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LJ-versary :: PoA 7

On May 6, 2003, I made my first post to LJ. I joined at the urging of the good people at

haremxf, and soon discovered the infinite carnival midway that is LJ HP fandom. Since then I've met hundreds of fans, befriended many, quarrelled with a few, and admired many more from afar.

Sometimes I feel like a naive farmboy coming to New York City. This fandom is bigger and louder and brighter than anything I've ever seen online. Sometimes it's too much. But most of the time, I just plain feel lucky to be a part of it. If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere. ;)

*hugs fandom*

Eeew... sticky. *brushes himself off*

*

PoA 7: The Boggart in the Wardrobe

Ron had spent the last quarter of an hour carefully shredding his own roots into exactly equal pieces. (95)

It's struck me before that Ron doesn't seem to do too badly in Potions or particularly incite Snape's wrath (except as a Gryffindor in general), and here he's being more careful than I would have expected. He does hate Snape on behalf of Harry, but he still tries hard in his class.

'Of course, if it was me,' he said quietly, '[...]I'd be out there looking for [Black].'
'What are you talking about, Malfoy?' said Ron roughly. (96)

'What did Malfoy mean?' [...]
'He's making it up,' said Ron, savagely, 'he's trying to make you do something stupid...' (97)

How much does Ron know, here? I can't remember if he seems surprised when Harry finds out what Sirius did, but it reads here like he's trying to protect Harry from the truth.

This is a well-done scene. We keep up on other plot threads while the Snape-Neville interaction is set up so that the Boggart scene will be effective without any need for exposition.

'Good afternoon,' he said. 'Would you please put all your books back in your bags. [...]' (99)

From the moment he enters the classroom, Lupin is nothing but collected and competent. Another possible suggestion that he's taught before.

'Possibly no one's warned you, Lupin, but this class contains Neville Longbottom. I would advise you not to entrust him with anything difficult. Not unless Miss Granger is hissing instructions in his ear.' (100)

In case anyone still had doubts on whether Snape picks on Neville above the other kids. Lupin, of course, perceives this immediately and comes up with a way for Neville to take back control of the situation. It doesn't seem likely that he planned the Drag!Boggart!Snape in advance.

This is an important turning point for Neville's character, but the real conflict is the power struggle between Snape and Lupin. We already know Snape hates Lupin (72), and now we see him trying to exert power over Lupin's class. Lupin fights back in kind, undermining the power Snape has over his own students, and does it in such a way that Snape has no real recourse. As usual, Lupin is calm and polite -- the same defense he used to show his students he wasn't shaken by Peeves's taunting (99), a potentially rattling reminder of his school days.

'He seems a very good teacher,' said Hermione approvingly. 'But I wish I could have had a turn with the Boggart--' (106)

Why didn't he let her, I wonder?

Previous re-read posts are saved in memories here.

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Lupin fights back in kind, undermining the power Snape has over his own students, and does it in such a way that Snape has no real recourse.

Yeah, Lupin is almost Slytherin there. The one problem with this technique is that it will only work as long as Snape is willing to avoid a scene.

Someday Lupin is going to goad Snape with one of his "you can't touch me!" remarks, and Snape is going to decide that choking the life out of Lupin is *worth* the trouble he'll get into -- we have seen Snape totally lose it once at the end of PoA, and also outright defy Dumbledore's wishes in OotP over the Occlumency lessons.

Actually, Severus does do this, at the end of PoA. Why choke the life out of someone with your own hands when you can insure that they will be shunned by the community at large? Snape has learned his lessons well, and shunning and humilation works wonders. I would not be be surprised at all if the anti- werewolf laws were started as a result of Remus' exposure as a teacher at Hogwarts, ala sex offender shaming.

And once again, screw Dumbledore. Dumbledore puts Snape to the tasks because Dumbledore cannot bring himself to trust Harry.

Frankly, Snape did the right thing in exposing Lupin at the end of PoA. He'd just *proven* he couldn't be trusted to take the Wolfsbane every time by *not taking* it. I don't care what the trouble is, going off your anti-psychotics when you know you need them and will attempt to KILL if off them, is one of the most irresponsible things an adult does in the series.

Not, that's not to say that Snape didn't *enjoy* spilling the beans about Lupin and forcing him to resign. It was at least two parts gleeful spite to one part dutiful responsibility when Snape told the Slytherins. And it might have been backhanded revenge against Dumbledore for hiring Lupin over Snape's (as it turned out) reasonable objections.

