1x02 || 1x13

Recovery.

12.06.2023

Two masks - one made of iron, but still easier to break than the one made of flesh.

Drawn in June 2023

the amount of harry potter fans who don't seem to realise that pensieve memories are not biased, but completely impartial, and just show events exactly how they played out is...interesting. we know what it looks like when they've been tampered with, but other than that.

yes i am talking about marauder stans claiming that snape's memories of the bullying were biased, and that he skewered them on purpose. where is the logic. why would snape alter his memories to make james look bad when he didn't want harry looking at them in the first place. use your brain.

No, they aren't impartial as memory is not impartial: Our electric head-jellies are not good at recall. Like, I agree that Snape's Worst Memory is probably fairly accurate in regards the Marauders behaviour, but come on now.

Come on now WHAT. We see multiple times that unless the memories are tampered with, something that is obvious - the disortions and muffling in Slughorn's, when you put one in the pensieve and enter it, you are in the event exactly as it happened. No biases. So much so, that when Harry enters Snape's memories, he sees parts of it that Snape did not. I am not talking about memories in a general sense, I am talking about the parametres of the book. In fact, the very reason we can't get the full accuracies of memory in general is why pensieves exist in the wizarding world in the first place! So we can view exactly what happened, now our own fading and biased version instead.

Just because that's what you remember, doesn't mean that that's what actually happened. Snape's memories were limited to his perceptions, what he heard or saw. All the pensieve memories are like that. You can't go anywhere in the world in someone's memories, just where and when that memory took place.

And I am not talking editing of memories, I am talking about the accuracy of the event itself as remembered by the owner of the memory. Memory is fallible, and we have no way of knowing if each event happened exactly as depicted in Harry's telling of it.

"Just because that's what you remember doesn't mean that that's what actually happened."

This very statement is one of the reasons why pensieves in Harry Potter exist. So you can extract the memory and examine it from a third person persepctive. You see events exactly how it happened, no personal bias. Like watching a scene from the past. And we see in the chapter in Snape's memories that it is not strictly limited to Snape's own perception, what he heard or saw. Harry was able to move away from Snape towards his father and friends. We see Snape engrossed in his exam and his paper and sit by himself. Harry stays with James and co, and sees James play with the snitch, and hears their conversation, including their open discussion regarding Lupin's lycanthropy. All things Snape did not see or hear. He couldn't, he was sitting too far away, and I highly doubt they would have said any of this within Snape's earshot. They use the element of surprise to attack him, he does not hear James' suggestion to allieviate Sirius's boredom.

We do actually know if what Harry saw was accurate because of what I said above but also because when Harry asks Remus and Sirius, neither of them deny the event ever happened or try to change any part of it Harry recalled. Just lessen the impact.

Where in the books does it say that, exactly?

And no, Snape HEARD the marauders. Sound, you see, CARRIES, and magic can fill in the blanks 👍🏻

Re-read the books where pensieve memories take place, like the Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix and the Deathly Hallows.

None of those chapters state that pensieve memories are infallible and like time traveling. In fact, we see the memories of a dementia sufferer later on and they are NOT intact. Pensieves are NOT time travel.

Source: http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2005/0705-tlc_mugglenet-anelli-3.htm

Note: the emphases are all mine. I would just like to point out how utterly impressive it is that Snape was able to both be bent so close to his own parchment that he was practically inhaling it and still see what James Potter was doodling on his parchment from across two aisles and up a third. Note: sarcasm is also all mine.

Even if JKR hadn't clearly said herself that Pensieve memories were always intended to be a magical reproduction of the exact events someone stores based on an extracted thread of memory then a simple bit of critical reading more than validates the conclusion.

One can still interpret this as James being on the edge of Snape's subconscious perceptions and the magic filling in the visuals. Two by three aisles distant is literally 10-15 feet away, after all.

Even ignoring JKR making her intentions quite clear for her canon of Pensieves, I'd genuinely be impressed if a person could both stare at their own parchment as closely and intensely as Snape is described and see 10-15 feet away to pick out exactly what someone else is doodling on their parchment. That's a real feat of magic right there!

