Courtly love in Potterverse WAS: What triggered ancient magic

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 187180


> 
> Alla:
> 
> No? You think he called her that, but he did not really *mean* it?
<snip>
> So I speculate that Snape always thought of Lily as mudblood, thought that it was an inferior thing to be - to be muggleborn, but also to him mudblood, but loved Lily despite that and finally under stress let his true thoughts show.
>

Pippin:
When did he ever treat her as an inferior before SWM? We should have seen hints of it, and we should have seen the point where Snape stopped feeling she was inferior. 

Did he ever express any surprise that she was as magical as anyone? No doubt Snape had heard people say that  Muggleborns were inferior, and that's why he hesitated before saying that her birth wouldn't make any difference.

But he didn't think it should apply to Lily.   IOW, if only his friends knew what she was *really* like, they'd consider her an exception, just as Slughorn did. But he was under a lot of pressure from his friends, and so was Lily.

Who knows how many times Snape heard his friends say that Mudbloods  wouldn't stand by the WW when they were needed? Binns says that is what Slytherin himself believed.  And how many times did Lily hear the same things said about Slytherins?

If Hermione came on a bunch of kids harassing her best friend, would she have asked "What's he done to you?"   Lily was already losing trust in Snape, not because of anything he had done personally, AFAWK, but because of the people he was associating with. I can't blame her for being suspicious, but it made her act just the way Snape had been told Mudbloods were going to act. 

 Then he had to go and prove *her* suspicions, by using the "unforgivable word" -- but IMO it didn't prove anything except that he trusted the wrong people (and had poorer impulse control than Lily, who managed to suppress her momentary urge to laugh at him.) 

 They both trusted the people who were nice to them, just as Harry did. But nice is not the same as enlightened.

Doubtless young Snape thought the world would be a better place once the "right" people were in charge, and if some people had to be shoved aside to make that happen, well, better Them than Us. Of course canon shows us the problem with that kind of thinking, but it's something a lot of characters had to learn the hard way.

Pippin