It's true. I'm a huge Lupin-lover, but even under extreme circumstances--the real shock of seeing everyone on the map--he skipped his medication. But he knew it as well. It wasn't just Snape spilling the beans that made him leave. He also said that he was aware that he could have hurt someone, and that the parents would be right.

I think that he should be given another chance... but under much stricter supervision about his meds.

How much stricter supervision could there be? Snape was already bring him the Wolfsbane and hectoring him about drinking it. The only thing Snape neglected to do was observe Lupin drink it (the standard for TB treatment nowadays), though I suppose Snape could have brough the potion early.

Sorry, it's just a pet peeve of mine -- reading a fanfic where Lupin (or the author) blames Snape for getting Lupin fired.

Lupin did it to himself! Snape helped pretty damned gleefully at the end of PoA, but if Lupin had just been responsible for once without someone holding his hand, it wouldn't have come to that. Snape doesn't 'owe' Lupin anything for getting him pushed out of the school.

Oh, yeah. That pet peeve I can see. I thought Snape's outburst was childish--Snape annoys me in general, and rarely more than in that scene, at least before OotP (that's not counting total outrages like the toad poisoning scene, which are in a different category)--but I never assumed it was the reason Lupin left. Lupin left because he'd screwed up badly.

I just wouldn't like to think that a single screw-up on a medical condition, no matter how stupid, should prohibit the patient from ever being gainfully employed again, especially when he's as good at his job as Lupin is. I mean, I've forgotten meds before, too. Granted, it doesn't make me want to eat people. But losing any chance of living independently because of missing antipsychotic drugs once? It doesn't appear to have happened since (or before that, since he started taking it), and he's accutely aware of it. If a former Death Eater can be trusted in the same room as Voldemort's mortal enemy, a psychotic who forget his medicine once can be given another chance, too.

If a former Death Eater can be trusted in the same room as Voldemort's mortal enemy, a psychotic who forget his medicine once can be given another chance, too.

Very good point. Dumbledore hiring Remus wasn't a fluke, but part of a pattern of putting his staff and students in difficult and dangerous situations because they deserve "another chance".

But wait a sec-

I don't have the book with me, but Remus could have stayed. He chose not- even though the children were put out by his leaving! The kids did want him to stay, despite knowing he was a werewolf. Severus did expose Remus' secret to the wider society (excellent revenge, I thought- want acceptance? Let see how people want you once they know who you really are) But Remus was offered the chance to stay by Dumbledore, ripping small children apart by accident aside.

Looking at the final chapter, I can't find any evidence that Dumbledore would have let him stay. It sounds like Remus pulled a Nixon -- he resigned to spare himself the indignity of being forced out.

he resigned to spare himself the indignity of being forced out.

Seems he got the indignity anyway... in OotP, even Harry, who loves him, referred to him as having been "sacked"--not as having resigned.

He may have been asked to turn in his letter of resignation, which would reconcile the two versions of events.

But Remus was offered the chance to stay by Dumbledore.

There's no indication that Dumbledore made any effort to have Remus stay. In GoF, Hagrid is put in the same situation as Remus -- his "inhuman" orginins revealed to the outraged public -- and tries to resign. Dumbledore doesn't let him. And Hagrid has endangered students any number of times by his refusal to follow a syllabus and exposing students to dangerous creatures they're not trained to handle. He's had a number of actual injuries in his classes. And, unlike Lupin, he's an incompetent teacher. Yet Dumbledore makes him stay. If Dumbledore wanted to, he could've made Remus stay.

I think it's pretty clear that, however talented a teacher Remus might be, he was hired because of his connection to Sirius and allowed to go once the connection was no longer relevant. Before that, he was left to his own devices for twelve years. Dumbledore hired Gilderoy friggin' Lockhart before he hired Remus.

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The easy solution to the Lupin trust-issues would be to re-employ him as a teacher, but not have him live-in. He is, after all, only dangerous at night and only then for three or four nights a month.

So if you decorate up the Shrieking Shack to make it suitable for human habitation as well as angry wolf, and send him off the grounds once he's taught all his classes for the day, the safety issues are dealt with.

Of course, you still have to overcome the prejudices of parents who think that just breathing the same air as a non-turned werewolf is dangerous for their little darlings, but I suspect that the next couple of years will rock the wizarding world on its heels sufficiently that that'll seem like a comparatively minor issue.

A bucketful of Word.

