Why Snape/Lily is a horrific ship:
Recently a couple of friends of mine remarked that they found the Snape/Lily relationship in the Harry Potter series "sweet," and I was too aghast to reply coherently, so I'm going to do it now.
I was profoundly disappointed when Rowling chose to go make Snape's obsession with Lily his primary motivation because I though that the cliche took away depth from the character as well as making a character I liked completely unsympathetic. Rather than a complex character with loyalties toward his former housemates but socio-poltical sympathies that are anti-genocide that winds up siding with people he personally dislikes because of a moral stance, Rowling turned him into a single-minded stalker.
For those of you fuzzy on the details, books five through seven (Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows) reveal the back story. Growing up, Lily was just about the only person kind to Snape and his thus his best friend. His worst memory was in his fifth year when he called her a mudblood because he was trying to be cool and accepted by his prejudiced classmates. When Lily marries James Potter and has Harry, Snape arranges for Voldemort to kill James and Harry, so long as Lily is left alive. The fact that Voldemort killed Lily is what actually ensures Snape's loyalty to The Order of the Phoenix.
So, Snape doesn't respect Lily enough to be kind to her under peer pressure. He's so controlling that he arranges to murder her husband and son, because he can't allow her to have a life without him. Only revenge really makes him take a stand against murderers obsessed with blood purity.
And some of my friends like this? I can only hope that they aren't big enough HP fans to realize what they were saying, and that they simply meant that Snape still thinking of Lily years later was sweet. Except that for anyone that knows the series, he wasn't still in love with a childhood friend over a decade later. He was still obsessed with the woman over whom he felt such ownership of that he wanted to kill her family without being obligated to even be nice to her. That's not love. That's not sweet. That's not a sympathetic or complex character. That's a rabid dog that happened to wind up hell-bent on bringing down the bad guys. Thus it completely undermines the message of the first book, not to assume that someone is evil just because they're a bit spooky and unpleasant.
This is particularly triggering for me since I spent five years in a "relationship" based on abuse. It was the typical controlling, emotionally abusive, rape-filled "marriage" that I couldn't escape due to violence against me and death threats against me and my family. I escaped due to a lucky series of coincidences as well as some very clever maneuvering.
Now, I'm at least as hopeless a romantic as the next person. I love Jane Austen relationships where people don't give up on love when things get hard. I'm indulging in some pining as circumstance takes someone important from my life as we speak. But it isn't love without respect, trust, and consent.
There's nothing sweet about stalking.
Related post on Twilight: http://discipuladc.livejournal.com/304454.html
I was profoundly disappointed when Rowling chose to go make Snape's obsession with Lily his primary motivation because I though that the cliche took away depth from the character as well as making a character I liked completely unsympathetic. Rather than a complex character with loyalties toward his former housemates but socio-poltical sympathies that are anti-genocide that winds up siding with people he personally dislikes because of a moral stance, Rowling turned him into a single-minded stalker.
For those of you fuzzy on the details, books five through seven (Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows) reveal the back story. Growing up, Lily was just about the only person kind to Snape and his thus his best friend. His worst memory was in his fifth year when he called her a mudblood because he was trying to be cool and accepted by his prejudiced classmates. When Lily marries James Potter and has Harry, Snape arranges for Voldemort to kill James and Harry, so long as Lily is left alive. The fact that Voldemort killed Lily is what actually ensures Snape's loyalty to The Order of the Phoenix.
So, Snape doesn't respect Lily enough to be kind to her under peer pressure. He's so controlling that he arranges to murder her husband and son, because he can't allow her to have a life without him. Only revenge really makes him take a stand against murderers obsessed with blood purity.
And some of my friends like this? I can only hope that they aren't big enough HP fans to realize what they were saying, and that they simply meant that Snape still thinking of Lily years later was sweet. Except that for anyone that knows the series, he wasn't still in love with a childhood friend over a decade later. He was still obsessed with the woman over whom he felt such ownership of that he wanted to kill her family without being obligated to even be nice to her. That's not love. That's not sweet. That's not a sympathetic or complex character. That's a rabid dog that happened to wind up hell-bent on bringing down the bad guys. Thus it completely undermines the message of the first book, not to assume that someone is evil just because they're a bit spooky and unpleasant.
This is particularly triggering for me since I spent five years in a "relationship" based on abuse. It was the typical controlling, emotionally abusive, rape-filled "marriage" that I couldn't escape due to violence against me and death threats against me and my family. I escaped due to a lucky series of coincidences as well as some very clever maneuvering.
Now, I'm at least as hopeless a romantic as the next person. I love Jane Austen relationships where people don't give up on love when things get hard. I'm indulging in some pining as circumstance takes someone important from my life as we speak. But it isn't love without respect, trust, and consent.
There's nothing sweet about stalking.
Related post on Twilight: http://discipuladc.livejournal.com/304454.html