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

[selkie]

You are fiddling dirges on my emotions.

*sob-flounces off*

[asakiyume]

Stop; you're making me cry ;_;

[aurumcalendula]

I'd basically reached Harry Potter fatigue by the time I reached the last book (I still need to watch all of the movies after Chamber of Secrets), but I found the memory part really affecting.

Dammit, now I kinda want vid him to Running Up That Hill (*reminds self of all the other vidding stuff I have in progress*).

[drinkingcocoa]

Heh. I feel summoned. :-)

I think of the way that Snape lived and died, without any guarantee that his efforts would be recognized or even that people would ever stop spitting on his grave, as the characterization of the way JKR felt about some of the things she had to do as a young mother on the run with her baby. If you know you're doing something to protect your most loved person, you can withstand being reviled, misunderstood, despised, or called a coward for running away. But it galls. I think it was hard on her pride to be the formerly promising genius girl who was a single mom on welfare, the same way that Snape always grits his teeth when people laugh at him for allegedly groveling for, and failing to achieve, the petty goal of switching jobs to DADA professor.

I know a lot of people loathe Cursed Child, but I was deeply unsurprised to find that Snape is unambiguously celebrated as a hero in that one. I think the Snape portion of that story is one fulfillment of the fantasy of somehow letting the dead know that they are posthumously appreciated.