Eileen Prince Is Very Interesting To Me, I Wish We Knew More About Her And Her Relationship With Severus,

Eileen Prince is very interesting to me, I wish we knew more about her and her relationship with Severus, but also her past. I would like to think they had a good relationship but realistically it was most likely strained because of the abuse she/both of them faced at home, she was probably for the most part emotionally absent. And maybe in a way there's a parallel between her and Severus. What if she resented her son because she couldn't help but see her abuser in him (and she hated herself for feeling this way)? The same way Severus would later feel about Harry? What if he inherited his mother's anger

It makes me kind of sad how there's this great camaraderie among all the members of the Order except for Snape. He's always on the outside. And yes that's partly self-created by some of his behavior. But it's still sad.

He risks his life in one of the most dangerous assignments, brings his reports and then leaves; everyone else sits down happily to dinner together and he goes home to eat alone at Spinner's End.

And all anyone can think of is how glad they are he doesn't stay for dinner. His whole life the dynamic has always been that he is disliked and excluded. And to some extent sometimes, because he expects that treatment, he creates the conditions for it. It's quite tragic.

What do you think of the neo-nazi description for Snape? (To be honest I'm so tired of people ascribing values of real life events to a fictional text. There are simply not enough parallels to label someone a Nazi or terrorist, whatever Rowling may have intended.)

I agree with you; it makes me uneasy because I think the writing in Potter about this specific issue is not deft and nuanced enough for it to be analysed and critiqued rigorously.  Nazism, and similar right wing facist offshoots are very dangerous concepts and ideologies, and I think that using the term constantly can reduce its currency and impact.

This is why Godwin’s Law was important as a concept - as Godwin himself said, he was attempting to force people to scrutinise why they instantly leapt to comparing the person they were arguing with to Hitler.  Such a statement shouldn’t be an unthinking process - and the more you do it, the more ridiculous it sounds, and there’s an argument that in doing so, you inadvertently reduce the real life horrors that were endured during that time period; Hitler and Nazism almost becomes a joke, which is unconscionable and utterly disrespectful when you consider the incredible loss of life on both sides of the war.

I also fear that we also lose sight of genocide as a problem - that too many in the West are happy to think of genocide solely in terms of the Holocaust and WWII, without thinking of other countries, other conflicts and wars.  There appears to be an assumption that it no longer happens, and won’t ever happen again, which is naive at best and ignorant at worst.

In fairness, I do appreciate that JK had these broad ideas in mind when she was writing the series, but just because that’s what the writer had in mind, it doesn’t mean that we have to critique using the same lens.  It bothers me when I see the rise of far right politicians, and I think that we’re so used to hearing accusations about Nazis that people won’t take it seriously when they need to…  The boy who cried wolf, and all that.

“’Never mind that! How did Snape punish Ginny, Neville, and Luna?’ asked Harry urgently.

‘Professor Snape sent them into the Forbidden Forest, to do some work for the oaf, Hagrid.’

‘Hagrid’s not an oaf!’ Hermione said shrilly.

‘And Snape might’ve thought that was a punishment,’ said Harry, ‘but Ginny, Neville, and Luna probably had a good laugh with Hagrid. The Forbidden Forest… they’ve faced plenty worse than the Forbidden Forest, big deal!’” -Deathly Hallows

So I do think it’s important that the Carrows are “in charge of all discipline” but Snape is the one to punish NG&L - presumably, as the war goes on, Snape’s control and status in Hogwarts is on the decline, or he knows that he can’t intervene all the time without being noticed by Voldemort. But the teachers “are supposed to refer us to the Carrows if we do anything wrong” and yet Snape takes the initiative here. And it’s also worth noticing that when Neville talks about the situation at Hogwarts - the torturing, the brainwashing - he never once mentions Snape. It’s the Carrows who are in charge of all that shit and if Snape doesn’t stop them… well, can he? Really? There’s a reason none of the other teachers rebel either and it’s because they know they can’t. Not without risking the lives of all the students (as well as their own). Snape is as aware of this as McGonagall - probably more so. 

But! Snape does what he can. What always confused me is how Harry, who is far from stupid, is so blinded by his hatred for Snape that he forgets how clever Snape is. Harry, do you really think Snape doesn’t know Hagrid won’t really “punish” NG&L? Do you think Snape’s worked with Hagrid for years and isn’t aware that he has a soft heart and is terrible at disciplining anyone, let alone people he likes? Snape sent them to Hagrid because he knows the Carrows don’t know that. In one swoop, he’s able to make it seem like he’s punishing these three while keeping them out of harms way and with someone he knows would never hurt them. 

