Addendum: Misjudging Lily
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In fact, we don’t know how long there was between Sirius’s “joke” and SWM.
Because think of what Severus is going to be brooding over AFTER the conversation. The scene ends with Severus’s dizzying rush of relief at Lily’s insistence that she thinks Potter an arrogant toerag—she doesn’t like his rival, at least!
But afterwards—well, Sev STARTED that memory at the point where he showed that he was feeling insecure about Lily’s friendship for him.
What a lot of Snapefen have been saying, about how Lily, when she found out Sev had almost been killed, if she truly cared for him, she would have found a way to come see how he was doing, and would have expressed some concern for him when they did talk? You think all that won’t occur to Severus afterwards, when he thinks about the implications that she KNEW all along about his brush with death—oh, not the details, but she KNEW. And she obviously didn’t care that much.
My first serious love, I decided that a thing he didn’t do proved that he really didn’t care for me. I naturally spent the rest of the relationship desperately pushing him to prove me wrong, while waiting for him to realize the truth as I had. And of course, eventually I was proved right; he grew tired of this, and me.
Ever since DH put the “joke” before SWM, I’ve tended to assume it was right before—like the month before. But I realize canon doesn’t give that—it was more just that I thought of the two incidents as a one-two punch. Someone else had made a case for it happening before James’s birthday in March, and indeed canon doesn’t say.
This poison may have been working on their relationship for MONTHS. Whatever Lily says or does afterwards, she’s already proved she doesn’t really care about him. Severus already knows she doesn’t; he’s just waiting for the final blow to fall, for her to admit it.
And adult Severus may have ultimately realized (as I did) that it hadn’t been true when he first concluded it. That he had made his fears come true. That may be the true significance of THIS memory, as "Mudblood" was always the point of SWM.
We are totally misjudging Lily based on the “The Prince’s Tale.” Because these were never meant to be Severus’s memories of Lily.
They’re his memories of what went wrong between them.
Because think of what Severus is going to be brooding over AFTER the conversation. The scene ends with Severus’s dizzying rush of relief at Lily’s insistence that she thinks Potter an arrogant toerag—she doesn’t like his rival, at least!
But afterwards—well, Sev STARTED that memory at the point where he showed that he was feeling insecure about Lily’s friendship for him.
What a lot of Snapefen have been saying, about how Lily, when she found out Sev had almost been killed, if she truly cared for him, she would have found a way to come see how he was doing, and would have expressed some concern for him when they did talk? You think all that won’t occur to Severus afterwards, when he thinks about the implications that she KNEW all along about his brush with death—oh, not the details, but she KNEW. And she obviously didn’t care that much.
My first serious love, I decided that a thing he didn’t do proved that he really didn’t care for me. I naturally spent the rest of the relationship desperately pushing him to prove me wrong, while waiting for him to realize the truth as I had. And of course, eventually I was proved right; he grew tired of this, and me.
Ever since DH put the “joke” before SWM, I’ve tended to assume it was right before—like the month before. But I realize canon doesn’t give that—it was more just that I thought of the two incidents as a one-two punch. Someone else had made a case for it happening before James’s birthday in March, and indeed canon doesn’t say.
This poison may have been working on their relationship for MONTHS. Whatever Lily says or does afterwards, she’s already proved she doesn’t really care about him. Severus already knows she doesn’t; he’s just waiting for the final blow to fall, for her to admit it.
And adult Severus may have ultimately realized (as I did) that it hadn’t been true when he first concluded it. That he had made his fears come true. That may be the true significance of THIS memory, as "Mudblood" was always the point of SWM.
We are totally misjudging Lily based on the “The Prince’s Tale.” Because these were never meant to be Severus’s memories of Lily.
They’re his memories of what went wrong between them.