death to capslock

Or, a multi-part meditation on Severus Snape, moral struggle, and love.

All that thinking about terri's Greater Love and the fic I'm writing has prompted me to blather on a bit about how I see Severus as embodying the more complex aspects of moral struggle that work their way into the HP books, despite JKR's refusal to let him openly come into his own on the page. I’ll be posting the parts of this as they get written (that is, in between writing sections of my dissertation, sigh). It’ll be more a sprawling web of related pieces than a single long argument, I think, so I’ll just post whatever feels complete enough at the time. This is an introduction of sorts to the theme, and to my view of Severus. It’s a view heavily inspired by our own terri and mary, as well a few others over on Snapedom and elsewhere.

I suppose my view of Albus is somewhere between terri’s Fool Albus and marionros’ Narcissist Albus, with a large helping of swythyv’s Well-Intentioned Moral Failure Albus. When I’m being generous.

(Hey! I can be as cynical and petty as any potions master too, you know – no claiming perfection of spirit here. XD )

My view of Voldemort… Well, we’ll get to that, in time.

Onward.

* * *

Indestructible – Part I

"You’ve got to hide your love away…” sang the Beatles.

Well. I don’t think they meant it quite this way, but looked at from a certain angle it’s an apt theme song for our dear Professor during the most spiritually trying phase of his struggle, and the war, that we see.

And no, I don’t just mean the surface fact of hiding from Voldemort, even under torture and Legilimency, any memory that might betray that he, in one way or another, loved and loves a girl named Lily. Or even a boy named Harry, or a man named Albus.

That’s the easy part.

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