On Sirius Black ...
Feb. 26th, 2009 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blamebramptonOne of the interesting people on my flist began a cool discussion on Sirius Black over at her journal. Alas, it's flocked (which is a shame, because there are some fascinating views), and so I don't want to go into much detail on the specifics. In fact, if it wasn't a common position in fandom, I'd not touch it. But it is, so although that person and others who know her know will be going 'a-Ha!'*, everyone else can just read this as another Brammers raves at length post.
The short position taken by many is: Sirius is poxy because he is a big fat bully.
Now, I have to confess, I have heard this opinion from someone close to me. Indeed, when I mentioned to one of my dearest fandom friends that I was writing Sirius/Remus last year, she replied 'But Sirius is a cock!'
She was very kind about the fic itself, though she concluded her thoughts with 'Sirius is still a cock, though.' and his bullying bastardry was a large part of the perceived cockdom.
And to an extent, I agree. I get why some people look at the character and see someone that they would want to avoid at all costs. He is a cock. But I would argue that while at times he bullies Severus Snape, and Kreacher, I do not think he is not a bully per se.
To begin with, we never see him bully anyone else. Certainly, the glimpses we have of him as a kid are of a cocksure, arrogant gibbon, but he is an aristocrat who has been raised to believe himself beautiful and brilliant. He is kind to the rodenty (or at the very best, uninteresting) Peter Pettigrew, he is welcoming and always generous to the poor Remus Lupin. He's a brat, and a bit of a prat, but the only people he is vicious to are Snape and Kreacher, and I would argue that he feels himself wholly justified in both.
When we meet him at 11, he has just made his first independent friend, James Potter. Sirius has already decided that the Blood Purity passion of his family is not for him. But mere minutes after taking his first purposeful steps away from the life his family mapped out for him, he encounters Severus Snape.
Now a perceptive, mature and compassionate Sirius would look at Snape and say, ah, you suffer from many of the same family ills I do, let us overcome the respective horrors of our childhood with comradeship and kindness leading the way. But neither Sirius nor Severus live long enough to genuinely mature. And at 11, they are both, like most neglected children, proud, wilful and self-centred.
And of course they hate each other on meeting. To Severus, Sirius represents the rich Pure Blood world that he is excluded from. His easy charm, good looks and good possessions are a world away from life as a Snape.
To Sirius, Snape is a pathetic figure. He's the scholarship boy who drawls more affectedly than anyone else, and who cuts out wine columns from the better papers and magazines so he can pretend a knowledge of vintages. If Snape was politically sympatico with the Marauders, Sirius would find this a little sad, but he would be no crueller to him than to Pettigrew (who is Snape's feebler and less interesting Gryffindor equivalent), which is to say give him a little teasing now and again, and take some in his turn.
But their school education is entirely in the shadow of Voldemort. Somewhere between a year and 18 months before the Marauders and Snape catch the train to school for the first time, Voldelmort waltzes back into England with his new name and his expanded support team and his solid plan for taking over the world.
Their entire youth takes place in the shadow of Death Eaters. People disappear. At first it is only rumoured names, then people they have heard of, then people they know -- in the case of Regulus, perhaps people they still love.
To Sirius's mind, it is bad enough that his family believes in the bullshit that is tearing his society apart, but that Snape buys into it is unconscionable. JKR has said that there are elements of Hitler in Voldemort. If we extend the analogy, Sirius is filled with disgust that his family have willingly embraced the Reich, how can he react to Snape choosing to join the SS with anything other than hatred?
What starts off as a childish dislike has more than enough reasons to burgeon into hatred. Snape responds, and their violence feeds on itself. Remember that Snape knows Sirius did not reveal the Potters, nor kill Pettigrew. I think he may well know this almost from the time it happens, but he certainly knows it for at least a year of Sirius's life. He never once does a thing about it.
