Survivor Snape, LOLLIPOPS sails again

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 33258

Ana:
> Will Snape Push up Daisies?

You mean in OoP?  In a word, no.  Not a chance, IMO.  Like him, loathe him or lust after him, Snape is without question one of the most if not *the* most intriguing character in the whole series, he has light years of mileage left in him, he has that mysterious side-swapping spying history about which we know so little, he undoubtedly holds a lot of the keys to Harry's past... JKR wouldn't be so wasteful as to kill him off in Book 5.  Book 7, now, quite possibly.

(Tabouli, having duly noted David's protests, is sticking to the literary arguments on this one.  Yes, in RL Snape would have targets on every side of his body, and would be a likely casualty.  In fiction, however, he's just too good to lose.  Similarly, the law of gender ratios convinces me that Ginny and Molly will be alive and kicking at the end of Book 7.  I think if a Weasley falls, it will be a brother or Arthur.  I'm inclined to agree with the "JKR's world has a shortage of worthwhile, significant female characters" line, but I won't go into that now).

Did JKR say she hated Snape?  I thought she once said she loves all her characters, even Dudley, and I approved wholeheartedly.  Nasty characters with mystique are great to write!  If *I'd* created a character like Snape, I would be grinning all over my face every time he entered the spotlight!

I wonder if Snape's a Mudblood whose parents disowned him when they found out?  Now *that* would account for a lot of that bitterness and cruelty, especially after being sorted into Slytherin...

However, as captain of LOLLIPOPS, I have to respond to this sudden resurgence of Snape/Lily theory.  OK...

judyserenity:
> Well, it could be that Snape was in love with Lily *and* she was 
deliberately cruel to him.  

Cruel, manipulative, spoilt, Snape-torturing Lily?  Weeeell, not impossible.  In fact, as someone who once hopefully suggested that Lily was a Slytherin (she's not) and gets impatient with JKR's housism and simplistic Good/Bad divide, I wouldn't mind a little straying from the path of All Gryffindors Are Kind Heroic Good Guys.  The nasty yet probably good Snape spices things up considerably; Lily being horrible as well would be a great twist.  All the same, I doubt it.  It relates to my "HP is children's lit" arguments... IMO JKR is housist, she's writing about things in a child-digestible format, and she already has a lot of horrors lined up for Harry in other areas.  Let him idealise his dead mother in peace as sweet and loving and caring.  The evidence that Lily was nice is minimal, but adds up... she's our nice-despite-the-Dursleys'-torturing hero Harry's mother, she was in Gryffindor, she was, to the best of our knowledge, emphatically on the Good Side, she seemed all happy and smily in the Mirror of Erised and the photo album, she died protecting Harry and still protects him with her posthumous love, she was Head Girl, Hagrid describes her as once of the nicest people you could want to meet, Dumbledore and McGonagall seem to have been particularly fond of her, and so on.

Marianne:
> Of course, this scenario of Lily-the-evil-heartbreaker assumes that 
Snape is lonely, friendless, unpopular, put-upon, etc.<

Why?  I don't see this.  You don't have to be lonely, friendless and all the rest to have an unrequited crush on someone.  Nor would Lily have to have been evil not to have reciprocated his feelings (as JKR said, what woman would want Snape in love with her?).  I suspect a boy who arrived at school knowing more Curses than anyone else is most likely a boy with some serious grudges against the world (at 11!  Poor Severus) due to mistreatment somewhere, but this wouldn't make him automatically popular in itself.  He had friends in Slytherin: Lupin and Sirius admit as much.  In fact, from all I can see, Snape would have been an articulate, intelligent boy with considerable magical talent combined with a chip on his shoulder and a vengeful streak.  Not a good person to get on the wrong side of.  But also, in the bruised sanctum of his mistreated heart, a boy likely to be susceptible to a monster obsession with a smart, pretty Gryffindor girl who is strong enough to be kind to him, unlike his own friends (who partly hang around with him out of fear) and his taunting rivals James and Sirius who have the good looks and success and confidence he lacks.

