[ SECRET POST #2394 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2394 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 038 secrets from Secret Submission Post #342.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Nope.

I mean, I'm not really pro-Snape - but the idea that Snape couldn't have been in love with Lily because he was also a Death Eater is simply not realistic, because human beings are complex creatures who do complicated shit for complicated reasons that don't always hang together coherently. Is it rational for him to combine those two things? No. It's not. But people aren't always rational - even extremely smart people.

We are complicated people, and the world is a fucking complicated place, and it's completely plausible that Snape could have had a perfectly sincere love for Lily while also being a genocidal fuckhead (not what you would call a well-expressed love, but love nonetheless).

[(Anonymous)]

A+

[wldcatsprstr_14]

This.

Most people who hate a group of people rarely hate EVERY person in that group because there will always be one person who is somehow the exception. Whether that's a friend, a family member, or a partner.

[(Anonymous)]

Huge difference between hating a group of people, and aiding in the genocide of their people. I'm sorry, but I think it's pretty mutually exclusive to say that you love someone but will still help in murdering everyone of their kind and possibly that person too.

[wldcatsprstr_14]

As someone upthread pointed out, there were Nazis who had Jewish partners and still went about their jobs in aiding the Reich. Love is, at heart, saying that this person is more special and more important and different from everyone else around you. So I don't think the two have to be mutually exclusive at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Even racists have black friends. Our actions to a people as a whole are not necessarily how we'll act toward a single individual from that group.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed.

And I hate Snape.

[chardmonster]

There were a bunch of German functionaries with Jewish or half-Jewish wives during the Nazi era.

The government kept giving them incentives to divorce, a lot never did. This is while doing their job with a goddamn genocide going on that was obvious to many.

So yes, you can be in love with someone while working against their people. I used the Nazi example because I've actually studied up on that but examples come up time and again. You make exceptions for the people you like. You act in completely irrational and utterly human ways.

God help me never make me talk about history and Harry Potter in the same post again.

[feotakahari]

The two do go together, particularly in book 7 when Rowling really started pushing the Nazi imagery for the Death Eaters.

[(Anonymous)]

My grandfather's family was quite racist. Back in the 40's when one of the cousins married a black woman they collectively decided that she was simply a very dark Italian and welcomed her into the fold.

[(Anonymous)]

Right, yes, this argument. "People are complex! People are irrational! Don't be so mean about my favorite psychopath's complex and irrational feeeeeeelings!"

Love that involves genociding the love object's entire species isn't useful or worth defending.

[siofrabunnies]

Explaining something isn't the same as excusing it, you know.

[(Anonymous)]

Just because someone's in love, it doesn't make them a better person than if they hadn't been in love.

Explaining that Snape might have loved Lily doesn't excuse any of his actions. At all.

[(Anonymous)]

I am kind of curious how you read "genocidal fuckhead" and thought that this was a defense of Snape

[lex_antonia]

Who said it was useful or worth defending? People are saying it's not unrealistic, which is demonstrably true.

[(Anonymous)]

Psychopathy isn't prerequisite for being evil. If it was then none of the genocides of the 20th century would have occurred. There simply wouldn't have been enough psychopaths within any given population for them to be logistically possible. A person can be utterly vile and commit horrenous atrocities while having genuine care for certain individuals. The fact that you're capable of feeling love for a specific individual doesn't somehow automatically make you a good person.

[diet_poison]

this

[(Anonymous)]

I have real, enormous problems with calling it love, let alone sincere love. I'll grant it probably felt real and sincere to him, but I don't think you can call it love without respect, and willingly committing to the genocide of a group while having that one special exception who is of course different -- still shows a fundamental lack of respect for who that one exception is as a person, no matter how large a pedestal you have them on.

[(Anonymous)]

A+, "this, so hard," and all of the like. Have an internet brownie.

[(Anonymous)]

That's definitely fair (and I think that's what I was trying to get at with the caveat about "well-expressed love").

I don't know. I think Snape's feelings existed and were sincere and could be called love in the way that we commonly use that word. Was it love in the highest, realest sense? No. That's a good point and I agree.

[(Anonymous)]

Your idea of love is the ideal, what we should all strive toward. Unfortunately, people are not perfect, many of us are actually quite broken and so we can't quite manage to reach the ideal. Sure, we're not Snape-level or Nazis or racists, those are the extremest of extreme, but we can be selfish, destructive, disrespectful to those we love, perhaps without meaning to, perhaps without even realizing it. Love for others is an extension of love for yourself; if you don't even prioritize emotional well-being in yourself, how can you conceive it for other people? But if you can't accept that these feelings, even as badly expressed as they are, are still considered love, then you're saying only perfectly healthy, well-adjusted people are capable of love.

[(Anonymous)]

Stop trying to think of love as necessarily any better or worse than other emotions and maybe you will get why this is not true.

[herongale]

I kinda want to say, "stop romanticizing love, goddammit!"

But instead I'll say this: human beings are animals. All the feelings we have are animal feelings. Love included. This is not to denigrate either animals OR feelings, but to say this: feelings are subjective and in real life you probably understand that you can't really tell people what or how to feel (or rather, you can TRY, but I'm sure you like most people know that feelings are not something you can coerce out of someone, let alone simply make go away by saying they are the wrong feelings for a situation or that someone isn't good enough to have certain feelings). With fictional characters, it's a little easier to define their feelings since we get to have more of an interior view, but even so it's clear that Snape himself regards his feelings for Lily as nothing other than the grandest, most epic of loves... a love so big that FOR HIM it made him moderate his otherwise IN HIS VIEW fully justified sense of genetic superiority, working for a cause HE DIDN'T EVEN AGREE WITH ALL THAT MUCH just because it was what "she" would have wanted.

See, he had all the respect in the WORLD for Lily the person... it's just that to him, "Lily the person" was NOT the same thing as "Lily the person born of muggle blood." This makes him a hypocrite and also makes him kind of pathetically ignorant, but morality is NOT a prerequisite for whether someone can feel true love or not. Love isn't some kind of higher spiritual thing for everyone, nor does it have to be: in its simplest and purest form love is simply a desire to always be together with someone and to be regarded well by that someone. That's all it is, or has to be. I would argue that Snape's love can't be called "noble" or "respectful" in any form, but that still doesn't make it not love because THOSE SENTIMENTS ARE NOT THE ROOT OF WHAT LOVE IS.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you, but not because I have a romantic and idealized perception of love. I believe that love in a relationship is something that develops with time and what Snape felt for Lily would more accurately be describe as a crush or infatuation. What he feels is romantic and idealized and a far cry from the true feeling of love that can develop between two people who are actually together.

[fuchsiascreams]

This. You can also be a fucking racist as shit white supremacist and still be in love with a person from another race. You just rationalize it, "S/he is different from all those other (insert racial slur here)!".