To Add On Lilys Flaws She Also Believes James And The Marauders Rather Than Severus (which Is Just Bad

to add on lily’s flaws she also believes james and the marauders rather than severus (which is just bad writing imo) and she tells him to be grateful james saved his life, she also who quickly bites back once you annoy her, she also gave cheeky answers to slughorn when he suggested she could’ve been in slytherin, (i personally hate her sm for her trying to tell severus he should be grateful to james would like to hear your opinions) but yes even her, a briefly mentioned character, is very flawed!

tbh my feeling is more that she just believed a rumour that was going around the school rather than having heard it directly from james. idk obviously we dont know. but teenage girls (and boys) often believe rumours. not that weird. I actually think she wouldn't have believed it coming directly from James given how she acts towards him in SWM, but if the school generally seems to agree that it happened then it's more believable.

re: her telling Sev he should be grateful, I've talked about this before (I think in that very post about lily's flaws) but I don't read it as "you should forgive james for everything he's done" but just this kind of desperate, naive "can't we all just get along and stop fighting" sentiment. it's still not a great thing to say, absolutely it's insensitive and tactless.

however it's always interesting to me how Snape people despise Lily for that singular comment (like that's the worst thing anyone could do lol) when Sev is pretty atrocious to her in that conversation too. He completely dismisses her feelings-- like how is Lily saying he should be grateful any worse than him writing off what Mulciber did to Mary as 'just a laugh'? Sev literally ignores her because he's too focused on his hatred towards the Marauders to hear his muggleborn friend's very valid concerns about the death eater wannabes he's hanging out with.

I don't think it's fair to hold Lily to a different standard than Sev, that's my opinion. If she's insensitive towards her best friend then god is he ever. and idk teen friendships are often like that- immature. they have yet to mature

they are so dysfunctional lol. and i love them for it personally!

I don't know if you have already answered this question: is there something in Snape's life that you wanted to see in The Price's Tale? For example, I think we deserved more information about "the prank".

I haven't yet! Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this ask...

There are definitely moments I wish had been included in The Prince's Tale, but I feel like it's difficult to separate what's in it/what's missing from it from Rowling's own issues as a writer and the way they intersect with Snape's story, or rather, how she tells it. Namely, her issues around writing women and her lack of research and minimal understanding of radicalization and fascist movements. Not to be a downer, because I feel like this is a very fun ask that's probably more about having curiosity around the character of Snape and playing around with what may have been there that we didn't see, but I can't help feeling that those moments are missing often because of what Rowling herself was overlooking or not thinking of.

I wish there were moments between him and Lily that showed us why they were best friends. It can't just be because they were the only magical kids in Cokeworth. There isn't one scene we see between them where Lily is affectionate or their mutual chemistry is apparent, not even a wry smile. The closest scene is when they're laying in the grass by the river as kids and Lily is asking him about the magical world. We understand through Snape's memories that he had a great deal of love for Lily, but it's not really apparent why. Rowling's issues with writing women as fully developed, interesting characters gets in the way, and although we're told they were close friends, we're never shown it. I'd have loved to see a moment or two where we see why they clicked. It could have been woven into the existing story as simply as the two of them exchanging a wordless criticism with just a shared look in the compartment on the Hogwarts Express when James and Sirius were being mean.

But it could also have been something more meaningful - after all, these are Snape's final thoughts, the most important moments of his life that connect to the information he needs to convey to Harry. Maybe a birthday gift Lily gave him, something small, a book she bought that she saved up her allowance for, and the impact on Snape of her putting thought and effort into it. I honestly would have loved something even as simple as just seeing Lily's humor and Snape's - not just him smiling when she says his name, but the two of them laughing freely. The tragedy of that lost friendship would have hit even more if we had seen a mutual affection, an understanding between two best friends, and an innocence that was consumed by a war and their separation into rival houses.

I also wish we had seen any of Snape's home life. We get the impression that he didn't like to talk about it too much and that Lily may not have quite understood how bad it was (given that Rowling has said that Snape's dad beat him with a belt, and the only reference to his home life we see is Lily asking if his parents have stopped arguing, plus the glimpse of them doing just that when Harry breaks into Snape's mind in OOtP). We have a couple of allusions to Snape's relationship with his mother:

He knows a fair bit about the wizarding world, including about dementors and Azkaban, what to expect at Hogwarts, and the Statute of Secrecy. Presumably, as there don't seem to be other wizards in Cokeworth, his mother has told him about these things. Either that or he overheard her talking to someone else/read her letters to someone/found information on it among her things (like wherever she kept her textbooks that he would inherit).

