Do you want to hear about the deal that I'm making?

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[drinkingcocoa]

It's amazing how this series in which one character's name gets put on every single book can have the most heart-rending emotional focus and arguably the biggest emotional struggle and the most heroism--is a completely other character. Did JK Rowling know she was doing that? Was it inadvertent or by design.

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

[asakiyume]

Very cool insights into JKR's actual situation and influences--thank you!