deathdaydungeon:
snapedefender:
flibbertygigget:
dungeonsblues:
supiprimi:
why would you distort “Severus changed sides because of Lily” to “Severus only changed sides because of Lily”? Trying to save someone you care about is a pretty good reason imo.
This argument annoys me too because I think I can see where it stems from, and I disagree with the idea behind it. The idea being that a good person should care about everyone equally and not care about someone more than others. I despise that sentiment deeply (DEEPLY) and I think it’s been used to guilt-trip people rather a lot. And don’t get me wrong, some human beings might work like that, I wouldn’t know. Some relgions are very keen to encourage people to want to work like that, as are movements and organizations, and sometimes you follow this line of thought until you reach Utilitarianism. Or trolley problems. Would you let 500 people die so that your best friend may live? Would you push your best friend in front of the train so that the 500 people may live? Most of us don’t think in trolley problems. Or, frankly, don’t naturally care about the greater good more than we care about our best friend. And because one’s man holiness is another man’s inhumanity, caring about everyone equally is not even what most of us aspire to.
There is a relevant passage by Orwell that says “To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others” and I think that the beauty of that sentiment is generally twisted when it comes to Snape Discourse (wow do I hate those words) and it makes me fucking mad.
Or whatever, I guess.
I have opinions and I am not holy. (She says, banging her fists on the table)
Trolley Problems are interesting to me because they force us to confront our definitions of morality. What do these choices say about me, about what I value? Why do I sacrifice my friend for 50 but not 10? Why do I hesitate more when asked to push my best friend rather than simply change the track? Do I choose to value children or adults or dogs or men or women?
Who am I to say I’m a good person?
We have an example of a person who always aces the Trolley Problem in the Potterverse: Dumbledore. And on one hand, that makes him a great general, a great strategist, the one and only Leader of the Light. On the other hand, that makes him feel morally icky. He’s willing to raise a child like a pig for slaughter. He’s willing to purposely stymie any chance for growth or happiness for a human being so that he can keep his perfect spy. He makes these decisions and directs the Trolley with a coldness that I only see matched when Voldemort himself says “I regret it.”
Alternatively, Snape is interesting because he LIVES the Trolley Problem. His JOB is to watch people die, and later to kill Dumbledore, so that he can save more people later. And he does this, oh he does it. He lets the Trolley run over those whom he could not save.
But ONLY those whom he could not save.
Severus lives in DEFIANCE of the Trolley Problem. He snatches people from the tracks. He’s given the option to push someone down or let others die and throws himself over the edge instead. He sees no-win scenarios and tries to find a loophole, any loophole, because this is his line in the sand and he’ll be damned if he crosses it.
Of course, in the end, he has to cross it. He has to tell Harry to go to his fate. But that’s the beauty of Severus’ response to the Trolley Problem. He will do what he has to “for the greater good”, spy and lie and kill and die, but he will not give into the comforting falsehood that the lesser of two evils is a good. He will stand, back straight and soul torn to shreds, look himself in the eye and say, “It was wrong. It was the best choice, but it was wrong, and it was what I chose.”
That is what makes Severus different from Dumbledore. That is what allows his redemption arc to exist. And that is what makes him one of the strongest, most moral characters that I have ever known.
oh, that’s gorgeous
bc dumbledore is so often presented as the morally superior in the snape and dumbledore relationship - we see dumbledore’s disgust and we accept that it’s the right reaction to snape’s desire to save lily. but is it? dumbledore sees snape wanting to save lily first and foremost as wrong, but for dumbledore putting any one person ahead of others without cause (like putting harry above others for “the greateter good”) and doing it out of simple love is wrong. dumbledore doesn’t think like that and he can’t think like that regardless due to his position in the war. so of course of COURSE he sees snape’s devotion to lily’s survival over harry’s (the more “useful” person to want to protect) as disgusting or wrong. dumbledore’s moral values are skewed differently, but that doesn’t mean they’re what we should see as objectively right.
which means dumbledore ISN’T the “right” one in snape and dumbledore’s relationship. dumbledore is a big picture thinker and he values the most people he can save; but is that right when it means sacrificing one person, esp when it’s a person you love? hp’s always had that very interesting question about “the greater good” that is clear in dumbledore; is it for thegreater good when people are thrown under the tracks to ensure other people’s survival? who chooses who survives and who doesn’t and do they have the right to choose?
