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]

Ooh, thank you! This prompted me to go look at Snape's Pensieve memories in DH as well (duh on me! I'd forgotten they talked about this in those memories) and that indeed answers the question – the prank came sometime before the fifth-year "worst memory" scene, though we don't know specifically when. (More about that below.)

"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...?

[stereolightning.livejournal.com]

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...?

Ahhhh I want to write or read a fic about this so BADLY now!

[starfishstar]

Go for it! :-) I'd think there's potential there, even, to do a sort of "five different ways..." fic or something – as in, exploring the same snippet of time from a bunch of different angles – I'd say there's enough leeway there to do everything from "Sirius as a sociopath and Snape as unfairly wronged" to entirely the opposite...