pet_genius

But Harry’s anger at Snape continued to pound through his veins like venom. Let go of his anger? He could as easily detach his legs. . . .

This is the first Occlumency lesson. Harry is right, of course. Feelings don’t go away because you want them to. To let go of them when they’ve not been addressed or validated can be as hard as detaching a leg. And yet, it’s what Dumbledore asked Snape to do, and it’s what Snape had to do to survive the first war as Dumbledore’s spy. You have to ask yourself… how?

Trapped animals chew off their own legs to escape. It’s a sacrifice they make to survive.

If there’s one thing in a fic that turns me off it, it’s the idea that Occlumency shields are a thing, that Severus was so gifted at it because he’s got some power like Second Sight or being a metamorphagus. I always preferred to think of Occlumency and Legilimency as skills that can be learned, even if some have more aptitude for it than others.

Severus entered Hogwarts with the kind of life experience that primed him for developing these skills, and left it with even more. Occlumency is magical dissociation, a post-traumatic coping mechanism, and Severus has C/PTSD. More under the cut; tw: just general angst.

These past 3 months so many innocent people got executed for the reason of them being against this Islamic regim (IRGC), and in any case you haven't heard, more than 43,000 people got killed in only 2 days :) and rarely anybody talked about them. And since those days more people have been killed, raped and tortured for speaking up about the truth of IRGC. No, the majority of Iranians don't want this regim, we are barely surviving under this dictatorship as human beings (you can't imagine how hard it is for people in the minority groups). Also about the tragedy of Minab's school, even the cause of that was this regim for we, Iranians, are grieving their death. Death to this regim.

It is so cruel that my people get to live like this. When I came online and I saw so many updates from my favorite games and fandoms I felt like I couldn't breath, for I wanted to live a normal life, my people want the same but here we are trying out different VPNs to see which one works.

Even with our internet back, we won't stop talking about the evil actions (and evil existence) of Iran's Islamic regim.

I ask you to do the same.

Ahh but porn has always existed!! Look at cave paintings! Okay. Masturbate to cave paintings. I really want you to masturbate to cave paintings. If it's the same thing, you should have no issues masturbating to cave paintings. I'm dead serious when I say I have no issues with anybody masturbating to cave paintings, or even written smut or anything that doesn't rely on the rape of real people and profiting off of it. I'd be fine with hentai if so much of it didn't try to up the shock factor as much as possible to get people hooked on various fetishes.

​The "it’s always existed" argument is such a lazy reach. There is a massive structural chasm between a cave painting and a multi-billion dollar tech industry that uses predatory algorithms to keep people scrolling through increasingly extreme content. One is a human expression; the other is a profit-driven machine that relies on the financial desperation of real people.

​You can be 100% in favor of people having healthy, liberated sex lives while still recognizing that a massive, unregulated industry built on the extraction of labor from vulnerable populations is a net negative for society.

Let us be clear, sweetie: Severus Snape is not some angry little man on a forum crying because no witch would date him. No, no. Severus Snape is a man who once held love in his hand, fumbled it—dropped it—and then decided he should never touch anything that delicate, again.

He didn’t become celibate out of bitterness. He became celibate out of penance. The man took his heartbreak and turned it into a lifelong funeral march with no coffin, no flowers, just black robes and regret.

You think he couldn’t find someone else? Please. He’s tall, mysterious, clearly got cheekbones sculpted by rage and repression. He could absolutely ruin the right person—in the best way. But does he flirt? Does he date? No, darling. He broods. With purpose.

Because Severus Snape isn’t single. He’s emotionally widowed. Lily Evans didn’t just die—she became the ghost he takes to bed every night. And he? He became her silent mourner, carried grief like someone who never got the chance to be anything to her. Never kissed her. Never claimed her. But oh, he remembers her like a vow.

This man wears grief like couture.

No one else gets close. Not because they’re unworthy—but because he refuses to let himself be chosen again. It’s giving martyrdom. It’s giving “I could destroy you with how much I feel but I won’t.” It’s giving “touch me and I might unravel in front of the tapestry.”

He doesn’t need pity. He needs a mirror that tells him, “She never loved you. But you loved her. And you helped seal her fate. It wasn’t rejection that broke you—it was living with the belief that you had no right to be loved after what it cost.”

But until that day? Snape remains the widow of the living. Alone. Unkissed. Unhealed. And absolutely unforgettable.

—

It's Shaun_vids.

It's Leeja Miller.

It's Dan Olsen/Folding Ideas.