I have to agree, a person could interpret it like that but....well it would be a tad bit of a stretch to do so.  I don’t know many people who can bend down half an inch over their own paper and possess the visual acuity to also see what someone that distance is scribbling on their parchment.  Not least because when you bend down that way it changes the field of vision.  Paper is quite flat, you see.  It’s two dimensional.  If you try to read a flat piece of paper laying on a table several feet away while bending down close to a piece of paper on a table in front of you then you’re going to have quite the visual limitation to overcome.  At a certain point the argument just becomes a matter of debating semantics for the sake of it versus what appears to be a bit of common sense thinking.

Harry saw what James was scribbling because the nature of the Pensieve allowed for it and not because Severus could clearly see and recall it in his memory while also bent so closely over his own paper and focused on it too.  It’s Occam’s razor, the explanation that makes the greatest amount of logical sense and which coincidentally is supported by Rowling herself.  Complete arse though she is, and as much as I enjoy creatively reinterpreting her canon in ways I know she would chaff at, when it comes to debates regarding the intended mechanics of the magic she wrote into her world her own intentions do still ultimately end up being the default for how things work and even before “Snape’s Worst Memory” it was fairly clear when Harry went into Dumbledore’s own memory that Pensieves functioned in a way that were quite magical and quite different than memory alone. 

the most accurate snape quote i’ve ever read by someone on a forum: “Risking himself to save others is the pattern of a man who believes in a good beyond himself, his own interest, his own loves and hates. For those who believe Snape can only be motivated by revenge- keep in mind- he had his chance at revenge on Black when Black was unconcious after the Dementors attack. What did he do? He conjured a stretcher and delivered him to Pomfrey for medical attention, in sharp contrast to Black’s own recent treatment of the unconscious Snape, dragging him and bumping his head into things. Snape changes over the course of his lifetime. Snape never becomes a nice person. He does become a good one.”

I imagine vulnera sanetur to be just like the healing song in the Rapunzel disney movie

It's beyond me why the HP fandom lets it slide that our man Snape canonically made up a healing song like a goddamn Disney princess, like... he really did that

This little bit of information is apparently under question due to the Fantastic Beast 3 film. Gellert used it. But considering how wonky those films timelines are -cough- Minerva -cough- I am choosing to ignore it.  Snape you’re still a Disney Princess.

new headcanon: vulnera sanentur existed already as a healing spell and young Snape, bitter and angry and frustrated, created a spell that would require it’s use. ie. instead of him making up the spell and it’s healing counterpart, he made up a violent counterpart to a healing spell.

maybe because he knew that there was a healing spell for what he made up. Because our boy would absolutely say, “if you didn’t pay attention in class and learn this healing spell, you deserve to bleed out.”

Even more tragic, he learned it from his mother who learned it as some point in her life because a healing song may be easier to use than a complex healing spell with a wand (particularly in a household where Tobias may have banned open displays of her magic). Just imagine the circumstances in which she may have needed it, especially as she and Tobias were said to have argued frequently and Tobias supposedly "didn't like anything much."

can people please reblog this if they’re a harry potter account/snape fan account or something, my dash is like barren and I know it’s bc JKR is a terrible person but i’m dying over here LOL. when i was in college there was so much shit every day and i miss it

In HBP, Lupin tells Harry a bit about what he’s been up to lately: scouting out the werewolves. He says “Dumbledore needed a spy, and here I was. Ready-made,” in a tone that is “almost bitter.”

Hmm

He then goes on to say that he is having a hard time getting the werewolves to trust him, because he “shows the unmistakable signs of having tried to live among wizards,” and seems to have some negative feelings about the kinds of things he is expected to pretend to be ok with or even participate in so that he can gain/maintain their trust.

Hmm again

Of course 90% of my fandom posts are about Snape, so you may already see where I’m going with this.

But if you don’t, let me put this scene in context: it’s right next to Harry relaying what he saw of the interaction between Snape and Malfoy and trying to convince Lupin that Snape isn’t really trustworthy and Harry asking Lupin about the Half Blood Prince. The book itself starts out with Snape defending his Death Eater credentials to Bellatrix (who doesn’t trust Snape because he’s spent so much time living under Dumbledore’s eye) and ends with Snape killing Dumbledore. Lupin tells Harry that he does not hate Snape, although when Harry directly asks Lupin if he trusts Snape, he gives the somewhat-evasive answer that “it comes down to whether or not you trust Dumbledore’s judgment” and that he trusts Dumbledore and Dumbledore trusts Snape. My first impression of this is that Lupin is a character who has a very hard time taking a firm stand on things and an even harder time if it goes against the opinions of someone he feels indebted to. He would not stand up to James and Sirius because he felt like they already gave him more than he was entitled to just by being his friends, and he would not stand up to Dumbledore even if it means accepting a horrible life because he feels he owes Dumbledore for giving him a chance at school and for giving him a job for…less than a school year. And this is true of him. But it is also an interesting parallel. Lupin does not understand Snape or know his motivations, but he knows Snape is (supposed to be) a spy, and he uniquely of the characters understands a bit of what that entails, to have to pretend to be the thing you hate most about yourself, to do/witness terrible things, for people on both sides not to trust you, and to do it all on Dumbledore’s orders.

