Quote from Naaga on May 19, 2023, 2:38 pm

James and Sirius are either very saintly or very evil

The idea that James and Sirius even might have been nice boys came about, I suppose, because many readers didn't realise that Rowling was writing a sort of detective fiction from Day One and that many of her characters therefore tell lies, even in what appears at first sight to be exposition. Many people took Remus's statement that the cause of the enmity between young Snape and James and Sirius was that Snape was jealous of James's prowess on the Quidditch pitch at face value, and then used this to excuse the behaviour seen in the Snape's Worst Memory scene as a one-off. Some became so wedded to this idea of their interactions that they missed the point that we learn in DH that James and Sirius began their bullying of Snape before they even got to Hogwarts, just because he wanted to be in Slytherin, and that Remus had therefore been lying.

At least one Marauders fan, very disturbingly, argues "Harry loves James and Sirius, therefore James and Sirius are Good. James and Sirius are bullies, therefore bullies are Good, therefore their actions must be justified, therefore any person who is bullied must be Bad, therefore Snape is Bad. I am a bully, therefore I am Good and anybody I choose to persecute is Bad and deserves to be hurt." [This is my own paraphrase of her argument, but it's an accurate paraphrase, just more concise. She devotes her time to writing long, elaborate poems describing how she would like to torture Snape to death, and really did claim that because she is a bully like James and Sirius that proves that she is a Good Person and has a special infallible instinct which tells her when other people are Bad, and therefore anybody she bullies must by definition deserve to be bullied.] Other fen of the Marauders have claimed that they weren't bullies at all, that they only picked on Snape and did so only because they could sense that he was deeply evil, or because they had a rivalry of equals.

This is frankly ridiculous. On Pottermore, Rowling characterises James's and Sirius's treatment of young Severus as "relentless bullying". She has stated that at least part of the reason James and Sirius picked on Snape was because James was sexually jealous of his friendship with Lily. She has Dumbledore tell Harry that James was to Snape as Draco is to Harry. She draws a clear parallel between the Marauders and Dudley's gang by giving Dudley a side-kick named Piers (an old French variant of Peter) who is described as rat-like, and who helps Dudley to bully by holding down his victims. She has Sirius, in a moment of seering honesty and self-awareness, say that Peter typically attaches himself to "the biggest bully in the playground". We get to see detention records which show James and Sirius constantly in trouble for randomly hexing other students. Lily accuses them of "hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can", and Remus says outright that James hexed people for fun. Rowling has Snape say that they attacked him as a gang, and since she shows us nothing which contradicts this (except for a suggestion that during seventh year Snape and James duelled one on one) she presumably means it to be true - even though Snape's statement that James would never attack him unless it was four on one was an over-simplification, since we are shown an attack by James and Sirius with Peter as support and Remus abstaining. Possibly Snape sees the fact that a prefect sat by and failed to intervene as part of the attack, just as one would if one were assaulted in front of a police officer, and they did nothing to stop it.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, when Rowling was asked to write a short piece for charity she chose to write a vignette of James and Sirius in the summer between their sixth and seventh year, already members of the Order of the Phoenix and already valiantly fighting what are probably meant to be Death Eaters, but finding time along the way to jeer at and make fools of two innocent Muggle policemen. They may persecute Snape more selectively and intensively than most of their other victims, but Rowling couldn't make it plainer that she sees them as basically just liking to pick on anybody they perceive as weaker than themselves.

Part of the problem is that it seems to be the case that in the US, schoolboy pranks are an acceptable and common form of humour, while sarcasm is comparatively rare and seen as aggressive, meaning that if an American is being sarcastic they probably mean to be genuinely nasty. This leads many American fen to over-estimate the degree to which Snape is being aggressive when he makes sarcy remarks, while seeing the Marauders as just playful. But here in the UK it's sarcasm which is an acceptable and common form of humour, while the kind of extreme "pranks" the Marauders go in for are rare and seen as a form of assault; so the Marauders have to have been quite aggressive to have behaved that way (albeit that practising spells on each other is fairly common at Hogwarts).

