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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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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."