HBP Chapter Two: "Spinner's End"

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

* So it turns out Snape lives in a dilapidated northern ex-industrial town. Hmm. Somehow I just can’t get my head around GrittyWorkingClass!Snape. Still, at least I can amuse myself by imagining him saying all his lines in a Yorkshire accent.

* So Bellatrix AKs the fox and kills it. I thought you had to really feel the hatred in order to cast an Unforgiveable properly? Maybe fear is a good enough motivator as well. Or she thought it was an Auror, and her hatred for them meant she could do the curse. Although “I thought perhaps it was an Auror” makes it sound like she wasn’t really sure. Maybe Bella just hates everything.

* “We must be the first of our kind ever to set foot—” Interesting. So apparently Bellatrix doesn’t consider half-bloods like Snape to be “real” wizards, and apparently Eileen didn’t count either – anybody know what her blood status was? I’d thought that she was a Pureblood, though I’m not sure where I got this from – if she was, then maybe Bella considers her to have forfeited her magical status by running off with a Muggle.

* “The place had an air of neglect, as though it were not usually inhabited.” So, is this because Snape only lives here during the school holidays, or does he normally spend the holidays in Hogwarts, and the house seems neglected because he doesn’t live here at all? I suppose it would make sense for Snape to live in Hogwarts – his room there is probably nicer than Spinner’s End – but I’m not sure why he’d have suddenly started living out.

* Snape lives with Wormtail, apparently without killing or seriously harming him, even though Wormtail betrayed Lilly to her death. So, either Snape doesn’t know who betrayed the Potters, or he’s got a really impressive amount of self-control, or the whole Lilly thing was just an explanation to give to Harry.

* Wormtail’s storyline in the later books makes no sense. For one thing, why did he go back to Voldemort? JK Rowling wants us to believe that only Voldemort could keep him safe, but why not just find a Muggle family to live with? Or a family of foreign wizards? I doubt that, say, the Japanese would know the story of Peter Pettigrew, so he’d probably be safe there.

* And the way everybody treats him with total contempt is unrealistic too. Finding and resurrecting Voldemort was quite an achievement. He ought to be given (at least grudging) fear and respect, not scornful rejection.

* And the cowardice charge seems a bit off after GOF. Cutting off his own hand as part of a magical ceremony? Eek. I know I couldn’t do that.

* Also, WTF is up with everybody calling him “Wormtail”? Why use his childhood nickname, instead of his actual name?

* I don’t know why, but the elf-made wine just seems really jarring to me. Maybe because all the other mentions of elves make them out to be low-status menial servants, not high-quality vintners. It sort of reads like JKR has just ripped something out of another fantasy world and put it here without thinking about whether it was really consistent with what she’d written elsewhere – or, to put it another way, like mediocre fan fiction.

* Most of Bellatrix’s reasons for distrusting Snape actually have a really obvious answer. He was spying on Dumbledore, so he couldn’t do anything too suspicious else he’d blow his cover. Duh.

* “And – forgive me – speaking of dangers… you were facing six teenagers, were you not?” Ooh, burn. Although as fun as it is to see Snape verbally bitchslapping people like this, I can’t help but think it would be better if rather than having characters mock the villains for their incompetence, JK Rowling had just written less incompetent villains.

* The same applies with Snape’s screed against Harry’s ineptness and extraordinary good luck. Whilst it’s nice to have a character acknowledge this for once, it would be even nicer to have a more intelligent protagonist.

* So… apparently the half-blood Snape is “Draco’s favourite teacher”, “Lucius’ old friend”, “the Dark Lord’s favourite, his most trusted advisor” – even allowing for a bit of exaggeration here, can you imagine a Jew being told something like this in fascist Germany? No, neither can I. Surprisingly tolerant bad guys 1, pasted-on Nazi analogies 0.

* Sooo, with the Unbreakable Vows… who gets to decide whether Snape is really helping Draco “to the best of his ability”? Or whether it seems that Draco will fail at his task? Is that the Bonder’s job?