I don't care what the trouble is, going off your anti-psychotics when you know you need them and will attempt to KILL if off them, is one of the most irresponsible things an adult does in the series.

I can see where you're coming from, but this seems a bit harsh. Remus was really caught between a rock and a hard place. He had evidence that three students were being dragged off into an isolated location by a murderer (whether he thought that murderer was Sirius or Peter). I kind of read it as him acting to save the kids immediately, and planning to get the Wolfsbane afterward. (After all, how much time would've been wasted if he'd gone looking for Snape first?) Unfortunately, as events unfolded he simply ran out of time. I honestly can't blame him for that decision -- moonrise was a ways off, but the kids were in mortal danger (he thought) at that very instant.

I tend to condemn him much more for hiding his knowledge of Sirius' animagus abilities and form, as well as the secret passages into the castle. That was a year long series of very dangerous (were Sirius truly the murderer everyone thought) lies of omission. Not taking the potion that one night seems to me more a matter of being forced to choose the lesser of two evils at a moment of crisis.

This is a good point. Remus didn't really have any way to know how long he would be in the Shrieking Shack, and once they'd confronted Sirius, he couldn't very well stop and say, hey, could we talk about this later? The result could have been just as deadly.

See, for me, not taking the Potion is just the capper on his year-long well-hidden irresponsible actions. I could forgive the not taking the Wolfsbane *or* not telling about Sirius the animagus *or* keeping silent about Map and the secret passages it reveals, but the whole combination is just too much.

Remus is hard to pin down because so much of the trouble he causes is because he *doesn't* act when he should, instead of acting when he shouldn't.

True. I'm also inclined to not put all that much moral weight on some of it because of plotting concerns. JKR needed some reason for the confrontation to be put off until the end of the year, Sirius's transformation was key to it, and she'd put someone on campus who knew about it, so why didn't he tell? Um... convinced himself it wasn't true. Yeah. That'll do. And now, back to the story. It wasn't like she could address the issue earlier without Harry knowing about it--have Lupin satisfy himself that this wasn't the case, or go into his thoughts in any detail as he made his choices. Harry wouldn't have known about it, and that would have taken too long to explain during the climax in the Shrieking Shack. So when a major mistake is obviously necessary to the plot and the character is otherwise treated quite sympathetically, and the author says she'd want him teaching her children... I'm inclined to chalk quite a lot up to "plot device."

I think you're right about the external reasons that Remus had to make those mistakes. Many of the adults in the books have had to do some iffy things in order to give the kids necessary action -- that's the nature of a story that's set up in this way.

However, when we turn away from traditional analysis and try to explain characters' actions internally -- when we write fanfic, in other words -- I think we're forced to call into question the morals and judgment of Lupin, Dumbledore, and the other adults who have made plot-driving mistakes. That's what makes a good fic!

It's interesting to try and look back and remember what I thought of these things as I was reading the book, before the reveal at the end.

I do seem to remember that I suspected Lupin of covering up for Sirius from quite early on. The two reasons I thought most likely for him to have done that were:

(1) because he himself was Evol and had framed Sirius for murder. (As Sirius was such a moustache-twirling cliché villain by the time Hallowe'en had come and gone, I felt convinced that he couldn't possibly be all bad. Lupin as alternate bad guy was an idea I mostly dismissed once the Patronus training started though. By then I was starting to look with more suspicion at rats and cats and dogs. Werewolves seemed like one double bluff too many.)

(2) because he thought Sirius hadn't done it and was therefore covering for him. Colour me surprised when it turned out that he'd actually still believed his former friend to be a villain throughout the entire year that he'd kept quiet about the Animagus stuff.

And I still don't know quite how you explain away the fact that he didn't confide that piece of information even to Dumbledore, unless it's out of sheer wretchedness that all of his friends had either died or turned bad. Maybe there's a small part of him that felt that even a bad-to-the-bone Sirius out there was better than a soulwiped and Kissed Sirius in terms of clinging on to a little bit of his childhood.

Still pretty irresponsible though. Perhaps Lupin's biggest character flaw is that he can see where he goes wrong by being passive... but still doesn't do anything about it.

unless it's out of sheer wretchedness that all of his friends had either died or turned bad. Maybe there's a small part of him that felt that even a bad-to-the-bone Sirius out there was better than a soulwiped and Kissed Sirius in terms of clinging on to a little bit of his childhood.

Aw. You know, I think this works. Remus is good at denial, and as JKR has said, one of his great flaws is that he wants friendship too much.