Now, it can well be argued that he can't – and don't for a moment think that I don't have a longer list of excuses for Severus's behaviour – but the central question is whether or not Sirius is a bully. If bullying is defined, as it usually is, as someone who exerts power over those weaker than him with elements of coercion, then Sirius is just a piss poor bully. Severus ends up with all the power, and Sirius never tries to coerce him into anything.
What Sirius is, is a hater.
He hates Severus, who represents everything that Sirius sees as being wrong with the world, and who embraces those ills without family connections, without Pureblood entitlement, without any reason that Sirius considers remotely valid. He absolutely hates Kreacher, who represents everything he ran from and who he ends up imprisoned with (imprisoned, mind you, after 12 years in Azkaban).
Now I am not saying that this is good. I am not saying that he is a decent chap under all that. He's fucked up, perhaps iredeemably. But he lives in a war zone, where everyone is fucked up. To single him out for condemnation is to ignore the fact that war fucks over every single member of a society.
What is remarkable is not that Sirius and James can be pricks, that Severus is a walking pile of neuroses and power tripping, that Dumbledore is a manipulative shit nor that there seem to be only two or three actually good parents alive in the Potterverse. What is remarkable is that any of them can be halfway decent at all.
*80s pop joke. You know you loved the video clip ;-)
The short position taken by many is: Sirius is poxy because he is a big fat bully.
Now, I have to confess, I have heard this opinion from someone close to me. Indeed, when I mentioned to one of my dearest fandom friends that I was writing Sirius/Remus last year, she replied 'But Sirius is a cock!'
She was very kind about the fic itself, though she concluded her thoughts with 'Sirius is still a cock, though.' and his bullying bastardry was a large part of the perceived cockdom.
And to an extent, I agree. I get why some people look at the character and see someone that they would want to avoid at all costs. He is a cock. But I would argue that while at times he bullies Severus Snape, and Kreacher, I do not think he is not a bully per se.
To begin with, we never see him bully anyone else. Certainly, the glimpses we have of him as a kid are of a cocksure, arrogant gibbon, but he is an aristocrat who has been raised to believe himself beautiful and brilliant. He is kind to the rodenty (or at the very best, uninteresting) Peter Pettigrew, he is welcoming and always generous to the poor Remus Lupin. He's a brat, and a bit of a prat, but the only people he is vicious to are Snape and Kreacher, and I would argue that he feels himself wholly justified in both.
When we meet him at 11, he has just made his first independent friend, James Potter. Sirius has already decided that the Blood Purity passion of his family is not for him. But mere minutes after taking his first purposeful steps away from the life his family mapped out for him, he encounters Severus Snape.
Now a perceptive, mature and compassionate Sirius would look at Snape and say, ah, you suffer from many of the same family ills I do, let us overcome the respective horrors of our childhood with comradeship and kindness leading the way. But neither Sirius nor Severus live long enough to genuinely mature. And at 11, they are both, like most neglected children, proud, wilful and self-centred.
And of course they hate each other on meeting. To Severus, Sirius represents the rich Pure Blood world that he is excluded from. His easy charm, good looks and good possessions are a world away from life as a Snape.
To Sirius, Snape is a pathetic figure. He's the scholarship boy who drawls more affectedly than anyone else, and who cuts out wine columns from the better papers and magazines so he can pretend a knowledge of vintages. If Snape was politically sympatico with the Marauders, Sirius would find this a little sad, but he would be no crueller to him than to Pettigrew (who is Snape's feebler and less interesting Gryffindor equivalent), which is to say give him a little teasing now and again, and take some in his turn.
But their school education is entirely in the shadow of Voldemort. Somewhere between a year and 18 months before the Marauders and Snape catch the train to school for the first time, Voldelmort waltzes back into England with his new name and his expanded support team and his solid plan for taking over the world.
Their entire youth takes place in the shadow of Death Eaters. People disappear. At first it is only rumoured names, then people they have heard of, then people they know -- in the case of Regulus, perhaps people they still love.