Comments

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Heh, I loved this chapter just for the verbal skewering. But word on the incompetent villains and all.

I actually found working-class Snape immediately believable, I think for a number of reasons. Partly it fits with the sense I always had of him as someone who knew deprivation of some kind, but partly it comes from his habits, especially his rigid formality. Those born to the higher classes don't work so hard at formality and or loudly insist on maintaining it - they act like Draco and Lucius, comfortable and entitled. The ones who put such *visible* effort into constant formality and demanding shows of respect tend to be those striving for acceptance into a class higher than the one they were born into, and acutely conscious therefore of all the little things they are having to learn and work at in order to not appear lower-class. (But YES on Yorkshire Snape. Heh. XD Though he'd probably have worked at ironing out his accent as part of the trying-for-posh bit.)

RE Eileen, the Trio assume she's a pureblood, but we're never given confirmation of this fact. I like the Princes = purebloods idea myself, but there's relatively little direct canon support for it; it's really supposition. (Though I'm sure that JKR *meant* us to read her as pure, and to thus read Snape's story as a parallel to Voldie's, Voldie-lite, just as she meant Voldie's story to parallel the legend of Hitler's Jewish ancestry.)

I hear you on the cowardice thing. I think we're meant to read him as a coward because he preferred living, and doing whatever it took to stay alive, to dying. See Sirius' rant in the shack - 'courage' = willingness to die, the more pointlessly and grandstandingly, the better. That's why Gryffindor 'bravery' is meant to be the moral opposite of Slytherin cunning and self-preservation, and Harry's passive unthinking lamb-act is the thing that will defeat Voldie's Evil focus on never dying. The 'Wormtail' moniker: I have no Watsonian explanation (why and how would the DE's even know the nickname?), but Doyalistically I feel that it's probably an unconscious expression of JKR's contempt for the character. Just like the way she *always* has to remind us that the evil Slytherins are ugly according to conventional standards, with thinning hair or thick waistlines or pimples or bad teeth or greasy hair, etc.

Elf-made wine: WORD. I think she slipped into conventional fantasy pseudo-Tolkienism there for a minute and nobody in her editor's office (did she still have one?) noticed because hey, she DOES have elves.... Unless we were supposed to think of Dobby's cousin laboring to painstakingly squeeze each grape by hand, and conclude that *obviously* Snape is evil like the Malfoys because he relies upon exploited elf labor for his leisure?

It's not just the Malfoy connection and 'most favored' bit that require a bit of stretching when looked at in the context of what JKR TOLD us about the DEs and Snape - it's the whole idea that he ever voluntarily became a DE at all. Why on earth would a literal half-blood, even one with father issues, want to join a pureblood supremacist movement, and, more importantly, why on EARTH would these supposed supremacists want HIM in their exclusive club? Bella clearly doesn't think he belongs at this party, and it's not like he's on the list of political or strategic must-haves like Barty. So why did Voldie issue nobody-Snape the gilded invitation, and why did Sev accept it? (Also, what is up with Hagrid's assertion that Voldie tried to recruit the Potters?) I think a lot of the (admittedly very interesting) speculation about abusive!Tobias and Voldie feeling some personal connection to a fellow rejected half-blood come out of a need to make sense of this. I think the pasteded-on-yay Nazi imagery serves more to distract us from the actual specifics of what's going on more than it helps to clarify anything, grr.

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

I hear you on the cowardice thing. I think we're meant to read him as a coward because he preferred living, and doing whatever it took to stay alive, to dying. See Sirius' rant in the shack - 'courage' = willingness to die, the more pointlessly and grandstandingly, the better. That's why Gryffindor 'bravery' is meant to be the moral opposite of Slytherin cunning and self-preservation, and Harry's passive unthinking lamb-act is the thing that will defeat Voldie's Evil focus on never dying.