i think harry is the really interesting case study for this difference in morality between dumbledore and snape. dumbledore loves harry - but harry is not someone he loves first, he is a weapon to use first. so dumbledore will sacrifice him, bc dumbledore sees that sacrifice as necessary. dumbledore would not have gone running to his enemy to beg them to do anything to save harry; he would have accepted harry’s death. but snape may accept that harry needs to die, but he recognizes it for what it is: an evil. necessary, but morally bad. which is really, REALLY interesting to me bc we see dumbledore’s disgust for snape’s desire to save one person over many with lily - and then we see snape’s disgust at dumbledore’s willingness to sacrifice one person for the man reflected backa few scenes later. which implies that it’s not that dumbledore is a “good” person and snape is a “bad” person - they have both done things to disgust and outrage each other and that disgust and outrage is based on your own moral inclinations, not on any objective moral law.
a lot of people use dumbledore’s disgust to “prove” that snape was doing a bad thing or is a bad person without really thinking it through - can dumbledore really be called a moral compass in this series when he does so many amoral things? can we rely on him to be an objective source of good vs bad? can we really trust his opinion on snape’s actions considering how different (NOT better; different) his own moral code is? and these questions are infinitely more interesting than another tried round of “snape only changed sides for lily, so he’s a bad person.”
Words cannot express how fascinating I found the trolley comparison @flibbertygigget - I rather wish I had thought of it myself. Both of these posts rather made my weekend.
To add onto @snapedefender‘s salient point about the juxtaposition of Dumbledore’s disgust and Snape’s disgust, I agree, their reaction to each other’s moral code is extremely telling. I mull a lot on the notion that Dumbledore and Snape are on very similar trajectories, albeit at very different stages.
Dumbledore can afford to have a slightly different moral outlook because this war is not comprised of his peers - this is not Gellert or Aberforth or Ariana; he has a distance from the subjects which can only come of not being equals. Snape, on the other hand, is far too close to the subject matter - he is emotionally entangled, and desperately desired that Lily would live because she was his friend. His motives have nothing to do with ‘what is right’, but what he wants. (Snape’s later behaviour is a curious mix of him doing what could be perceived to be right, but seemingly convincing himself that he’s doing it for selfish reasons; Harry must live as he is a cipher for Lily.)
This ‘what is right’ versus personal desire is somewhat similar to Dumbledore almost permitting Grindelwald to run riot following their fight; he doesn’t do ‘what is right’ for society, but what personally suits him best. However, more fascinatingly, at the point Snape’s made aware of his behaviour and motivations - at the point that Dumbledore queries him - Snape starts to change. This ultimately culminates in his final stance; his acceptance that Harry must die ‘for the greater good’.
It is this stance that we see resume in the CC AU; Snape has no qualms about laying his life down for the cause, just as Dumbledore (and arguably, more importantly, the HP AU version of himself) did before. The continued reiteration through the CC AU that Snape is a hero is a spotlight cast upon the changed Severus Snape who stood at the end of Deathly Hallows. At that point, he had grown from a selfish character to one who, in many ways, equalled Dumbledore - but the reader barely saw it, as Snape’s road was not one down which the reader travelled.
This is a truly fascinating discussion. One of my greatest objections to the “Snape only changed sides because of Lily” argument, and one I’ve discussed before with my friend @tiltilla, is the air of privilege and the glaring double-standard that particular condemnation evokes.
Firstly, because many of the characters who are most lauded in the Harry Potter series for “changing” did so out of love for a singular individual and not because of any greater immediate philosophical, moral, or ethical paradigm shift.
Narcissa did not lie to Voldemort because she saw the light; she did not lie for the sake of Harry; she lied because Voldemort’s reign had had a direct, negative impact on her family (Lucius and Draco) and it required Voldemort being a threat to her and her family for her to aid Harry. Indeed, in the canon following the events of the Deathly Hallows we see that the ideological values of Narcissa Malfoy are no more altered than Lucius Malfoy’s and Draco’s marriage in Cursed Child has led to an estrangement between them.
Then we have the curious case of Regulus Black and the implication from the text that what changed his perspective, in particular, was Voldemort’s intention to kill Kreacher in preparation for his Horcruxes. Prior to that, we’re presented with a privileged boy from a pureblood family that engaged in the same kind of hero-worshipping of Voldemort and the Death Eaters that we witness from Ron early on with the Chudley Canons and Victor Krum. He kept Daily Prophet clippings he hung on his walls and genuinely admired Voldemort’s cause and joined him. It was seemingly not until Kreacher was directly threatened that the reality of what the Death Eaters were doing appears to have set in and he betrayed them.