The fact that Rowling clearly sees the Marauders as extreme bullies comparable to Dudley does not mean that she sees them as iredeemable. She shows us Dudley beginning to mature and to appreciate the fact that Harry saved him from the Dementors, so if James had lived and Sirius hadn't had his mind damaged in Azkaban, they too might have come to appreciate the risks Snape takes for the Order. In the real world, Nelson Mandela was apparently a bit of a thug and a bully when he was a teenager, but he spectacularly grew out of it and got wisdom. So the fact that James and Sirius were rather unpleasant boys does not necessarily rule out the possibility of their someday growing into good men, if they'd had half the chance.

About James we know very little, and most of what we do know is highly unpleasant, so a saintly James is really a non-starter. However, we do know very little about him. Many people seem to have liked him, so it's fair to say that he probably had many good points which we just don't know about, and it's quite unlikely that he was wholly bad. He might have been a wonderful poet, or a lifelong campaigner for house-elf rights - we just don't know.

What we do know about him that's good is that, according to Dumbledore, he would not have been willing to execute Peter Pettigrew in cold blood as he grovelled for mercy - which puts him one up on Remus and Sirius, who were working themselves up to do just that. He drew the line at actually murdering a classmate, and was willing to take a risk to save him - although if the werewolf incident occurred after he had mastered the Animagus transformation, the risk was "Being seen to be an unregistered stag Animagus" rather than "Being eaten", since we know were-Remus wouldn't attack him in beast form. Remus does however say that James risked his life, which suggests it was before he became an Animagus. He wasn't prejudiced against werewolves or Muggleborns (or, probably, against half-bloods, since Remus and Peter were both half-bloods) and he dedicated himself to making Remus's experience of being a were less painful and miserable. He provided Sirius with a safe haven when Sirius broke up with his family. He was brave enough to join the Order of the Phoenix whilst still a teenager, and willing to fight against Voldemort.

What we know about him which is neutral is that he comes from a privileged, caring background and is highly talented both academically and on the Quidditch pitch. He can have an amusing, charming manner. I put his reputed hatred of the Dark Arts down as a neutral characteristic because there's a whiff of hypocrisy there, considering that the Dark Arts seem to be any magic which is trangressive, dangerous or unauthorised, and James himself is an unregistered Animagus, puts bystanders in danger from an official Dark creature, and collaborates in producing and using The Marauder's Map which most wizards would probably regard as a Dark Arts object in itself, since it's basically a covert surveillance device capable of invading the privacy of everybody in the area. Nowadays he'd probably be a computer hacker, spying on other people through their webcams.

As for negatives, we see that James starts at Hogwarts already filled with house prejudice, and interrupts Severus and Lily in order to sneer at Sev's desire to be in Slytherin, without any provocation. Severus then gives as good as he gets by suggesting that Gryffindors are thick, and James responds by escalating to minor physical violence and trying to trip him. James is clearly the one at fault here - he initiates the verbal argument without provocation, and then when Severus responds he escalates it. This sets the pattern that we see in fifth year, where James has such a sense of entitlement, or such scorn for somebody who is obviously poor and working-class, that he believes that he has the right to do whatever he likes to Severus, and punishes him if he dares to defend himself.

While we do not know for sure how much bullying of Severus went on prior to fifth year, the fact that either James or Sirius (we're not told which) dubs him "Snivellus" before they even get to Hogwarts, and they are still using that nickname at the end of fifth year, combined with the fact that Sirius was willing to try to murder Severus some time earlier in fifth year, strongly implies that the bullying was ongoing throughout their time at Hogwarts. And it was bullying, not just rivalry, because it was four on one - unless you think that the Marauders were such incompetent fighters that four on one was even odds. Rowling herself calls it "relentless bullying", implying numerous incidents over an extended period.

James saves Snape's life, but then goes right back to launching a totally unprovoked attack on him just because he is bored. At the very least, this suggests a startling lack of finer feelings - at worst that he saved Snape because he didn't want to lose his toy.

Unless you want to propose a setup in which James is bisexual, and persecuted Snape because he secretly fancied him and wanted to get his attention - in the same way that awkward boys try to get a girl's attention by pulling her hair - the fact that James saved Severus and then went right on bullying him in a very vicious and humiliating way is a strong indication that his saving of Severus was not done because he cared about him in any way. At the same time, Snape was not necessarily right to believe that James saved him only to keep the Marauders out of trouble. It's quite possible that James did have a sense that murdering a classmate - any classmate - was an unacceptable act, even though he clearly thought that bullying was OK.