When Lily asks him, “Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?” Snape hesitates before replying no. This implies that he's aware of pureblood bias in the wizarding world, and is making a decision about how much of his knowledge to share with Lily, or perhaps about his own stance on it. (There's something lovely in his perceiving her insecurity and choosing to shield her from knowledge that would exacerbate it.)

On the train platform, Eileen is described as, “thin, sallow-faced, sour-looking” as well as greatly resembling Severus.

This isn't much to go on, but we can reasonably infer a complicated relationship, and a woman who is emotionally closed off and/or judgmental. She's a wizard who dresses her son in hand-me-downs so either she's not very good at transfiguration or she doesn't care about him enough to allow him the basic dignity of clothes that fit and make him comfortable. I would have loved to have seen a moment or two in Snape's memories that show his relationship with his parents, and they could have been a good opportunity to also show his (possibly codependent?) relationship with Lily as he goes to her for comfort after. I don't think she would have consciously offered him any, but rather that she was a way for him to escape his home life and convince himself that he was fine. His closed-off response when Lily asks him if his parents are still fighting implies that the subject has come up before, but also that Lily doesn't understand how bad the situation is and Snape doesn't want her to (which makes sense, most abused children don't realize how abnormal and extreme their experiences are - we accept the norms we're presented with). There could have even been something as simple as Snape showing him mom a new bit of magic he learned to do and her trying to suppress it in him lest his father see and get upset, and him then showing his new skill to Lily who appreciates it and tries to learn it. This is just an example, but it would have shown a tense dynamic at home in which Eileen prioritizes not angering Tobias to protect Severus, who as a child would only perceive a kind of rejection that he seeks Lily out to replace with validation. This would make sense in the dynamic Rowling set up, and is more complex and interesting than his "greedy" looks and Lily's questions about the wizarding world.

(Before I move on from the Snape and Lily childhood moments, I also want to say, I really don't like Rowling's use of the word "greedy" in The Prince's Tale. It feels aggressive and judgmental, and also out of place in describing a child who lives in abject poverty. My assumption is that what she meant was more of a hunger in Snape's face, or perhaps a determined ambition to get to know Lily, which would align with how his personality is otherwise written.)

The other thing I would have loved to see more of is his Death Eater arc. The whole point of Snape giving these memories to Harry is to explain himself, and convince him to listen to Dumbledore's instructions at the end (which, btw, Dumbledore's portrait could have done, but we all love a bit of drama, so fair). The idea that Snape defected from the DEs only because Lily's life was threatened feels like a weak character motivation and is one of the many ways that Rowling illustrates her naivete and lack of understanding of fascist movements, their use of radicalization as a tool to prey on vulnerable people, and their cult-like dynamics (and that's probably why she fell victim to radicalization herself). I've written a little bit about it before (please don't make me find the link), but I think that Voldemort's going after Lily wasn't the catalyst in Snape's defection, but the final thread that snapped.

When he and Lily argue outside Gryffindor Tower after SWM he doesn't deny it when she accuses him of wanting to be a Death Eater, but he also doesn't own it. He doesn't take pride in it and try to convince her that if only she understood what he does, she would get it. By that point he's been established as an ambitious boy who knew what house he wanted to be sorted in even before starting school - when Lily is sorted into Gryffindor, Snape is sorted into Slytherin so quickly that it's clear he hadn't even considered changing his mind in order to follow Lily. He scoffs at James on the train when he says he wants to be a Gryffindor. It can therefore be assumed that Snape isn't refraining from arguing with Lily because he's deferring to her opinion or trying to appease her. While an argument could be made that he lost his confidence through years of bullying by that night outside Gryffindor Tower, I think that, if anything, that would have made him feel an even stronger need to identify with a group like the aspiring DEs in Slytherin. There's also a bit of a disconnect between the way Lily refers to him and his friends wanting to join Voldemort and be DEs, and no one having come to Snape's defense that afternoon, not even from his own house.

