I find it ironic when I think of who exactly got me to start reading the Harry Potter series in the first place. But that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

I am once again obsessed by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I keep ruminating about the relationship between Severus Snape and Lily Potter. It is also ironic that I didn’t see it coming. I’m so totally into the whole unrequited, tragic love thing, and I love characters who never get the girl, who never even had a chance, and who die hopeless and alone. I can’t believe that I had no clue whatsoever what exactly it was that bound Snape to keep Harry safe, and what made him so trustworthy to Dumbledore. You would’ve thought that I’d’ve been all over it.

It just dawned on me that the whole Severus & Lily subplot is so very Wuthering Heights. As Alyssa deconstructs it, Severus is Heathcliff and Lily is Catherine. The Brontë Blog has more literary analysis (and also compares Harry Potter himself to Jane Eyre.)

(As an excursus, my sister recently told me about a book that is a re-imagining of Jane Eyre, told from Bertha’s point-of-view. Bertha is recharacterized as a woman who comes from a non-Western culture, and what is described as madness in the original book is really just Bertha experiencing (1) a communication barrier and (2) culture shock. Or was my sister just describing The Wide Sargasso Sea?)

It makes me curious as to what was going through Snape’s mind the entire time. Did he think his life was pretty much over, and that to give his life in protection of Harry was, to paraphrase yet another tragic hero, Sydney Carton, a far, far better thing that he does, than he had ever done? Or was he in it for vengeance against the people who destroyed the one person whom he ever trusted, and whom once actually genuinely cared about him? I can only imagine the black hatred that he must have for Voldemort and the Death Eaters for killing Lily. And like Iñigo Montoya, perhaps he had never really thought of what life could be like once he had achieved his aim. (What’s even better is that he dies probably believing that he may have failed in his only remaining two reasons for living (1) to keep Harry safe and (2) to defeat Voldemort and the Death Eaters. For one thing, Snape died believing that Harry had to really die to be able to beat Voldemort, and in the final analysis, there was good chance that all of his and Dumbledore’s careful planning could end up going horribly wrong, with Voldemort winning after all.)

I really can’t wait until “The Deathly Hallows” hits the silver screen. If it’s done right (and, knowing Hollywood, that’s always a very big “if”), it should totally break my heart.

How much of your destiny is truly predetermined? How much of it is self-fulfilling prophecy? (There are technical terms for these things, I think, except I can’t remember them. Confirmation bias? Forer effect?)

Somewhat sadly and quite pathetically, I’ve come to identify myself with an unusual type of literary protagonist: the hero who doesn’t get the girl. Off the top of my head, there are only really three stories I can think of where this happens unambiguously.

Though I actually have never read it, the first one is Wuthering Heights, in the character of Heathcliff. My friend was reading Wuthering Heights at the time and told me that I reminded her of this character. (Great.) But I actually probably first ran into this character in Michael Penn’s song ”No Myth” which is, naturally, a song about a guy who isn’t able to hook up with the girl that he loves. But I think it definitely ranks up there on the list of obscure literary references made by a pop song. (Interesting bits of trivia: Michael Penn is the brother of the actor Sean Penn, and married the singer Aimee Mann) While this song came out in 1990, the most striking memory I have attached to this song is driving up 880 in Milpitas in 1998, although I don’t particularly remember where I was going.

Another character to which I’ve been likened is Sydney Carton, the doomed alcoholic barrister who falls hopelessly in love with Lucy Manette, and for whom he eventually sacrifices his life for. I didn’t read this book until my junior year in college, during a trans-Pacific plane trip to the Philippines. My sister had just read it for high school at the time. What struck her about the character was the aura of wasted potential that clung to this character.

Lastly, and perhaps less literary, is Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series. The love of his life, Lily Evans, ends up marrying a guy Severus totally hates, James Potter. Lily is eventually murdered by the Dark Lord Voldemort, providing the driving force for Snape’s hidden-yet-unwavering opposition to the bad guys, although he is eventually killed as well (for what I feel were rather arbitrary reasons, but I guess an author has got to do what an author has got to do when a deadline is looming.) He kind of combines the increasing bitterness and vengefulness of Heathcliff driven by losing the woman he loves first to marriage to a rival, and then to death, with Sydney Carton’s aura of wasted potential, total despair and wanton self-sacrifice, dying what seems to me, a meaningless death, since he does not get to find out that Voldemort was successfully vanquished and that Harry actually lives.

When I first read the dénouement to Snape’s subplot, I was astonished. Here was an actual character who could hold the torch for a lost love some 15+ years after the fact, and who ends up dedicating his entire life in memory of her, without hope or ambition of ever finding love again. As far as he was concerned, it seemed to me that he considered his life pretty much over. Finally. A character that I could relate to!

The astonishment soon turned into a mild depression, with the realization that the probability of me dying alone and unloved is pretty high, and ever increasing with time, and while it doesn’t seem like a good way to go, I’m in no mood to really do anything about it. It is, to put it bluntly, fucking hopeless.