You know, to me this seems a lot less brave than just plain stupid. I mean, just to be pragmatic, isn't it a lot better to survive and be able to fight again, so you can be, y'know, actually useful?

Also, you make a really good point about Snape and the DE's. It kind of seems like JKR wanted to lump all of her bad-ish guys together, even if it didn't make sense. Other than Umbridge, but she is actually is an effective villain. I didn't originally feel this way, but the more that she tried to bring in Nazis, the less it really worked. I mean, Nazis and pseudo-nazis are kind of the go to villain, but they have been horribly overused. I know that villains can be hard to write- heck, I have had issues with this myself as an amateur writer, but nowadays Nazis are kind of a cop-out. Especially when the writer doesn't seem to understand how the original ones got into power in the first place.

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

"I hear you on the cowardice thing. I think we're meant to read him as a coward because he preferred living, and doing whatever it took to stay alive, to dying."

So that means Voldemort is a coward for making all those Horcruxes? ;)

Although seriously, that's another reason why Voldemort shouldn't show so much contempt for Pettigrew. He *knows* how powerful a motivator fear of death can be. If Voldie's spent most of his life trying to conquer death by making loads of Horcruxes, he ought to be a little bit more cautious of Pettigrew. Because after all, being willing to betray your best friend and mutilate yourself to avoid death isn't pathetic, it's *scary*. There's no telling what such a person might end up doing.

Hmm, maybe that's why Voldemort treats Peter so badly: he's trying to crush the man's self-esteem, make sure he won't turn on Voldemort like he turned on Lilly and James.

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/So that means Voldemort is a coward for making all those Horcruxes?/

Well, considering that Harry told him to “be a man” when he was taunting him about feeling some remorse in DH, I think that we are supposed to think of him as a coward in a way. Especially since Dumbledore tells him that he’s wrong for thinking that there’s nothing worse than death in OotP.

/that's another reason why Voldemort shouldn't show so much contempt for Pettigrew. He *knows* how powerful a motivator fear of death can be. If Voldie's spent most of his life trying to conquer death by making loads of Horcruxes, he ought to be a little bit more cautious of Pettigrew. Because after all, being willing to betray your best friend and mutilate yourself to avoid death isn't pathetic, it's *scary*. There's no telling what such a person might end up doing./

Exactly! Voldemort should be the one to truly see what Peter’s potential is, to see through Peter’s show of subservience. In fact, that could be a good reason for why Peter became a Death Eater in the first place, because he felt that Voldemort was the only person to truly appreciate his gifts, instead of mocking him and writing him off as a fawning toady like everyone else did. But, of course, Voldemort’s appreciation of Peter would show him in a somewhat positive light (regardless of his actual motivations for enlisting Peter), so he has to constantly mock Peter to show how evil he is.

/maybe that's why Voldemort treats Peter so badly: he's trying to crush the man's self-esteem, make sure he won't turn on Voldemort like he turned on Lilly and James./

But then if the reason why Peter betrayed Lily and James was because he didn’t feel properly appreciated by them and was boiling in resentment, then Voldemort’s contempt would definitely the wrong approach to maintaining Peter’s loyalty.

[sunnyskywalker]

It's too bad we never got to see a flashback or memory of how Voldemort treated Peter in 1981. If he did put on a show of appreciating Peter back then, it would be another point in favor of Voldemort's mind or emotional control or something having deteriorated since then, which just seems more plausible than him always being such a poor leader.

[night-axe.livejournal.com]

Wrt Eileen's blood status, I agree that JKR probably wanted to parallel Snape and Voldemort (and Harry) by giving a pureblood parent to each. I've come around to the idea that's actually what "half-blood" means: someone who's half a pureblood. "Halfbreed" is a concept bigots like -- half Us, half Other. I think that's where purebloods draw their limit of acceptance, and anyone who's less than half pureblooded is part of the great mass of mutts. If they cared enough to differentiate between all possible varieties of non-purebloods, they'd have separate words for them (quarterblood, semidemiquaverblood, etc etc).

