So ehm, I was looking for something in PS and
Neville had somehow managed to melt Seamus’s cauldron into a twisted blob, and their potion was seeping across the stone floor, burning holes in people’s shoes. Within seconds, the whole class was standing on their stools while Neville, who had been drenched in the potion when the cauldron collapsed, moaned in pain as angry red boils sprang up all over his arms and legs. “Idiot boy!” snarled Snape, clearing the spilled potion away with one wave of his wand. “I suppose you added the porcupine quills before taking the cauldron off the fire?” Neville whimpered as boils started to pop up all over his nose. “Take him up to the hospital wing,” Snape spat at Seamus.
..... first lesson. First ever lesson and Neville seems to be the most dangerous student ever? Like I can't imagine Snape making them brew the most complicated potion ever for their first try?
Of course there's some 'funny' element to it, but if we see this from Snape's perspective, that's a horrible first impression. Like legendary-bad-student material. Cursed even. The kind that will manage to make anything explode or boil over or destroy the equipment and injure himself and others.
MAYBE it was just bad luck and then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, like, Neville expects to fail, Snape expects him to fail and then he does. But Neville seems to genuinely lack skills in potion-making and I can't blame Snape for getting nervous/impatient/annoyed with him. Sorry. That's a huge stress to teach someone like that, even just safety-wise.
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I recently read a neat story that presented this not as Neville being *untalented*, but rather being *uncontrolled* with huge potential. Look, if it was simply the magic inherent to the ingredients fueling Neville's potion disasters, we ought to see a lot more students suffering from melted cauldrons. Especially with experimenting students like the twins. But we only ever hear of Neville. So it is something related to Neville, not the potion itself, that is the root of the problem.
And in this interpretation, its because he has a real, massive, natural talent (for potions) that is going haywire all the time because Neville is... not facing, much less accepting (much less embracing!) his own magical ability in anything. Neville is in denial mode and he stubbornly digs his heels in until he gets shocked out of it - sometime in book 4 I think? - and starts working. In fact, Neville's arc (even obscured as it is by the relentless HarryPOV) is a pretty standard heroic journey: massive talent/gift, denial, finally forced to accept what must be done, hard work, growth into someone capable of facing down the villain, and then doing just that.
