starfishstar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
starfishstar) wrote2014-03-29 12:40 pm
starfishstar) wrote2014-03-29 12:40 pm
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Question: When exactly was "The Prank"?
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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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!