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loserthree comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 11 - Less Wrong
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Dumbledore is a sonovabitch. Harry's wrong about how Snape heard the prophesy. Malfoy and Friends may be wrong about how Narcissa died. The whole matter of lighting a live chicken on fire may be a strange misunderstanding. But Dumbledore is still a right bastard for what he did to Snape, which we may put together from chapters 17, 18, 27, & the renumbered 76.
Chapters 17 & 76 tell us how Snape pursued Lily while he was her friend. (Or that's what Snape thinks of what he was doing. He was probably a 'Nice Guy' about it and it would probably have failed in the usual fashion. But that wasn't allowed to happen.)
To be clear: despite the (deservedly) doomed-to-the-friendzone fate of Snape's attempts to woo Lily, Dumbeldore nonetheless stepped in and instigated fights between Snape and Lily by writing things in Lily's potions book. While headmaster and responsible for the well being of children, Dumbledore sabotaged a relationship between children! He might even have done this because it did not fit the story he foresaw for a very Slytherin Snape to remain friends with a pretty and heroic Lily. He might have done it for even worse reasons.
Yes, worse. Dumbledore said, "Hogwarts needs an evil Potions Master to be a proper magical school, " in chapter 18. If he is willing to allow the abuse of children to keep an evil potions master, we might believe he would abuse a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old to make an evil potions master.
Chapters 27 & 76 tell us how it looked to Snape when it ended, and most importantly that he did not understand what happened and, until the events of this fic, knew he did not understand and was seeking understanding. How desperate for understanding must he have been, to ask an eleven-year-old? To Snape, the final rejection was not justified by what he knew of Lily, and so it seemed to come out of nowhere.
Snape wouldn't, couldn't know why the new fights with Lily were starting. For the fights to continue, Lily must have remained unaware that Snape was not writing in her potions book. And for Lily to remain unaware, Snape could not find out the reason for the fights. From Snape's perspective, his only real friendship suddenly encountered incomprehensible, insurmountable obstacles in his fifth year. And then it fell apart and it was all his fault.
The reason Snape does not understand why Lily didn't forgive him is that he is missing information. He does not know about the things Dumbledore wrote in her potions book while allowing Lily to believe it was Snape. When things regularly happen to a person without that person knowing why, especially when those things involve loss of something valued, it can make the person habitually insecure. Snape was probably already insecure on account of his home life and status as a target for bullies. Insecure people often become hostile and abusive to defend themselves. That is to say, Dumbledore made Snape a villain, possibly on purpose, possibly because he felt it made a more fitting story than would a life of Snape's own choosing.
It is my hope that Snape will read Lily's fifth year potions book, will understand that Dumbledore ruined his like, will dedicate himself to killing Dumbledore, and will be successful before the close of the fic.
Snape killing Dumbledore? I don't know, it sounds a little far-fetched.
Something similar to the technique you describe is known as gaslighting.
...which implies that, in the course of all these fights, Lilly never mentioned it to him. It's not enough for her to disbelieve his denials, she must never have given him an opportunity to make them. That being so, what were they arguing about? What sort of dialogue would you write for those scenes? What states of mind do you imagine for her?
In other words: I notice that I am confused.
If two people are in a relationship like very close friends, marriage or long-term dating, or just roommates, they often have fights about little things. These fights are not because the little things have some hidden importance that would make them not-little, but because there is a big thing that upset one or both people. They don't talk about the big thing. They never mention it. They may not understand that is why they are upset.
That is how people fight over toilet lids being left up, or dishes in the sink one day to many, or whose turn it is to take the garbage out, when what they are really hurt by is loss of autonomy, or financial insecurity, or fading intensity of intimacy, or some other big deal.
That is also why many couples cannot resolve longs series of fights on their own, and why couple's counseling works, most of the times when it does.
People rarely become rational communicators on their own.
And so she never told him.
Are you really comfortable putting "hurtful and/or stupid things written in a Potions textbook" in the same category as financial insecurity? Or are you saying that Dumbledore used the textbook to induce a profound fear like that? And did it such that Lilly never e.g. tried to respond to one of the Potions remarks face-to-face?
I dunno. I'm trying to imagine how this played out concretely, and I just can't manage it. Try this exercise: pick two of your high-school friends, and try to produce the effect you're describing, without either party realizing that anyone else is involved. Give yourself all of Dumbledore's powers. I don't believe I could have done it without mind-manipulation magic - and if I were going to use that, why bother with the Potions textbook at all?
Yes, I am absolutely comfortable doing so. I'm talking about two children who have never been taught to communicate with intention, with raging adolescent hormones, and with typical teenage naïvete regarding bother their own emotions and those of others.