The Marauders are not the worst bullies they could be. So far as we know they don't rape their victims, or extort money from them. But the attack on Snape at the end of fifth year has a number of aggravating features. It's completely unprovoked. Hoisting Snape up by his ankle could be seen just as horseplay, since Remus says that that spell (which is Snape's own invention anyway) was very popular in fifth year, and that at times you could hardly move for being hoisted up by your ankle, but when Snape swears at his attackers, James punishes him for it - again, he is showing that he has such a massive sense of entitlement that he believes that he has a perfect right to treat others however he likes, and nobody must cross him. The message he is sending to Snape is "You're so low that I can do what I like to you and you're not even allowed to object." We see this on the very first day that they met, when James has to escalate the aggression because he can't deal with the fact that when he was rude about Slytherin, Snape answered back.

Although Sirius claimed that James hated Snape because Snape was into the Dark Arts, we can see that James started picking on young Severus when he knew nothing about him except that he wanted to be in Slytherin. Rowling has said that the bullying was at least partly motivated by James's sexual jealousy of Sev's friendship with Lily, and yet at a time when James wants to impress Lily he can think of no reason for his persecution of Snape except "He exists". He appears in fact to be trying to use Snape as a hostage - hoping to coerce Lily into going out with him because if she doesn't he'll continue to torment her old friend. But the message he is giving Snape is "Your crime is your very existence and you have no way out of this hell except to kill or die".

According to the prequelle-ette which Rowling wrote for charity, James and Sirius were already Order members and fighting Death Eaters by the summer before their seventh year, while taking time off to bait a couple of innocent Muggle policemen. During seventh year James, despite being Head Boy, continued to hex Severus, showing a total disregard for the school rules it was now his job to uphold. Sirius and Remus present this hex-war and mutual or even as instigated by Severus, but this seems unlikely because James was able to conceal it from both Lily and the staff, and it was James who had the Map which enabled him to see where Lily and the staff were at all times. The implication is that it was James who decided when and where they would fight. It's hardly surprising, then, that Snape joined the Death Eaters, after seeing James join the Order and become Head Boy, whilst still having a vicious streak and a total disregard for the rules he was meant to be upholding, and apparently a sneering attitude to Muggles too. Snape had every reason at that point to think that the Order side was a party of thugs, and Lucius and co. probably went out of their way to appear refined and civilized, until he was in too deep to get away.

Depending on whether or not James really did remove young Snape's pants, the attack on Snape by the beech tree ended with a minor sexual assault, if he carried out his threat, or sexual harrassment if he only threatened to. In the films James only suggests taking off young Snape's trousers but in the books it was his pants. Pants in Britain means underpants, and we know that that's so in this case because Snape was bare-legged under his robes. Motivated, according to Rowling, by sexual jealousy, James was proposing to expose Snape's bare genitals to a baying mob - the sort of thing which might well have earned him a prison sentence in the Muggle world.

There is an anomaly concerning James's behaviour in seventh year. Remus and Sirius say that James continued to fight Snape in seventh year but suggest that it was one on one and mutual, or that Snape was the attacker - although it seems more likely that James set the timing of their encounters, since he had the means to see that there were no staff around, and Snape did not. Snape says that James never attacked him except four on one. We don't know whether Snape is wrong here, or whether he's right and the other Marauders continued to join in in seventh year, or whether it's true that Snape's encounters with James in seventh year were one to one, and Snape does not consider these to be attacks but rather duels.

But whatever the precise details, James was Head Boy, and he was prosecuting an illegal private quarrel through the corridors of Hogwarts. He clearly had little or no sense of duty or of respect for the rôle and the rules he was meant to be upholding. He was, in effect, a corrupt official.

Even worse, he routinely collaborates in allowing were-Remus to run in areas where there are potential victims (we know this because they had many near misses), putting innocent bystanders at risk of being infected or killed. His desire to help Remus is admirable in itself, but he could have insisted that if Remus was going to run loose as a were it had to be deep in the Forbidden Forest or on empty moorland, where he would not encounter other humans - but clearly he did not do so. Instead, he took stupid risks with other people's lives, and continued to do so when he was Head Boy and an Order member.