And while this has veered off a bit into meta, my point is: Snape's experiences of becoming a Death Eater and eventually defecting seem complex and I would have loved to have been shown more of it. It would have been a useful thing to convey to Harry as well. Was there a moment when he became disillusioned? Was there a moment when he started feeling shame? Maybe he thought, as someone who had been bullied for years and abused at home, that once he was on the other side of that experience and in a position of power over someone else, he would feel confident and secure and safe. Maybe the first time he experienced being in that position, he instead felt pity and shame and it was like having the rug pulled out from under him. Revenge is never as satisfying as you think it will be, and something either happened to Snape, or was maybe always there, to make him choose to treat Sirius humanely at the end of PoA and hand him over to the authorities instead of using the excuse to wreak vengeance on him firsthand. I'd have loved to see moments that show us his growth as a person - profound realizations in volatile circumstances that prompted him to find a way out from Voldemort's ranks, and maybe a glimpse of how dangerous that way out was.

Rowling held so much back about Snape - a complex, grey, nuanced character - in order to drop this big reveal about him and Lily at the end of DH. When she finally told his story, all of it was focused around Lily, a character who wasn't developed and who we only see being reactive. The veil is lifted on Snape but only enough to show that he had a deep love for Lily (who, by the way, I think he would have referred to as Lily Evans even after her death, not Potter, and I will fight Rowling on this but then I'd fight her on a lot of much more important things so that's not saying much). We still don't find out much about Snape's life, background, or experiences, and even less about Lily. I wish there had been a lot more to The Prince's Tale than "sorry kid, I did it all for your mom because of my guilt in failing her as a friend." It's one of those moments that feels exciting when you first read it, but the potential to build it out into something that improves on re-reading the books was kind of lost.

And yes! We absolutely deserved more information about the prank! Could have been great to see Lupin bully Snape actively before it, and compare it to his lack of involvement in SWM. Could have been fascinating to see the dynamic between him and James as the latter tries to pull him back, or even the moment in Dumbledore's office where he's told to keep quiet, and how that moment contributed to his radicalization! Harry spends most of DH processing and questioning his relationship with Dumbledore and learning about him, and seeing Snape have a similar experience from the opposite direction would have been fantastic. Ie. where Harry venerates Dumbledore until DH when he begins to doubt him, Snape doubts Dumbledore and grows to trust and respect him over time. I'm sure there's more that I could think of, but this answer is already incredibly long so I'll leave it here for now.

“what will you give me in return?” is such an insane thing to say to someone who historically has Fuck All. even more insane to say when you are Aware that they have literally fucking nothing

severus tobias snape, choir boy, st ignatius parish, cokeworth, 1968

—

for @byronicbat who asked for it in between our ramblings XD he’s effie cute, i can hardly believe it

Re-read this bit in Half-Blood Prince again and thinking about how blatantly it seems to be telling us that Harry is biased against Snape and our impression of him thus far has been clouded by seeing him through Harry's eyes (emphases mine):

‘The Dark Arts,’ said Snape, ‘are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible.’ Harry stared at Snape. It was surely one thing to respect the Dark Arts as a dangerous enemy, another to speak of them, as Snape was doing, with a loving caress in his voice? . . . ‘He tried to jinx me, in case you didn’t notice!’ fumed Harry. ‘I had enough of that during those Occlumency lessons! Why doesn’t he use another guinea pig for a change? What’s Dumbledore playing at, anyway, letting him teach Defence? Did you hear him talking about the Dark Arts? He loves them! All that unfixed, indestructible stuff -‘ ‘Well,’ said Hermione, ‘I thought he sounded a bit like you.’ ‘Like me?’ ‘Yes, when you were telling us what it’s like to face Voldemort. You said it wasn’t just memorising a bunch of spells, you said it was just you and your brains and your guts - well, wasn’t that what Snape was saying? That it really comes down to being brave and quick-thinking?’ Harry was so disarmed that she had thought his words as well worth memorising as The Standard Book of Spells that he did not argue.

Half-Blood Prince, Ch. 9

There's a direct contrast being drawn from one scene to the next between Harry's perception of Snape and Hermione's less-biased, more critical one. Where Harry hears a "loving caress" for the dark arts in Snape's voice, Hermione hears the passionate, determined explanation that Harry gave a year earlier - one based in a firsthand understanding of what it takes to protect oneself from harm against dark magic.

This is also the first scene in this book where we see Snape teaching a class. The first time he shows up in the book is when he's entrusted by Tonks to deliver Harry safely to the Great Hall from the school gates. So the first encounter with Snape in HBP is as Harry's protector, be it begrudging or not, and the second is one where an immediate parallel is drawn after between him and Harry, Hermione questioning the latter's bias and hinting to the reader that judging him based on Harry's perception may not paint an accurate picture of Snape. Through the rest of the book we see Harry have an increasingly hostile relationship with Snape while developing a great fondness for the Half-Blood Prince, despite it also being Snape, only Harry doesn't know that, so he's able to see his humor and cleverness.