But then again, there are far worse things in life than to be alone and unloved. For some unknown reason, the depression managed to snap a few days ago. While nothing has changed with regard to my non-existent love life, there seems to be something that has changed in my perspective.

My current attitude seems to range somewhere between “oh well” and “I don’t give a fuck.” I haven’t exstinguished hope entirely, but I’m pretty much gearing myself up for a continued solitary existence for however many more years I may have left. (I am utterly convinced that I am going to die young, for pointless reasons, and in quite possibly a violent manner.) Odds say, given my personal and strong family history of depression, anxiety, and just general insanity, I am most likely to end my life in suicide. Still, you can never rule out the random drunk driver going the wrong way on the freeway. Or early-onset coronary artery disease, the way my diet is. Suicide by hamburger. What a way to go.

Then I read about this metaphor about life, and I have to say, “Yeah. That’s it.”

Life. You do with it what you can. The faster your realize the things you can’t or won’t do, the less time you waste living with regret. I guess. Something like that.

I can’t seem to get over Snape’s forlorn and hopeless devotion to Lily. On one hand, it’s really sad and pathetic. On the other hand, it’s heart-wrenchingly awesome.

In a way, the last thing Snape sees before he dies (quite horrifically and with much gore) is Lily’s eyes.

I suppose the thing that really gets me is that I can relate.

Carrying a torch for a lost cause for 10+ years? (And in Snape’s case, it really is a lost cause, considering that the woman he loves is dead.) Sure. It happens. Like I said, it’s sad and pathetic.

Sacrificing your life—not just dying, but giving up your every waking hour as a sacrifice—in the name of your unrequited and yet enduring, impossible-to-quench love? Oh, man.

I can’t wait to watch this part in the movie theaters, in three years or so. I hope they don’t cut it. This entire scene should be perfect.

“You never saw Snape cast a Patronus, did you, Riddle?”

Voldemort did not answer. They continued to circle each other like wolves about to tear each other apart.

“Snape’s Patronus was a doe,” said Harry, “the same as my mother’s, because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from the time when they were children. You should have realized.”

(P.S. No, Harry is not the product of an affair between Snape and Lily Potter.)

I:

“If she means so much to you,” said Dumbledore, “surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?”

“I have—I have asked him—”

“You disgust me,” said Dumbledore…. Snape seemed to shrink a little. “You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want?”

Snape said nothing, but merely looked up at Dumbledore.

“Hide them all, then,” he croaked. “Keep her—them—safe. Please.”

“And what will you give me in return, Severus?”

“In—in return?” Snape gaped at Dumbledore… but after a long moment he said, “Anything.”

II:

“I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter—”

“But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore seriously. “Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?”

“For him?” shouted Snape. ”Expecto Patronum!”

From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe: She landed on the office floor, bounded once across the office, and soared out of the window. Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.

“After all this time?”

“Always,” said Snape.

Because of the release of Deathly Hallows today, I had to catch up and read Half-Blood Prince. One of the reasons why I had decided to put off reading it was because everyone had ruined the “big surprise,” which was the death of Albus Dumbledore.

I suppose the death of the great wizard has been a staple of fantasy for quite a while now, at least ever since Gandalf the Grey plummeted into the trackless depths of Moria, and since Obi-Wan Kenobi met his end from the blade of his former apprentice. (In fact, I almost feel like every fantasy series that has hit the mainstream has been some bizarre hybrid of the ideas of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas: an inconceivably powerful artifact that tethers the Dark Lord to existence in this material plane, a Chosen One meant to restore the balance. But I digress.)

I guess it’s probably just a function of when I read The Lord of the Rings. Even to this day, even though I know that Gandalf the White comes back, I always get a little misty eyed when I read about the Fellowship of the Ring traversing the orc-infested Mines of Moria. I used to feel a little pang of sadness when Obi-Wan Kenobi was cut down by Darth Vader, but unfortunately, George Lucas makes him look decidedly less regal in Episodes I-III that he sort of lost part of his mystique. But when Severus Snape blasts Dumbledore out of the tower, I don’t know, I guess it would’ve been better if I didn’t know.

Still, hands down, the part of The Lord of the Rings that really gets me right there is when Merry has just finished helping Éowyn kill the Witch King of Angmar, and no one seems to notice that he has been deathly injured until Pippin stumbles upon him, and he ends up trying to drag him to the Houses of Healing. Merry ends up asking him, “Are you going to bury me?” and if I’m in the right mood, I can get all teary-eyed.

And now, a spoiler: I just finished Deathly Hallows and Severus Snape’s part in the story was just, wow. He is now definitely my most favorite character in the series, and even though we all know that he’s not the one-dimensional villain that the characters want to believe he is, I was still surprised by how poignant the entirety of his tale is.