Most disturbing of all is his behaviour to Lily. We've been told on Pottermore that James's treatment of Snape amounted to "relentless bullying", i.e. it took place over a long period, and we see that James and Sirius in fifth year are still using the nickname "Snivellus" which they gave to Snape on his first day at Hogwarts, so the implication is that they bullied him pretty solidly during the intervening five years. Rowling has said that James's motive was at least partly sexual jealousy. So, James wasn't Lily's boyfriend at this point, and neither was young Severus, he was just her friend, and yet James was so obsessively possessive and jealous, even at age eleven, that he resented the idea of Lily even talking to another male, saw her as in some sense his property whether she liked it or not, just because he fancied her, and punished a classmate for years for daring to be her friend.

In fifth year he tries to force Lily to go out with him against her will, despite her appearing to dislike him intensely, by in effect holding Snape hostage and threatening to go on persecuting him unless Lily relents. When she tries to protect her friend, he threatens her with violence for daring to oppose him - "Don't make me hex you." This is an absolutely classic example of an abuser's attitude to their victim: "I'm going to hit you, but it will be your fault for not doing as you're told". In seventh year Lily starts dating James because she believes he has grown up a bit, but in fact he is deceiving her in a very nasty way, betraying the Head Boy/Girl job which they share (and which she probably takes seriously) and continuing to hex her old friend, which is something he evidently knows she would hate if she knew about it, since he goes to the trouble of hiding it from her.

According to Pottermore, once they were together James drove a wedge between Lily and her sister by being obnoxious to the Dursleys, and one of the main reasons the Dursleys resented Harry was because he looked like James and James had been so nasty to them. In this case,there was right and wrong on both sides. This is what Pottermore says:

"James was amused by Vernon, and made the mistake of showing it. Vernon tried to patronise James, asking what car he drove. James described his racing broom. // Vernon supposed out loud that wizards had to live on unemployment benefit. James explained about Gringotts, and the fortune his parents had saved there, in solid gold. // Vernon could not tell whether he was being made fun of or not, and grew angry. Then evening ended with Vernon and Petunia storming out of the restaurant, while Lily burst into tears and James (a little ashamed of himself) promised to make things up with Vernon at the earliest opportunity."

James committed the first sin, by finding Vernon funny and letting him see that he did, but after that they were as bad as each other. Although James does seem to have laid it on with a trowel about how much richer than the Dursleys he was, which is a very crass, low-class thing to do in British culture.

Judging from his behaviour at school, it seems distinctly possible that if they had lived James would have continued to deceive Lily when it suited him, quite possibly including with other women. At least, he might well have been faithful to Lily because he loved her and never felt tempted to stray, but if he did ever feel tempted to stray then the fact that Lily wouldn't like it wouldn't have stopped him. The fact that he threatens Lily when she defends her friend makes it possible he might even have become a wife-beater (for as long as it took Lily to hand him his balls in a shoebox). In this case, the fact that Rowling evidently quite likes James doesn't help much. He can't be so totally evil that there's nothing there to like at all, but since Rowling herself married somebody who turned out to be a wife-beater, and whom she must initially have liked, the fact that she likes James doesn't mean that he isn't a wife-beater in embryo.

James comes across as a swaggering, privileged Hooray Henry who gets a buzz out of persecuting what he sees as his inferiors. We're actually told that he looks like a boy who has been "well cared for, even adored", and that he is a top student, and Rowling has said that he was the beloved only child of aged parents. We know so little about him, though, that it's possible to make him more sympathetic by assuming he actually has low self-esteem for which he is compensating. His parents could be in some sort of bad odour, for example - maybe his dad spent seven years in Azkaban for fiddling Hippogriff races. Or he might have a really small dick....

Actually, his problem may have been that he was praised too much. Some studies have shown that praising children all the time, for everything, can actually undermine their confidence, because they don't know whether they've genuinely done well or not.

One noteworthy thing we can say in his favour is that if he knew that it was Harry who was the target of Voldemort's attention, then he could have saved himself by abandoning his family when they went under Fidelius, and he did not do so. And he appears to have been a very fun, lively dad, if not an entirely responsible one when it came to dangerous sports. Yet JK Rowling's comment in an interview with Today in 2007 that "you could make a very good case for Arthur Weasley being the only good father in the whole series" suggests that she herself doesn't think that much of James's parenting skills.

Sirius is equally unpleasant in many ways, and even more reckless with other people's safety, but in his case we get to see clear mitigating circumstances, and we see enough of him to get to know some of his virtues, as well as his faults. He comes from a difficult and stressful home life where he evidently suffered some of the same emotional abuse as Harry, in that he was constantly compared with another child and found wanting. If his mother's portrait is anything like the woman herself, then there's a streak of madness and obsession in the family - bearing in mind that Bellatrix is his cousin.

