regarding OotP, an aside

[petronia]

I have this thing I want to write, about how I don't think the behaviour of James and Sirius was really as blatantly horrible as everyone says. Or perhaps it is, but that the emotions involved aren't black-and-white, they're Complicated, and they exist for a reason other than we're-being-testosterone-poisoned-fifteen-year-old-jocks-looking-for-someone-to-push-around. This is because schooldays!Snape - now that I've gotten a better look at him - reminds me very strongly of a girl who was in my year. I still feel uncomfortable when I think of her, because by the time I was through my junior cycle I loathed her with an intensity I've never experienced before or since. When I say never I mean it: never, and when all is told she did very little to me that was objectionable. I started seventh grade going out of my way to make friends with her.

There's no way to be friends with some people. Whether or not it's their fault is a moot point.

I'm sorry that her life in school was hell, because though I never really took my feelings out on her others did, and she was ostracised. I was sorry then, too, actually, but it made no impact on the dislike I felt and still feel. That kind of emotion can be reasoned away about as well as love can.

This is not to say that Snape deserved the high school experience he got, only that it does take a good five years of history at least to build up the kind of prejudice where the walls can't come down in adulthood on either side. I like Snape as he is in the present of the books, though I have no illusions about him being a nice person, or even the possibility of him becoming more personable, should he manage to make some peace with himself and those around him. I don't like him as he was in his fifth year at Hogwarts. The overlapping images from memory are too vivid. There's sympathy and recoil at once, and I picture myself like Remus, frowning but tuning them out instead of trying to stop what's happening, because I don't really want to help the victim; I just wish my friends would stop engaging in distasteful behaviour.

And when Lily does intervene, he gives her the middle finger basically. That's most familiar of all.

I can't put this across properly in an essay; I've probably insulted Snape fans, Lupin fans, and godaloneknows. What I should do is write it out in fic, but that would actually be too personal, close to painful. How do you rationalise that kind of unreasonable like or dislike, when it makes you do things you know on some level is wrong? Is hatred any easier to explain than love? ...And I'm an introspective wanker by nature at that. Mixed feelings like these would probably just irritate a person like Sirius to the point of outburst, and I'm not surprised anymore that he and Snape couldn't be adults around each other.

Comments

[ex-radicaled804.livejournal.com]

You know, seeing it put that way, I sort of understand it. I hadn't met anyone quite like that until college... there's a girl who was in one of my classes last semester. No social skills to speak of. She really did very little to me, but I couldn't stand her. As far as I know, nobody could. And while my default setting with people I don't know well is somewhere between 'civil' and 'nice', I had a genuinely difficult time not being NASTY to this particular girl.

What I've encountered more often is people who are just such terrible wimps that I have the urge to kick them, emotionally, until they fight back. Unfortunately they almost never do -- a lot of the time they whine to other people, but that doesn't satisfy my need for them to kick back. It's... odd.

...I'm done. Really.

[acadine.livejournal.com]

I count myself as a fan of all three and I agree, actually.

Now, granted, I identify hugely with Snape, especially Hogwarts Snape, because that's who I was (and, damnit, I need to take my "what's the point of As?" speech out of Millicent's mouth and put it back into Snape's where it belongs...) -- but, basically, yeah. For one thing, I think he went out of his way to be unlikeable... or, rather, the thought of being liked by "those kind of people" would be repugnant. God knows, when I was that age, I mostly related to people as categories of ideas - hell, I still do, to an extent - and seeing as Snape is male, he probably would have been even worse about it. Snape seems like he was the kind of kid, for one thing, to be bright see through "the System" - but not bright enough to do anything but resent the hell out of everyone who kept it going, to the point of dehumanizing anyone who wasn't sufficiently like him; which I'd say would be "socially maladjusted, lower-to-middle-class Slytherins of high intelligence".

That kind of "I am an outcast, but my outcastness makes me BETTER THAN YOU, you stupid mindless sheep-people, whom I know are stupid mindless sheep people because you play Quidditch, are in Gryffindor, and primp your hair" attitude... yeah. It shows; often very passive-aggressively, but it shows. Not that I think Sirius or James were particularly well-adjusted for going after it, but I don't think it's typical "let's bully someone to knock up our status/vent our aggressions/etc" bullying.

... I do kind of disagree on the Lily thing. At least - have you considered the role gender plays in that? A weird, non-normally-socialized boy Snape may be (at that point), but he's still a boy in terms of how the rest of the school deals with him. Being rescued by a girl would be hell; first off, your masculinity is instantly in question, and boys that age are downright vicious about such things; secondly, there's the question of does-Lily-like-him/does-he-like-Lily, is he a threat to James's sexual dominance - theoretical sexual dominance, but there nonetheless. And then there's the fact that she's a mudblood, which means shit from the Slytherins.

