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Do you want to hear about the deal that I'm making?
A couple of weeks ago, my mother decided to follow her Harry Potter re-read with a rewatch or in some cases first watch of all the movies; I came in at Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and we finished both parts of Deathly Hallows (2010/2011) last night. I had forgotten that even with all the compression and elision of film vs. book, I still find the post-mortem montage of Snape's memories devastating. All those past impossibilities, all that unredeemable time; like being fanned a hand of alternate histories, but nothing in a dead man's memories can be changed. The film omits one point I really would not have glossed because of its importance to both Lily and Severus—that their friendship doesn't end because she starts dating his bully, but because he starts hanging out with magical neo-Nazis—but then it invents something that hurts so much it feels like it must be true: that Snape was the one to discover the carnage at Godric's Hollow, his old rival dead on the stairs and his dearest love in the nursery where she died for the child now crying in his crib as Snape cries among the shattered plaster on the floor, rocking the lifeless body of Lily Potter in his arms. They look like a bereaved family. They are, kind of. They aren't. Snape could never have raised Harry even if he hadn't needed to preserve his appearance of loyalty to Voldemort, which I suspect even his formidable skills at double-agenting could not have kept up with a baby in the picture; he didn't share Lily's blood that shielded Harry at the Dursleys' and I am aware of the understatement when I say that he wasn't good with children. He becomes one of Harry's parents all the same, the one Harry doesn't know about, the one who literally died before he let anyone know. The silver doe bounding through Dumbledore's office could have been pathetic: clinging to a ghost. It's the one part of himself Snape can't lie about. It's a powerful emblem of love.
I am sure that eight years ago everyone already thought of vidding Snape's history to "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)," but here we are. I am very prosaically going to walk to a grocery store.
I am sure that eight years ago everyone already thought of vidding Snape's history to "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)," but here we are. I am very prosaically going to walk to a grocery store.
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Okay. I'm glad.
Film-Snape is a less thorny character than book-Snape—less thin-skinned, less casually petty, and of course he's played by Alan Rickman, who I don't think was physically capable of not being attractive whether he'd washed his hair or not—but he shares the essential quality of heartbreaking heroism which has nothing to do with being a nice or even always a very good person. That's important. It's what I cared about most when I read the series for the first time and crossed my fingers that J.K. Rowling wouldn't screw up in the last book and she didn't and neither did the movie. So I end up still thinking about him, hours and years later. A character like that is worth seven books of which at least four badly needed editing.
(I took this part out, but I am putting it back in because it is one of the other crucial things about Snape: he doesn't know that I still think about him. He doesn't know that the grandson of the woman he loved is named after him. He doesn't even know, when he dies, that his story will survive him—but if it does, it will be because Harry Potter of all people knows everything about him now. No wonder Harry calls him "probably the bravest man I ever knew." And he doesn't know that, either.)
ETA: I thought a lot about Snape between 1999 and 2007 and I guess it didn't go anywhere.
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AUGH.
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Then I read your added-back-in edit and am in pieces all over again because that pathos is one of the things I feel the strongest in life: 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.
I think that's why there have to be patronuses that act with freedom and seeming self-awareness and why JK Rowling had to write the epilogue, so that *we* can be aware. But it doesn't make his not knowing--his dying without knowing--any less heart-breaking.
he shares the essential quality of heartbreaking heroism which has nothing to do with being a nice or even always a very good person. --I share with you a life-long fascination with and concern for characters like this.
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.
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Thank you; I'd read about him, but I hadn't seen that article. The photo circa 1980 is fantastic.
"John in his prime however was, in a good light and without his spectacles, almost supernaturally beautiful: like a cross between an early 19th century Romantic poet and a slightly undernourished pre-Raphaelite knight. He had, in particular, the best-shaped mouth I've ever seen on a bloke."
Because I came straight to this article from thinking about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it appears that John Nettleship has become my mental fancasting for that "pale, thin, poetical-looking person" who is the Raven King, whose straight, dark, longish hair gives him "something of the look of a Methodist preacher or a Romantic poet." I hope he would have been all right with that; he had to live with one fictional character already, plus apparently Richard III. This is the sort of thing that happens to people with interesting faces.
The article itself is a mix of really fascinating information, fandom politics, personal opinion, and psychogeography, the last of which I was totally not expecting, but then I wasn't expecting the discussion of reincarnation either. Or the Fisher King.
I laughed out loud at the caption "John claimed that this sequence, shot in the school science lab., showed Snape vaporising himself."
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I think JKR did know she was doing it. In interviews before the series was finished, every time people asked important questions about Snape's motives or storyline, she would refuse to answer, saying it would give away too much. She had a lot bound up in that character. He partly reminded her of her dead mother (her former mean teacher also being her late mother's boss and good friend) and partly, I believe, he had exaggerated versions of her own least favorite personality traits. The parent-generation person who is guilty of ruining the life of an innocent baby, Snape's storyline, is related to JKR's guilt over the difficult life she set up for her first child when they were on the run from her first marriage, in my guess.
:-)
Snape <3
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I used to think "of all people" about this, but I don't now. I think Snape strove the last year of his life to become somebody who could dedicate himself to protecting someone he truly couldn't stand. It's easy to protect those you like, but giving your life for someone who hates you is the hardest thing in JKR's universe and I think he died satisfied because he'd managed that necessary thing.
I don't think he was 100% terrible with children because there is an (extremely immature) exception: in a petty way, he is very good at spitefully championing his own tribe of Slytherin kids, whom he sees as perpetually wronged. Even though, if I were head of a school, I would warn or fire a teacher who behaved as he did for most of the series, the Slytherins did experience him as responsive and sympathetic; he even gave career advice to Crabbe and Goyle, who could not possibly have charmed him with their dimwitted thuggery. We see this most clearly in his steadfast protectiveness of Draco, and the way Scorpius is honored to meet him in Cursed Child, reminding us of how the Malfoy family must understand that they owe everything to him.
ETA: I thought a lot about Snape between 1999 and 2007 and I guess it didn't go anywhere.
Hee. Me too, and I finally did do something with it. Heh. This guy is one for the ages. I like smart grumps.
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I'm not sure that's at odds with my original statement. Snape doesn't just give his life for someone he can't stand who hates him, he entrusts it to that same someone. There's an astonishing bravery and vulnerability in that. He lets himself be seen wholly by someone who might learn all his secrets and still hate him—the equivalent of the fans who argue that Snape can never be truly redeemed. (It is not a relevant question for me, for the record; it's not a concept I find very useful in either my life or my fiction. Atonement and restitution make a lot more sense to me. I find Snape to fulfill those conditions. Is it enough? How would I know? It's what he could do.) At the same time, there's no more important person who could see him than Harry. The stakes are high and complicated and all of this in a man who for all his life-saving spy's self-control has canonically never handled vulnerability—it usually comes tied up with mockery—well. Knowing it had to be done, like just about everything else in Snape's life since the death of Lily, can't have made it easier.
This guy is one for the ages. I like smart grumps.
They are excellent.