It's Milo Rossi/Miniminuteman.

It's Jessie Gender.

It's Adam Something.

It's Professor Dave.

It's Sophie From Mars.

When people get paid to do an activity, one day the pressure will be on to do that activity when funds are tight (they're always tight). This is true of "developing opinions" and of "sex work" and of all of it.

The thing with snape is that he had no support system in the muggle world nor the wizarding world, and any value the pure-bloods saw in him cuz of his genius was post probably lost after he got flashed and humiliated in front the whole school, I say he doesn’t have a choice because the choice was social suicide and being in poverty or joining a cult, one which excepted him and actually saw potential in him.

Yeah it would've been better for Snape to do that. It's so easy for people like anon and me to say that. I have no kids (tbf neither did Snape), no debts, no rich older men grooming me, no cult with its hooks in me, no shattered sense of self, no former best friend who left me and I feel crushed by guilt about it, no dreams of fixing the above by becoming awesome and powerful, no being stuck in the mindset that being awesome and powerful will somehow solve my life.

Here how it’s described in the book:

Snape pulled out his wand from an inside pocket of his robes and Harry tensed in his chair, but Snape merely raised the wand to his temple and placed its tip into the greasy roots of his hair. When he withdrew it, some silvery substance came away, stretching from temple to wand like a thick gossamer strand, which broke as he pulled the wand away from it and fell gracefully into the Pensieve, where it swirled silvery-white, neither gas nor liquid. Twice more, Snape raised the wand to his temple and deposited the silvery substance into the stone basin, then, without offering any explanation of his behaviour, he picked up the Pensieve carefully, removed it to a shelf out of their way and returned to face Harry with his wand held at the ready.

-Order of the Phoenix, Ch. 24

Snape extracts three strands of memory, but we don’t know what they contain. They’re described only as a “silvery substance… stretching from temple to wand like a thick gossamer strand.” In comparison, here’s how the memories Snape gives to harry at the end of DH are described:

Something more than blood was leaking from Snape. Silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid, it gushed from his mouth and his ears and his eyes, and Harry knew what it was, but did not know what to do - A flask, conjured from thin air, was thrust into his shaking hands by Hermione. Harry lifted the silvery substance into it with his wand.

-Deathly Hallows, Ch. 32

Again, the memories are described as a silvery substance. There’s no mention of it coming out in bits and pieces, as if separate memories came out individually, but as a single amorphous substance which can be deposited into a flask by lifting it and placing it inside.

The stone Pensieve lay in the cabinet where it had always been: Harry heaved it on to the desk and poured Snape’s memories into the wide basin with its runic markings around the edge.

-Deathly Hallows, Ch. 33

Here too, where Harry empty those memories into the Pensieve, they seem to be described as a single substance – we know that the flask Harry empties held numerous memories from Snape in it, but they don’t seem to be separated in any way. They’re extracted, bottled, and put into the pensieve in the same way a single strand of memory would be. It seems very possible that Snape could have pulled away a single strand of that non-gas, non-liquid substance at the start of Occlumency lessons, yet it contained numerous memories instead of just one.

The way extracting and storing memories seems to be complex. In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore has the memories he’s collected stored and organized in individual crystal bottles. This implies that memories can be extracted both one at a time and also en masse, the way thoughts work - sometimes we think of a single experience, and sometimes we go through multiple memories simultaneously, jumping back and forth between each one. The Pensieve also holds multiple memories simultaneously, as we see in Goblet of Fire when Harry first falls into it and experiences several of Dumbledore’s memories. Those memories all follow the same theme - various Death Eater hearings after Voldemort’s fall.

While it’s implied that the Pensieve shows memories in chronological order, we don’t know if a person viewing them is necessarily seeing the earliest one in a set. It’s possible that a practiced Pensieve user, or one who enters the Pensieve with deliberate intent to view a series of memories, is more likely to view those memories starting with the earliest one. When Harry went into the Pensieve and saw Dumbledore’s memories in Goblet of Fire, he was cautious and curious. We nevertheless have no way of knowing if there were earlier memories he didn’t see, or even if those memories were chronological order, but they seem to be. In contrast, when he goes into the Pensieve in OotP to view Snape’s memories, he’s being reckless and thoughtless. – he’s just had a fight with Cho, he’s been angry for months, and he takes it out on Snape by invading his privacy. It’s very possible that this attitude and approach to someone else’s memories affects how they’re viewed, and that he drops into the middle of a series of thoughts and SWM is just where he happens to land. Maybe it’s exactly because he feels this way that he does, because his own feelings of frustration and rejection connect with those in Snape’s memory.

