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David wrote:
I don't remember the incident terribly clearly, but we have to consider that Neville's choking and spitting are, in fact, overacting to enter into the spirit of the joke.
That's always possible, of course, but it doesn't strike me as terribly consistent with Neville's portrayal elsewhere in the books. I could be failing to remember something, but I can't off-hand think of a single instance where Neville has played the buffoon (on purpose, that is) to entertain others, or been seen joking around with his peers in that particular fashion.
Which isn't to say that he never does, of course, nor that it wasn't what he was trying to do in that particular scene. It strikes me as far more likely, though, that the choke and the spit were instinctive "eeewwww, yuck, a tampered sweet that could do God only knows what to me" responses.
Well. Either way, he was a good sport about it in the end, and that's what counts.
As for my "semi-autistic" comment...
Semi-autistic? You know yourself best, of course, and I know little of autism, but Neville? Forgetful, clumsy, possibly disorganised, but (even semi-) autistic?
That was very poorly phrased on my part, sorry. No, I don't view Neville as an autistic type at all. On the contrary, he strikes me as quite sensitive to other people—to interpersonal dynamic—which is most decidedly not a characteristic of autism.
I myself was (incorrectly, in both my opinion and in those of subsequent doctors) diagnosed as autistic at one point in my childhood, as I had a number of classically autistic traits — none of which Neville shares. Some of the end results, however, were much the same: the apparent absent-mindedness, and the inability to deal very well with certain subjects in school, and the tendency to make the exact same mistakes (stepping onto that trick stair, for example) over and over and over again, much to the frustration and the bewilderment of others.
So while the cause was very different, the end result, in terms of others' perceptions, was quite similar, if not identical. That was all I really meant by that comment.
(And although I know that it's my own fault for having brought it up here in the first place, I really do think that if people wish to discuss autism itself any further, we should take that to the OT list.)
I wrote:
I'll even let you in on a little secret here. I thought that Lupin's oh-so-blatant "let's bolster Neville's confidence" was kind of condescending too, to tell you the truth.
David said:
Surely it had to be blatant, because Snape was blatant. Lupin's remarks, while serving the function of bolstering Neville's confidence, were primarily a rebuke to Snape, which therefore had to be administered before the same people who were witnesses to Snape's remarks.
I agree with you both that it served as an excellent rebuke to Snape, and that this was its primary intent.
What I was responding to there, however, was mainly how Harry seems to have viewed Lupin's pedagogy in regard to Neville — and therefore how we as readers tend to think of it.
In GoF, when Harry learns of Crouch/Moody's passing on Professor Sprout's praise to Neville, he thinks of it both as "very tactful" and as "something that Professor Lupin would have done." (I'm paraphrasing from memory here, so forgive me if I'm a word or two off.) The implication seems to be that Harry believes Lupin's encouragement of Neville to have been both tactful and wholly positive...and I'm not altogether certain that I believe that it really felt that way to Neville himself — much in the same way, in fact, that I'm not altogether certain that I believe that Neville's feelings towards Hermione's acts of kindness towards him are utterly positive or without a certain degree of ambivalence.
Of course, I could be wrong about that. And I am very likely to be over-identifying, projecting myself rather too much onto the character. But it does strain my suspension of disbelief somewhat to think that Neville does not notice the pity and the condescension, or that these things do not, on some level, bother him.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on March 8, 2002 3:43 PM
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