But I think there's an important distinction to be made, in terms of questions of moral/ethical fortitude, between someone who's doing something because they're trying to atone for a single bad choice vs. someone who's doing something because it's the right thing to do in general.
This is where I thought Snape's story was going: he had some revelation - and I did cry out in the long, dark night, Please, not Love of Lily! - some moral turn-around or realization, didn't want to kill infants, didn't want to see actual people rather than abstract people sorts of things being killed, began on a path of redemption because he saw that it was the morally right thing to do.
It could have gone there, even for Love of Lily. He could have tried to model himself on what she would have wanted to see, and grown to do right for right's sake. I had some hope at first that this was supposed to be the message, and maybe it was, of his telling Phineas Nigellus not to use the word "Mudblood", but now I'm just afraid that this was another thing that he'd done to Lily and was trying to make up for having done. It could have been a great story, it could have been uplifting in the sense of hope for the WW (and us).
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Re: part I
Date: 2007-07-27 05:05 pm (UTC)This is where I thought Snape's story was going: he had some revelation - and I did cry out in the long, dark night, Please, not Love of Lily! - some moral turn-around or realization, didn't want to kill infants, didn't want to see actual people rather than abstract people sorts of things being killed, began on a path of redemption because he saw that it was the morally right thing to do.
It could have gone there, even for Love of Lily. He could have tried to model himself on what she would have wanted to see, and grown to do right for right's sake. I had some hope at first that this was supposed to be the message, and maybe it was, of his telling Phineas Nigellus not to use the word "Mudblood", but now I'm just afraid that this was another thing that he'd done to Lily and was trying to make up for having done. It could have been a great story, it could have been uplifting in the sense of hope for the WW (and us).
*mourns*