Courtly love in Potterverse WAS: What triggered ancient magic

[dumbledore11214]

No: HPFGUIDX 187183

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. <SNIP>


Alla:

This is exactly my point.  Only I would say that he hesitated not just because he **heard** from other people that Muggleborns were inferior, but because he learned and adopted that philosophy at early age.

But really after rereading what you wrote, I really agree with a lot of it. I said that Snape loved Lily **despite** who she was, so sure I agree he thought that it should not apply to her. 

Only when you think that the group to which person belongs is inferior, I think you are lying to yourself (not you, hypothetical you and  in this instance I mean Snape) that you do not think that one person of this group is inferior, I think sooner or later the bulb will go off in your head that oh no, this person belongs to this group, he or she is absolutely the same and I was deluding myself.

It reminds me of when person would say, oh I do not like jews, but my best friend is a Jew, or I do not like gays but my best friend is gay, or I do not like Black people but my best friend is black person.

And I always want to say when I hear this silliness, really, you consider yourself to be a friend of this person, when you cannot come to peace with such a huge part of who this person is? I always think, I hope your so called "best friend" will run for his or her life from you as far as possible that to me is a RL equivalent of the situation between Snape and Lily.


Only my speculative opinion of course, but based on Snape's hesitation and him eventually joining Death Eaters, I think it has at least canon based reasons for it.


Pippin:
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.

Alla:

Lily did not defend him enough as best friend needs to be defended, but association with DE wannabe would make me start loosing trust in my friend too. And there is of course another IMO plot overriding character consistency. As Zanooda (I think) said that JKR tried soo hard to not let us know before time that Snape and Lily were friends, that of course she would not show Lily acting as best friend should, but probably as prefect defending a stranger. Regardless though, even if Lily did not defend him at all, which I would find wrong, to me the fact that he called her that word shows what **he** believed in as well, not just that he associated with wrong people. 


Pippin:
<SNIP>
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.

Alla:

Well,yeah, one of my original points was that these were Snape's learned views and NOT something that he just did by abandoning his original principles whatever they were. I am saying that his original views seemed to be pretty ugly. I think he learned the value of every life because of Lily's death and in Dumbledore's service. Too bad that he did not learn that he needs to treat people the way he wants to be treated if you ask me, but that's an aside. And I surely agree that several characters needed to learn that.

JMO,

Alla