It’s also possible that the order memories can be viewed in is determined by how they’re extracted and saved – in which case, if Snape was just dumping groups of memories into the Pensieve during Occlumency lessons, their order may not have been chronological, or there may not have been any order to them at all, as opposed to when he gave Harry the memories that we see in the Prince’s Tale, which may have been in chronological order because his life was flashing before his eyes as he was dying. Therefore it’s also possible that Harry dropped into SWM in OotP because Snape extracted a group of memories and the most triggering one was at the forefront. But if Harry hadn’t been interrupted, perhaps the memory would have shifted into other ones of Lily - Snape’s apology to her, their childhood memories, etc.

There seem to be multiple possibilities for how extracting memories and viewing them in a Pensieve works. When Harry sees Snape’s memories in The Prince’s Tale he sees the same one he saw in Snape’s Worst Memory. It’s possible that when he first sees it in OotP he just happens to fall into that part of a longer timeline of memories, or that he falls into a cluster of memories of which that is the most prominent one. All we know is that Snape put at least three memories into the Pensieve, but Harry saw this particular one. It’s possible that it wasn’t just three memories Snape put in there but three sets of memories. If that’s the case, it’s also likely that these sets are organized differently than what we see in The Prince’s Tale. If his motivation in extracting memories was to hide them from Harry in OotP (and by proxy, from Voldemort), and if in that moment he was in a measured and controlled emotional state, it would affect his choice of what memories to share. Perhaps these are a more robust set focused entirely on Lily, and presumably other areas of his life he doesn’t want Harry to have access to, whereas the set of memories he gives Harry in DH are about conveying Dumbledore’s message that Harry has to die and giving it context (to which Snape and Lily’s friendship is integral).

Then, very slowly, Slughorn put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his wand. He put his other hand inside his cloak and took out a small, empty bottle. Still looking into Harry’s eyes, Slughorn touched the tip of his wand to his temple and withdrew it, so that a long, silver thread of memory came away too, clinging to the wand tip. Longer and longer the memory stretched until it broke and swung, silvery bright, from the wand. Slughorn lowered it into the bottle where it coiled, then spread, swirling like gas. He corked the bottle with a trembling hand and then passed it across the table to Harry.

It’s described very similarly to how Snape removes his memories in OotP, in that it’s a long silvery strand. But unlike with Snape’s, we know that Slughorn only gives Harry one memory—the one of him telling Tom about Horcruxes—because we view it shortly after.

Also, just the fact Snape pulled out three distinct strands. If one can pull out groups of memories at a time, and the only purpose of removing them was presumably to reduce the chance of Harry seeing them, why not just remove them all at once in a group instead of three times? It would be more efficient.

In DH when Snape is dying, my impression was they’re coming out all together in one mass because he’s doing it with more desperate, instinctual magic instead of deliberately with his wand—like he’s literally bleeding his memories as he dies, not really consciously selecting them. It’s the only time we see groups of memories like this; the rest are all distinct, singular memories.

Sadly we get no evidence from Dumbledore’s memories in HPB, which are oddly kept in bottles instead of him just pulling them out of his head at the time, as it might have given us more insight into the way they work (and I don’t understand why he’d go to the trouble of bottling them up in the first place. I’d say he was worried about dying before showing them to Harry, but he showed zero urgency about meeting with Harry in HPB, waiting several weeks between the first and second appointments. Anyway…).

*We may be reading way too much into something that the author might not have thought through all that much, but I’ve got to get my kicks somehow, I don’t know about you.*

Re: your point about Dumbledore, one of the reasons he keeps the memories in individual bottles is that they aren’t all his. He tells Harry that he got them from various sources - one of them is from Ogden, the Ministry official who visited the Gaunts, one is from Morfin himself, and one is from the house elf of that witch Voldemort takes Hufflepuff’s cup from. Dumbledore is thorough, and instead of relying on his own memory of conversations with these people, he gets their firsthand memory - on several occasions through great effort, because Voldemort went to such lengths to modify their memories. Something I’ve always wondered about is whether it’s possible to place someone else’s memory into your own head, the way we see these wizards do when they place their own memories back in.

