Question: When exactly was "The Prank"?

[starfishstar]

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!

Comments

[starfishstar]

You're right! The prank came before the worst memory (more in my reply to author_by_night above, and I'll lay out what I found in a more careful look back through the books below), though I haven't found anything to conclusively pin it to fifth year – theoretically, the prank could have been a year or two earlier than the worst memory, though happening during the same year seems like a more logical guess.

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.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

To be fair, Sirius wasn't quite in his right mind at that point. However... I think fandom took a more favorable approach to MWPP than we were supposed to have. I think they had the best of intentions, but the reason they're all killed off is because they really screwed themselves over the first time around; Snape included. They're slaves to their own mishaps, they're their own Dementors. The trio (and to a certain extent, Teddy) are the second chance they never got. Which is downright depressing, but I think that's what JKR intended.

However, because I want to love them, I choose to ignore the fact that it may have been the entire point of their arc.

[starfishstar]

I'll buy that – that Sirius said things in the heat of the moment during that tense scene in the Shrieking Shack that he might regret at other points. Then again, I'm guilty of just what you say, liking these characters and thus wanting to find ways to write them as ultimately sympathetic, if flawed, people! (Definitely I've come to like Sirius a huge amount more through fanfiction, which...does that mean fanfiction is simply giving us a chance to explore the character more deeply? Or is fanfiction distorting the character from who he actually was in canon? I dunno!)

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...

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Oh, I definitely think we're still meant to love them - she certainly seems to; apparently killing Sirius off was awful for her, she loved Remus and had him as a metaphor for AIDS patients who were discriminated against, and she gave Harry James's patronus. But I think she also wanted them to essentially be tragic heroes, good men who were nonetheless taken down by their own flaws. And yes, I think distrust was a huge part of it - the trio has some of that, but they're able to come back from it before it's too late.