In just these two examples presented alone, we can argue that neither Narcissa or Regulus saw fit to go against the Death Eaters or Voldemort until they were personally affected by their coming into power.
This is the crux of the argument and condemnation people make in regard to Snape. That he didn’t leave Voldemort and the Death Eaters for the “right” reason; that he only “cared” when he was personally impacted by them because they threatened the life of someone he loved. However, this argument neglects to examine a key and fundamental difference between Snape’s choice and Narcissa or Regulus’s choices and it does truly require one to have a very privileged mentality when it comes to developing a moral framework by which we “presume” to judge ourselves or others.
Mainly, that both Narcissa and Regulus were born into privilege. They had the class status, blood privilege, and influence that Snape did not possess and could not truly hope to possess as things were for him.
It requires a certain ignorance to how social factors that privilege some and act as a gateway or exclusionary measure for others function to assume that everyone perpetuates acts that are criminal or immoral for the same purpose or ideological reason. For instance, when a person of wealth commits fraud or theft they are not being driven by need or desperation they are, arguably, being driven by greed. In contrast, a person living in poverty might steal or scam someone because their basic needs are not being met and they’re desperate –it’s a matter of survival and not a matter of hubris.
Indeed, this does not even account for the systemic issues within a society, which can often shield or even reward one social group for immoral or criminal behaviors (in the US the unethical dealings of the Wall-Street elite that led to the 2008 economic recession, which led to no criminal or legal actions taken against the perpetrators, indeed some were rewarded by President Obama’s stimulus package, are a good example) while simultaneously forcing an underprivileged group into no-win scenarios that either necessitate criminal acts for the sake of survival or perpetuate harmful stereotypes of impoverished, uneducated, criminal elements that ensure that even individuals who are not guilty of crimes often find themselves wrongfully punished.
Similarly, members of a privileged group might join an extremist faction like the Death Eaters because they see where they stand to benefit most from an ideology where wealthy pure-bloods are given absolute supremacy. In contrast, an impoverished, half-blood with few prospects (most telling in the fact his own Head of House, Slughorn, overlooked his genius and potential because his status ensured that despite all of that his chance of amounting to much were slim) and a history of abuse and bullying would be drawn to a faction like the Death Eaters for a myriad of complex reasons.
We needn’t forget that Snape was an impoverished half-blood, so if we are to attempt to apply real-world social comparisons (something which I have always been adverse to doing for reasons I and several others have discussed) then we must take those to their natural conclusion. Snape would fulfill the role of a person who partially embodies the very elements that ideological blood-supremacists in the ranks of the Death Eaters would like to see expunged or further disenfranchised.
To join such a cause and entirely sympathize with the ideology of Death Eaters like Lucius Malfoy would, thus, be self-defeating for a half-blood (i.e. mixed blood) individual like Snape (and while there are those who might argue Voldemort’s own half-blood status we must not forget he holds an advantage as the de facto leader of the Death Eaters who has stylized himself as the very heir of Salazar Slytherin in such a way that he’s managed to discard/conceal his Muggle lineage far more effectively than an individual like Snape could hope to achieve).
As such, we can reasonably conclude that the greater draw to an individual like Snape would be the promise of power; an entry into the upper echelons of a society he was formerly excluded from being able to approach. Thus, a form of hopefully obtaining status for himself he otherwise could not have achieved after Hogwarts. Further, as an underprivileged half-blood in a house that turns out more pure-blood blood supremacists and Death Eaters, failing to appear to sympathize with their cause ensures he will become a target. Then, there is the glaring factor that the people who have most antagonized him during his school years (i.e. the Marauders) and the authority figures (i.e. Dumbledore) who, at least in his perception, appear to have allowed it are the ones allied against Voldemort and his Death Eaters. It becomes a choice between joining with people who have promised you the opportunity for social networking, power, some affluence, and the security needs you have not been able to realize throughout your childhood and siding with many of the people who undermined those security needs even further and escaped unscathed for what appears to be house politics and solidarity.
Ergo, to argue that Snape’s reasons and motivations for becoming a Death Eater are comparable to the Malfoy family’s reasons and motivations or the Black family’s reasons and motivations speaks to a certain privilege and ignorance to how social factors can influence the choices people make. It’s the equivalent of the sneering commentary more privileged people make when they talk about higher incarceration rates in underprivileged neighborhoods (”Well, if they would just stop being so lazy and pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find work instead of committing crimes then they wouldn’t all be in jail”).