On top of it all is the hit to his pride.

Honestly, the part where Lily "rides to the rescue" made me cringe. People often did somewhat similar things for me, and it never helped. Ever. If anything, it was worse than all the teasing/bullying/sexual harassment/pranks, because of the sensation of being pitied. Good, honest score I didn't mind; I expected it, and given my worldview back then, it was kind of a badge of honor. The "aww, poor thing" - that stuck in my gut.

There's also the fact that none of my occasional popular-crowd benefactors ever bothered getting to know me at all, or tried to make friends with me. It was very much "I will descend from on high and bestow grace, for which you should thank me"; nothing turns kindness to shit like that kind of disconnect. Lily isn't trying to be Snape's friend, she's trying to be his patron, almost, and probably doing it to feel better about herself. She doesn't really seem to have any kind of genuine empathy for Snape, himself. So I think his reaction to her is fairly justified.

I think of all of them, Lupin probably came the closest to doing the right thing: just leave the kid alone.

* And I need to write up an essay on Snape and gender. He's so. Not. A. Man. Damnit. Then again, neither is Dumbledore.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I agree on the motivation for the Lily thing; that it would only have made things worse in the long run, and that as a male HSer, being rescued by a girl really sucks. So I understand why he did it. All I meant to say was that that was the passage that really lit up the lightbulb, so to speak - made me realise why I had a baseline hum of discomfort with the whole scene that went beyond "oh, gosh, James is such a jerk" etc.

...I probably am basically Remus in that social scenario; liked by the teachers but started near the bottom of the food chain, moving up due to popular friends. Above Peter, if only because competence gets some respect from peers... That scene is so primally high school, isn't it? Bless JKR the schoolmarm. It should be an online quiz.

[sdavis.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a Lupin fan, I'm not offended in the least. I agree with you about him. In my latter years in public school, I shared several classes with a girl who was the spitting psychic image of Snape. She wasn't likable, she wasn't approachable, and I had nothing to do with her but school business. Neither of us was the worse off for mutual indifference.

As well as I understood the urge to verbally abuse her, because everything about her invited that, I thought the people who bothered were twits. Likewise, I thought the people who wanted to save her from self-imposed solitude were naively optimistic about the power of friendship, which is betimes unwanted and ill-received, rightfully. There are personalities that are incurable, but can demonstrably be exacerbated.

[keieru.livejournal.com]

I rather like it, actually. Teenagers will do idiotic things, and then they grow up and feel idiotic about it. What James and Sirius did to Snape is no worse than what Harry and Draco routinely do to each other, and of course Harry doesn't have the perspective to realize that.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

I remain disappointed. Even making allowances for immaturity and Complication, I'd conceived of James as...well, not as a bully. It's one thing to hate a schoolmate, especially a schoolmate who positively invites hatred--but it's another to publicly torment him for the purposes of one's own amusement. Lemme put it this way: yes, high schoolers are stupid and not yet fully civilized, but some of them are genuinely nice kids, also. By "nice kids" I mean "not the kind of kids who would hang a disliked person upside down to expose his grubby underwear for mockery." So sue me, I'd imagined that James was a nice kid.

As for Lily's intevention in that scene, I don't think she was trying to be Snape's friend or his patron. I doubt she was thinking particularly of Snape at all, but rather of confronting the obnoxious Potter over behavior that everyone else was willing to abet or ignore.

[niqaeli]

Maybe I didn't react as badly to that scene because when I was in jr. high, I was a strange mix of Remus and Snape--I quietly ignored all the shit going down around me. And I had no friends, and was outcast and alienated from my entire year, for many reasons. But I was not bullied much. I was simply apart, other, strange and unlikable, and but not worth bothering with, because they could not score on me, so strange and other was I.

I was inconspicuous, quietly ignoring everything, never tattling, never speaking, and because of that, I saw Snapes and Jameses all the time, from the outside looking in. I have a very realistic view of teenagers for it, on all sides of the equation.

James wasn't an irredeemable prat, he was just a stupid vicious fifteen year old boy who had five years of baggage with Snape, the socially maladjusted, bitter, nasty bastard.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Mostly my question is when will it come home to roost, so to speak: even after seeing it from Snape's point of view, Harry still takes everyone and gangs up and hogties (is that right? maa, I don't feel like checking the text, which is why I'm not a literary scholar after all) Draco et al on the train. Both sides give and take as far as that standing war goes, so it's pretty similar situation, isn't it? I'm just wondering if JKR will do anything with that, or just let it slide by, that parallel.

(I'm still miffed about the whole prophecy plot, so I'm having trouble thinking of OotP as something other than a popular fanfic, but.)