case: (Default)
Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2013-04-03 06:41 pm

[ SECRET POST #2283 ]


⌈ Secret Post #2283 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________



16.


__________________________________________________


















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 032 secrets from Secret Submission Post #326.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

(Anonymous) 2013-04-04 03:14 am (UTC)(link)
While you make a reasonable enough point about Snape's unfair and hurtful behavior as a teacher, I'm not sure how the narrative could have gone any other way. From the first book, Snape is set up as the grudging ally who would eventually make the Heroic Sacrifice so that the protagonist could succeed. It would be really hard for Harry to have said, "Wow, this guy made the ultimate sacrifice to help save us and defeat the Pureblood Supremacists... but he used his authority to mistreat the kids he supervised, so fuck him and his heroic death." I think the better message there is that a person doesn't have to be perfect in order to do the right thing in the end, and that you don't need to like someone personally in order to respect what they've done. I thought the books at least touched on those ideas a bit, but I last read them about five years ago, so YMMV.

With Spike, I was actually really interested in the way Spike's redemption brought up the question of the nature of vampirism and the morality of the Slayer. How morally culpable are vampires for their actions -- can they choose to do otherwise? The conclusion I came to is that it very much depended on who and what the person was in life; as a mortal, Spike had a deep capacity for selfless love that was not entirely eradicated by becoming a vampire (see his devotion to Dru). Thus, his period of enforced pacifism and socialization with humans allowed him to re-develop some rudimentary moral reasoning within a very narrow in-group, and when that in-group had a strong moral compass, he was able to stumble along in that general direction with only vague prompting. It was a specific confluence of factors that would be impractical to replicate for any significant number of vampires, and probably wouldn't work on the majority of them anyway (for instance, it would never have worked on Angelus), so I don't think that it wholly undercuts the work of the Slayer -- but I like the fact that it removed the hard binary of human/monster. It made the setting richer, and I think it complemented the other themes of the later seasons well (for instance, Season 6 was all about how humans could be just as monstrous as any demon -- so why can't a demon go the other way, and become more human?).