More importantly, where Narcissa stood to benefit from betraying Voldemort (in that her family held more influence prior to Voldemort’s return and suffered as a result of it) Snape did not. Narcissa could afford to rid herself of Voldemort and, in a reflection of real life, the privilege and wealth of the Malfoy name were still enough to help her and her family avoid severe ruin in the aftermath of Harry’s victory.
Indeed, even Regulus’s own defection was significantly different in that it did not require that he sustain it. He sacrificed himself and that is the extent we have of his defection, and while giving his life to defy Voldemort was no small feat and quite laudable, he also did not have to face any of the stigma or consequence of such a defection. He died a hero and that is the crux of his choice. He was not vilified as a traitor by some; he did not have to juggle the consequences of his defection and how it might impact those close to him; he did not have to continue the fight beyond that single act of defiance in which he was able to feel peace in the knowledge that his sacrifice allowed him to be redeemed.
Then we have Snape, who joined the Death Eaters during a period when Voldemort’s blood-purity ideology appears not to have been the defining characteristic of his movement (otherwise Lily would not have been able to “thrice defy” his efforts to recruit her to his cause) and he did not stand to benefit from it having been regardless, whose defection from Voldemort begins with Lily but carries on for twenty years after her death and, most importantly, evolves.
Yes, Snape first defected for Lily. Just as Narcissa betrayed Voldemort for her family. Or Regulus realized the truth of the Death Eaters because of Kreacher. It began with a single individual who was loved; his ah-ha moment came when the actions of the Death Eaters became personal and affected someone he loved and that did spark his defection, initially.
The problem is that the book canon does not support a reading that this is the sole reason that he continued to betray Voldemort. Primarily because if he was only doing it because of Lily and that his sole motivation for keeping Harry alive was because he was her son, then the very moment that Dumbledore revealed that he would have to die should have exposed this. He could quite easily have shown his true colors then when the reason for his loyalty became moot and turned from the Order and Dumbledore.
Indeed, Snape’s position in killing Dumbledore ensured that there could only be two outcomes where he benefitted:
The first is assuming that Dumbledore continued to withhold the information about the Horcruxes and that he was also ignorant of the reasoning behind the Elder Wand. Snape would naturally conclude that he stood to benefit far more in a world where Voldemort won. Largely because the plan to kill Dumbledore left him as a spy out in the cold with no means of clearing his name in the aftermath, thus implying the likelihood of his death given the absence of an escape route. As such, in a world where Voldemort wins and he has seemingly succeeded in winning his favor and obtaining a top position like Headmaster of Hogwarts, and where all his former Order allies are turned against him, he would have concluded that he benefited far more from making sure Voldemort won.
The second option would have been to defect and go underground; tip of Harry to what Dumbledore intends and simply go into hiding and leave wizarding society to unravel as it will.
Depending on whether you want to argue that Snape never stopped believing in what the Death Eaters stood for and only betrayed them for Lily or that he was a coward that only risked his life for her, either option would be more plausible than what he does. He could just as well have concluded that Dumbledore manipulated him into protecting Harry for Lily only so that he could be slaughtered in the end and said, “Well, fuck it then, I’m going back to the Death Eaters.” or he could have have chosen to remain loyal to Lily and warned her son then removed himself from either side, “Because fuck them both, I don’t want to die and I’ve done my part.”
What he does, however, is see things through to the bitter end. More to the point, the books become more transparent and in-your-face about driving home this vital point: Snape’s reasons for defying Voldemort have changed in reflection of the way he has changed. It began with Lily but it does not continue because of her. Something which Cursed Child drives home for us: “One person. All it takes is one person. I couldn’t save Harry for Lily. So now I give my allegiance to the cause she believed in. And it’s possible — that along the way I started believing in it myself.”
It’s not for Lily’s sake that he saved Lupin and risked his position in HP: DH. It’s not for Lily’s sake that he confesses in HP: HBP that the only people he has watched die of late are “Only those I could not save.” Indeed, somewhere along the way, Snape’s reason for defected stopped being about one person alone, or how the loss of that person and his support of the Death Eaters affected him.