This theme is a dominant one throughout the book, though it doesn't become clear until the end when we find out Snape was the Half-Blood Prince, but by then our impression of the Prince is murky given the unexpectedly violent outcome of Harry trying out Sectumsempra (and it can be argued he's to blame for doing so against another person instead of finding out what the spell does in a safer way), and our impression of Snape is even worse given that he'd just killed Dumbledore. We don't find out until the next book that Snape had been fighting on the same side as Harry the whole time, risking - and eventually losing - his life for the same cause. In retrospect, Rowling (boo, hiss) spends a lot of time in HBP dropping breadcrumbs that Harry's impression of Snape - and thus the reader's - is affected by bias and thus inaccurate.

Slytherin and Eton: A Primer on the British School System.

Slytherin occupies an odd place in the Harry Potter fandom. In canon, while it is the house with the second most development, that development is almost entirely negative, with the house and a large quantity of its students acting antagonistically throughout the piece. Heck, Hagrid, the lovable gruff figure who acts as Harry’s (and thus the audience’s) introduction to the magical aspects of the series explicitely calls them the most evil house before Harry has even seen the castle. This, along with Draco Malfoy’s terrible introduction (Malfoy will be covered in detail later in the piece) and the fact that Harry is already having to distance himself from Voldemort by the time of the sorting, is the major reason that Harry chooses anything but Slytherin. While the house, or rather its representatives, are sort of given more naunce later with Slughorn, Malfoy’s Draco and Narcissus, and Snape, the core example of how it is treated in the series comes just before the final battle, when the entire Slytherin student body either sides with Voldemort (Crabbe and Goyle, and to a lesser extent Parkinson who is willing to hand over Harry to save herself) or refuses to fight the good fight at all. 

The weirdness comes from the fact that Slytherin is probably the most popular house to self identify as within the active fandom. Aside from having traits many consider positive associated with it (cunning, loyalty and ambition), it is also treated as the outcast house to the rest of the school, particularly the Gryfindors. The treatement of Slytherin therefore sticks in a lot of fan’s nerves, and understandably so. The notion of Houses, defining people at age 11, is already a weird way to handle things, after all, and defining an entire group of them as evil from the start? Yeah that’s not great, particularly if you identify with aspects of them. I myself would probably be a Slytherin or a Ravenclaw, so I can understand this distaste. But…here’s the thing. The reasons for treating Slytherin this way are not entirely diagectic in nature. The house is the centre of a massive pile up involving world building, characterisation and most importantly some fairly blunt and pointed social commentary about the British School system and society at large. 