Re: your point about Snape and why he removes the memories, I’ve always wondered if this was sloppy writing, or if the magic around memories is more varied than we see elsewhere. Or maybe it’s unique to Snape… he’s one of the best legilimens in the books if not the best, since he’s able to fool Voldemort completely. It’s possible he’s figured out a way to extract memories that diminishes their presence in one’s mind, or maybe it’s easier to compartmentalize and close one’s mind to protect certain thoughts if they’ve also been extracted. The language used in the books is “extract” not “copy” which implies that even if something is left behind, it might be diminished or partial. Then again, the memories are described similarly to ghosts - white and physical but not tangible. So maybe the extracted memories are imprints, like ghosts are.

SHHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUUUUUUUT THEE FUUUUUCK UP

Are we talking about the same fucking guy?? Like Snape as in Severus Tobias Snape???????????? This dude was doing fucking OVERTIME protecting harry from corrupt fucking adults either attempting to harm or manipulate him why the fuck would he of all people take advantage of him like that

if someone so as much as STARED at harry in a creepy way, girl version or not, and snape was present…that pdf would be fucking OBLITERATED, SILENCED, TORN APART, RAVAGED!!!!!! he would literally torture that dude????? if they even thought about trying something in his vicinity or not snape would be there with a fucking battle axe 🫩

the dude was literally putting his life on the line for him and if you don’t think he’d absolutely massacre some offender over him then your crazy..even crazier if you think he’d be the one doing such a thing

“bbbbb-but he liked his mom🥺” Who the fuck came up with the logic that if you like someone romantically then you’ll turn into a predator??? actually fucking braindead and such a disgusting, pathetic, HARMFUL, and biased claim to make like how does one come to this conclusion

NO PROOF THAT HED EVER BE SO FUCKING DISGUSTING!! NONE!!!!

i feel like this should go unsaid like???

and this also extends to the rest of his students too. like yeah he may be an asshole but if some offender tried some shit with ANY of them they’d meet a very painful fate. Like those are HIS STUDENTS. HIS KIDS. fuck are you talking about???😭😭😭😭 Yeah he was a bully for a teacher but he always showed up when they were in danger, he’d be the last person to harm them like that????????

anyways here’s high cortisol snape making sure his bumass kids don’t die of hypothermia!! fav scene from this game no i haven’t played it for longer than ten minutes

“my dad thinks my mom is hot so he must be sexually interested in me” <- does putting it that way show you how stupid this is???

and YES. My guy loves his students. He’s always pissed at them because they’re in his classroom messing around with stuff that could ACTUALLY KILL THEM. But we see time and time again in the books that he’s more than willing to put his life on the line for the kids he’s in charge of.

I have no doubt that Snape would commit great violence if a predator was around. Like even if he WAS an asshole that hated his students through and through, most adults are naturally inclined to attack those who hurt kids. Like the meanest, nastiest adult would still probably beat a predator to a pulp if they caught them touching kids.

so even if Snape truly was just The Worst, I still find it hard to believe he wouldn’t break somebody’s teeth over something like this. Even the thought of someone hurting kids like that is enough to make someone who is in a perpetual state of irritation and mild anger over said kids want to protect them. It’s practically instinctual.

the second thing you wrote reminded me of that one fanart where snapes pinching harry’s ear and telling him off for almost dying like eight hundred times.

snape would be set to azkaban for what he’s to to a fucking pred if they were in the vicinity of any of his damn students. I agree with you, hating child predators is like one of the only thing *most* of humanity can unite over. I don’t gaf how ugly snape can be, you WILL catch him with a wand in hand if such a dangerous person was present.

Basically people enjoy triggering real life victims of real life abuse for the sake of a point they made up and has no basis whatever.

You know

There is a lot of trauma to go around in HP, and tragically (and realistically), it keeps happening.

Harry is repeatedly orphaned, first from his parents, then from Sirius and Dumbledore - his actual appointed parent figure if anything should happen to his parents, and Harry's "last, greatest protector" according to his narration of the funeral.

Dumbledore's formative trauma is his role in his sister's death thanks to dabbling in Dark magic and the subsequent cover-up, and within his attempt to pay his karmic debt and stop another Dark wizard from taking over, he finds himself endangering god knows how many children under his care: Snape nearly died as a student, and many of the children he watched grow up and then recruited into the OOTP died as well. The seemingly incongruent triumphant look in his eyes when Harry tells him about the blood Voldemort took might be the moment his own pattern breaks for the first time - he is still fighting for the Greater Good, but thanks to his machinations over the years, he had given Harry a chance to survive his part in Dumbledore's crusade. I think this arc concludes when he fights for Draco's soul unto death - it serves a strategic purpose to cement Snape's position, yes, but also, he died having saved a child in his care from the fate that had tormented Dumbledore himself even after an actual century.

