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TheModernAmerican posted:But the thing is I can write him off completely because the one good thing he did was motivated by a creepy, obsessive, almost stalker-esque attachment to a person he would otherwise hate out of hand due to her heritage (remember that mudblood is a slur that people reacted to with extreme offense, and that Snape worked with and was allied with a revolutionary movement that wanted to have Lily Evan's killed due to her parentage). And this so called good act is tainted because he betrayed the only people he could count as allies because of this of this legitimately insane obsession. Well people are inclined to romanticize things to erase unpleasant realities. Personally having known a few people who were involved in hate groups, I still think Snape honestly loved Lily on some level. He exhibits a pretty standard case of the kind of cognitive dissonance you get from bigots who will carve out all kinds of exemptions for individuals they like or love. Snape was a profoundly miserable person growing up in a very unhappy house. He hung his hopes on two things 1. the day he would get to go to Hogwarts and everything would change for the better because he'd be with the people he belonged with, and 2. His friend Lily Evans who would be there, too. Number one got crushed pretty quickly; he was smart and good at magic, but not liked or respected by the people around him. That disappointment probably lead him to sabotage his friendship with Lily in active ways like being an ungrateful, miserable poo poo when she comes to see if he's o.k., and inactive ways like joining a hate group that condemns Lily and those like her (remember the cognitive dissonance.) So Lily cuts him out of her life when his place in their friendship shifts from 'dead weight' to 'potential threat' and she moves on with her life, falls in love, has a kid, fights a war. But Snape never gets over it. On some level he knows she was the best thing that ever happened to him, the one person that really cared about him. And it eats at him. He cannot get past it, and it keeps running through his head like a traumatic memory. He thinks with enough time he can find a way to set it right, he can fix things, he just needs time... and then his boss puts out the hit and suddenly there is no time. So Snape runs off to Dumbledore ready to sell out everything he's been doing for years in exchange for more time for Lily so he'll get more time to figure out how to fix things. Her husband and child never cross his mind because whether they live or die has nothing to do with what he ultimately wants, a big, fat rewind button that'll let him undo that last argument and the loss of the one person who was most important to him. So yeah, he loved Lily. Loved her enough to realize he'd hosed up bad when he ran her out of his life, and used the hate and self loathing that created to fuel his involvement in elaborate revenge plot against the person who ordered her death. Otherwise he remains a petty, miserable jerkwad obsessed with every slight and abuse, real or perceived, that he got in high school to the extent that he holds those grudges against even the children and houses of his old foes.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2015 12:01 |
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# ¿ May 16, 2024 02:14 |