Meta: Lily and Sev
Source: Lily and Sev
Lily and Severus´s friendship fucks me up, like listen, I hear your analysis about how Snape was a toxic and emotionally dependant friend that basically guilt-tripps Lily to stick with him and how Lily was rather cold and probably did not care that much about him and wanted to ditch his friendship a long time ago.
buuuuut
I reject it, I am sorry but that sucks, I want them to be friends, good friends that genuingly loved each other but a bunch convoluted bad decisions and ocurrances made them drift apart slowly until Severus pulled the last straw.
I want lily giving longing looks to Severus when he is not watching, because he was her friend for so long, the one that laughed at her sardonic jokes that her other friends thought were too crude.
I want Severus feeling completely misarable in the summers because, now he has to stay in his horrid home all day while all the previous ones he had spent the afternoons in Lily´s room listening records, leaving just before her parents came home ( because they didnt like the awful boy from spinner´s end at all)
I want Severus telling avery and mulciber that if they even dare to look at Lily he will kill them
I want Lily getting angry at Sirius for insulting Severus´s old shabby clothes because what does a rich asshole like you know?
like, I know lily had way better social skills, was friendly and became close friends with many people later on her life, but Severus was her bestie! and it hurt so much to sever thier friendship even if she was doing the right thing.
Please, I can´t bear the thought of Severus dedicating the rest of his life to a person that didnt even care that much about him, its physically painful and I blame JK for writing the friendship with so many missing pieces.
This!!! The interpretation that Severus and Lily didn't have a "real" friendship is so disheartening.
It's so weird that the Prince's Tale doesn't include a single memory of Severus and Lily just being friends without something going wrong and them ending up fighting. I feel like once again Jo should have shown instead of just told, and the fact that so many people interpret Snape's feelings and actions towards Lily as a pathological obsession is evidence of that.
Exactly! Not to mention that interpretation makes the whole thing so mean spirited, its valid but I hate it.
My personal opinion and headcanon is that the Prince's tale is not suppoused to be an accurate representation of lily and severus's friendship dynamic (severus fucking up and Lily "nagging" him about it) but rather, its a collection of all the times Severus dissapointed Lily, it would make sense, given remorse is Snape's main motivation, he regrets things even the ones that happened in childhood.
And honestly, this difference in interpretations is jarring especially because it changes the entire takeaway of Severus’ arc, IMO. I think it shifts the focus from Severus’ actions and choices towards Severus as a person.
- Severus and Lily being actual best friends who genuinely love each other, enjoy each other’s company and do normal friend things > “Wow, he had something really good going on for him and he really fucked it up with his actions.”
- Severus falling in love with the idea of Lily and thinking of her as his best friend just because she was the only person to ever be kind to him, while Lily never enjoyed his company and finds him awkward and creepy but goes along with his delusion and manipulation anyway > “Wow, what a fucked up person.”
Like, that is a HUGE difference. Huge.
It makes for a much more emotionally meaningful and compelling story that Severus had a real chance at love and happiness, yet ruined it with his own actions influenced by his insecurity – and he knows it’s his fault. He is genuinely remorseful to the point he wants to die. This gives him sufficient motivation to sacrifice the rest of his life in order to try to make up for his screw-up. This is the arc that JKR, based on her tweets etc., meant for Severus to have in canon, yet like I said – it wasn’t made clear enough because of her apparent issues with the “Show, Don’t Tell” -rule.
Meanwhile, the other reading kind of seems to take away Severus’ entire ability to make right choices in the first place by insisting that he isn’t actually capable of loving another person, but that it’s only about what he gets from interacting with others – his “friendship” is essentially emotional abuse and manipulation of a girl he “latches onto” because of how she makes him feel. That essentially, he sees Lily as an extension of himself, without any love and appreciation at all for the individual human being she is.
The issue with this interpretation is that the problem is not so much about Snape’s choices and actions anymore: it’s now all about the fundamental way he perceives and interacts with the world and other people – and namely, how abnormal/unhealthy it is: it’s now about the very core of his personality being faulty.
Like, I’m only an armchair psychologist, but I’m pretty sure that this kind of selfish, manipulative and exploitative pattern of behavior in personal relationships is strongly indicative of a few certain personality disorders, and people who interpret Snape this way seem to very, very rarely acknowledge this, focusing only on how reprehensible his behavior is from a purely moral standpoint.
Implying that Severus is not unlike Voldemort, basically incapable of loving another person is pretty much saying that he has at least strong traits of a personality disorder – which isn’t much of a choice, is it?
Whether it is the sense of security and validation (indicative of BPD), or the attention and admiration (indicative of NPD which I never in a million years can see canon Sev having) – I’ve seen both in fic – that makes him want to keep Lily by his side through manipulation and guilt-tripping with no regard for her feelings, it’s not how the mind of a healthy person works.
If Severus were simply using Lily for narcissistic supply, it would make no sense for him to do any of the things he did after her death. Why would he choose to stay at Hogwarts to protect her son after her death? Why would he choose to kill Dumbledore, play the part of a traitor and a villain and basically become the most hated wizard in the UK?
If his affection towards Lily wasn’t about her as an individual, as a person, none of this would make sense. Exploitative, manipulative people just find new victims to give them what they want, because in the end, it’s all about them. You see people constantly claim that in the end, Snape was purely selfish and always only out for himself, but it just makes absolutely zero sense. It directly contradicts his actions in canon!
