Lily's Friend: Renamed "With Her Own Eyes": A WIP

[terri_testing]

With Her Own Eyes

Summary: Mary Macdonald watches the breakup of another of Lily Evan’s friendships.

Warning: Emo!Snape.

The fire bites, the fire bites. Bites

Comments

[oryx_leucoryx]

There is a formatting problem - looks like you missed a tag to end the italics.

I don't think I need to see the canon conversation - it obviously was the reason for Severus' renewed temporary happiness. But I wonder what caused the return of the foul mood.

BTW your summary says "Mary Macdonald watches the breakup of another of Lily Evan’s friendships" - were there other broken friendships? Or was this a reference to Lily's relationship with Petunia?

And I wonder about Mary thinking of James "no wonder if James had eyes for Lily instead. Even if she was a Muggleborn." Is this a reflection of Mary's thoughts about blood status? Does she expect james to prefer someone else over a Muggle-born?

[totalreadr]

What oryx_leucoryx said: It's clear Severus' "looking as though he’d invented a spell to stride on sunlight" was because of the canon conversation.

...

I was just thinking of the computer game Civilization II (I don't need no stinkin' Call to Power, or III, or IV) and how if you have a "Fundamentalist" government, you can break treaties and alliances and so on with much less of a hit to your reputation because, the manual explains, "The other countries don't expect any better from you."

Likewise, when Draco called Hermione a Mudblood, Hermione finally had an excuse to slap him, but in general, neither the Trio nor the readers thought any worse of him. They (unlike Lily) didn't expect any better from a Slytherin.

I guess I expect the same attitude from Mary, so I get confused when she gives so very much emotion to Severus. She almost even comes off like Lily toward James in SWM!

“Why, that ungrateful little-jerk!”

To me "jerk" seems a little too much what you'd call a peer. What about something like "worm"?

It made her quite hot

[oryx_leucoryx]

As I understand it, Terri needs Mary to be someone who has a sympathetic view of James. Knowing Terri's view of James, this doesn't leave much room for Mary to be much else. I'm not even sure if a female Sirius would have worked because she'd be left out.

[lynn_waterfall]

Re-reading this, I'm struck by how easily Muggleborns would find themselves in the Dark = evil group. They'd certainly be familiar with metaphors where darkness is equated with evil, and if the word "Dark" was generally used when people disapproved of something, or *did* mean that it was evil, they'd probably never realize that the situation was more complicated than that.

Unless someone sat them down and explained it to them, but Hogwarts isn't very good about teaching Muggleborns about wizarding culture. Hermione only knows as much as she does because she reads obsessively, and even *she* only learned about house elves in her first three years in the WW through word of mouth. Even after that, she only happened to meet Winky at the World Cup, and only happened to hear about house elves at Hogwarts from Nearly Headless Nick.