Snape's traumas are many, but the formative one is catalyzing Lily's death. He then finds himself - again, but worse this time - forced to push the trigger on his only friend's death. The pain this causes him is evident - he wails like a wounded animal in the immediate aftermath and even risks going to Sirius's house to find something that would keep him going.

I'd like to propose that Snape might have known that Harry's best chance at survival - i.e. Snape's best chance at redemption - would be Harry's Lily-like self-sacrificing act.

Pensieve memories are unfalsifiable, but there might have been an element of choice in when to end them, and it's possible Snape always knew he would have to use a Pensieve to persuade Harry to believe him. The conversation that ends in "Always" couldn't actually have ended like that, because nothing is actually resolved: Dumbledore does not convince Snape that Voldemort's defeat is more important than Harry's survival. The height of the conflict between Snape and Dumbledore is the least natural point to end the scene. Tellingly, Dumbledore's eyes are closed throughout the entire explanation of Harry's supposed ultimate fate. Snape and Dumbledore were both legilimenses, and legilimency requires eye contact. I strongly believe closed eyes, then, indicate "there's more".

“Precisely. If there comes a time when Lord Voldemort stops sending that snake forth to do his bidding, but keeps it safe beside him under magical protection, then, I think, it will be safe to tell Harry.” “Tell him what?” Dumbledore took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

This is followed by the explanation, including the dialogue:

“So the boy . . . the boy must die?” asked Snape quite calmly. “And Voldemort himself must do it, Severus. That is essential.”

So: Harry must know why he is dying, and it must be done by Voldemort's hand. Harry must also find out, and then sacrifice himself, at a very specific moment. If the only important thing is "dead Harry," this could easily be achieved. The specifics are essential.

Dumbledore opened his eyes. Snape looked horrified.

Snape's admonishment, and the "Always" exchange, follow.

After this conversation occurs, Snape kills Dumbledore, and immediately after that he duels Harry and does not let him come to harm, saying "Potter belongs to the Dark Lord".

In Dark Lord Ascending, we see that Snape made sure Voldemort would know he alone must kill Harry. I posit that it was not merely Voldemort's ego, as he could have sent anyone (and indeed he used Narcissa as a human shield to make sure Harry was truly dead). He is uniquely bad at killing Harry. Yet he says:

"But I know better now. I understand those things that I did not understand before. I must be the one to kill Harry Potter, and I shall be."

This must have come from Dumbledore's spy, then sitting beside Voldemort as his most valuable servant.

Snape is still capable of producing the Doe Patronus, which represents Lily, and he is still serving Dumbledore despite having been used by him for years at that point.

It might mean that Snape understood that his personal quest for redemption is not as important as the entire world, but this insight is already served by his choice to die, sending Voldemort to battle with a wand that won't answer to him.

And anyway, if Harry must die, why is it so important that he sacrifice himself willingly? Why is it so important that Voldemort himself do it? A final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort or one of his cronies would have happened at some point, and Harry would have died, and Voldemort's last vestige would have died with him. Snape was not a stupid man, and not an unquestioning follower. The idea that this is actually rather a strange thing for Dumbledore to insist on must have occurred to him at some point. The self-sacrifice element was Harry's chance to come back, and this was why giving Harry the memories was imperative. Presumably, this knowledge also made it worthwhile to Snape to explain himself and his actions as thoroughly as he had, because really - only a couple of the memories he gave Harry are strategically important.

Snape dies because of the prophecy he had delivered. Lord Voldermort says:

"It cannot be any other way,” said Voldemort. "I must master the wand, Severus. Master the wand, and I master Potter at last."

Snape is why Voldemort is interested in Harry, and he dies for this, and because of this. Voldemort thinks he is due to win at any moment.

But Harry - Harry, who had spared Peter Pettigrew, who had by then amassed so many tragic deaths - can feel pity and mercy, even for Snape. In the shrieking shack, where Harry had proved his mettle once before, Snape is slowly dying and Harry shows his compassion to him, the compassion Snape must have missed so much, lacked so painfully. He gets to look into Lily's eyes knowing that perhaps he might not have failed her.

He dies redeemed, even - especially - to the boy who was his main victim. Snape had both orphaned him and mistreated him as a student, but he was Harry's true latest and greatest protector. His pattern is broken, his trauma is resolved, and Lily's sacrifice is not wasted.