[HPforGrownups] Re: My Take on the Whole Snape/Draco/Dumbledore/Secret Keeper Thing

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 161135


> Eddie:
> An angle on this topic that I haven't heard mentioned is that James
> used Levicorpus on Snape -- a spell Snape invented.  How did James
> learn this spell?  From Lily, I speculate.  I'm thinking that Snape
> only ever told her about it, and then she went and blabbed it to
> Snape's worst enemy.  If I'm right, then Snape felt betrayed by Lily
> the moment James used Levicorpus.
>
> Eddie
>
> Sorry for so much snippage, but my comment wasn't in direct response
> to anything that had come before.

Magpie:
I have heard something related, that Lily's smile in the scene that she's 
trying to hide is because she recognizes that Snape's spell is being used 
against him, which is kind of related.

wynnleaf,
While I know there are certainly those who think that this scene *ended* a 
friendship between Snape and Lily, I have always felt that if that's so, it 
is a huge discredit to Lily.  As you say, there is no real acknowledgement 
of Snape personally in her comments.  But worse, she *leaves* him at the 
mercy of James and Sirius just because he calls her a bad name.  Granted, 
the word he used was terrible, but if she was really his friend she should 
not have left
him at the mercy of his enemies.

(By the way, I don't know about other cultures and countries, but in the USA 
one of the worst racial slurs is commonly used *between* people from the 
same race as an insult, and even as a joke, but is
not taken as nearly so insulting as if the same slur comes from people *not* 
of that racial group.)

Magpie:
Well, it could be the end of their friendship, or the beginning of the end, 
I don't think they would be all friendly and then this is what ended 
it--this surely would be building.  As has been pointed out, Lily doesn't 
acknowledge Snape as a friend, so whatever their relationship I don't think 
everything was great between them before then.  But this isn't an isolated 
thing for Snape, which is why I see no reason to think we need more than the 
epithet to think he might have been racist.  Now, I get drawing the 
distinction between whether he really believed this stuff and whether that 
was the biggest appeal to him, since Snape, unlike someone like Regulus, was 
not raised with these beliefs and was not a Pureblood.

But that's why I asked exactly how much does it have to matter before he's a 
racist?  We've never heard Muggleborns using that term for each other.  They 
barely seem to identify with each other at all (something I find a little 
unrealistic, but leave that aside). Snape is a Half-blood, not a Muggleborn. 
Perhaps it was only later that he went from being slightly insecure about 
being only Half-Wizard and decided to cling to what Wizardness he had, I 
don't know.  But I can't imagine if this were a real situation that someone 
could think Snape was using that word there as one minority to another, in 
front of two Purebloods. It's similar to the way I feel about the 
Muggle/Wizard stuff in the book. I've said that no, I wouldn't trust being 
friends with a Wizard if they showed that they pulled the Magic card on 
uppity Muggles. I can think of many friendships that wouldn't survive this 
kind of use of an epithet--after all, we can't assume that Snape apologized 
for it later.

And then there's the fact that we know Snape became a DE.  When Sirius talks 
about Voldemort he says a lot of people believed in his ideas until they saw 
what he was really about, suggesting to me that this stuff was part of the 
appeal.  He's not saying the opposite, that most people liked Voldemort 
himself but were put off by the Pureblood stuff.

Now, with Snape as an adult I don't see any signs of at all that he himself 
is particularly racist in Wizarding terms.  I can't think of a single scene 
where he seems motivated by anyone's bloodline (comparing him to Hagrid's 
probably very eye-opening that way).  We haven't seen anything that says he 
was raised with the kinds of beliefs the Malfoys and Blacks were.  But I can 
still believe that as a teenager this had some kind of appeal to him. We've 
got to get him into the Death Eaters for some reason--he's got his anger, 
certainly, and his anger against James specifically, but after 6 books I 
haven't seen many signs that Snape was a very special DE in that sense. 
Especially when we get this scene in OotP where he joins the very few 
characters in canon to call somebody a Mudblood.  It just seems logical to 
point to this moment as a sign of the direction Snape is going. We don't get 
a lot of clues like that about Snape, so why not take this as a sign that 
he's becoming more of a DE?  Why does he call her a Mudblood here, after 
all?  Why is that the worst thing he can call her?  If he's angry about her 
flirting with James he might have called her a slut or something like that. 
Or maybe this word was powerful for him because it connected him to the 
people he was tied to by then.

-m