It's mostly in terms of fanfic that I'm trying to decide how to "weight" the external factors. What's the intent of this character? What does he really represent in the Potterverse, and what's the moral "truth" of him?

If I go into a fic with a whole lot of my own external judgments--say, what the hell is wrong with all the adults in this world that they let Harry get into these scrapes?--then it's going to skew me away from what the characters actually do. If I think, on the other hand, "Okay, something had to be the cause of this all going down at the end of the book," then I can give it the weight that it seems to have on characterization in canon. So, yes, Remus can be careless in extreme situations. But what's the real gist of the character? What does he represent to Harry, and what does he appear to represent for Rowling? Whatever outside judgments other people may make on his behavior, Rowling treats the character as a light-bringer (literally, in his opening scene), and as a kind man who has the flaw of wanting to be liked too much--not as an evil man, not as even a dangerous man when the moon isn't full. The tone of the text suggests that he is meant to be loved.

For myself, I'm not all that wild about Sirius, but it's clear from the text that I'm meant to love him as Harry does (and as JKR seems to), so when I write him in fanfic, I take that wild side that would drive me berserk in real life and make it into a kind of manic good cheer, combined with a hair trigger temper (not all that uncommon a combination). And no span of attention at all. I also dislike Snape, as I've mentioned, but I'm not likely to write a fic in which he goes back to the Death Eaters and actually is helping Voldemort, though, like Ron, in real life I'd tend to suspect it.

The unfortunate thing about having the child hero series is that all the adults around him have to display idiocy, malignancy, or carelessness in order to have him get to the climatic battles when he really should be nowhere near them. Since that's a given, I'm inclined to write off at least idiocy and carelessness (malignancy is deliberate) as relatively minor character traits--plot devices, mostly--and concentrate on the other things we know.

So, yes, Remus can be careless in extreme situations. But what's the real gist of the character? What does he represent to Harry, and what does he appear to represent for Rowling?

Yes, I understand where you're coming from in this whole comment. Rowling has these very clear ways you're meant to respond to the characters, even if(perhaps because?) they are so skewed through Harry's POV. Sometimes it works really well (Umbridge!). And sometimes it doesn't work, like I'm finding increasingly with Dumbledore - he's supposed to be this nice mentor figure, but he does so many irrational things for the greater cause of plot that I'm just frustrated with his incompetence. But then again, that's a different school of analysis - the external one, the what-did-Rowling-intend for this character. If we treat the characters as actual people, then all their little flaws and conflicts are brought into the light. And both ways of analyzing are fun, the first because you get to puzzle out what Rowling means, and try to replicate the 'canon' feel of her characters. The second because if we take the facts that she gave us and but her intent to the back of our minds we can go crazy with different interpretations. What I find fascinating about that is that the interpretations change with the person reading, because they aren't seeing the facts through Harry's eyes or even Rowlings - like in this discussion! Some people read Remus as useless and dangerous, and others as a good guy who just had a lapse. (Personally, I'm with you on that. I think in the excitement he just forgot, and it shouldn't be held against him.) :D

Yah...I'm sure this is old blab to you...just an excuse for me to rant. ;)

Regardless of other factors, I felt and still feel that the sacking can be entirely justified on the grounds that Remus failed to tell anyone that Sirius Black was an animagus. Imagine if Sirius *had* actually been the bad guy, not Peter. A dangerous, insane criminal with strong ties to You-Know-Who is on the loose, a man who killed twenty people in a public street with one curse.

How many lives did Remus put in danger by concealing that information? Sirius broke out of Azkaban and no-one had any idea how - except for Remus. Sirius evaded capture for months and no-one had any idea how - except for Remus. Sirius broke into Hogwarts and tried to get into Gryffindor Tower, and no-one had any idea of how he did it - except for Remus. What if people had died because Remus didn't tell anyone? Would he have still kept silent?

My answer for that is yes. He would have kept silent until it was too late, because each successive murder would just add to the reason why he didn't tell anyone in the first place: he felt guilty.

Heck, if Remus had just fessed up about his friends being animagi, someone *might* have said, "Peter Pettigrew could turn into a rat? Hmmm. Let me check some facts..."

Remus is hard to pin down because so much of the trouble he causes is because he *doesn't* act when he should, instead of acting when he shouldn't.

Yes! And Sirius is the one who acts when he shouldn't and gets frustrated when he can't. ;)

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