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Still on a Deathly Hallows note:

There are great fanfic opportunities to fill in what everyone else was doing while the trio was on their quest, and here are some great results:

All those empty spaces : Petunia during that year, with the Dursleys forced to hide.

Five Moments of Doubt: meanwhile, at Hogwarts. Great, great look at various members of the ensemble (Professor Sprout, Ginny, Neville and Minerva McGonnegal) and through them at Snape.

rozk has posted her insightful review, connecting the novel with fantasy tradition.

And some scattered thoughts that occured to me while reading everyone else's meta:

It says something (good) about the text that (some) Marauder fans and Snape fans feel their favourite(s) were treated unjustly as opposed to the other. I've seen Sirius fans complaining that not only gets Kreacher redeemed but Harry comes to agree with the viewpoint voiced by Hermione (and Dumbledore in Order of the Phoenix) that Sirius treated Kreacher horridly; complaining that we don't hear enough about how horrible it was for Sirius to be forced to live again in the house he had escaped as a youth. (My take on this is that we heard quite a lot on that in OotP, which did present us with Sirius' pov on the Black family and having to live in Grimmauld Place. I didn't see the need for a rehash. Also, some of Sirius' comments if repeated would make him look very callous, notably his dismissal of his brother and Kreacher's loyalty to the (other) members of the Black family.) Then there's the whole Remus issue (as mentioned before, I didn't see his actions as ooc and agree with this post that some of the flaws Remus displays in DH have been hinted at as early as PoA, usually seen as the Remus And Sirius Yay! book; of course, the biggest complaint re: Remus is his off stage death, which usually gets compared to Dobby's death scene and funeral, and/or Snape's death and chapter-long background exploration. Not by part of Snape fandom, though. No, to them, Snape dying at all (and not in a blaze of glory/dramatic gesture but as part of Voldemort wanting a weapons upgrade) is the ultimate insult, crowned by lack of public rehabilitation (I don't know, I thought that was precisely what Harry was doing when bringing up Snape's true allegiance in front of the entire school, aurors, and assorted surviving forces of good during his showdown with Voldemort). Snape's relationship with Lily: I've seen meta where readers loved it, I've seen meta where reader's hate it because, runs the argument, it means Snape never had a moral awakening at all and is less complex a character if he did it all because as a nine years old, he befriended a neighbourhood girl and loved her for the rest of his life.

Now, leaving aside that the ability to love is a crucial virtue in JKR's universe (like it or not, those are the established rules and were from the first volume onwards), I thought that the chapter in question, The Prince's Tale, did among other things a great job in making Snape's relationships with both Lily and Dumbledore layered, and yes, show something like a moral awakening. First, Lily. Crucial here is imo that this isn't some unrequited crush from afar. Lily might never have loved Severus Snape romantically (or maybe she has, we just don't know, we only have Snape's pov on the memories, and he doesn't seem to think so), but he was her friend and she was his. This friendship continued until their fifth year at Hogwarts; five years in a climate of violent partisanship between Gryffindor and Slytherin, which can't have been easy for either of them. We certainly have no other example of such a friendship in Harry's generation; during Harry's fifth year, at the Sorting Hat's song, Ron dismisses the mere idea as unthinkable. Just as importantly, the friendship doesn't end because Lily falls in love with James Potter. When it ends, she still doesn't like James or the other Marauders more than she did at age 11 in the train to Hogwarts. (And btw, someone brilliantly pointed out what had escaped me, that the scene with Lily, Snape, James and Sirius echoes Harry, Ron and Draco in the first novel; a skinny black haired boy, his red haired friend and the child of privilege making arrogant claims.) Nor does it end because of the single insult, "filthy little mudblood", which is just the straw that breaks the camel's back. "But you call everyone of my heritage that," Lily says to Severus when he tries to apologize. "Why should I be any different?" As with her charge that he's aiming to be a Death Eater, he has no reply for that. Because he might be sorry for insulting his friend, but at this point, young Snape certainly believes the ideology, and that's what Lily can no longer stomach. To make a rl analogy, if there's a childhood friendship between a white boy and a black girl, and several years later he hangs out with racists who make no bones of the the fact they intend to join the Ku Klux Klan once they graduate, with the full intention of lynching as many people of colour as possible, he starts to use racist epitaphs left and right and finally calls her "nigger", too - well, then it's really not a surprise if the girl considers this reason enough to end the relationship. Even though she knows said boy partly came to hang out with the future Ku Klux Klan crowd because he got bullied by some of her classmates. (Whom, again, she's not friends with at this stage.)

