Collecting headcanons &amp; meta like little tadpoles from a puddle

#Love this addition #My fave is PoA because I found it exciting and revelatory when I first read it #It's the first book where you realize there's an overarching plot and these aren't just stand-alone books.#A lot of backstory is revealed and that there are complex relationships that have been working in the background without #the reader realizing it #It's the first book that really hints at the chiastic structure of the serieso #and the first one where things start getting dark. Harry hearing his parents' last panicked cries is a departure from the #mission/mission achieved protagonist is heroic pace of the first two books

elenianz-deactivated20200816

hc that snape was trying to make a small talk

deathdaydungeon

I howled at your tags

#dumlbedore: you need to be friendly w/ sirius. snape: it’ll be hard but ok.#snape: so how’s the cleaning going? sirius: fuck off

When we talk about Occlumency lessons and the memories Snape deposits in the Pensieve, I think most people (myself included) assume that Snape only puts three memories in there. But what if he puts three sets of memories in? As in, each strand of memory he pulls away contains a cluster of memories around a particular subject or train of thought.

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).

Obviously this is all conjecture and there isn’t much textual evidence to go on. Memories and the Pensieve have been a grey area of canon at best. Nevertheless I find the idea very compelling, that if Snape could hand over a whole series of memories as one unit in DH, it should be possible to extract them in groups as well as individual ones. In which case the question isn’t what specific memories other than SWM did Snape put in the Pensieve during Occlumency lessons, but what sets of memories? SWM may have belonged to a larger set of memories of Lily. Perhaps the other two sets have to do with his history as a Death Eater and might include his work as a spy, and his memories of childhood abuse that are personal and make him feel vulnerable? All Harry sees when he breaks into Snape’s mind is his father shouting at his mother. The extra-textual information given on Pottermore and approved by the author (boo,hiss) says that Snape’s father used to beat him with a belt… if Harry broke into his mind and saw the most vivid memories, would they be of Snape’s father shouting or of him being whipped? Wouldn’t it be the latter? Unless… it wasn’t accessible because it had been put in the Pensieve for safekeeping.

It’s possible it’s groups of memories, and an interesting idea, but I still think based on the evidence we have, it’s likely three distinct individual memories. Because Snape isn’t the only person we see extract their memories in canon; Slughorn does too.

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…).

The biggest question to me has always been why Snape removed the memories in the first place, besides needing to for plot reasons, because from all three characters, we can see removing a memory doesn’t make you forget it. Snape knows to be pissed about what Harry saw; Slughorn laments what Harry will see after removing the memory; and Dumbledore knows what memories are in the bottles well enough to talk about them. Definitely a very large grey area!

Good point, I forgot about Slughorn! Though it’s interesting that his memory is described as long, while Snape’s is described as thick. I think Slughorn’s is long because he’s hesitant and barely willing, but there’s no description beyond that. Snape’s memory is described as a thick strand, and that he repeated the act, which implies all three strands he pulls from his head are thick. It’s possible this insinuates multiple memories grouped together, and it’s also possible the implication is that what he pulls from his head is more substantial and leaves less behind so it’s harder for anyone to get at it should they invade his mind.

*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.

I do still like the theory that the reason Snape extracts memories three times, even if they’re clusters and not individual memories, is because the process of extracting them and the way the pensieve works reflect how thoughts work in a person’s brain. Some people can only entertain a single thought, while others are able to mentally multi-task. Even most people who can do the latter can’t think disparate thoughts easily, though. What I mean is, if you think about your childhood besty you can remember a bunch of things about them in quick succession, but you’d have a hard time mixing in memories of the job you had in your mid-20s or what you cooked for dinner every night last week simultaneously. However, if you weren’t thinking about something else you could probably rifle through various memories of that job even if it spanned several years, or you can probably easily think through dinner last week in one go, it’s just harder to do both at the same time. It’s not hard to group memories like that for most people, but if you had to concentrate on all three kinds at once it would take a lot more energy and focus. It can potentially be done, but why would you try, when it’s so much easier to go categorically, the way the brain works?