I think that while it is true that Lupin is a bit of a coward when it comes to confrontation and that includes being afraid/feeling undeserving to make judgements about people, he is also especially unwilling to outright condemn Snape because he knows that the same things could be said about himself. Maybe he is afraid of opening that can of worms, maybe he has some sympathy, or maybe he just really needs to convince himself that Dumbledore for sure knows what’s best because if Dumbledore’s judgment is bad, that means that he is going through all of this for naught. And the scene after Snape kills Dumbledore and flees sheds interesting light on the OotP members’ individual reactions to his seeming treachery. Lupin is almost personally betrayed by Snape’s actions and by Dumbledore’s judgment being apparently wrong. That’s got to be a foundation-shaking moment for him even more than for the others.

Harry understands bravery in the face of physical danger. He has a much harder time dealing with people believing lies about him, especially when those lies involve people not understanding how personally traumatic all of these experiences have been for him. But he is not yet capable of understanding that as a sacrifice in the same way Lupin and Snape do. His reaction to Lupin’s accounts of discrimination is a naive “but that’s wrong of them!” To him, morality is fairly straightforward, and moral solutions are simple and direct and instinctive and unflinching. He is a Gryffindor through and through in that regard. Lupin understands that life is not that simple, and that just because you think something ought not to be the way it is, just because it’s unfair, doesn’t mean that’s not how it is, and you have to work within that.

Harry’s angst of the previous book revolves largely around his inability to accept that. Consciously or unconsciously, Lupin is trying to explain this to Harry, but he will not really understand it until the end of the series. In fact, I would argue that this is shown most strongly by the fact that Harry fails to see the parallels between Lupin and Snape and between Snape and himself. His reaction to Lupin describing his life as a spy among dark creatures is empathy and outrage at the injustice Lupin has to face, because he already likes Lupin and thinks he’s a good guy. But when multiple people try to present Harry with the explanation that Snape’s suspicious conversation with Malfoy is the same thing, an extension of the spy work he was told to do by Dumbledore, Harry refuses to consider it, because he’s already made up his mind about Snape’s evil just as he’s made up his mind about Lupin’s goodness. In the end, both are revealed to have good and bad qualities.

But it’s also just interesting to see the parallels being set up long before the audience is aware that it is a parallel. Lupin is narratively telling Harry that things are not always as they appear to be, and that sometimes the sacrifices demanded by the ‘greater good’ are not just physical danger but also your own morality, identity/self-image, innocence, reputation, even your humanity itself. This is, after all, Snape’s story to a T, though neither Harry nor the audience knows that yet. The foundations for that parallel are being set up before any solid proof is given, and just like Harry’s developing maturity gives him an evolving perspective, this is something the audience can only see in retrospect (or when you’re on your third back-to-back go-around of the audiobooks because you’re insane.)

Does anyone have a source on grieving a painful childhood? Or rather, a wasted one? When you realize it could have been so much better, if not for... lots of shitty people. You could have been a totally different person, a better, happier, healthier one... but this opportunity has been wasted forever.

I do, in fact. These are from a online publication I often read and are both fairly recent.  I hope they may be of some help or comfort.

Yes, Sweetheart, You Do Get to Grieve Your Lost Childhood

How Do I Actively Grieve My Past?

+ A socially-awkward streak of perfection in speech

This is a little thought that has been nagging me since I saw these

but mostly this

Those are obviously not mine, they are how Rowling viewed Snape in her head (the hats are terrible). I’m not focusing on the cruelty of how she constructed such a character to be ridiculed for his ‘ugliness’, rather I’d like to make you notice—as you guessed—the body language used there.