It’s been a running gag that what racism is to the American political discussion, classism is to the British. This is not entirely true (for one thing we are certainly not over racism or xenophobia here), but there is a nugget in there. British society is heavily class stratified society. We have some of the worst mobility in the developed world, and much of our political system is dominated by a very small part of society.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is that there is a particular branch of the schooling system that dominates government, known as the Public Schools. That name can be confusing at first. The original group of Public schools vastly predate the mandatory schooling system; the oldest of them predate Columbus’ birth by over a decade. Not his voyage to the Americas, but his birth. The original idea was that they would take promising boys who normally would not get an education, due to them not coming from families who could afford them to be educated, hence the name Public Schools. Nowadays these are all elite private schools, not linked to the department of education. While approximately 7% of the population attend these schools, 33% of the members of Parliament (MPs), 50% of the Peers in the second chamber of government and 70% of the top judges are educated here. Heck, of the 54 Prime Ministers who have led the country, 32 were educated at one of three Public schools; seven at Harrow School, six at Westminster School and nineteen at Eton College. Compare that to the 9 prime ministers educated, as I was, in state schools. These institutions form part of the basis for a web of connections that defines a lot of the elite parts of British society, not just in politics but in business, in media and in higher education as well; the “old boy’s club” that provides a barrier to entry for a vast swathe of society. While supporters of these systems will note that efforts have been made to overcome this, with around 310 of Eton’s pupils receiving financial assistance, but that means that the remaining 1,000 students come from families that can afford the £12,000 per term fees, and these students are only male. The idea that this system is anything close to meritocratic is not just laughable, it is the equivalent of starting a discussion on orbital dynamics with the word’s “assuming a heliocentric universe”. Another point to make? The entire House structure comes from these schools. Eton has 25 Houses, and in this case they are literally houses; they are where the boy’s sleep at night, since it is a boarding school. While not unique to Public Schools, they are heavily associated with them in British culture. I’m adding this in because Rowling didn’t just make up the concept of splitting the children into groups. As a teenager she attended Wyedean School, which notably historically had a four House system (oh look it’s almost as if there might be a connection), before abandoning it as the school grew (I can’t find anything about when this happened, but it could well have been after Rowling studied there). Hogwarts itself, while it is an individual school, is also a condensation, celebration and condemnation of the British School system as a whole, being the only wizarding school in the UK. Umbridge isn’t just a single throughly unpleasant inspector, she is a stand-in for OFSTED, the body responsible for school inspections. It’s notable that in Harry’s year in Gryfindor,  you have, among others, the dirt poor Ron, the muggle born Dean and Hermione, the Irish half-blood Seamus Finnigen (and given that this was written in the 90′s holy shit is UK and Irish relations another can of worms I am not going to open here because this already too long but will be glanced a bit at in a later bit of this essay). It’s honestly hard for me to not read Gryffindor and Hufflepuff as stand-ins for the UK state schools, Ravenclaw for the private schools, and Slytherin as the public schools. Remember what I said about how Slytherin is treated as the outcast part of the school? Well, it is honestly treated much like the rest of the UK school system treats the private school. How is that? Well, when it snowed in my school days and we all went to the main park, the one thing that would immediately unite all the state and a lot of the private schools was the arrival of the public school kids (particularly since they tended to try and pick snowball fights with everyone while throwing classist insults around). Slytherin is in many ways the house of privilege, and not necessarily earned privilege. Lucius Malfoy, until his ousting when he plays his hand too hard in the second book, is the leader of the Board of Governors and escaped Azkaban despite his crimes, while it is explicitely stated in the first book that Slytherin has won the House cup for repeatedly in the previous years, mainly due to Snape bestowing preferential  treatment on his own House (and yes I do think it was fine for Dumbledore to pull that last minute switch, since Harry Ron and Hermione had just legimately just prevented Voldemort from returning. That kind of deserves some credit. The Neville bit might be pushing it but again, the timing was just pretty tight). But there’s more to what Slytherin represents, and this comes back to what I was saying about how charactisation is involved in this pile up, particularly the characterisation of Slytherin himself. Specifically the characterisation of him as a rascist shitfucker. I know that’s blunt but so it is the characterisation. He left a giant monster behind for the sole purpose of having it one day unleashed on a load of kids for the crime of not being born to magical parents, and Slytherin the house has historically been defined as much by its stated qualities of cunning and ambition as it has been by this continuing tradition of racist ideology. The Sorting Hat song is not the full picture as to what defines the Houses; they have grown beyond that, both in universe and in fandom. This characterisation comes back into social commentary because, yes, the UK has had and still has a long history of racism and xenophobia, from our imperial history to the Troubles in Ireland to how Eastern European and muslim immigrants are treated now. So why does Slytherin House still bare a stain from Slytherin the man? Well, in a word, it’s tradition. Remember what I said about the age of these institutions? Yeah, that’s not a joke. The Public School system, the Oxbridge higher education that it feeds into, are heavily influenced by traditions that have grown up over the ages. Heck, it used to be that in Eton, the youngest boys in the House were basically servants to the older students and staff, a practise known as “fagging” (I am not even joking). Wizarding society in general is also heavily steeped in the past; the steam train of the Hogwarts express, for instance, or the very concept of the Houses themselves. Heck, while it is never confronted directly, quite a few characters talk about how the Sorting isn’t the best idea, most notably the Sorting Hat itself. Slytherin the house has passed down the ideals of Slytherin the man in its culture, just as the UK has passed down racism, classism and xenophobia in ours. If Voldemort is the embodiment of these issues at their most violent, then Parkinson is them at their most passive; she is willing to go with Voldemort’s demands to save herself, and is willing to accept the racism and classism throughout the books. This is what I meant by a collusion between characterisation, world building and social commentary. The books were written while Rowling was viturally penniless, and a lot of the social commentary in them reflects this, including the way Slytherin is portrayed. Is it fair to the characters of Slytherin? Should she have been more naunced about it? Well, yes. There’s a reason I called it a pile up, but if you are treating the resulting mess as simply being in universe, you are going to miss a lot of important aspects about why she created it the way that she did.