He collaborated with James in baiting Severus from the outset, for nothing - but he was in a precarious position, because he had honestly admitted his own connection with Slytherin, and therefore there was a risk that James would turn on him too if he didn't curry favour. He took an equal part, so far as we know, in recklessly endangering innocent bystanders by encouraging were-Remus to run in areas where there were other humans about. In the prequel we see that like James he was probably already an Order member and heroically fighting enemy wizards during the summer between his sixth and seventh years at school, but also that like James he makes time to bait and jeer at two innocent Muggle policemen, just because he can. Like James, the detention records show he had a long history of hexing people for fun.

He either intentionally tried to murder Severus (probably to prevent him from finding out that three of the Marauders were studying to be Animagi), or recklessly endangerd him without caring whether he would be killed or not, and in so doing he tried to make Remus unknowingly complicit in killing or infecting a fellow student. At the very least this would surely have got Remus expelled and wrecked his future - at worst, it might even have got him executed, to say nothing of the psychological injury he would have suffered. Yet, even for this there are mitigating circumstances.

We know from his tombstone that James was born in March 1960. We know that Sirius was in the same academic year as James, we know that he was arrested early in November 1981, and we know Rowling has said that he was "about twenty-two" when he was sent to Azkaban. In 2015 she Tweeted that Sirius was born on 3^rd November 1959,.

Sirius says that his Uncle Alphard left him money, and that when he was seventeen (i.e. of age in wizard terms) he bought his own flat. It's possible that Alphard died some time after Sirius's seventeenth birthday, but the coupling of being seventeen with buying a flat somewhat suggests that Sirius already had the money but had to wait until he was of age before getting his own place. If that's the case he probably bought his flat as soon as he could, i.e. round about November 1976. Prior to that he says that he had camped out at James's place during the school holidays, plural, and prior to that - but after turning sixteen - he had split from his family.

Assuming that Sirius bought his flat soon after turning seventeen, there are only three holidays - the Christmas, Easter and Summer holidays of his fifth year - which he could have spent with James. If he really spent holidays, plural, with him, then these must have included the Easter and Summer holidays, and we don't know about the Christmas one. Possibly Christmas was when he and his family had their final fight.

We do not know exactly when Sirius tried to lure Severus into a close encounter with were-Remus - an act comparable to trying to feed a classmate to a grizzly bear, or deliberately infecting them with Aids - but Snape says Sirius was sixteen at the time. It was probably a significant period prior to the underpants incident, since when they come out from their DADA OWL Snape is ambling along in an academic haze and apparently not on the alert for danger from the Marauders, even when they settle down near him and begin talking, and even though they have all just been concentrating on an exam question about werewolves. Evidently, by this point the Marauders have been behaving themselves for long enough that Snape no longer expects attack from them - so that tends to set the werewolf "prank" in early to mid fifth year.

We cannot know whether the so-called "prank" happened before or after Sirius's split from his family but it must have been within a few months either way, plus Sirius and his parents were probably at odds well before he left home. It seems likely, then, that at the time that Sirius either intentionally tried to kill Severus, or recklessly endangered him without caring whether he would be killed or not, he was under immense psychological strain. This goes some way towards explaining both his reckless or murderous behaviour and why he wasn't expelled for it: he didn't really have anywhere to go, if his place at boarding school was removed.

Nevertheless it was an act of reckless criminality, the sort of thing which in the real world would likely have resulted in a gaol sentence, and he tried to make Remus an unwitting participant, without regard to the damage that that would do to somebody he's meant to love. He may be slightly sociopathic - although not completely so, since he clearly loves James.

Although Sirius's likely poor mental state in fifth year is a mitigating factor, his reasons for persecuting Severus were even less noble than James's. Sexual jealousy in a hormonal teenager is understandable, but Sirius by his own admission seems to have persecuted Severus mainly because he was physically unprepossessing and an "oddball"; and despite what he later says to Harry about Dark Arts, his actual grievance against Severus (the boy whom he had previously tried to murder) during the underpants incident seems to be that he had a big nose and oily skin. This contrasts with Harry's sorrow and empathy when he sees Luna being persecuted (insofar as it's possible to persecute somebody so serenely unconcerned). Harry, we are being shown, is the better man, and this is reinforced when we see how much kinder Harry is to Kreacher, and are told that Sirius's unkindness to Kreacher contributed to his death.