(for further theorising on this topic, may I shamelessly direct you to my "Unauthorised Biography of Severus Snape" in the archives?)

Catherine:
> I think the Snape and Lily coupling is speculation without real 
foundation. I could be entirely wrong, but nothing in the book leads 
in that direction, and the prejudices that have been revealed in the 
book so far make the possibility unlikely.<

(Ta-Bull-i snorts, paws the ground, and stampedes towards the red rag...

Eileen:
> But on the other hand, I got the whole L.O.L.L.I.P.O.P.S. thing by 
intuition, as soon as I had finished PS/SS (...) Three books later, 
and still no idea, but I'm a firm member of that illustrious club just 
because 1) I firmly believe in following one's intuition, even if I'm 
not sure intuition exists and 2) I think it's incredible so many other 
people came up with the idea very seriously (unlike flip jokes about 
Snape/Trelawney pairings) when there's not anything explicit in the 
text to support it. <

...accompanied by Eileen, Amanda, and the entire crew of the Good Ship LOLLIPOPS)

No, there's nothing *explicit* in the text to support Snape/Lily.  No "real foundation", so to speak.  But this is hardly surprising.  If Snape loved Lily and this played a pivotal role in the secret of Harry's past, to be revealed at the appropriate dramatic moment and point in the Harry/Snape relationship, JKR isn't exactly going to spell it out, is she?  She likes to be crafty, to misdirect, to throw in red herrings and come up with the unexpected.  There was nothing "explicit" in the text to support Scabbers=Peter until PoA either.

All right, let me outline some of the (indirect but nonetheless thought-provoking) evidence.

1. Snape hates Harry on sight without any direct provocation whatsoever.  Hence there must be some mysterious reason for this hatred pre-dating his actual meeting of Harry (possibly connected with Harry's appearance).

2. We later discover that Snape's main justification for his treatment of Harry is his "celebrity" status and rule-breaking, just like his father.  Sure, Harry breaks rules, and gets a lot of leeway, but unlike Lockhart shows no sign whatsoever of wanting to capitalise on or wallow in his "Boy Who Lived" laurels.  Snape refuses to see this, blinded by his own resentment, and takes points off Harry and gives him detentions and humiliating him at every opportunity.

3. Hagrid is very evasive when 11yo Harry declares that Snape hates him, making it clear that Snape *does* have a very good (albeit top secret and possibly adults only) reason for hating Harry, but one which is evidently overshadowed by a still better reason for protecting him.

4. Snape and James were at school together in Slytherin and Gryffindor respectively, and hated each other.  The reasons put forward for this are:
a) Snape was jealous of James' brilliant Quidditch performance, and possibly the fact that he became Head Boy despite rule-breaking.
b) James, whom he already hated, saved his life after Sirius' practical joke.  The ignominy of it!  Snape then saved Harry from Quirrell, making he and James "quits", but continues to persecute Harry anyway.
c) (indirect evidence from Marauder's Map and Sirius' sneers) Sirius and James, especially the former, lampooned Snape for being unattractive, i.e. greasy haired and big nosed and "slimy" (=servile and flattering?)

5. James and Lily met at school, therefore at the same time when Snape was around, and James and Lily were Head Boy and Girl at Hogwarts (at the same time, therefore in the same year, or one after the other?).  Both were killed by Voldemort, leaving Harry an orphan raised by ghastly Muggle relatives; Lily needn't have died, but did so in order to protect Harry.

6. Lily was very pretty and apparently nice, clever and caring, as well as good at Charms (see above arguments and Hagrid's and Ollivander's comments near the start of PS/SS).

6. Snape hung around with a group of Slytherins and became a Death Eater, presumably not long after leaving Hogwarts, but then later did something drastic enough to convince Dumbledore (no fool,he) that he'd changed sides for good, and become a spy, *before Voldemort's downfall*.

