Why Snape/Lily is a horrific ship:

[discipuladc]

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

Comments

[pet_lunatic]

Oddly enough I said almost exactly this to somebody just the other day! I like Snape as a literary device - I think he's unusual: the idea of somebody on 'our side' being, when it comes down to it, such a horrendously twisted human being. Not just messed up and therefore perhaps deserving of sympathy, but so appalling that he's basically irredeemable, in that even his 'redemption' was motivated by inexcusable underlying traits. It's not common (in my experience, anyway!), especially in literature designed for younger readers, to come across a character like Snape batting for the good guys. How anyone could interpret his attitude towards Lily as anything other than profoundly disturbing, though, is amazing to me. I'm a little concerned that Dumbledore seems to think his weird obsession with her is touching as opposed to pathological. I hope he was just using it to manipulate Snape to do what he needed him to do! Come to think of it, half the supposed good guys in HP are, at the root of it, gits. I honestly don't know if that was

[discipuladc]

I was inclined to think that Dumbledore was just being manipulative, because that's how I see the character. Of course, Harry naming a kid Severus suggests that Snape has been redeemed in Harry's eyes, and since Rowling doesn't weigh in on this being problematic in the text, she almost condones it.

[leighleighla]

Totally agree.

I keep wondering what things would have been like if in a twisted world, Voldemort had killed James and Harry, but left Lily alive.

I imagine Snape would not have lived very long. I'm pretty sure she would have snapped his neck pretty clean.

But thing about that. If she had lived and James and Harry had died...her husband, whom she clearly loved, and her...what was he? two months old? Three? That's terrible. That's not sweet at all.

[discipuladc]

Yeah, July to late Oct, so 3-4 months.

I'd like to think of Lily as someone who would have figured out that she wasn't allowed to live for no reason, and who had motive, and taken her revenge on Snape instead of running to him for comfort. If Snape didn't expect that, he must not have really respected her at all, just desired to posses her as a status symbol.