Snape, didn't love her; at least not in the way most people in comfortable circumstances would like to be loved. Again, he chose the deatheaters over her. Does anyone think that Voldemort was begging a halfblood Slytherin join to his inner circle? No, that was an active choice, an ambition, on his part. To kill people like her. I think on some level later on he must have hated her: she has the one thing that made him "special" magic, and she's better at it than him, and then to top it off, she goes and marries his school rival. His ideas, of what could have been had his plan to allow Voldemort to murder Harry and James Potter come to fruition amount to little more than disturbing fantasy.

 

Well that went to a needlessly creepy place.

 

Snape is a manchild with an irrational grudge, but what you wrote there has no reflection in canon. That's straight from an extreme end of the fanon spectrum.

Besides, everyone knows Snape never has and never will have sex. Puh-lease.

 

The man essentially torments a child (and to a 'lesser' extent an entire generation of children) simply because he was bullied by the Marauders. If not the sign of an evil man it is definitely that of a broken one. For all his love for Lily he still went and joined a group whose views were completely against her and everything she stood for, only changing his mind when this resulted in her death. I'm personally of the opinion that Snape, whilst a good character, was a terrible individual.

 

I think Snape was awesome and should have been with Lily instead of that berk James.

 

SNAPE. good character. bad person. did bad shit, liked a girl, doesn't make up for it. the end.

Can the thread be over, now?

Edit: Are you kidding me? Infracted. -Sesc

 

This thread along with a few others seem to have become a magnet for post count spam. When I get a notification for one, I now know to expect a notification for the others within minutes.

Unsubscribed.

 

He brought it all on himself with the choices he made as a student at Hogwarts. He would have been a loyal death eater if the prophecy was about anyone other than HP.
One good deed does not make up for countless mistakes.

 

My personal opinion is that, had the prophecy not been able to apply to Lily or her kid, Snape would have been perfectly okay with Voldemort killing some other family.

So while Snape's love for Lily led to his betrayal of Riddle, I don't think it's a redeeming factor. Especially since the way he treated Lily's legacy was pretty shitty, even if he was also the son of his schoolyard tormentor and beared a much greater resemblance to said tormentor.

His love may have been genuine, but it's not a sufficient excuse to his actions. When he ended up sacrificing his life, I think he, in some small way, did manage to make up for some of his actions.

 

JKR discussed this on Twitter a few months ago. For posterity:

 

No, but his other acts such as being a double agent within the Death Eaters did. He did a lot of evil, but then repented and risked his life to gain redemption. He was still an ass though.

 

/10charlimit

 

I think something the fandom ignores is how genuinely abhorrent and creepy Snape's behavior is towards Lily. In my view, he saw Lily as nothing more than a sexual object, or even just an object since the first minute he met her.

He met her and seems to have laid claim to her somehow, and is frightened of anyone else taking her away from him. That's not a friendship, that's an obsession. He even tried to get her away from her sister, even though he really didn't need any help in causing a rift between them.

It only got worse when he reached puberty, which is when seeing her as a sexual object comes in. Her wishes and desires are not important -- only his are. He can't understand why she doesn't love him, and later can't understand how she could desire someone else other than him. He even shows this when he tries to tell her that he's not going to 'allow' her to be with James Potter. He backtracks, of course, when she calls him out on his incredible sexism, but it's still there. He shows all the signs of an abuser in a relationship, trying to manipulate Lily by telling her that he "thought they were best friends" and such. It's classic manipulation.

If Snape ever truly loved Lily, instead of treating her as something that belonged to him, he could have never have joined Voldemort, whose primary purpose (at least to the public) was the destroy anyone not purebred.

He's the classic "nice guy". He feels that he's deserving on Lily's affections and love, but when he doesn't get it, he resorts to insults and violence. I'd suggest that he never saw Lily as more than something to keep him company in the beginning, like a cherished pet, and then someone to have sex with later on. It fits with his upbringing, seeing muggles and muggleborns as less than human.

 

This seems...reductive. He didn't like Petunia, and didn't understand why Lily did, since she was a muggle who was mean to both him and Lily, hated magic etc. I don't think that's the same as him trying to take her away from her.

And he never attacked or resented her out of jealousy, nor did he ever reveal his feelings to Lily. And not caring about her feelings is kind of incongruous with him opposing Voldemort and anti-muggleborn bigotry and protecting Harry on her behalf.

 

I defy you to categorically prove that. :awesome

You know, this raises an interesting question.

Would Petunia have hated magic so much and thus treated Harry so poorly if Snape hadn't injured her and left such a terrible impression on her? Would the rift between her and Lily have been as bad? Years later, Petunia remembered Snape ("that awful boy" - OoTP, Ch2) and still spoke of him with obvious distaste. She probably felt like most of the business with Lily was his fault for telling her about magic, and it's doubtless he came off like a scrubby, creepy, git to her, as a child.