In theory I like the idea of the memories being related to how one thinks—though I feel the need to point out humans can’t actually cognitively multitask, and what we are better and worse at is task switching, recall, and focus (eg my experiences with memory and recall are quite different being neurodivergent). I don’t think the books completely support this though, given the memories are always in objective third person and accurate unless willfully “tampered” with like Slughorn’s falsified memory. It’s unclear to me though whether that is a function of the magic in the pensieve, the magic to extract a memory, or both—but it’s very much not representative of how memories get stored or recalled in our brains, unless you are one of the very rare people with eidetic memory.

I really really like the idea of the physical form of the memory being related to how badly one wants to hide it, though. I’m still not sure based on evidence we see that they actually get hidden in one’s mind once removed, but I suppose that’s possible. Interestingly, extracting memories is a nonverbal spell, so there’s no way to know if they’re all being pulled with exactly the same magic or different versions of the same spell (e.g., extract to hide from your own mind vs extract to share with others).

Another somewhat related possibility for the thickness of the memory is the significance of the memory’s impact on one’s mind, and I think this might be my new headcanon. I saw your other reblog and had forgotten about Dumbledore pulling the one about the prophecy, but those are thin. Snape’s are thick. Slughorn’s are neither thin nor thick, so somewhere in between.

When we look at the memories, they also seem related to how “big” the memory’s impact is on the character’s psyche and self-perception—along with their desire to keep it secret.

Dumbledore’s memory is about something that doesn’t have a ton of personal impact, and he wants to share it with Harry. Slughorn’s is a source of deep shame and he’s reluctant but willing to share it. Snape’s is incredibly traumatic and changed his relationship with his closest friend forever, and he wants no one to ever see it, but especially not Harry.

Re: Dumbledore’s bottles, I know all the memories aren’t his, but a couple are, and it just seems weird that he’d need to extract his own to keep with the others, when he’s there with Harry when he shows them to him, and would be accessible to him if he wanted to view them himself with more completeness/objectivity. Why include his own in the collection? Maybe it has to do with the effort to extract them, but then why would Snape not just keep his hidden in bottles too? It’s just odd to me, but not something that’s a big deal in the grand scheme of things, I suppose. Definitely more interesting questions to consider.

And yes we are definitely thinking way too hard about this, but it’s fun!

Oooooh I love your interpretation that the thickness/thinness of the memory is about emotional impact! That’s also a really interesting way of looking at it.

And you’re right, I think I used the wrong language. When I talked about cognitive multi-tasking, what I was trying to describe was the ability to flip through related memories quickly, as opposed to being able to do so with disparate thoughts, ie. exactly what you said, task switching. I’m also ND and my brian will often flit from one thought to the next, but it’s still systematic, and task switching is HARD. I do think, though, that even though the extracted memories are able to be viewed objectively in a pensieve, the process of recalling them still has to operate by the rules of a person’s mental ability. Ie. that recalling is still bound by the abilities and/or limitations of a person, but once the memory has been extracted it’s an objective depicition of an event.

I think maybe Dumbledore is just a little too meticulous, and had memories ready for his meetings with Harry in the little bottles? Either that or the author, who has uhhhh been known to write carelessly, just didn’t think about it.

When we talk about Occlumency lessons and the memories Snape deposits in the Pensieve, I think most people (myself included) assume that Snape only puts three memories in there. But what if he puts three sets of memories in? As in, each strand of memory he pulls away contains a cluster of memories around a particular subject or train of thought.

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).

Obviously this is all conjecture and there isn’t much textual evidence to go on. Memories and the Pensieve have been a grey area of canon at best. Nevertheless I find the idea very compelling, that if Snape could hand over a whole series of memories as one unit in DH, it should be possible to extract them in groups as well as individual ones. In which case the question isn’t what specific memories other than SWM did Snape put in the Pensieve during Occlumency lessons, but what sets of memories? SWM may have belonged to a larger set of memories of Lily. Perhaps the other two sets have to do with his history as a Death Eater and might include his work as a spy, and his memories of childhood abuse that are personal and make him feel vulnerable? All Harry sees when he breaks into Snape’s mind is his father shouting at his mother. The extra-textual information given on Pottermore and approved by the author (boo,hiss) says that Snape’s father used to beat him with a belt… if Harry broke into his mind and saw the most vivid memories, would they be of Snape’s father shouting or of him being whipped? Wouldn’t it be the latter? Unless… it wasn’t accessible because it had been put in the Pensieve for safekeeping.