Although Dumbledore seems to think Sirius was impatient and cold to Kreacher because he was a low-ranking creature who symbolised his awful childhood, I've always thought it was probably more to do with Kreacher's obsessive behaviour. Many people have trouble dealing with the fact that the feelings of a mentally ill person are real people-type feelings, even if their cause is a delusion. And Sirius must have had a bellyful of humouring the mentally ill from dealing with his own mother.

We can say that during the underpants incident, although Sirius likes to bait Severus by hexing him and rendering him helpless, the really nastiest bits - forcing their victim to eat soap because he dared to protest, saying that his crime is just that he exists, stripping him (or proposing to) and displaying his genitals - were all James's idea. We may say that Sirius is a bully too, and perhaps even a murderer manqué but he doesn't fight as dirty as James, he's not as cruel, and he doesn't come across as having that same air of entitlement - that sense James has that he has a right to do what he likes to everyone else and nobody must object.

As an adult Sirius's hatred of Snape seems to be an obsession, a phobia (even Remus calls it a prejudice), and therefore something he can't entirely help. He's been in Azkaban for nearly twelve years, he spent much of that time and of the intervening year as a dog, he probably hasn't even seen Snape for eighteen years, and yet when he meets up with Remus and Harry at the Shrieking Shack, as soon as Remus mentions Snape, Sirius reveals that he is still gloating over the murder attempt (or whatever exactly it was) and saying that Snape - who Rowling herself says Sirius had bullied relentlessly, who he doesn't know is listening, and with whom he has probably had no interaction for eighteen years - had deserved it. Whether he means that Snape deserved to die or just deserved to be given a fright isn't clear, but once Snape reveals himself, Sirius goes on baiting him and sneering at him even when his own life depends on winning Snape round. It seems to be a point of madness in him, like his mother's ranting - which is really not surprising, after all that he has suffered. He seems obsessed with Snape's physical appearance, his oddness.

[I'm fairly sure Sirius is gay, and that the girly posters on his bedroom wall were just a sop to his parents. The closest emotional attachment in his life seems to have been to James, we're told that during the aftermath of the DADA OWL a girl eyes him up and he doesn't notice, there's never any mention in the books of a girlfriend or any social connection with any female other than Lily and his mother, and his obsession with Snape seems to revolve around the fact that he finds him physically unattractive - something which you would expect to be very low in his priorities if he were straight. On Pottermore JKR has Remus commenting about a handsome friend who survived Azkaban and who always gets the women - but that may mean the women go after him, rather than vice versa. I suspect that Rowling originally started to write Sirius as gay, then realised that that might make his desire for fourteen-year-old GoF Harry to turn into a clone of James seem a little creepy, so she tried to backpedal.]

Nevertheless, even though Sirius hates Snape and wants to rubbish him, he still tells Harry that he never heard a rumour that Snape was a Death Eater. Within the limits of his own prejudices he seems to be extremely honest. He even says that Peter typically attaches himself to the biggest bully in the playground, so he knows what he and James were. And he actually thinks about ethics, about right and wrong, more than most of the characters; even if that doesn't necessarily stop him from doing wrong. His insistence on young Snape having known a lot of curses and having been an expert on the Dark Arts even as a boy - which is not supported by the other evidence - may be because he has enough honour to feel bad about his and James's "relentless bullying" of Snape, but he's also (even) more immature than Snape so when he knows he behaved badly, instead of saying "I did a bad thing and I must put it right" he tries to convince himself that he had been justified; he tries to reassure himself that Snape was a formidable opponent and that attacking him many on one wasn't as unfair as he really knows in his heart that it was.

Even his continued boasting about the werewolf incident may be because he knows perfectly well that he did a bad and stupid thing which endangered not only Snape but Remus too - his old friend Remus who is right there beside him - but he's never going to say "Oh God, Remus, I must have been out of my mind - I could have got both of you killed". He knows he ought to feel very guilty, but is sulkily determined not to.

