Snape and love (was What triggered ancient magic? WAS: Re: James and Intent

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187043

 > Potioncat:
> Here's where we differ. And we will probably continue to differ because it's speculation (unless someone can find canon.) There is a difference between wanting a person and loving a person. If courtly love is the model, then Snape wasn't hoping to get Lily for himself, but simply to save her life. I don't think he expected Lily to become his, nor was that his goal. JMO.
> 
Carol responds:
I hope that I can make this a bit more than an "I agree" post! I do this young Snape was selfish in that he only cared about saving the girl he loved and not her wife and child, but it's rather like (IMO) a parent concerned with saving his own child from a school fire and not thinking about the other children. I don't think his desperate wish to save her had anything to do with sexual desire or delusions about her gratitude to him for getting Voldemort to spare her life (which would have been unrealistic in the extreme). It's just that he didn't want her to die and he felt terrible remorse for having revealed the Prophecy when he found out that the girl he loved might die because of what he had done. At that point, he didn't care one way or the other about Harry or James. He just wanted to save Lily's life, just as Harry (for less selfish reasons) wanted to save Sirius Black's life at the MoM, only he wanted to do it himself through direct action. Harry wasn't thinking about a reward or gratitude, only about the life of someone he cared about. I think that was the case with Snape, too, except that in his case, he couldn't save Lily himself--he had to rely on older, more powerful Wizards--and his love was complicated by guilt at having been the one to endanger her in the first place with his information.

There's nothing disgusting about it. It would have been much worse if he *hadn't* felt guilty and wanted to save the girl who had once been his best friend and whom, I think, he loved in both a romantic and a chivalrous way (the knight and his lady kind of courtly love where everything he does is in the name of the lady--or maybe that came later, with the doe Patronus after Lily died and he idealized her memory).

Anyway, I don't think the kind of love matters. You don't beg Voldemort, of all people, or Dumbledore, the powerful leader of the other side, to spare the life of someone you only desire sexually. He *loved* her, as the purity and beauty of his Patronus shows.

Carol, just stating her opinion and not wanting to argue with anybody about it