What gets me, time and time again, is that Snape does this for Neville, the student everyone in fandom thinks he hates. I doubt Snape likes Neville, but he hardly wants to see Neville tortured - he wanted to, all he would have had to do is refer him to the Carrows for punishment instead of Hagrid. But he doesn’t. Because even he doesn’t like the students, even if they all hate him, he wants them to be safe. There isn’t anything that says liking always equals protecting and disliking always equals not caring about their safety. If anything, we see this abundantly with Snape and Harry, but we also see it when Snape’s headmaster. Which is why I’m always really, really vexed when McGonagall and Flitwick drive Snape away and yell coward at him in “The Sacking of Severus Snape.” It bothers me that McGonagall, at least, wouldn’t have been suspicious about Snape doing favors for Gryffindors (ESPECIALLY Neville) by getting them “easy” detentions. And we have no real evidence that Snape participated in the tortures or the brainwashing - only that he allowed it to happen, again, because it wasn’t like he had any real choice otherwise - not while he had to protect the position Dumbledore died to help him keep and finish the war. 

I mean, I get the ‘Snape bullies children!’ argument. I do. He hardly treats them nicely. But I think that this, and the consistent, dogged way he looks after Harry are constantly overlooked and undermined. I’m not saying that what Snape does for the students negates his past behavior, but it bothers me when we only pay attention to the negative things he’s done and ignore the positive ones.

I was seeing some Harry Potter debates on Quora and found this interesting and wanted to share this answer with you.

Quora

Credit goes to : Valeria Mesalina

“This is just my opinion, so not canon, and most likely controversial, because “always”.

I do believe Narcissa both liked and loved Severus. And he liked and loved her too.

Only one chapter to show us what Narcissa and Severus’ relationship was like. And one chapter is enough.

She knew where he lived, and knew the way through the labyrinth very well, as if she had travelled those streets many times before. Would Lucius have left Malfoy Manor to have tea and jam and cream scones at Severus’ place? No way.

She called him by his name. All the time. Severus, Severus, Severus… oh, Severus. Very few people called him by his name. Lily, once. Dumbledore. Charity. For the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix members, he was Snape.

She said she’d come to him because he was Lucius’ friend (not true, because Severus dumped his Death Eater friends when he turned sides - if he ever was Lucius’ friend). She said Severus was the Dark Lord’s most trusted counsellor (not true at that point, either, because the Dark Lord had placed Wormtail to spy on him).

Why was she, then, so confident that Severus would help her? She was acting against the Dark Lord’s express orders; yet she did not think, even for a second, that Severus could betray her. She knew he would help her.

She trusted him completely. Why?

The only explanation I can come up with is that she had a personal relationship with him. Not as a fellow Death Eater, which she wasn’t, anyway, but as a friend - more than a friend, judging by the way she behaved.

JKR doesn’t show us adults actually touching or caressing each other. We have Molly Weasley, The Mum , nagging everyone from her husband to Sirius, and little else.

Then, out of nowhere, Narcissa was touching Severus, seizing the front of his robes, so near him that her tears fell on his chest (her niece did the same thing later on, when she told Remus that she loved him and she didn’t care - very much mirroring her aunt’s actions). He held her hands and tried to calm her; when she fell at his feet, he lifted her up and took her back to the sofa, holding her all the time.

They were touching each other so confidently. That implies they were very much comfortable touching each other - and if they were, it had to be because this was not the first time.

She kneeled in front of him and clutched his hand, kissing it. And he didn’t let go of her hand, didn’t even care Bellatrix was there, he just held her hand and looked into her eyes, till he knelt in front of her, still holding her hand, still looking only into her eyes, and promised her everything, under the astonished gaze of Bellatrix.

Take Bellatrix out of the picture, and next step would have been to make love on that sofa - except this is JKR.

Kneeling in front of one another, looking into each other’r eyes, holding hands and reciting vows…. well.

If that’s not close, I don’t know what is. Theirs was an intimate relationship. Maybe Narcissa never cheated on her husband; but that does not mean she could not have loved another before she married Lucius - and be loved by him.

Apparently, with a few exceptions, people fell in love with their teenage crushes at Hogwarts, got married as soon as possible and produced a child as soon as possible. So, married at nineteen, parents at twenty. Narcissa would have been blackmailed into marrying a Pureblood guy as soon as she was of age (17). There weren’t that many Pureblood guys around, and her older sister did the unthinkable and married a Muggleborn. Better be safe than sorry.

Yet Cissy didn’t have a son till she was 24/25.

She was intelligent, and Severus was already doing advanced magic when he was fifteen. She was a bit older that Severus, but not that much. They would have been, as Voldemort followers, thrown together quite a lot, they were both very intelligent and extremely powerful, unattached, and young. Neither of them was a diehard follower.

Why wouldn’t she be attracted to him? He was brilliant, innovative, he had imagination, he was quite different from the people she knew. She wouldn’t have any anti-Slytherin bias, she wouldn’t have given a damn about the Dark Arts, she had a rebel streak. And probably she also saw what Lily didn’t. That Severus would always be true to a woman he loved.

They could have loved each other. Why not? Many years later, they still did.”

Quora

So what do you think? You believe there was a deeper relationship between Narcissa and Severus or not? I admit I never thought of it this way before but this answer was interesting, because they indeed seem pretty comfortable between each other.

What do Snape haters take away from Snape's story? When they finish the last page of Deathly Hallows and close the book, what do they think the point of Snape was in the whole series? Is the time spent reading about him just a total waste to them?

Genuinely curious...