And even if I should turn out to be right in thinking that Snape's remark to Hermione was made primarily for Lucius Malfoy's benefit (via Draco, who was of course a witness to the scene), it still doesn't excuse the cruelty of the remark -- IMO there should have been another way for Snape to strengthen his DE "cover".
Until the end of Goblet of Fire Snape, in my view, doesn't have any interest in maintaining a Death Eater cover (and in any event, the events shown in the Pensieve suggest that he's blown any cover he once had). I think that remark is wholly in character with him being a bully, and it really is almost impossible to think of a decent justification for it. But I've had teachers exactly like that, and so far as I was aware they weren't doing it because they had present a cover story for a magical conspiracy, but because they were horrible inadequate people who found it easier to be take out their inadequacies towards kids who had no way of fighting back. So I'm probably temperamentally less adapted to start looking for excuses for people like that than I am for terminally socially inept kids whose parents' utterly wrongheaded political notions have given them serious problems in their ability to bond with their peer group, and who have never actually been taught that certain anti-socially behavioural traits are in fact both wrong and likely to maximise the sense of social exclusion that lead to them being displayed in the first place.
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Date: 2003-03-24 01:39 am (UTC)Until the end of Goblet of Fire Snape, in my view, doesn't have any interest in maintaining a Death Eater cover (and in any event, the events shown in the Pensieve suggest that he's blown any cover he once had). I think that remark is wholly in character with him being a bully, and it really is almost impossible to think of a decent justification for it. But I've had teachers exactly like that, and so far as I was aware they weren't doing it because they had present a cover story for a magical conspiracy, but because they were horrible inadequate people who found it easier to be take out their inadequacies towards kids who had no way of fighting back. So I'm probably temperamentally less adapted to start looking for excuses for people like that than I am for terminally socially inept kids whose parents' utterly wrongheaded political notions have given them serious problems in their ability to bond with their peer group, and who have never actually been taught that certain anti-socially behavioural traits are in fact both wrong and likely to maximise the sense of social exclusion that lead to them being displayed in the first place.