Then there's Snape's silly pseud, The Half-Blood Prince. You're supposed to think it means "the prince who's a half-blood" but really it's "half-blood member of the Prince family". That's a pretty pointless distinguisher if there are other half-blood Princes around. It'd be like Harry calling himself The Magic Potter. Ergo, the Princes are purebloods.

That Voldemort might recruit a half-blood like Snape isn't all that surprising. Snape was Lucius's protegé, he was brilliant, it's not like anyone was going to have to marry him. I doubt Voldemort cared one way or the other about his blood status (is there any evidence that he ever was genuinely prejudiced, as opposed to exploiting other people's prejudices?). He's not really the type to have fellow feelings for anyone else; I think he just liked Snape because he was useful and ambitious but loyal. But what did Snape think he was signing up for? Not Muggleborn genocide, that's for sure. JKR stated he joined the DEs to impress Lily. How on earth did he expect to impress her with an anti-Muggleborn movement of whatever stripe? Is there anyone, including the author, who has any coherent idea of Voldemort's agenda anyway?

[oryx_leucoryx]

Then there's Snape's silly pseud, The Half-Blood Prince. You're supposed to think it means "the prince who's a half-blood" but really it's "half-blood member of the Prince family". That's a pretty pointless distinguisher if there are other half-blood Princes around. It'd be like Harry calling himself The Magic Potter. Ergo, the Princes are purebloods.

That assumes Severus was distinguishing himself from other Princes. But I doubt he knew Princes other than his mother. I took his emphasis on his blood status as being directed at his housemates as well as people like Slughorn - those who believed talent indicated pureblood status. He was saying 'see, I can invent all these spells while being a half-blood. Take that!'

JKR stated he joined the DEs to impress Lily. How on earth did he expect to impress her with an anti-Muggleborn movement of whatever stripe?

Not directly. But if he expected to learn cool things that would allow him to do something that would impress Lily then yes. Or if he could use insider knowledge to warn her and save her.

[night-axe.livejournal.com]

Excellent points. I'd assumed Snape was emphasizing the wizard side of his family (I may be a half-blood, but I'm one of the Princes) with a side order of boyish bragging (The owner of this book is a prince...sort of). Hadn't considered his nickname might simply mean "Half-blood Pride". But if Snape's housemates treated him like a second class citizen, to the point where this nickname was his "screw you" response, why did he at the same time take up the purebloodist cause? I'm probably missing something but why didn't he take the next logical step and reject their values completely? Was he really that delusional, or desperate for a job, or...?

[oryx_leucoryx]

Variations of internalized bigotry are a common thing. Think of 'chill girls' - those women who make it in men-dominated areas and adopt misogynystic attitudes - they are proud in how they overcame the obstacles in their way but don't think anything should be done to improve things for other women - anyone who doesn't do as well as they did probably deserves it. Also consider that the supposedly open-minded side among the wizards rejected him for being a Slytherin, for studying the Dark Arts, for existing. Whichever side he chose he'd have to deal with self-loathing. It's just a matter of which aspect of himself he'd have to loath.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Hmm. If Severus could have found an adequate source of income that was independent of politics he might have been able to stay out of the politics and eventually gained peace of mind. Darkglare has a few such scenarios. In 'Snape's Worst Memory' he becomes independently wealthy through a complicated inheritance. In 'Be careful What You Wish For' (WIP) he has an independent Dark Arts consulting business. This allows him to avoid both Tom and Albus, and handle the Ministry from a position of power.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

I agree completely on working-class Snape; it just made sense to me immediately to read this character this way. In fact, Jodel had been arguing that he was working-class for years. And his extreme formality is a part of that reading.

As to the cowardice: apparently anyone who ever tries to save their own life, for whatever reason, is a coward by definition in the Potterverse. So yes, making Horcruxes is certainly a sign of cowardice.