I love Gryffindor but even I have to admit it’s probably the most shit stupid idea for a Hogwarts House because it’s like “yes let’s take all the adolescents with poor impulse control and put them ALL IN THE SAME PLACE”
What a lot of people don’t realise is that Helga Hufflepuff basically gamed the entire house system so that ordinary, chill people could get some goddamn peace for a change.
“Snape was just a fuckboy who was bitter he got friendzoned,” says the fan who romanticizes the Marauders and conveniently forgets that the only character to ever act entitled to Lily’s romantic attention was James Potter, who bullied Snape from the start simply because Snape was Lily’s friend and male. Like, if anyone was a fuckboy…
Except that Snape is the one who felt entitled to Lily’s attention. Did James pursue her a little too aggressively? Yes, but he behaved like a pretty typical teenage boy with a crush. When Lily rejects him James brushes it off and keeps trying to get him to liker her, Snape’s the one who gets upset and lashes out at her. Also, by literally everyone else Snape and James are described as having the same sort of relationship as Harry and Malfoy but we only ever see the relationship from Snape’s point of view because James is dead. Do you think Harry is a bully too?
So here’s the thing. Literally nothing you just said is supported in canon.
James was more than “a little too aggressive” in his pursuit of Lily. He relentlessly bullied her best friend, and at one point even tried to use this as leverage to get Lily to date him (he’d stop the torment, if Lily would agree to a date). Lily herself calls him out on how he is a bully, saying he walks down corridors, hexing anyone who annoys him just because he can. When they get together in 7th year, it’s because he supposedly has stopped his bullying ways, but continues to bully Severus in secret behind her back. That is canon. That is said by Sirius and Remus, after Harry saw “Snape’s worst memory” and was appalled at how fucking horrid his father was.
And, why is it that James constantly bullies Severus?
JK herself said: “James always suspected Snape harboured deeper feelings for Lily, which was a factor in James’ behaviour towards Snape.“
So. Because Severus Snape was Lily Evans’ best friend, and a guy, James worried that he was a rival for her affections, and from day one targeted him for bullying. Because how dare Severus even think he has the right to talk to her, when obviously James is the one she should pay attention to.
The only character we see not respect Lily’s rejection is James Potter. This is canon. He doesn’t ever take “no” for an answer. He refuses to. He resorts to lying to her in order to finally get her to date him.
Severus Snape, for one, never tried to be anything more to Lily than her friend. We are given no evidence to the contrary. And when she breaks off their friendship, he leaves her alone. We see him bargain for her life, we see him mourn her, but we see nothing to suggest he ever talked to her again after she ended their friendship. He respected her decision, and backed off.
You also seem to misunderstand the comparison between Harry and Draco. Harry is Severus and Draco is James. It’s another case of a rich, self-entitled jerk bullying someone from an abusive home, just because he feels slighted.
I almost scrolled past this, but I won’t because it’s exactly the kind of Snape apologia and vilification of James that really bothers me in the HP fandom.
1- There is absolutely no evidence in canon that James ‘relentlessly’ pursued Lily. That is fanon. Sure fanon has that trope about James repetitively asking Lily out and almost stalking her. In canon we only see James ever ask Lily out ONCE. In Snape’s worst memory. The rest of the time we see Snape having to tell Lily that James fancies her and there is no evidence she even knew about it before that, then we have Lily actively defend the maradaurs to Snape asking him why he was so obessed with them :
(DH, The Prince’s tale, p540 bloomsburry edition )
“… thought we were supposed to be friends?” Snape was saying. “Best friends?” “We are, Sev, but I don’t like some of the people you’re hanging around with! I’m sorry, but I detest Avery and Mulciber! Mulciber! What do you see in him Sev? He’s creepy! D’you know what he tried to do to Mary Macdonald the other day?” Lily ha reached a pillar and leaned against it, looking up into the thin, sallow face. “That was nothing” said Snape. “It was a laugh, that’s all -” “It was Dark Magic, and if you think that’s funny -” “What about the stuff Potter and his mates get up to?” demanded Snape. His colour rose again as he said it, unable, it seemed to hold in his resentment. “What’s Potter to do with anything?” said Lily. “They sneak out at night. There’s something weird about that Lupin. Where does he keep going?” “He’s ill,” said Lily. “They say he’s ill -” “Every month at the full moon?” said Snape. “I know your theory,” said Lily, and she sounded cold “Why are you so obsessed with them, anyway? Why do you care what they’re doing at night?” “I’m just trying to show you they’re not as wonderful as everyone seems to think they are.” The intensity of his gaze made her blush; “They don’t use Dark Magic, though”.