The Lily memories lead over to the Dumbledore memories, and that second relationship is, imo, just as important. The first of these is unlike any Snape-leaves-the-Death Eaters scene from fanfic I've ever read (as in said fanfic Dumbledore is usually being Mr. Compassion, warm and welcoming). Here, he's harsh, to put it mildly, and utterly ruthless. Which is rather important for Snape's development if you ask me, because what he gets Snape to admit - that Snape is afraid for Lily and Lily alone (him not being concerned for James is one thing, and absolutely understandable, but there is baby Harry, and that baby really hasn't done anything to him) - certainly warrants that harshness, not a pat on the back. Snape at this stage is changing sides because of personal loyalty, not because he can't stand what Voldemort does in general any longer. However, this is not where it ends. Two memories later, we've arrived in the Philosopher's Stone era, with Snape ranting about Harry at age 11, and Dumbledore calmly telling him he's projecting while continuing to read his newspaper. Now depending on your take on Headmaster Now Revealed To Be Morally Ambiguous Enough To Make Machiavelli Hesitant, you can see this as contemptous on Dumbledore's part and Snape chaffing under an obligation he was morally blackmailed into... or as two people who in the intervening years have grown very accustomed to each other. Supporting the later reading are two memories that follow. There is Snape's reaction to Dumbledore's suicidal ring quest when he's doing his best to heal him (which is more or less "why did you hurt yourself, you idiot?!?"), followed by a passage that's downright mushy for Snape:

"I am fortunate, extremely fortunate, that I have you, Severus."
"If you had only summoned me a little earlier, I might have been able to do more, buy you more time!" said Snape furiously.

I'd say this is as close as Snape gets to declaring his caring feelings for anyone not Lily Evans. Of course, Dumbledore pounces at once and follows this up with manouevring Snape into his promise to kill him. The moment itself is a great mutual trading in sarcasm:

"Would you like me to do it now?" asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. "Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?"
"Oh, not quite yet," said Dumbledore, smiling. "I daresay the moment will present itself in due course."

It's a long way from "help Lily" and "you disgust me". Crushing hopes from the Snape/Draco camp, Snape next suggests that Dumbledore could simply let Draco kill him, and replies to Dumbledore's "That boy's soul is not yet so damaged. I would not have it ripped apart on my account" with "And my soul, Dumbledore? Mine?" Which on the one hand you can read as selfish from Snape, but on the other also as an abhorrence of killing itself. Not just the killing of the one person other than Lily he has personal ties with, because after Dumbledore delivered his bombshell - that they have kept Harry alive so Harry can let himself be killed by Voldemort - , we get this:

"Don't be shocked, Severus. How mny men and women have you watched die?"
"Lately, only those whom I could not save," said Snape.

Yes, he's shocked at the Harry-as-pig-for-slaughter idea because Harry is Lily's son and keeping Lily's son alive is his primary mission, but that's not all. Men and women he could not save - or could -, plural. He's not in the business of just keeping Harry (or Dumbledore, for that matter) alive. This being Snape, you don't get a "I get it now: nobody deserves to be killed by Voldemort, not just Lily" monologue, but this sentence - "Lately, only those whom I could not save" - to me delivers exactly that message.

And Dumbledore? Does he still see Snape as nothing but an extremely useful intrument in the fight against Voldemort? I don't think so. At the end of this particular memory, Dumbledore has what he wanted from Snape, the promise to kill him, the promise to keep the school as safe as he can afterwards, the promise to deliver the you-must-let-Voldemort-kill-you message to Harry. So what follows when he sees Snape's Patronus - the silver doe in memory of Lily - has nothing to do with getting anything. (...)he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears. "After all this time?" "Always," said Snape. The only other time I recall that we see Dumbledore cry is with the Inferi in HBP, confronted with the ghosts of his past. (He might also have cried for Harry at some point in the books, but I'm not sure about that.) Here, he cries for Severus Snape. Doesn't mean he's not willing to go on using him - any more than his affection for Harry stops him from using Harry - but he grieves for Snape, and Snape's life. Going into more speculative territory, I'd venture that post-Grindelwald, Snape was the person he had the most honest and closest relationship with. (And yes, that includes McGonnegal; based on the snippets of conversations we get between them, theirs was a respectful friendship with however McGonnegal having no idea of Dumbledore's more ruthless side.)

For this complexity, and for many other reasons, the final volume of the Potter saga might just be my favourite of them all.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Bamberg