Courtly love in Potterverse WAS: What triggered ancient magic

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 187171


> Carol, who agrees that Snape's love didn't alter when it alteration found and appreciates the Shakespearean allusion but still thinks that the spiritual guardian is an idealized incarnation of the beloved person's essence as perceived by the caster
>

Pippin:
Okay, but how does that show that Snape loved the idealized incarnation and didn't love Lily as she was? 

Anyway, we were discussing how Snape could want to be a DE when he knew that Lily thought they were evil. But re-reading, he wasn't paying attention when Lily said that. They could have had a dialogue about it, but they didn't. 

It was instead the sort of conversation that Dumbledore speaks of where each person is more interested in proclaiming their own point of view than in understanding what the other has to say. The result was that Lily thought she'd already given him an ultimatum: "You've made your choice" while Snape expected that if he could only convince her his apology was sincere, they could go on as before. 

If Lily hadn't broken off their relationship, they might have come to a mutual understanding eventually, much as Ron and Hermione did about the House Elves. At this point of the story, though, they're both relying on received wisdom, just  as Ron and Hermione were in GoF.

 Neither had any  first hand knowledge of what it means to be a DE. Even if some of Snape's older friends had already joined up, they wouldn't have been at liberty to tell Snape what it was really like. 
It's easy to take an extreme position when what you know has already been distilled to remove any possibility of nuance.

Pippin