Now, what does this scene tells you. First for someone who supposedly didn’t give as good as he got and was only the helpless victim of James, we learn that : 1- Lily doesn’t understand why he is so obsessed with them and can’t see the resemblance between the marauders and the very real, blood supremacist, dark magic using bullies that Snape was hanging out with and found funny. 2- Snape was very clearly trying to out Remus and actively trying to prove his case; so please do tell me, if this isn’t reason enough for James to hate Snape then what is? Not only did Snape actively try back when he was 15, but he DID out Remus years later because he couldn’t let go of the past when Remus was being nothing but cordial with him.
2- Which brings me to my next point, the idea that Snape was an innocent victim and not a bully himself is utter bullshit.
Let’s look at another excerpt from the books shall we:
(DH, The Prince’s tale, p542, Blommsburry edition)
“I was. I would have done. I never meant to call you Mudblood, it just -” “Slipped out?” There was no pity in Lily’s voice. “It’s too late. I’ve made excuses for you for years. None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you. You and your precious little Death Eater friends – you see, you don’t even deny it! You don’t even deny that’s what you’re all aiming to be! You can’t wait to join You-Know-Who, can you?” He opened his mouth, but closed it without speaking. “I can’t pretend any more. You’ve chosen your way, I’ve chosen mine.” “No – listen, I didn’t mean -” “- to call me a Mudblood? But you call everyone of my birth Mudblood, Severus. Why should I be any different?”
Now what does this tells us? This tells us that unlike what the Snape apologists often love to pretend, Snape wasn’t an inactive by stander in the wannabe-death eaters sessions of muggleborns bullying. He actively took part in it, he actively threw slurs at them. Lily herself mention that and Snape doesn’t deny any of it.
Not only that but we also know that Snape invented Levicorpus, which we later see James use, how do you think James learned it if not because he had it used against him? We even see Snape use Sectusempra on James; Sectusempra, aka the spell capable of cutting someone open and leave them to bleed to death. This is the kind of experimentation Snape did with Dark Magic, so spare me if I don’t buy the “poor innocent Snape” narrative. He was a bully at school, going after muggleborn with his band of magical equivalent to the Hitler youth. But aside from that, please do tell me more about how Snape was innocent and never gave as much as he got when even LILY calls him out on his bullying of Muggleborns and admitted herself that she couldn’t excuse him anymore.
“Severus Snape, for one, never tried to be anything more to Lily than her friend. We are given no evidence to the contrary. And when she breaks off their friendship, he leaves her alone. We see him bargain for her life, we see him mourn her, but we see nothing to suggest he ever talked to her again after she ended their friendship. He respected her decision, and backed off.”
Excuse me? We should admire him because he backed off after HE threw a slur at her and still tried to talk to her when she didn’t want to, even saying he would sleep in front of the common room if she refused to have that talk?
And above all, we should think Snape is such a great guy because he bargained for her life? WHAT? Snape – may I remind you – was the reason why her life was even in danger to start with! Snape is the one who sold a BABY’S LIFE to Voldemort without second thoughts and only backed off when he realized that the baby in question was Lily’s. And not only that but he only partly backed off because he didn’t give a shit about what would happen to Harry and James, AKA the man she loved and HER SON. Dumbledore himself called him out on it:
“You disgust me,” said Dumbledore, and Harry had never heard so much contempt in his voice. Snape seemed to shrink a little. “You do not care, then about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want?”
I genuinely cannot believe my eyes that some people are trying to paint this as a selfless act on Snape’s part. If it had been Neville he would have let him die without blinking, just like he was ready to let Harry die, a ONE YEAR OLD BOY and the son of the woman he claimed to love. I do not doubt that he loved her, but his love was entirely and completely selfish and none of what he did was for her. He did what he did for himself and to feel better about what he had caused. Snape was not a good person. Snape was bad guy who did the right thing for the wrong reasons. All his life he remained the same bitter bullying douchebag, he bullied kids as a gorwn ass man, he never got over it unlike James.
The point of Snape isn’t “good is not nice”, the point of Snape is “you don’t have to be a good person to do the right thing”. “Good is not nice” is in fact the point of James. Was James an immature “toerag” (as Lily colourfully put it) when he was 15? Sure he was, but his heart was always at the right place which is something we cannot say of Snape. And he grew out of it, which is another thing we cannot say of Snape.
The fact that James bullied Snape isn’t the only thing we know of him. We also know that James welcomed Sirius in his home when the later had nowhere to go, we know that James accepted Remus for who he was and became an Animagus to help him, we know that James befriended three outcasts without caring about how uncool they were, from what family they came from or what disease they had to deal with, we know that James was ALWAYS disgusted with pure blood supremacy as evidenced by his reaction when Snape calls Lily the m-blood in front of him. We know that when Snape was busy joining the Death Eaters fresh out of school, James was joining the Order and fighting against Voldemort from the start (a war that as a pure blood he could have stayed entirely out of). We know he defied Voldemort three times and lived to tell the tale, we know that he died throwing himself between Voldemort and his wife and child without even a wand to try to give them time to escape. James was a good person who wasn’t always nice and grew out of his bullying way.
