Behind the Scenes: The Gestaltation of Severus Snape
You're not alone; that's been the general consensus based on a number of reviews on FFN and AO3, along with Mary's Best Girl status
Quote from The Gestalt Prince on May 10, 2023, 11:59 pmYou're not alone; that's been the general consensus based on a number of reviews on FFN and AO3, along with Mary's Best Girl status
Sometimes I think you aged down Mary for skipping the whole Snape/Mary shipping business 😹.
That was one reason, although that hasn't stopped some reviewers from wanting that. The other reason was that I wanted Mary to be young enough to be somewhat uncorrupted by the biases at Hogwarts, but old enough to have some agency in her life. So sort of like a Lily who wasn't too taken in by the Gryffindors.
So sort of like a Lily who wasn't too taken in by the Gryffindors.
We can't blame Lily's issues on Gryffindor though. My issues with her came from her general behaviour towards Snape and her hypocrisies. Even Mary who is younger sees Snape more clearly than Lily ever did.
It's not exactly a 1:1 situation, as Lily and Mary are their own characters. Lily, for the most part, doesn't understand what Severus has to deal with aside from what she herself is present for. Mary's written to be more emotionally perceptive overall, and she's more easily able to empathize with someone else who's been targeted for bullying.
@thegestaltprince which characters are your favourite in your fics and which characters you struggle to write?
I think overall, my favorite characters, aside from Severus and Lily, would have to be Mary and Regulus (at least when it comes to writing their POVs). Mary's just a bundle of wholesome, and I really like Regulus's storyline and the way it will eventually go.
While I don't really struggle to write any of them, there are certain POVs or chapters that are hard. Act II, Chapter 4: The Longest Week was, and remains, the most painful chapter I have ever written, simply due to size and content. At the same time, I'm proud that I wrote it, if only to convey the same frustration with the audience regarding how long we have to wait until the "week" is done with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-sYe-kiljk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2p7r9jN2ck
This is where I imagine Cokeworth to be located and its general aesthetic.
I thought now would be a good time to just go over what exactly Sev and Professor Snape experienced in the summer of 1976 after they forced the gestaltation process. It's only now that I've figured out a relatively good way to do that.
- Usually, when someone watches a movie or show or some sort of visual medium, it's from start to finish in the order of presentation. For example: if a movie is 120 minutes long (not including credits), the audience watches the movie from beginning to end in 120 minutes.
- Now, imagine laying out each frame of that movie (let's say it's 60 frames per second to match how much the human eye can process), each frame with its own audio playing when viewed. This would be 432,000 frames total.
- Now, instead of watching the movie frame by frame, imagine watching all 432,000 frames simultaneously and having a perfect memory of what you just saw.
- Now, instead of viewing 120 minutes (432,000 frames) within 1/60th of a second, imagine viewing 459 months and 23 days (72,539,712,000 frames; yes, this is Snape's total lifespan) within 1/60th of a second.
- Now imagine this isn't just a viewing and audio experience, but an experience of every single sense and emotion felt within those frames of life.
- Now imagine experiencing all of this 60 times per second between the end of Act I Chapter 5 and the beginning of Act II Chapter 1 (not including the times Professor Snape pulled him into their shared psyche room).
- And now, after that summer, imagine Sev having to experience this every single night when he's not medicating.