I don't have two high-school friends to rub together. The fact that I'm still in touch with one person from twenty years ago is the freak result of a whole series of unlikely coincidences. But somewhere in those years I've harbored runaways that age, I've sheltered semi-homeless kids that age, I've broken up fights between kids that age, and I've provided relationship counseling to kids that age. It's hard to make them get along if they aren't inclined to. It'd be shit-easy to imagine making them fight if you could convince one that the other was doing hurtful things, which is what we are led to believe happened.
I guess what I'm saying is that you are either limited in information on teenagers or in imagination. Sorry, but I don't know how else to answer you, just now.
My apologies, I wasn't clear. I meant, pick two of your high-school friends when they were in high school. Or if you prefer, pick any two of "your kids", whatever that means to you, at an age when they'd been friends for at least five years. Not two kids who "aren't inclined" to get along, two kids who are.
What, concretely, do you write to start them fighting? I see several straightforward ways to worsen an existing argument, but creating a new one, without either participant noticing the asymmetry, is much harder.
No need to apologise; you don't know me. Without wanting to get too distracted by an argument over credentials: my involvement with teenagers in unending, God help me, but perhaps I do lack imagination. I'd observe in turn that you seem to have identified very closely with Snape's suffering, and have paid relatively little attention to Lilly's thoughts and feelings in this affair. That's when I noticed my confusion: I tried to model Lilly's half of this, and failed.
It happens I don't. I've never been 'friendzoned,' never hidden my courtship attempts behind friendship, and never lost a friend due to what seemed to me to be a single event. I have little sympathy for young Snape.
Teenagers aren't well-equipped to build lasting bonds and relationships. Their poorly-controlled emotional outbursts and social anxieties are more likely to lead to defensively cutting contact than building bridges. They break apart easily enough on their own, even if they are, for a time, inclined to each other's company.
Without regard to the degree of the hurt -- and teenagers do react in an exaggerated fashion to minor injuries of ego, don't they? -- people do get in arguments where they never mention the thing that upset them enough to get in an argument. I think that is what the author means us to understand took place between Snape and Lily.
Snape actually murdering Dumbledore at some point is too MoR-ish of an event for Eliezer not to include.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance. Dumbledore in this fic is far from perfect and all-seeing.
This is a case of You Just Told Me - Harry offers that excuse to Dumbledore, who then goes on to repeat it back to him.
Dumbledore didn't say that he caused the fights between Lily and Snape. He said this:
"And", not "therefore" or "so". Bear in mind that this is the same scene earlier in which this takes place:
We're told in big bright flashing letters not to take Dumbledore's implications in this scene at face value. And we already know why Lily and Snape actually fought: because Snape was turning evil! His best friends were wannabe Death Eaters! That's why Lily actually cut off their friendship, not because of jokes written in a Potions book.
If anything, it seems like Dumbledore was trying to get Lily to think of Snape as someone who could be lighthearted and joke around, as someone who could put a smile on her face, to try to get her to have feelings for him so she could pull him away from the Death Eaters! Some parts of MoR!Dumbledore may be a mystery to us, but his desire for people to choose the light over the dark is patently obvious. Dumbledore would never, ever ruin someone's only chance to save themselves from serving Voldemort. He wouldn't.
I doubt it. Eliezer originally thought that Lily was dating Snape, the passage was changed to refer to her "one of her friends" after readers pointed out that they'd never dated. And if they were originally assumed to be dating then Lily would have already had feelings for him - no need to meddle like that.
You're totally right; I had forgotten about that. So I retracted my above comment, only to realize that it doesn't necessarily ruin my theory. Whether they were dating or merely friends, Lily and Snape would have fought over his Death Eater tendencies, and they are what would have ruined the relationship. Dumbledore could have seen their relationship falling apart and tried to reconcile it any way he could.
But yeah, that seems a lot more far-fetched when you take Eliezer's prior mistake into consideration.
I have to agree with fezziwig that I notice that I'm confused about this idea that D writing in Lily's book somehow destroyed any hope of friendship between them. I don't understand your scenario: you think Lily was upset about the writing, blamed Snape, but never mentioned it, and that was enough to destroy a friendship? And Dumbledore somehow knew that writing in a book would cause this effect? "I want to destroy Snape's friendship... I know, I'll write in his friend's book!"
Given all the weird things that happen at Hogwarts, souls trapped in books and strange notes found under pillows and time travel, I kinda doubt Lily would stick to the hypothesis that it must be Snape, and never mention it.