And he says that the knowledge that he was innocent of the crime he had been imprisoned for protected him from the Dementors in Azkaban, so if he had started to brood about the things he really was guilty of, his bullying of Severus and many others and his putting of both Remus and Severus in extreme danger, that guilt might have made him vulnerable to the Dementors, so he would have to excuse his own actions to himself. Indeed, thinking about the Shack incident would have to lead to thinking about Remus, then about the fact that he had wrongly believed that Remus was the traitor, then about the fact that this had led him to recommend to the Potters that they should make Peter their Secret Keeper - another train of thought he really couldn't afford, in Azkaban.

He behaved in a thuggish, brutal way during PoA, slashing the Fat Lady just because she wouldn't let him into the Gryffindor common room, and handling schoolboy Ron so roughly that he snapped the boy's leg like a branch, so you can see that the violent heart which led him to try to kill young Severus is still there. The worst thing we see is that when he has Snape as an unconscious, unarmed captive he either deliberately bumps his head against the ceiling or at best carelessly fails to prevent it, putting Snape at severe risk of dying from Second Impact Syndrome.

We have to allow for the fact that Sirius is twelve years out of practice at using a wand, here, and probably dazed by malnutrition, and Snape has just threatened to send him back to the Dementors. It's not really surprizing if he isn't up to realising that Snape is just trying to protect Harry because he thinks that Sirius is what Peter really is, and that Snape's intention to send him, Sirius to the Dementors should therefore be judged alongside his, Sirius's intention to execute Peter in cold blood for having done what Snape thinks that he, Sirius did. Even so, Sirius's knee-jerk brutality contrasts badly with Snape's knee-jerk gentility when he in turn has Sirius as an unconscious, unarmed captive, believing him to be a mass-murderer who betrayed Lily to her death and has come to finish the job by killing Harry, and he nevertheless carefully transports him on a stretcher. Snape the guttersnipe has better manners than Sirius the wealthy Pureblood.

But here again Sirius is hugely stressed, not to mention mentally addled by exposure to Dementors, by malnutrition and by time spent as a dog, and if he were not so stressed, in his fifth year and here in Harry's third year, he would probably have been better able to control his violent impulses.

In her essay Severus vs. Sirius: A Short Meditation on the Nature of Love Mary Johnson argues that Sirius was crazed and blinded by his own vengeful nature in that he kept trying to kill rat!Peter, when his own freedom and exoneration depended on his being able to prove that Peter was still alive. I feel in fairness that I should point out that we don't know whether Sirius's desire to kill Wormtail was crazed or not, because we don't know what happens to Animagi who die while transformed. If killing Wormtail the rat would result in a freshly dead human Peter Pettigrew, leaving his corpse somewhere where the Aurors would find it would be quite an effective way of proving that he hadn't died in an explosion twelve years ago, without the risk of his running away again.

Sirius is willing to execute Peter in cold blood, but Remus seems to be the instigator, and Sirius has the greater grievance. He expects Harry to be James redux, and is angry when he isn't, but much of the advice he gives Harry is sensible, and he does love him: we see for example that he bought Harry his first broom as a baby, and then he made the effort to buy him a racing broom even when he was a fugitive and doing so might have got him caught. At Grimmauld Place he needles Snape constantly (and Snape needles him back, but Sirius seems to be the one to escalate the conflict); but then he is under a great deal of strain, living in the family house where he had been so unhappy, unable to go outside, marginalized by Dumbledore and hitting the bottle, and his hatred of Snape seems to be a kind of neurosis.

And he is very young, in a sense. He may be technically thirty-six when he dies, but he has really lived as a relatively normal human having relatively normal social interactions for only twenty-four years: the other twelve years he was in solitary confinement and/or a dog. He was probably fairly happy between leaving the family home at sixteen and a bit and being arrested at just turned twenty-two, and for about six months after fleeing on Buckbeak and before returning to the U.K. - a total of around six happy years. The other thirty years were all more or less horrible.

Like Snape, he had to endure a terrible bereavement for which he was partly responsible (it was he who persuaded the Potters to make Peter their Secret-Keeper), so like Snape he had both grief and guilt to deal with, with the additional twist that another friend whom he had trusted, Peter, had set him up and got him sent to Azkaban for life for a crime he hadn't committed (although as a spy Snape, of course, had to betray people who trusted him to the Aurors). Sirius does get a few more good things in his life than Snape does, and is treated with more kindness and appreciation by more people - but then, nearly twelve years with the Dementors is probably substantially more destructive of self than anything Snape had to endure, so the two men are about equally tragic.