Serenade In The Common Room

serenade in the common room

DAENERYS TARGARYEN AND THE WOMEN WHO PHYSICALLY RESEMBLE HER

Ashara Dayne: Even after all these years, Ser Barristan could still recall Ashara’s smile, the sound of her laughter. He had only to close his eyes to see her, with her long dark hair tumbling about her shoulders and those haunting purple eyes. Daenerys has the same eyes. Sometimes when the queen looked at him, he felt as if he were looking at Ashara’s daughter … (ADWD The Kingbreaker)

[Ashara Dayne’s appearance] almost certainly is a reference to Elizabeth Taylor. Years back I had asked George about the violet eyes of the Daynes and whether they were related to the Targaryens. His response was that so far as he knew, they had no Targaryen blood… and then he pointed out that there are people with violet eyes in the real world, and he specifically pointed out Elizabeth Taylor as an example. (Elio Garcia)

Naerys Targaryen: The sister of King Aegon the Unworthy and Prince Aemon the Dragonknight was beautiful as well, but hers was a very fine and delicate beauty, almost unworldy. She was a wisp of a woman, smaller even than Dany (to whom she bears a certain resemblance), very slender, with big purple eyes and fine, pale, porcelain skin, near translucent. Naerys had none of Dany’s strength, however. (So Spake Martin)

Lynesse Hightower: “What did she look like, your Lady Lynesse?” Ser Jorah smiled sadly. “Why, she looked a bit like you, Daenerys.” (ACOK Daenerys I)

viktoriya novikova as daenerys targaryen || elizabeth taylor as ashara dayne || mia farrow as naerys targaryen || tamzin merchant as lynesse hightower

I think nuance gets lost in the prank discourse with people trying to absolve their fave of their sins. Both Sirius and Snape were wrong. Both have tempers and can be ruthless/ petty when crossed and are capable of violence. Both take pride in their intelligence and can be brutal to those they see as intellectually inferior. So it was a lethal combination where both of them bought out the worst in each other.

totally agree. Sev's vindictiveness and obsession with the marauders is somewhat understandable but ultimately really unhealthy and def crossed a line; we see in prince's tale that this obsession prevented him from being a good friend to Lily. It's a pretty explosive combination with Sirius's recklessness, disregard for consequences and his somewhat darker streak compared to Harry and James.

tbh I've often thought that Sev and Sirius are similar in many ways, (though both would kill me for suggesting it) almost parallels, and I think the prank situation showcases that pretty well!!

>>I mean mostly the fact that he never shows any real remorse for it. I'm not saying that he didn't feel guilty for hurting Remus, I think he did-- and I also think that academically, intellectually, he understood it was wrong. But in SWM we see it doesn't really change anything about his behaviour. And why would it? There weren't any real consequences for what amounts to attempted murder.

this this this. sirius is a fascinating character and imo a big part of what's so fascinating about him is the disconnect between the morals he academically and intellectually holds (judge a man by how he treats his inferiors, die rather than betray your friends, etc.) and the instincts he follows when he can't/doesn't check himself (...how he treats his inferiors, that one time he betrayed lupin's secret for a fun prank, etc). this sounds really anti-sirius lmao but it's not, he's such a good take on the "it's our choices not our nature that define us" thing and is possibly the first adult we see in text genuinely engaging with this theme in a real world-adjacent way rather than transforming into a feral ragemonster each month or having his evil boss growing out of the back of his head or something. i do love me some metaphors but the relative realism is nifty.

exactly!!!!! the girls that get it, get it. honestly i feel like a lot of analysis by people who genuinely love Sirius reads as anti-sirius just because my boy's got a lot of flaws and I think anyone who rly loves the character for who he is (same goes for Snape) actually loves him because of those flaws, not in spite of them. so we love to talk about them lol

it makes him so interesting! the kreacher thing, the way he directly contradicts his own advice from the previous book, is such a clear example of this. I mean, again Sirius has been conditioned to view house-elves as inferior, and not only that but Kreacher is the last living reminder of everything he suffered at home and everything he hates-- it's understandable why he'd react that way to Kreacher, but it's also what proves his undoing.

In a way there's something admirable about it, like Sirius has had to overcome MUCH more than someone like James in terms of challenging his own beliefs. is it any wonder that being thrown in azkaban at age 21 and then forced into a different kind of prison would stunt his growth and understanding about the world? despite that he was still able to be a great godfather to harry.

I made a thing Tom should be back there too but only if your screen brightness is up… or if you squint really hard I guess

Are Lily and Petunia working class? I feel like they’re coded more like lower middle, with parents who are very class conscious in the way that people who’ve only relatively recently inched their way into respectability can be - Lily and Petunia both have classist insults on the tip of their tongue when they’re done with Snape and that had to be a deliberate invocation of the attitudes inside the Evan’s’ home considering they’ve got basically no other personality traits in common - and who hope their daughters marry up, which they both do. They don’t really seem as kids to speak or act in the way that the few unambiguously working class characters in the books do. She can’t be raised middle middle, because she’s far too obsessed with the performance of it once married to be comfortable that status won’t be taken from her, but her dad was like…a bank clerk. Or a council worker. Not a lawyer, but not a working class factory guy or tradesman either. Cokeworth reads to me as split by the river, with Snape’s condemned Victorian slums in the shadow of the mill and then Lily and Petunia over a bridge in the nicer part of town on one of those endless 1930s estates with a gated playground that are all over the country. Sometimes it’s hard not to read an uncomfortably condescending undertone into JKR’s words about Lily’s goodness that a key part of that goodness in the author’s eyes was her ability to overlook the class disparity with Snape. Would love to hear your thoughts on this because you usually spot much more going on in the text than I do!

