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The January Challenge: Lily revisited

The World of Severus Snape

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The January Challenge: Lily revisited

[info]sylvanawood
1/3/11 04:02 pm
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The Challenge for January 2011:

Lily revisited



Years ago (we've been around for a while, oh yes!)we had 'Severus and Lily' as a monthly challenge.

[info]alicekinsno1 suggested to take a closer look at Lily's character:

Maybe something that discusses the character of Lily more deeply? I'd love to see what some of your ideas are for just how Lily went from treating Snape so harshly and talking back to James, to being the stereotypical "saintly mother" at the end of her life. There's something about her personality that doesn't add up.

That is to say, how her apparently selfless decision to die for her baby makes sense in light of the way she treated Severus or even James. With possibly a side comment about how despite being so powerful and gifted she didn't really show any of that by dying pleading for her baby's life without even trying to take on Voldemort.

Please post your entries here or in a separate post. I'm looking forward to your entries.
If you have ideas for new challenges, please post them here. (This is a new list, your earlier suggestions are still in the old post).
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  • Re: Pearlette to Duj

    [info]00sevvie
    1/14/11 10:32 pm (UTC)
    If the normal rules of judging characters' behavior are suspended because it's a fantasy world, how then can anyone criticize not only Lily and James, but Severus, Draco, or for that matter Voldemort? The fact that it is fiction, or set in a world with magic, doesn't mean moral judgments don't apply. If you one chooses to say it does for them, then no character can be judged by them on such grounds. Either one is reading the books with a sense that moral judgments can be made, or not. They don't apply only to certain characters and not others.

    And just because culturally it seems normal for parents in the WW to be more blase about their children's safety doesn't mean that nobody can find fault with that attitude. (Though again, I think here JKR's tone shifts cause problems for some readers.)

    • Re: Pearlette to Duj

      [info]summeriris
      1/14/11 11:53 pm (UTC)
      I'm not saying that we can't or shouldn't criticize, I'm just saying that we can't judge how safe flying toy brooms are because they don't exist outside the books. We criticize the characters, not the toys their children play with. The entire WW is blasé about injuries. They have magic, we don't. If a child falls off a step in this world we take them for an xray, the WW doesn't know what xrays are. Broken bones are fixed with a wave of the wand. Wish I had one sometimes.
      There is a tone shift in the books. In each book the tone gets darker as the protagonists grow up and the situation worsens. Harry's problems shift from winning a Quidditch match to sacrificing his life to save his world. I think we have to have the flexibility to shift with the books.

      • Re: Pearlette to Duj

        (Anonymous)
        1/15/11 04:41 pm (UTC)
        "I'm just saying that we can't judge how safe flying toy brooms are because they don't exist outside the books."

        The internal evidence is that it wasn't safe. He broke a vase and "nearly killed the cat." *How* unsafe we can't judge, but hazards were not removed or shielded, and magic doesn't always protect from injury or fix it.

        duj

        • Re: Pearlette to Duj

          [info]summeriris
          1/15/11 09:41 pm (UTC)
          Children bump into tables and bookcases and chests all the time. Some times something gets knocked over and broken. That's the nature of childhood and no one would dream of shouting child abuse/neglect if a child while running through their home did something like that as a one off. As I said earlier my niece used to miss the dog by inches with her walker when she was under a year old. And yes I am using that as a comparable item to a toy flying broom. Do I think she would have killed the dog if she had bumped into it, of course not. She wouldn't even have hurt him. We actually see these brooms in action in the scene for GOF at the Quidditch World cup. The children on them have their feet just about an inch off the ground and the brooms are going real slow. It doesn't help your point to exaggerate the dangers to a magical child. As these toys would seem to be popular in the WW, I would put them in the same class as tricycles and such from our world. Children do get injured, that's a fact but to infer that Lily is neglectful for letting her magical son ride a toy is pushing your point into the outer edges of reason. We can critique the characters, their humanity and their interactions, but it is an exercise in futility to critique the reality of their world as it has been created. Some things we just have to take as their reality. Flying toy brooms is part of that reality just as waving a wand to fix a broken bone is.
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