To Sirius's mind, it is bad enough that his family believes in the bullshit that is tearing his society apart, but that Snape buys into it is unconscionable. JKR has said that there are elements of Hitler in Voldemort. If we extend the analogy, Sirius is filled with disgust that his family have willingly embraced the Reich, how can he react to Snape choosing to join the SS with anything other than hatred?
What starts off as a childish dislike has more than enough reasons to burgeon into hatred. Snape responds, and their violence feeds on itself. Remember that Snape knows Sirius did not reveal the Potters, nor kill Pettigrew. I think he may well know this almost from the time it happens, but he certainly knows it for at least a year of Sirius's life. He never once does a thing about it.
Now, it can well be argued that he can't – and don't for a moment think that I don't have a longer list of excuses for Severus's behaviour – but the central question is whether or not Sirius is a bully. If bullying is defined, as it usually is, as someone who exerts power over those weaker than him with elements of coercion, then Sirius is just a piss poor bully. Severus ends up with all the power, and Sirius never tries to coerce him into anything.
What Sirius is, is a hater.
He hates Severus, who represents everything that Sirius sees as being wrong with the world, and who embraces those ills without family connections, without Pureblood entitlement, without any reason that Sirius considers remotely valid. He absolutely hates Kreacher, who represents everything he ran from and who he ends up imprisoned with (imprisoned, mind you, after 12 years in Azkaban).
Now I am not saying that this is good. I am not saying that he is a decent chap under all that. He's fucked up, perhaps iredeemably. But he lives in a war zone, where everyone is fucked up. To single him out for condemnation is to ignore the fact that war fucks over every single member of a society.
What is remarkable is not that Sirius and James can be pricks, that Severus is a walking pile of neuroses and power tripping, that Dumbledore is a manipulative shit nor that there seem to be only two or three actually good parents alive in the Potterverse. What is remarkable is that any of them can be halfway decent at all.
*80s pop joke. You know you loved the video clip ;-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 04:52 am (UTC)Seems to me the 11-year olds were simply doing what pre-teens generally do: ranking others and jockeying for position. While I can't imagine James's family being chummy with the Blacks, the wizarding community seems small enough, and the purebloods fewer and fewer, that James and Sirius had to've at least been aware of each other. And even if they'd never met, surely they'd have recognized in each other their similar stations in life. They meet on the train and become fast friends, then stumble upon two strangers: a pretty girl and a sullen, odd boy with something to prove. The girl, maybe they're on the fence about her even if she is bossy, but not the boy. The boy is, unfortunately, immediately sized up and found wanting. He's too different, too unpleasant and clearly not of their lot. Not to mention, for some odd reason, the girl not only chooses his company, she defends him. That's the jumping off point, anyway, as far as I see it. Severus never really had a chance. Not because James and Sirius are bullies, but because Severus has no social skills and a ginormous chip on his shoulder. He's gonna show them all... And he's the perfect target for the two boys because they get exactly the reaction they're looking for from him, every time.
And I do think you're right about the werewolf business. Sirius would have to have been completely irrational to blame Severus for leading Regulus astray (I'd think it more likely it was the other way round), being that his parents, however squeamish they might've been about getting their own hands dirty, were wholly in agreement with Voldemort's rhetoric. So I think there was a jealousy factor as well---Snape was friendly with Sirius's brother, while Sirius was persona non grata with family. Snape is still that same easy target, but in this case, it's more personal, and so, much more fierce.
Anyway, that's just my take on things. Isn't it funny how so many people can read the very same words and come to different conclusions like that? I mean, some of these debates are heated, and most of the debaters are so absolutely convinced that they are 'right' about this character or that one, they cling to their positions with grips of steel, sometimes getting downright nasty. But the reality is that it's all just speculation on our parts.
No one truly knows but JKR, and she ain't tellin.