Neville Could Have Been Good at Potions

owlpostagain:

From the beginning, Neville is hugely intimidated by Snape. Snape bullies him relentlessly, insulting him in front of his peers and even other teachers. As a result, Neville is a completely incompetent Potions brewer. It’s stated outright that Snape made Neville’s performance significantly worse. 

To be fair, Neville isn’t particularly talented in any of his
other classes either. But I genuinely think Potions could have been one of Neville’s best subjects.

Think about how much Herbology and Potions have in common.

Both subjects:

• involve methodical work
• don’t require actual wandwork
• must be done in a specific order, where doing it wrong will lead
  to safety issues and disaster (extracting something from a dangerous
  plant vs. brewing a potion)
• require a high comfort level with gross/weird substances
• are highly tactile
• involve plants/plant-based ingredients

So a good Potions teacher would have looked at Neville and said, “if
you can be good at Herbology, then you can be good at Potions. You
already know that Valerian root is used as a sleep aid, now we’re going
to use it in a dreamless sleep potion.”

But that didn’t happen.

So I really really really hope that at some point in his adult life, Neville realized that Potions might not be so awful after all.