Sadly, it still doesn’t occur to any student that we see that the house cup contest is meaningless and dumb.
I've always found it so weird that they take it so seriously, even from the first book. The closest equivalent we had at my school was the occasional competition between the dorms that nobody took all that seriously. It feels like they're all so concerned about winning their answer to penny wars or whatever and they don't even get a pizza party for it. Of course, we all had actual friends in other dorms and didn't see where we slept as indicating anything about the nature of our souls.
Snape hates Harry for being "like his father" but he's got his mother's worst qualities too. "I'm totally compassionate and caring about everybody while being a jerk!"
That's an interesting thought. Snape has this idealized version of Lily built up in his head (though I guess everyone else kind of does too). He might well hate Harry for reminding him just how untrue his mental version is, both by forcing him to look at the memory and by acting a bit like her. I could also kind of see Dumbledore cluelessly causing a great deal of anguish by telling him to try to see the Lily in Harry instead of the James.
I tend to think of his great love for Lily as being something of a crutch by that point - I think he genuinely had the change of heart about Voldemort that everyone was assuming he'd had before DH killed that idea, but he thinks so badly of himself that he believes he needs someone else to enable him to do the right thing. So, he uses Ideal!Lily to lean on in his head and Dumbledore (real or portrait) to determine what he actually does. Any reminder of what she was really like would probably feel like a hit to his moral center.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-05-02 06:39 pm (UTC)I've always found it so weird that they take it so seriously, even from the first book. The closest equivalent we had at my school was the occasional competition between the dorms that nobody took all that seriously. It feels like they're all so concerned about winning their answer to penny wars or whatever and they don't even get a pizza party for it. Of course, we all had actual friends in other dorms and didn't see where we slept as indicating anything about the nature of our souls.
Snape hates Harry for being "like his father" but he's got his mother's worst qualities too. "I'm totally compassionate and caring about everybody while being a jerk!"
That's an interesting thought. Snape has this idealized version of Lily built up in his head (though I guess everyone else kind of does too). He might well hate Harry for reminding him just how untrue his mental version is, both by forcing him to look at the memory and by acting a bit like her. I could also kind of see Dumbledore cluelessly causing a great deal of anguish by telling him to try to see the Lily in Harry instead of the James.
I tend to think of his great love for Lily as being something of a crutch by that point - I think he genuinely had the change of heart about Voldemort that everyone was assuming he'd had before DH killed that idea, but he thinks so badly of himself that he believes he needs someone else to enable him to do the right thing. So, he uses Ideal!Lily to lean on in his head and Dumbledore (real or portrait) to determine what he actually does. Any reminder of what she was really like would probably feel like a hit to his moral center.