= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Blueberry comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (866)
I also wonder why Snape got offended. Harry's answers were extremely supportive of Snape's situation back then: which makes me think Snape wasn't really offended, just pretending to be. Maybe the whole point was just for Snape to tell Harry the unpleasant truth about his parents in an emotionally powerful way, as a way of getting back at Harry because of his parents.
Snape still loves Lily and was upset about hearing her insulted, was my interpretation.
Awww... but that puts Harry in an impossible position. There's nothing he could have said that would have worked. If he had said Lily made a good choice, that would have directly insulted Snape. And Snape must have known that Harry would be in an impossible position, so he must have wanted to trap Harry into thinking he had done something wrong.
It's not quite impossible. He could have roundly blamed everything on James, casting Lily as a pure, victimized, agency-less casualty of his manipulations. That seems to be what Snape does.
It is possible to respond in a less direct way. Competent social skills would suggest putting very little actual content into his answer. I am less cunning than Harry and not known to be particularly conservative in my expression of potentially provocative positions but even so I do not think I would have all that much trouble responding with tact. Snape would still make a hostile reply but he does that to answers to potions problems anyway. He probably wouldn't be tempted to kill me.
I don't know about you, but having someone tell me I should give up something I've been overfocused on for a long time can be quite painful.
Assuming Snape was genuinely hurt by Harry's interpretation of Lily, I would expect to see a fraying between Snape and the Dumbledore faction as Snape questions why he is so faithful to Lily.
Yes, I suspect that was the point of that scene - to make things harder for Harry by taking away a (secret) ally. That would align with Eliezer's stated philosophy of fanfiction.
Furthermore, the major event in Aftermath 2 is that Snape reads students' minds again-something he agreed not to do under his agreement with Dumbledore. Which is further evidence that he has "gone rogue."
Ch. 18
In Aftermath 2 it seems reasonable that safety of Alissa requires reading her mind.
Edit: Thus, the change is that he directly addressed cause of her distraction.
What is most interesting to me is how Snape handles being offended. Snape has been portrayed in this FanFic as being extremely shrewd and self controlled. Harry even made observations along those lines himself, upgrading his respect for Snape considerably.
Snape (quite rightly) downgraded his trust in Harry's cunning. I wonder if Harry downgrades his respect similarly. If Severus had the cunning of even the 11 year old Malfoy he would not 'never talk to Harry again". Any benefit that he could hope to extract from Harry is still there and Severus is enough of a political agent to work past some offence when given a few months to cool down.