life-threatening. Too bad. Because society's rejoinder is, "You should have thought of that before!" and only their youth could have excused them. If they were lucky.

One could hardly blame the Dursleys if *they*  thought it was intentional, and also thought that Harry and even Arthur were in on it. 
 
The Twins also didn't think about how it would look for Arthur if his  children were involved in anything even remotely resembling a Muggle-baiting. If Arthur hadn't been there to straighten things out before the Improper Use of Magic Office heard about it,   Lucius Malfoy would've thought Christmas had come early. 

What the Twins did was wrong, and also abysmally stupid. It could have turned out far worse for their friends and family than it did for their intended victim, but for all that it wasn't evil and Arthur doesn't treat it as such. Certainly he isn't about to end their relationship -- they haven't shown him that they're unworthy of his love, they've shown him just how much they need it. 

But it wasn't entirely innocent either, and Arthur doesn't buy the excuse that the Twins didn't make Dudley eat the candy, not one bit.

---
"I didn't give him anything,"said Fred with another evil grin. "I just *dropped* it...It was his fault he went and ate it, I never told him to."
"You dropped it on purpose!" roared Mr. Weasley. "You knew he'd eat it, you knew he was on a diet--"
GoF ch 5

To draw on your analogy with your chocolate-lover friend, if you knew she was desperate for a chocolate and you told her how to find one, it would be highly disingenuous for you to claim that you didn't know she was going to eat it.

Pippin