(also, what working class family names their first child Petunia???)

so, i certainly think this is a fair reading, anon - which definitely works with snape and petunia and lily's canonical... vibe.

i just prefer the class divergence between the snapes and the evanses to be smaller in real terms - and, therefore, more profound in imagined ones.

by which i mean that i like the tension between the two families to be intra-working-class beef between a "respectable", "aspirational" working-class family and the feckless delinquents it considers beneath them.

this is because it always strike me that so much about petunia's relationship with snape is based in her fear of the mirror he holds up to her, and the inadequacies she's terrified it will reveal. the main one of these - obviously - is that snape's continued existence reminds her of her desire to be magical [and shocking, bohemian, unconventional etc.], but i also think that snape works well as someone who reminds her that all the affectations of middle-class respectability she puts on are mere fiction. she's just a working-class lass from cokeworth, no better than he is...

[which offers an explanation for her terror as an adult that her solidly middle-class lifestyle will be snatched away from her - this fear is connected specifically to harry's magic; magic is what took lily away from her; lily was introduced to magic by snape. she has escaped him by ascending into the middle-classes, but the frightening, corrupting influence he represents - which threatens to unmask who she really is and where she really comes from - stalks her still...]

i certainly agree that her and lily's parents would be incredibly class-conscious, but i see it as the adult evanses looking to receive recognition which would allow them to distinguish themselves from the lower orders in a way which might help them advance in terms of class status, rather than allowing them to retain a previous ascension up the greasy pole.

and this will obviously have involved the demonisation of members of the working-classes they believe to be letting the side down - petunia clearly being desperate to call snape whatever the seventies version of a "chav" was during their first meeting can definitely be read as having that "it's people like you that give people like me a bad name" flair. and i think that's more potent - and would bother petunia a lot more - if it's something she thinks from within the same social class as snape, rather than [however tenuously] from a bracket above him.

the evanses house and mr evans' job would absolutely play into this intra-class divide. i agree that they probably lived on a housing estate built between the 1930s and 1950s - but i think it's also entirely possible that the estate they live on was council housing. the housing division in cokeworth might be a smaller-scale version of that seen in other post-industrial cities in the north-west, such as liverpool and manchester - policies intended to move families out of unfit victorian stock into new-builds, which came with things like indoor toilets and central heating.

[in reality, these policies rehoused a lucky few in nicer estates within their original communities, displacing many onto estates miles away from where they'd started and leaving others stuck in condemned slum housing.]

i think it's worth noting that - while the perception of someone who lives in council housing has become exceptionally negative since the 1980s, in the 60s it was still considered perfectly respectable to live in council housing which might have looked like this:

[none of which, i imagine, are still in use as council stock...]

certainly, it was considered infinitely more respectable than living in the slums.

the sorts of council tenants who would end up in these houses often had a reputation for their own version of "keeping up appearances" - tidy gardens, community interaction, not behaving in "rough" ways - which is very similar to how this is performed by the middle-classes, but which still has a distinctly working-class flavour - particularly when it comes to the perception of jobs, education, and what one receives from the state.

mr evans could, for example, have a trade and still think of himself [and expect to be perceived in society] as meaningfully more sophisticated than a low-skilled and frequently-unemployed mill-worker, like tobias snape - especially if he was something like a plumber, electrician, or gas-fitter. this would be the case even though both of these jobs can be described as "blue collar".

and i like these really minor distinctions because they play up just how petty the performance of class is in britain - but they also reveal just how thorny and multi-layered it is at the same time. this really vibes with how i see petunia: petty and competitive and obsessed with rules which people outside of her class bracket don't care about [i.e. how marge doesn't give a fuck about the prim middle-class manners the adult petunia will come to pride herself on] and worried about the fragility of her position and very much faking it until she makes it - and also complex and multi-layered and inextricable from the long and complicated history of social class in the twentieth century.

two final points: on the names, i basically think that the fact she's called petunia is a little wink to the camera for the mams and dads in 1997 reading the books at home with their children - "petunia dursley" is absolutely intended to remind you of "hyacinth bucket", the social-climbing protagonist of the bbc sitcom keeping up appearances. that character was also a working-class lass who ascended to the middle, and who went to extraordinary lengths to keep that hidden from the upper-middle-class circles she was desperate to access...

and the main thing which i think "others" the snapes? religion. i am wedded to the idea of tobias as a catholic of northern irish extraction - which would have been accompanied by all sorts of stereotypes about fecklessness [drunkenness, having too many children who can't be paid for, violence] which, when compounded by him living in a slum and being unemployed, would have turned him into someone the evanses would have seen it as entirely appropriate to define themselves against even if they nominally shared a social class.

this would only have got worse as the 1970s began...