There is a common example of body language we teach people: when you cross your arms in front of your chest, you are in a posture of defense. This occurs mostly when you confront someone, sometimes someone you disagree with, or a large group of people, for instance during a presentation in front of a class. Teachers will tell you to stop it because it sends a message that you’re closed up, that you feel threatened: the arms are protecting your chest, resting between your body and that of the opponent, they form a shield and they can even hug you in a sense, as though trying to warm you up in winter.

Now, notice how Rowling drew Snape? He constantly joins his arms in front of him. Not only is that a reminder of the arms-crossing I described, but sometimes it evolves into the second but mostly third panel: Snape is pulling the pans of his robes in front of him. For me, it’s not just a message of defensiveness: it’s a message of active self-protection, of being re-assured, of sensed fragility, of having something to hide and protect. Self-comfort, like when you pull a blanket around your shoulders and hold the ends in front of you. It’s pulling something near your heart, in front of an exposed part of the body with vital organs, which adds a sense of secretiveness. Imagine doing that with your coat. Try doing it and study how you feel, what messages you are sending yourself, how people could interpret what you’re doing. So unless his robes are really long, I think this posture is extremely revealing of Snape.

This is not only pictured in her sketches though. It’s in the books each time Snape’s described as an overgrown bat. What do bats do? They retract their wings in front of them, hiding their bodies like this:

(Picture not mine obviously)

So this pulling of the robes in front of him fits exactly with canon.

I have fair belief that this habit—starting with how he felt the need to hide his mother’s clothes as a kid and blushing for the embarassment and the discomfort under the hot sun, starting with the physical assaults as he’s been bullied, starting from how people mocked his looks—has been completely inscribed into him since when he was sexually assaulted, stripped of his underwear in front of everyone, unable to hide himself with his robes. Well there he’s hiding his front constantly. He’s tugging at those robes, securing them before him all right. Maybe whenever he lets them go he feels somewhat exposed, naked? Maybe he needs to grip at something to ‘hang on’? I could say it’s used as to make him imposing and look big in the class, but again, guess why he’d do that?

This is terrible. You’d have to be blind, or really unconscious of how to spot victims of trauma, not to notice the signs. You might not be able to read Snape’s mind, but on the body, he’s an open book. Snape stands no chance in front of Muggles who know where to look and who interpret correctly. A single glance, maybe a single class where you see how he behaves, talks, moves and interacts with students, and you guess everything.

But this is not all:

(Notice the pronounced/bobbing Adam apple, also is that a giant table or just something to put a book to read in front of the class like I see on interviews for the press? And again, he’s crossing his arms in front of his chest)

All of those are signs that give a pretty fair insight as to who Snape is inside and how he feels, what he thinks. Obviously there are people who read body language better than me…

I’d like to add this: people with low self-esteem (prone to be targets of radicalization) often think people laugh at them on their back. But for Snape, those insults are real. They haven’t ever stopped. He can’t even fool himself when he can literally read the minds of his students and the people around him. I remember that my saving point to move past a Snape-like behavior, was the realization that people didn’t look at me to laugh on my back—I was normal and inconsequential, and I never felt such a wonderful mind-blown. Snape doesn’t even have this luxury, and I can’t imagine how he could get out of this destructive circle of negativity. No wonder he’s cruel and openly nasty; I often view them as either revenge or defensive tactics (defend yourself from perceived attacks or strike first because the best defense is attack and the person you’ve attacked now knows they mustn’t try funny things with you if they don’t want to get hurt, they better leave you alone). Heck, even his ugliness could have turned into a weapon to instill fear into potential threats. Snape knows how Death Eaters look pretty ugly and how that can intimidate people; students have no luck (‘ugliness ‘attacks’ the eye’).

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it strikes that chord damn well. So much in fact, that I love this version of Snape very much.

