Question: When exactly was "The Prank"?
Mar. 29th, 2014 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Hello out there Harry Potter friends! I've been trying to figure something out, and thought I'd put the question to your collective wisdom:
Does canon ever tell us exactly when "The Prank" (Sirius telling Snape how to get past the Whomping Willow and thus nearly getting him killed by a transformed Remus) took place? I think I've seen some fic writers place it in the Marauders' 6th year, but is there evidence for that? I went back and checked in the book (PoA chapter 18) where Remus describes the incident, and he doesn't say anything specific about when it was. (In fact, he doesn't even say whether it was before or after the other Marauders became Animagi in their fifth year, so theoretically it could have been much earlier, in their third year or something!) Remus' bio on Pottermore doesn't say either.
This is for a story I'm writing about Remus and Sirius reconnecting and revisiting some of the demons from their past just after GoF/just before OotP (yeah, the whole thing of stepping back from one-shots for a while so that I can focus both on my long fic, and on original writing, isn't quite working... though I'm also working on the long fic, and on original writing... no wonder I feel so discombobulated lately!)
It's not essential to know this – I could just mention "when Sirius played the prank on Snape," as opposed to "when Sirius played the prank on Snape in their Xth year" – but it's something that's always niggled at me, and I thought maybe someone out there might know!
Does canon ever tell us exactly when "The Prank" (Sirius telling Snape how to get past the Whomping Willow and thus nearly getting him killed by a transformed Remus) took place? I think I've seen some fic writers place it in the Marauders' 6th year, but is there evidence for that? I went back and checked in the book (PoA chapter 18) where Remus describes the incident, and he doesn't say anything specific about when it was. (In fact, he doesn't even say whether it was before or after the other Marauders became Animagi in their fifth year, so theoretically it could have been much earlier, in their third year or something!) Remus' bio on Pottermore doesn't say either.
This is for a story I'm writing about Remus and Sirius reconnecting and revisiting some of the demons from their past just after GoF/just before OotP (yeah, the whole thing of stepping back from one-shots for a while so that I can focus both on my long fic, and on original writing, isn't quite working... though I'm also working on the long fic, and on original writing... no wonder I feel so discombobulated lately!)
It's not essential to know this – I could just mention "when Sirius played the prank on Snape," as opposed to "when Sirius played the prank on Snape in their Xth year" – but it's something that's always niggled at me, and I thought maybe someone out there might know!
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Date: 2014-03-29 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-30 10:08 am (UTC)"PoA mentions Sirius having been sixteen" – do you remember where? I didn't find that.
I completely agree that this order of events (the "worst memory" bullying coming after the prank) doesn't speak well of the Marauders at all. Their taunting of him in the "worst memory" scene seems casually malicious (they were bored, he was there), as opposed to targeted at getting Snape to keep quiet about what he knows about Remus, and that seems pretty awful. To nearly get him killed (even if James did also save him), then just go on casually bullying him... Harry (and Lily!) isn't wrong that 15-year-old James was a pretty insensitive jerk... Then again, I suppose we don't know what happened in the intervening time between the prank and the worst memory – maybe the bad feelings over the prank only served to make all of them behave even more terribly to each other, to the point that tension was running really high by the end of fifth year...?
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Date: 2014-04-01 12:10 am (UTC)Ahhhh I want to write or read a fic about this so BADLY now!
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Date: 2014-04-01 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-29 04:55 pm (UTC)I suppose the other place you could look for clues is in Book 1 when Dumbledore tells Harry that James saved Snape's life when they were at school.
But with the evidence I can recall off the top of my head, I assume it's in fifth year. And also - that would mean that James can probably transform at this point, and DOESN'T, or Snape would have known he was an Animagus (and probably worked out that everybody else in that group was, too). Which - CRAP. Kudos to James for holding that together in the middle of a crisis.
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Date: 2014-03-30 10:18 am (UTC)You're completely right that Snape already knows for sure about Remus (having glimpsed him, transformed, down the end of the tunnel during the "prank") at the point that he's heavily dropping hints to Lily. Funny, I'd vaguely assumed, just based on my memory of that dropping-hints scene, that Snape didn't yet know for sure at that point – he was only guessing based on what he'd been able to figure out himself. (He's "ill"? Every full moon?) But that conversation states quite specifically that the prank had already happened before it. I guess what's going on is that Snape does know, but he's trying to present it to Lily *as if* it's just a theory of his, backed up by quite a bit of circumstantial proof. ("There's something weird about that Lupin. Where does he keep going?") Quite clever of him, actually, given that he's forbidden to tell what he knows!
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Date: 2014-03-30 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-30 10:29 am (UTC)Completely agree – I would like to think the prank caused the Marauders to grow up a bit – but apparently it didn't. In fact, in PoA, adult Sirius even says – of having nearly gotten Snape killed – "It served him right. Sneaking around, trying to find out what we were up to... hoping he could get us expelled..." YIKES. Possibly Sirius' worst moment in the entire series, revealing that he feels no remorse for having nearly gotten a fellow student killed.
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Date: 2014-03-30 10:00 pm (UTC)However, because I want to love them, I choose to ignore the fact that it may have been the entire point of their arc.
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Date: 2014-03-31 10:05 am (UTC)Do you really think JKR meant us to see the Marauders as responsible for their own downfall? It seems to me she has a lot of love and sympathy for them in the way she writes them, and that their tragedy is more a result of forces around them that are beyond their control. You could make that argument, though, that the mistrust and lies and suspecting the wrong person was what led to their downfall, and that the difference with the trio was that they found a way to come closer together despite their doubts and jealousies, rather than be pushed apart...
