“My father,” Harry whispered. It was his best guess, the one thing that might save him. “My father tried to protect you from the bullies.”
How does Harry end up with that conclusion after Snape’s story? Up to that point, there were bullying Gryffindors, a Slytherin and a muggleborn girl trying to safe the Slytherin, and I fail to see where his father might come in.
In the Chinese martial art of Tai Chi Chuan, there is a practice called “Pushing Hands”, where the objective is to dislodge the opponent’s stance (or, in competitions, move them out of a given area.)
As always with the traditional MAs, there are different styles of practice, hard and soft, more external and more internal.
In some of these styles, practitioners try to unbalance the opponent as softly as possible so to not evoke resistance until it has become futile – essentially executing a physical sum-threshold attack.
Thanks for giving me a general concept for this kind of behaviour!