Did JK Rowling know she was doing that? Was it inadvertent or by design.
I don't know! Everything changes in the writing, even in stories where the end is known from the start, and I don't know how much Snape changed—or was discovered—as she wrote him over the years. I don't know enough about her development as a writer or her original ideas for the books. Honestly, even if she accidentally backed into him, he's an extraordinary achievement. He may be the thing that holds the books together when everything else has faded.
The fact that there are people whose lives are walking through hot coals and they never even know that there are people with buckets of water for them. They never get to know.
That's beautifully and painfully said.
--I share with you a life-long fascination with and concern for characters like this.
It's funny that I don't think of him even now as my favorite character, because that's Remus Lupin (whose death I still think was not necessary). But he was my most important character. He was the high-wire act I was waiting to see if Rowling could pull off—by the last book, I knew that the resolution of his arc would make or break the series for me—he was the most complex and the most messily real. He dies with so many things in his life unresolved, so many partitions and contradictions. We end up sorting them out instead. At the time I worried it was the narrative tidying of death-by-redemption, but now it feels important to me that even death doesn't smooth him out. That's part of reality, too.
Second ETA: It's never too late. It's gone somewhere now.
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I don't know! Everything changes in the writing, even in stories where the end is known from the start, and I don't know how much Snape changed—or was discovered—as she wrote him over the years. I don't know enough about her development as a writer or her original ideas for the books. Honestly, even if she accidentally backed into him, he's an extraordinary achievement. He may be the thing that holds the books together when everything else has faded.
The fact that there are people whose lives are walking through hot coals and they never even know that there are people with buckets of water for them. They never get to know.
That's beautifully and painfully said.
--I share with you a life-long fascination with and concern for characters like this.
It's funny that I don't think of him even now as my favorite character, because that's Remus Lupin (whose death I still think was not necessary). But he was my most important character. He was the high-wire act I was waiting to see if Rowling could pull off—by the last book, I knew that the resolution of his arc would make or break the series for me—he was the most complex and the most messily real. He dies with so many things in his life unresolved, so many partitions and contradictions. We end up sorting them out instead. At the time I worried it was the narrative tidying of death-by-redemption, but now it feels important to me that even death doesn't smooth him out. That's part of reality, too.
Second ETA: It's never too late. It's gone somewhere now.
I just meant it never went away! But thank you.