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Date: 2014-03-31 11:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-30 10:51 am (UTC)PS: Doesn't give us anything about timeline, just Dumbledore saying, "Your father did something Snape could never forgive. [...] He saved his life."
PoA: Remus describes the prank, including stating that Snape did in fact catch a glimpse of him, in werewolf form, at the end of the tunnel, but doesn't say how old they were when it happened.
OotP: Snape's worst memory (being taunted by James and Sirius and then inadvertently insulting Lily, resulting in the end of their friendship) happened during OWLs, i.e., end of fifth year. But we don't learn anything about the prank or when it happened in relation to the "worst memory."
DH: Here's where we actually get the timeline, since we're presented Snape's memories in the Pensieve in chronological order.
In the scene where Lily's objecting to Snape's Slytherin friends, and they then start talking Remus, with Snape very heavily hinting that he's a werewolf, Lily says, "I heard what happened the other night. You went sneaking down that tunnel by the Whomping Willow and James Potter saved you from whatever's down there." – As in, that conversation between Lily and Snape takes place very shortly after the "prank" happened.
In the sequence of Snape's memories that we see, that Lily-and-Severus conversation is directly followed by the "worst memory" scene that took place during OWLs at the end of fifth year. However, the memory directly before the Lily-and-Severus conversation is of them getting Sorted on the first day of their first year. So obviously there are big time jumps between memories. All we know to place the Lily-and-Severus conversation is that Harry, observing, thinks they look "a few years" older than at the Sorting. So theoretically that conversation – and by association, the prank – could have happened any time from, say, late in third year, to very shortly before the end of fifth year (though before OWLs and Snape's worst memory).
Logically, I'd guess that it makes sense to assume it happened sometime during fifth year – but I don't see any evidence in canon that establishes that for sure.
Thoughts? Any details I missed that would pin this down further?? (author_by_night, you said something about Sirius having been described as 16 at the time of the prank...?)
(Again, I don't actually *need* to know, for my current story-writing purposes, I just find it interesting...)
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Date: 2014-03-30 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-31 10:07 am (UTC)Actually it looks like the wiki has Sirius' birthday in autumn (his death was in June), so that works – he would have turned 16 sometime in the middle of 5th year. Yay, for once JKR math works! ;-)
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Date: 2014-03-30 02:05 pm (UTC)1 September: Begins sixth year at Hogwarts. Snape is 16 years old.
1976-1977 school year: Sirius tricks Snape into following Lupin through the passage beneath the Whomping Willow. James Potter, realizing that Snape would encounter a full-blown and very dangerous werewolf at the end of the passage, stops Snape from going through, thereby saving his life. Snape, much to his disgust, is indebted to James Potter because of this. Dumbledore calls this a "life debt."
http://www.hp-lexicon.org/timelines/timeline_snape.html
I feel it's more logical that it happened during their Sixth year, for reasons you've already mentioned.
I don't know how certain we can be that Snape's memories are purely cronological? Snape was not exatly in a very relaxed state when he retreived the memories to Harry, heh.
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Date: 2014-03-31 10:16 am (UTC)I suppose Snape's memories might not be chronological, but all the rest of them do seem to be in order... Also, as stereolightning pointed out above, Lily and Snape's friendship ended completely when he called her a Mudblood (in the worst memory, at the end of 5th year), so that conversation where they're talking as friends and discuss the prank that happened "the other night" has to have come before the worst memory.
...Which, darn it, I totally agree, character development-wise, I want it to be in 6th year, too! But it looks like the evidence in favor of 5th year is pretty strong.
Then again, JKR is notoriously bad at keeping her math straight, so maybe we should feel free to interpret it as we like. ;-)
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Date: 2014-03-31 11:30 am (UTC)Absolutely!
There're several inconsistencies, and apparently some mistakes on birth dates and so on.
Another thing - even if The Prank happened before Snape's worst memories - that certainly doesn't seem good for the Marauders, especially Sirius and James - but we know very little about what really happened and the circumstances leading up to it. What we do know about the relationship between Snape and the Marauders we see mostly from Snape's POV, and while I do have quite a lot of sympathy for Snape as a character, he is more than able to be quite cruel himself even as an adult. Okay, this is totally besides the point, lol, and maybe it's just me trying to justify the actions of beloved characters ;) I really love the Marauders, and the people they grew up to be ;D
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Date: 2014-03-31 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-01 08:07 am (UTC)I thought of one thing, though, but I don't have the books here now to confirm, so this is based solely on what I remember.
When Harry uses the Floo to talk to Sirius and Remus about Snape's worst memories he'd just seen, doesn't Sirius say that they were fifteen when it happened? Harry says something like his father was an idiot, and Sirius answers "of course he was an idiot, we were fifteen, we were all idiots" or something like that. And then in the conversation with Dumbledore in PoA, Snape says that Sirius was sixteen when "The prank" happened. If I remember correctly.
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Date: 2014-04-01 12:19 pm (UTC)(Okay, to be fair, Sirius is making an off-handed comment about something that happened decades ago, so it's realistic that he doesn't remember whether James was 15 or 16 at the time. Also, JKR was very much focused on making the point that James was (about) 15 then, and Harry is 15 now, so that's fair enough, too. But still, JKR math...!)
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Date: 2014-04-02 10:08 pm (UTC)On the other hand I do find it rather odd that JKR specifically says that at least some of the Marauders were fifteen during Snape's worst memories and that Sirius is sixteen when The Prank happened, if The Prank happened first.
Maybe this is just one of those things we won't know for sure until if or when JKR says anything more about it for instance on Pottermore.
And I've grown a bit weary about these revelations tbh, prefering to leave canon to be canon, and more so after the whole Ron/Hermione - Harry/Hermione-thing ;)
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Date: 2014-03-30 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-30 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-31 10:16 am (UTC)