Bonus

Snape has the habit to require people to use proper terms. For instance, he tells Harry Legilimency is not “mind-reading”; he tells Harry, in HBP, that ghosts aren’t just ‘transparent’ but are the lasting imprint of a departing soul (and Ron will burn him for that, the second time his class laughs at him, and they say Snape is a tyran under whom everybody cowers? He’s losing his grip)

Those are pretty suspicious for me. Where does that need for precision come from? this somewhat sense of perfectionnism? I don’t want to use improper terms right and left, but those are reasons Snape can’t fit in with people. People want to speak fast, they don’t care for details and full specifics in everyday life, and if you speak about ghosts or legilimency, then they’ll know what you’re talking about and they don’t care about the almost-scientific terms—as Ron says, you won’t ask the ghost you’ll see if they’re the imprint of a departing soul. Snape cares very much though. Imagine a kid fixating on a single ‘perfect’ definition, or a man having something akin to obsessive perfectionism… this need to use the exact proper terms, even in informal settings… you get what I mean? Honestly the first thing that comes to mind for this mechanism is autism. Maybe Asperger-like. But what could that precisely be otherwise?

This reminds me of an analysis @raptured-night once did on the body language of Snape as Harry described him in “Snape’s Worst Memory.”  In fact, it further validates the views she expressed there and is doubly heart-breaking when you consider he never did so much shed the cornered and insecure body language of boyhood as it evolved as he grew into adulthood and could be so wrongly attributed to something menacing (even if “intimidation” may have been an additional and intended defensive component of it).  

Such is often the case I’ve found for people struggling with social anxieties or neurodivergences such as autism and aspergers as well.  We’ve all heard of the popular “tells” people are taught to look for to catch someone at being dishonest (eye contact avoidance or, alternatively, prolonged and too much eye contact, fidgeting, stilted sentences, or overly detailed stories, etc.) and they all apply to people who are on the spectrum or suffering from social anxiety which is why they’re so very flawed as “lie detection” methods go.  Half the criticism of Snape as a boy by antis (particularly that he’s creepy) echo the sort of language and prejudicial perceptions children born neurodivergent so commonly encounter.  I was on the receiving end of my share of it just for being so utterly shy and socially awkward as a girl, in fact!  Little wonder I related to Severus as I did, hm?  Very thoughtful analysis @ottogatto!

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (2013) & THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (2014)

She really ain't playin fair😍

I keep seeing people saying things like, “If you like this you need therapy cause it makes me uncomfortable!!” And the most COMMON retaliation I’ve seen to this is, “Well you’re assuming everyone can get therapy/therapy is for everybody!” And actually I don’t think that’s the right comeback to that

I think the right comeback to that is, “are you saying you support conversion therapy?”

I’ve gone to therapy for YEARS. A good therapists job is not to make you “normal” but to make you the best version of yourself. There is a REASON that in order to be diagnosed with a mental illness it must cause some amount of distress and disruption to your life, personally. People don’t to go therapy just for being weird, they go because something about their life or their brain is making things difficult and upsetting for them, and they want to learn how to deal with that.

If your version of therapy is just “this harmless thing you like makes me, personally, uncomfortable, and therefore must be wrong - so you must go to therapy to become more like me” - than you don’t want people to be their best selves. You want them to go to conversion therapy, so they will be more like you, because you think that you’re the pinnacle of normalcy and anyone who is not like you must be Bad™️ and require Fixing™️.

via @53rdcenturyhero​

My job as a psychiatrist is exactly to help people be the very best versions of themselves.  When I say that it doesn’t mean my goal is to make them a version of themselves society will most benefit from or regard as “normal.”  Rather my objective is to help them arrive at a version of themselves that they benefit from first and foremost. 

When I have clients come to me and confess to interests or even desires (sexual or otherwise) they fear are abnormal or reflective of some deeper mental issue they may have I ask them one of two questions to reflect on:

Is it harmful to you?

Is it harmful to anyone else?

We work through answering those two questions because they’re ultimately the only two that matters when it comes to these things.  I do get clients who have developed maladaptive coping mechanisms or have allowed certain interests to become so wholly consuming it is inhibiting their ability to lead a full, quality life and/or distinguish reality from fantasy.  In those cases there are steps we go through to help them work their way back from that and get to a better head space again that is more beneficial to them leading quality lives.  In fact, I use a very similar approach to what I do when helping clients who struggle with self-harm because in many ways maladaptive coping of this kind is always another form of self-harm and there are underlying issues that need to be addressed and worked with as well.

So as a mental health professional, that is my litmus test.  If you like something and it is not doing you harm or leading you to harm others then you’re usually good.  Should you find one or both of those two things change, then that is the occasion where you need to seek the counseling of a mental health specialist if you haven’t already.

Will seductively saying ‘doctor’ (consciously and unconsciously)

*always happy to provide some voice porn*