It began that way but where Snape differs from Narcissa, who only betrayed Voldemort because he had negatively impacted her family and who does not evolve in her views afterward, or Regulus who died young and as a hero without the complications of a long resistance or battle Snape truly earns his redemption in the sense that the reason he does the things he does are not about him or redemption, or even just Lily –it’s about the greater good.
Yet, all of this growth in Snape’s character; all of the progress he has made in his arc from young Death Eater (late-teens to 21) to a compellingly complex character on a redemptive arc is either dismissed entirely (while arguments resound on how a far more privileged boy like Draco who ascribed to the blood-purity rhetoric and benefited from it was too young to be held responsible for his choices despite havig joined around roughly the same age as Snape and planned for murder as his first big introductory act) or it is reduced down to “it was only for Lily” with a sneering degree of contempt that speaks to not just a lack of reading comprehension but a more disturbing attitude towards social attitudes when it comes to ideas of reform vs. moral purity politics.
The idea that someone lacking the resources, privilege, or support-system should be able to inherently know how to navigate or possess the moral attitudes we deem “correct” to be “deserving” of redemption or recognition for their efforts disturbs me greatly. That outlook is just another extension of the privileged gatekeeping individuals use to create barriers that limit the degree to which underprivileged people can benefit. The notion that the only way we can expect to deserve forgiveness or acknowledgment for changing or evolving our social views or attitudes is if we do so under a specific set of terms that are often difficult or impossible to immediately achieve is damaging.
Snape, a character with a limited experience with being on the receiving end of empathy; a socially and economically underprivileged character whose security needs went unmet and who lacked a functional support-system, made the decision to defect from an extremist faction that had seemingly promised to provide him with what he lacked and could not readily obtain on his own, at great personal risk to himself no less, in order to save the life of the one person who had shown him true compassion, care, and friendship.
In a book series that teaches us that love, above all else, can change everything Snape is no more out of place for his choice than Lily is for her own to not save her own life at the expense of her son. However, because he didn’t meet the expectations/demands of some who feel he should have been equipped with the kind of complex understanding that generally becomes more difficult when one comes from an underprivileged background where those expectations are not widely demonstrated and survival trumps them, he is referred to as an example of unworthy or undeserving of our understanding or acknowledgement. He’s no hero.
I would argue that this attitude ignores every person who has ever come from a place where the reasons for them supporting something or believing in something problematic are greater than those against them. Every person who has ever had the odds stacked against them in a system rigged to be unfair and leave them underprivileged. Every person who has experienced a gradual evolution of their views or behaviors over the course of their lives sparked by what may be a single ah-ha moment that led to that paradigm shift.
Indeed, it ignores people like me; raised in a household with a conservative, controlling, and abusive father in a deeply conservative state with few social or economic prospects to guarantee that I would get very far on my own, raised with the expectation that I supported my father’s problematic, prejudiced ideologies or suffer the consequences (abuse, homelessness, etc.). Who I was as a teenager evolved with time; a far cry from the pro-life, anti-feminist, racist who felt not saying the n-word was enough contribution to say I wasn’t racist I am now a seasoned academic and prolific blogger and writer when it comes to interpersonal feminism, social justice issues, and advocacy but the process wasn’t the product of a single moment where I snapped my fingers and rid myself of all the wrong ideas and thinking. I had to develop the tools and I needed access to the right resources (via exposure and education within social justice communities) to be able to navigate the complexities and nuances of social justice discourse and more completely challenge the old and damaging ideologies I had once adopted for several complex reasons. My start may have been shaky (it involved tentative attempts to compromise my old way of thinking with slight concessions for the sake of a friend who challenged me) but I continue to work to disabuse myself of the harmful rhetoric of my past and be a more effective advocate and ally.
The idea that all of it is but an exercise in futility, that people like me or who are far far more at a disadvantage than I as a white, cis, neurotypical woman ever could be, are not welcome because we didn’t start off already equipped with all the “right ideas and conduct” is gatekeeping. Plain and simple. It’s telling people that unless they can achieve certain terms and conditions then they shouldn’t bother. That continued effort and personal growth matter far less in our world than maintaining the idea of the purity politics they’ve created for the sake of their performative social justice discourse.
Snape, like Regulus, died a hero in the end but more interesting to me is the fact that while he was alive he also demonstrated to us a very important lesson on how imperfect people can still be redeemed and deserving; how even those of us starved of light can still find ways to grow –even if it is sometimes at a bit of a slant or less impressive than all those who have the best conditions for it.
To hell with the privilege and double-standards of anyone who would try to take that away.