I mean, sure, she was jealous of Lily's abilities and angry at the magical world for taking Lily away while leaving her behind, but maybe if Snape hadn't been there to make wizards seem like dicks from the outset, she wouldn't have been as bad as she was.

You can trace almost everything terrible that happened in the series to three events: Albus meeting Gellert Grindelwald, Merope Gaunt raping meeting Tom Riddle Sr., and Snape meeting Lily.

Gee... in the Wizarding World, bad relationships are trouble for everyone.

Spoiler

Kind of puts a new angle on the 'Marriage Law' fic: After Skeeter's book on Dumbledore is published and then the details on Voldemort's life come out, the Ministry decides that, for the good of the world, people can't be trusted to manage their own love lives; so they form a committee whose job it is to match people up.

No purebloods using the law to basically enslave others; no Ministry dictating who the citizens can marry, in an effort to offset the damage centuries of rampant inbreeding has done; just bureaucrats deciding the general public is too stupid to go out on the pull without causing Word War III.

Now, let's see how long it takes for this idea to enter the fandumb's collective unconscious and launch a thousand bad-fics.

If your skin is crawling, that only means that you are sane.

J.K.R. may have fumbled the chance to make people more accepting of Harry/Ginny (to the point where even she seems to have reconsidered Harry's options), but no one can say she doesn't know a thing or two about writing. Right there we see the crux of exactly how much of a betrayal it was, when Snape called Lily a mudblood (not to mention how fucking creepy he was).

They meet (after he'd stalked her from afar for a while), he tells her about magic, and then when she asks if her being muggleborn will make a difference in the Wizarding World, he tells her 'no.' This was clearly very important to her, right from the start.

Then it turns out that not only were there plenty of people out there who very much believed that it did matter and in fact made her less of a person to them, but Snape also turns around and puts himself in the same boat by using that racial slur against her, and joining a group of people who hate her kind and would see them dead.

I wonder how many people read that and let it slide right by them. (Although, a lot of it apparently slid right by Harry, too, since he named his son after his mother's stalker - and he didn't just read it, he saw it happening right in front of him!)

 

Regarding his prejudices and her feelings: it's like saying that a man born into the teachings of the KKK is able to both love a black woman as his equal and also hold those racist beliefs firm within his mind. The two are mutually exclusive. You cannot truly love someone if you despise and see the core of their being as inferior or dirty. Can a KKK member find Tyra Banks attractive and be willing to have sex with her, even wanting to have sex with her? Yes, even if he thinks her to be little more than an animal.

It's the same thing with Snape. He treats Lily as a sexual object because he can't see past his pureblood prejudices.

Petunia was only mean to Lily after she herself got rejected from Hogwarts after sending a message to Dumbledore. Before that we have no notion of how she acted when she realized magic was actually real.

Look at that phrasing. He's subtly distancing Petunia from Lily, but at the same time, replacing Petunia with himself.

 

No, his love for Lily doesn't redeem him. Just because somebody is in love doesn't mean he or she can't do bad things. A villain, although he or she might love somebody, has still committed crimes.

 

All this conversation reminds me of this article that I'm going to try to link properly this time instead of pasting, thanks guy in funny pictures!

Nietzsche: Love, Guilt & Redemption

It's only kind of relevant but this thread reminded me of it, because we're talking about Snape's love for Lily, Snape's guilt for all the bad things he did, and whether or not he could even be redeemed for the latter because of the former! But mostly the title is similar, the article is kind of hard to follow to be honest.

But the interesting question here is if redemption is really a possible thing when the other person is dead. Redemption is like clearing a debt, but if Lily is dead and it's her that Snape owes the debt to, then how can he pay it and know if the price is worth it?

So his love for Lily doesn't redeem him from anything because that didn't come after to help clear his debt. Instead you might argue that his 'helping' (air quotes!) Harry might have redeemed his earlier actions. Devoting his life to defeating the Dark Lord and ensuring that her son survived might have redeemed Snape for his past actions, and Lily might even agree.

Except Snape was a big jerk the whole time, and who knows, Lily might not have forgiven him for his role in events even if he died saving Harry's life, I mean, we can't know, and if we can't know is redemption possible? Maybe, but how do you know?

So I'd say that his love definitely doesn't excuse anything, but it's possible his actions later did, except he sort of sucked at all those later actions in a lot of important ways, so maybe not.

I guess Harry thought his later actions redeemed him though, since he named his son partly after Snape, so maybe so. With Lily dead Harry is the only possible person left to say that his debt was cleared, but I'm not sure if that counts or not.

What defines redemption in this situation?

Oh and I guess I should have mentioned that the whole "make up for" bit in the original post is what I took to mean redeemed because redeemed is a more specific word and I didn't want to keep typing "make up for" all the time but if that's not the concept you wanted to impart then my bad, haha.