And one can’t just wake up one day and decide to change the entire way their brain is wired to interact with the world because they realize they should be a bEtTeR pErSoN – it takes years of therapy to overcome this behavior and even then it’s not successful much of the time.
Anyway, this is kind of rambling and I’m not sure whether the point I’m trying to make is clear, but I guess when people and especially antis interpret Snape in the worst way possible and basically claim he’s entirely loveless, a Voldemort 2.0, it defeats the entire point the story was trying to make about Tom, Sev and Harry not being like each other – namely that quite literally the only factor that kept Snape from going fully dark like Voldemort was his ability to love. And despite the fact that this is made very clear in the last chapters in DH, so many people for some reason vehemently deny that he had this ability at all and it basically takes away the entire point of his arc. IDK.
EDIT: I can’t believe I initially overlooked the most obvious way that taking away Severus’ love for Lily ruins his arc: it erases his conflicting desires – his love for Lily and his love for the Dark Arts/desire for power – that are very central to his character, and turns him into a one-dimensional villain. There is no pull between the “goodness” of loving and being loved by Lily, and the “darkness” of desiring the power of the Dark Arts and Death Eater ideology. There is only the darkness of wanting to control and dominate Lily, and the darkness of wanting to control and dominate everybody else. It’s all part of one and the same motivation – power and control.
This is not mine this is by Peter Ramirez
Why was Lily such a bad friend to Snape?
All right, I’m reading a lot of responses in this string, none of which really answers the question honestly, so let me try to clean all this nonsense up with a fair answer. So…
Why was Lily Evans such a bad friend to Severus Snape?
She wasn’t… all that bad a friend. She just wasn’t all that great… of a friend. She had a difficult time — like a lot of people at that age, who don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, and are going through the emotional issues that come with adolescence — telling Severus she didn’t want to remain friends anymore.
And… she didn’t react very well when Severus was attacked by James and Sirius, leading up to the not-all-that-terrible-word, Mudblood, that Severus used on her, which everyone makes out to be worse than it was.
It wasn’t a nice thing to say. Okay? And, in surprise at hearing Severus use that word about her, Lily got flustered. There she was, the only person defending Severus, and here he goes and calls her a Mudblood. Got it.
So… she reacted poorly. He put her in an uncomfortable spot, and in the back of her mind, she had been trying to find a way to break things off anyway, so... she stormed off, leaving Severus to his fate, and — again, despite all the nonsense that gets thrown around that “Snape was already a Nazi,” and “Snape was a racist” and “Mudblood is the equivalent to the N-word,” — none of which is all that accurate, especially that last line, I don’t care WHAT the author said — that’s why some people think Lily wasn’t the greatest… friend in the world.
But, of course, no one can ever find common ground on this subject. It’s either “At age nine, Snape was no different than Voldemort, and he only got worse from there!” or it’s, “Lily was only friends with Severus until he was no longer of any use to her!” AGAIN — Neither of those which is true.
Severus was starting to hang out with the wrong crowd — Mulciber and Avery — but he wasn’t… a Death Eater yet. People just retroactively penalize him because he eventually DID… become a Death Eater. Okay, bad idea, Severus. But that doesn’t make what happened to him or the way Lily reacted acceptable.
Severus had been a faithful friend for a long time. So, leaving him to the wolves was bad form on Lily’s part. There’s no other way to say it. If she had been as good a friend to him, as he was to her, she would have made sure he was safe from James and Sirius and THEN… dumped him.
Sure, Lily wasn’t interested in going along for the Death Eater ride, so she didn’t want to be friends anymore. Fair enough. Perfectly reasonable. Understood.
That didn’t justify what Lily did by leaving him in the lurch like that. Sorry, folks, it just doesn’t, despite the many comments surely to follow that will point out every mistake Severus made in order to dismiss the truth here.
But… it also doesn’t mean she was an awful person. She wasn’t. They had once been friends. It could be argued that he was probably a better friend to her than she was to him — and that’s despite all his mistakes afterwards — but she was still his friend for a long time, such as it was. And, again, she wasn’t Dolores Umbridge’s long, lost twin sister.
Severus made mistakes later in life that a lot of people like to use to justify how crappy James and Sirius treated him, and to justify that Lily didn’t stick around when the going got tough.
And, on the other side, another group of people have some empathy for Severus because of the poor environment he grew up in and the lack of any real chance in life because of his abusive and neglectful parents coupled with the constant bullying he suffered for seven years at Hogwarts.
That’s why we get this huge divide over “Who was more right or more wrong, Snape or Lily?”
Because no one can just say, “They both made mistakes.” It’s GOT to be one or the other for most people.
Okay, let’s hear the uproar in comments. I can already tell, I’m going to catch hell just for suggesting he might have been the better friend, among other things.
Peter Ramirez's posts are amazing. Accurate, precise, bluntly honest with a touch of snark.
@profiction and @sanctuaryangel, can you share their link, I'm not familiar with their stuff though I like what's been written by them.
Quote from Naaga on July 17, 2023, 4:18 pm@profiction and @sanctuaryangel, can you share their link, I'm not familiar with their stuff though I like what's been written by them.
Hope this link works -
https://www.quora.com/profile/Peter-Ramirez-9?q=peter%20ramir
Keeping in mind, they don't post complete HP stuff.