Every characters aside from Snape always describe the Marauders as this generation Fred and George (who by the way also did a number of questionable things, such as shoving Montague in the vanishing cabinet, feeding Dudley their toffees or turning Neville into a bird). Were they always nice? No. Did they bully Snape? Yes. Where they still good people? Yes. James included.
Snape wasn’t a good person, he never was, he never grew out of his petty high school quarrels, James did. Both were assholes when they were teenagers. One grew out of it, the other didn’t. It’s as simple as that.
“The thing about Colin that I feel compelled to talk about is his intelligence because it’s really, really staggering. I’m deeply impressed by that man’s brain. When we do interviews together, I usually stay quiet and try to look pretty.”
Harry could feel Ron shaking.[…] ‘HERMIONE!’ Ron bellowed, and he started to writhe and struggle against the ropes tying them together, so that Harry staggered. ‘HERMIONE! HERMIONE! HERMIONE!’[…] Harry felt the ropes fall away and turned, rubbing his wrists, to see Ron running around the cellar, looking up at the low ceiling, searching for a trapdoor. […] Ron was now trying to Disapparate without a wand. […] Hermione’s screams echoed off the walls upstairs, Ron was half sobbing as he pounded the walls with his fists. (Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows)
Not everyone has a soulmate. Newt doesn’t. His wrists are bare of markings, no scrawling words detailing the first thing his other half will say to him, no one waiting for the first words Newt will say to them in return.
It’s freeing, Newt says. He runs through the seven continents of the world and collects his creatures to live in his case and sends letters home to his mother that say he’ll be home “at some point, but not just yet,” and it’s freedom. It is. What soulmate would let Newt put his creatures first? What soulmate would understand his itchy feet and his need to run and run and run and run –
It’s lonely, too. People who don’t have soulmates aren’t supposed to feel the ache, the burning need to find the person who’ll complete them. People who don’t have soulmates are supposed to fall in love slowly, gently, with whoever they want – they’re supposed to be able to separate and come back together and make mistakes and decide to be alone if they want. Some people look on them with pity, others look on them with envy, but the truth is that it’s neither better or worse. It just is.
Newt has never wanted anyone else. And that – what nonsense is that? Anyone else, anyone else from who? He doesn’t have a soulmate waiting for him. When he dreams, he doesn’t see snatches of their life played out in the flare of a sharp coat and the peaceful silence of the office at night. He doesn’t taste the whiskey they toast him with when they feel him lurking tentatively on the edge of their connection and he doesn’t make two cups of tea and set one out for them when he feels them reaching out to him in return.
He doesn’t have a soulmate. His wrists are bare. He’s dreaming.
You aren’t, a voice insists, stubborn and indulgent and patient. I’m in New York. I’m here.
Newt tries not to sleep because he hates waking up from the warmth and comfort of that distant voice and he hates remembering that he’s made it up. He avoids New York. America. All of America, he avoids it, because he can’t go and find that his soulmate doesn’t exist. He can’t.
The voice goes quiet. He’s not sure when – he hasn’t been dreaming, has been keeping himself firmly inside his own head – but the voice goes quiet. Newt finds a thunderbird that needs to go home to Arizona, and there are many ships he can take to get to America, but. The voice has gone quiet.
Newt takes the ship to New York and tells himself that it’s the easiest route. That he’s only thinking of Frank, of trying to get him home faster, of – of – he’s not thinking of the voice and the calm and the patient man that is waiting in New York. His wrist is still bare.
Bare it might be, but the moment Newt’s foot hits the concrete docks as he leaves the boat his wrist flares with fire and pain. He can barely stutter his way through customs and immigration because his soulmate is real and his soulmate is hurting and he stretches himself as far as he can but while he’s awake it isn’t far enough. He can’t find them. He can’t reach them.
He doesn’t get to sleep. He wants to, to slip into dreams and reach out and find his wayward voice, but there’re his creatures, and the holding cell at MACUSA, and the obscurial – on the roof, Queenie hugs him and doesn’t say a word to Tina and he hugs her back almost desperately. His left wrist is cramping from the constant agony and he can barely use his hand. His soulmate is screaming in the back of his mind.
Credence shatters under a hail of auror fire. Graves dissolves and Grindelwald takes his place. Jacob forgets they ever existed. Newt pulls his coat closer around himself and hides the way he’s shaking. His soulmate is cold, the creeping, biting cold that sinks into Newt’s bones and makes them ache.