OK, so let's consider all this.  Everyone seems to agree that Snape's malice towards Harry is connected with his grudge against James.  This is one serious grudge... right from the start Snape persecutes and humiliates Harry, an 11 year old student of his, mercilessly and without any evidence of provocation (unlike Neville, Harry isn't a clumsy danger to everyone else, unlike Hermione he doesn't clamour for attention), he almost loses it altogether when he (correctly) suspects that Sirius' escape has something to do with Harry, he keeps on trying to get him expelled, he extends his nastiness to Harry's best friends, he constantly accuses Harry of trading on his fame despite the lack of evidence to the contrary... phew!  This is nasty stuff!

What did James *DO* that was so bad that Snape can't get over it, even after he's left school and Quidditch-induced popularity behind, James and his wife have been murdered, Sirius has a life sentence in Azkaban, Lupin is a starving social outcast, and Snape has a prestigious post as Head of Slytherin and Dumbledore the greatest wizard of modern time's left hand <g> man?  So unforgivable that Snape feels compelled to torture James' 11 year old son who has never done anything to him, didn't even know his own father, and was raised in horrible conditions by Muggles?

You must admit, on the face of it that's pretty cruel, immature and spiteful behaviour from a successful 35 year old man in a position of responsibility at a school.  All his enemies have been killed or punished severely: by comparison, he's doing great!  Why can't he get over his grudge, or at least, keep it under control?

However, we *know* there's more to it.  Hagrid's evasion alone tells us that much.  We *know* there's some dark reason why Snape would hate Harry - is it just the Quidditch and the werewolf joke, or something more?  We *know* there must be have been something going on behind the scenes with Harry's parents.  Voldemort obviously wanted to kill them for some important reason.  We also know that Snape was, until not long before the Potter murders, hand in glove with Voldemort, and that he also knew at least James quite well in school.  As Eileen said, it does intuitively look likely that there is more than meets the eye between Harry's parents and Snape, and Snape/Lily has definite potential for explaining the depth of that cross-generational grudge...

For a start (apologies to those who've heard this a million times), Harry looks extraordinarily like James but with Lily's eyes, and is the living reason why Lily is dead.  (The agony of it for lovelorn Snape when Harry walks into the Hall!)  For another thing, the resentment at being teased about being ugly, not being a Quidditch star and being "slimy" (crawling... to whom??) from Sirius sounds suspiciously like a recipe for "jealous teenage boy that makes an idiot of himself not getting the girl when everyone knows he never had a hope in hell" to me.  (Why that arrogant prat James, and not me?  He's no better looking than me!  It's that stupid strong man QUIDDITCH stuff!  Maybe I should try lifting weights!).  Hence the evidence of James' Quidditch prowess undeservedly getting the girl (Harry), would make Snape especially touchy about the possibility of Harry undeservedly getting adulation for something he didn't consciously do, i.e. almost destroy the big V.  Let alone succeeding in Quidditch and breaking rules like his foul father!  Snape is projecting... Harry's behaviour does resemble James' in some ways, but Snape is *looking* for parallels, quite possibly to justify his own behaviour towards Harry. As for the mystery of Harry's past, mightn't Snape's lingering feelings for Lily have been somehow linked in to Snape's defection to Dumbledore and the mysterious events which ended in the death of the Potters?  In my Snape bio, I theorise that Snape was ordered to kill the Potters by V and suddenly realises what he has done in becoming a Death Eater (and that even if James and Harry are dead, he might approach Lily only to have her loathe him for his evil ways and then later have to join in slaughtering her and all other Mudbloods as V takes over the world...), leading him to a sudden crisis of conscience and side change not long before V goes to kill the Potters himself.

OK, all you anti Snape/Lily types out there, open fire, the Good Ship LOLLIPOPS is ready for you...

Ben:
> Is there something intrinsic about the word "Accio" embedded into the
magical fabric of the universe that causes things to be brought to the
speaker (imagine the poor prehistoric wizard who discovers this as he
sneezes, his wand inadvertently pointing at a woolly mammoth). <

(Captain Tabouli chuckles merrily and wanders down into her ship's cabin for some rum.  Accio Tankard!)


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