“Will we die?” Grindelwald says, eyes flicking down to Newt’s bare wrist. He smiles, cruel and mocking, and leans forward to confide: “Just a little.”
Newt still doesn’t sleep. He paces, reaching, grasping for his voice – for Graves – trying to offer any thread of warmth for the other man to hold onto. We’re looking, he says, again and again again and he doesn’t know if Graves can even hear him. I’m sorry I thought you didn’t exist. I’m sorry I took so long. We’re looking.
“Anything?” he asks Tina when she stops by to update him. She nods, barely gets out the first couple of words – “We think -” and Newt has grabbed his coat, pulling it on as he strides down MACUSA’s corridors to the apparition point. Tina doesn’t ask why he has to come along. She doesn’t need Queenie’s legilmency to see what this means, what Graves represents to Newt.
She nudges Newt with an elbow while they’re lining up to apparate out. “We’ll find him,” she promises. “It’ll be ok.”
But it’s not. It’s not ok because, because –
Newt’s wrist is blank because Graves never says his first words to Newt. Graves’ is not. Graves’ wrist is encircled by Newt’s looping, desperate scrawl:
She was the first person to stand up to Draco Malfoy at their first flying lesson. Notice that she stood up to Draco before Harry did. She instantly stood up to the school bully for making fun of Neville faster than “The chosen one” did. Oh, and did I mention she was only 11 at the time?
Speaking of the flying lesson, she was the first one who came to Harry’s defense when Professor McGonagall was reprimanding him, before even his best friend Ron did. Parvati wasn’t afraid to stand up to an adult-and a teacher at that-at the mere age of eleven because she knows it is the right thing, which seems to suggest she has a strong sense of justice.
She may be gullible, but she genuinely does seem to care for Harry’s safety when she warns him to “remember [his] tea leaves” during Hagrid’s 1st lesson.
She stands up to Snape that time he’s their substitute teacher.
She has great fashion sense; McGonagall was acting bonkers that time she told her to get rid of that cute butterfly plait she had in her.
She’s right; Hagrid’s lessons really are not safe.
She sticks by her beliefs when Harry blows up at her for it.
She gets her sister a date for the Yule Ball, something which she didn’t have to do, but chose to anyway, which indicates that she is a good sister.
Simultaneously, she managed to get Ron a date as well.
When Harry continuously ignores her, she leaves him:He was acting like a jerk, and since she respects for and esteems herself, she will not tolerate it, and instead goes on to enjoy her night without letting Harry’s astuteness ruin it for her.
She questions Umbridge in their first class.
When she laughs at Ron’s imitation of Hermione in HBP, she does what we’ve seen very few characters ever do after teasing Hermione: She apologizes. (Note how Ron, the person actively making fun of her, does not apologize.)
She may not be friends with Hermione, but she realizes that if she hurts someone else’s feelings the decent thing to do is apologize.
She was a member of Dumbledore’s Army.
She brought Professor Trelawney flowers when she was fired.
She hugged Lavender when she was crying.
Speaking of Lavender, Parvati’s a good friend all around.
She convinced her parents to let her and Padma stay in school 6th year.
She supports Lavender’s feelings for Ron, despite being somewhat embarrassed by their behavior, since she cares about her friend’s happiness.
She fought in the Battle of Hogwarts when she was at most 18 years old against a full grown Death Eater.
In conclusion, Parvati Patil actually had the potential to be a really great character, and it’s a shame JKR did not expand on her characterization as more than some giggling gossipy girl in Harry’s class. She deserves very little of the hate she receives from fans, and is actually quite awesome. 🙂
is that more or less shocking than the fact that these two
were married in real life?
You just made my post 200% better.
Wait for it, because in real life:
Cheated on:
With:
Shooting That last movie must have been really awkward
oooooooooogurl
Me, listening to all of this Goddamned tea spilling:
Wait what
Well shit
Oh god, you young’uns.
Back in the early 90′s, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson were THE couple in British cinema. Even in America they were highly respected. Think a posh, more talented version of Brangelina that did tons of movies together and won a bunch of awards, Branagh for acting and directing and Thompson for acting and writing.
Then Thompson did a movie without Branagh called Howard’s End, which co-starred an up-and-coming British actress named Helena Bonham Carter. Movie won a bunch of awards, including a Best Actress Oscar for Thompson. She introduces Carter to her husband, who casts her in his next project, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Whoops.
Good news is, the subsequent breakup inspired Thompson to write. She penned the screenplay to Sense & Sensibility, which won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay; to date, she is the only person in history to win for both acting and writing.
myblog 