It’s possible it’s groups of memories, and an interesting idea, but I still think based on the evidence we have, it’s likely three distinct individual memories. Because Snape isn’t the only person we see extract their memories in canon; Slughorn does too.

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…).

The biggest question to me has always been why Snape removed the memories in the first place, besides needing to for plot reasons, because from all three characters, we can see removing a memory doesn’t make you forget it. Snape knows to be pissed about what Harry saw; Slughorn laments what Harry will see after removing the memory; and Dumbledore knows what memories are in the bottles well enough to talk about them. Definitely a very large grey area!

Good point, I forgot about Slughorn! Though it’s interesting that his memory is described as long, while Snape’s is described as thick. I think Slughorn’s is long because he’s hesitant and barely willing, but there’s no description beyond that. Snape’s memory is described as a thick strand, and that he repeated the act, which implies all three strands he pulls from his head are thick. It’s possible this insinuates multiple memories grouped together, and it’s also possible the implication is that what he pulls from his head is more substantial and leaves less behind so it’s harder for anyone to get at it should they invade his mind.

*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.

I do still like the theory that the reason Snape extracts memories three times, even if they’re clusters and not individual memories, is because the process of extracting them and the way the pensieve works reflect how thoughts work in a person’s brain. Some people can only entertain a single thought, while others are able to mentally multi-task. Even most people who can do the latter can’t think disparate thoughts easily, though. What I mean is, if you think about your childhood besty you can remember a bunch of things about them in quick succession, but you’d have a hard time mixing in memories of the job you had in your mid-20s or what you cooked for dinner every night last week simultaneously. However, if you weren’t thinking about something else you could probably rifle through various memories of that job even if it spanned several years, or you can probably easily think through dinner last week in one go, it’s just harder to do both at the same time. It’s not hard to group memories like that for most people, but if you had to concentrate on all three kinds at once it would take a lot more energy and focus. It can potentially be done, but why would you try, when it’s so much easier to go categorically, the way the brain works?

When we talk about Occlumency lessons and the memories Snape deposits in the Pensieve, I think most people (myself included) assume that Snape only puts three memories in there. But what if he puts three sets of memories in? As in, each strand of memory he pulls away contains a cluster of memories around a particular subject or train of thought.

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).

Obviously this is all conjecture and there isn’t much textual evidence to go on. Memories and the Pensieve have been a grey area of canon at best. Nevertheless I find the idea very compelling, that if Snape could hand over a whole series of memories as one unit in DH, it should be possible to extract them in groups as well as individual ones. In which case the question isn’t what specific memories other than SWM did Snape put in the Pensieve during Occlumency lessons, but what sets of memories? SWM may have belonged to a larger set of memories of Lily. Perhaps the other two sets have to do with his history as a Death Eater and might include his work as a spy, and his memories of childhood abuse that are personal and make him feel vulnerable? All Harry sees when he breaks into Snape’s mind is his father shouting at his mother. The extra-textual information given on Pottermore and approved by the author (boo,hiss) says that Snape’s father used to beat him with a belt… if Harry broke into his mind and saw the most vivid memories, would they be of Snape’s father shouting or of him being whipped? Wouldn’t it be the latter? Unless… it wasn’t accessible because it had been put in the Pensieve for safekeeping.

#OK I’ll stop now I swear #Meta

Going to add one more thing:

Dumbledore walked back to the desk, placed the Pensieve upon it, and raised his wand to his own temple. From it, he withdrew silvery, gossamer-fine strands of thought clinging to the wand and deposited them into the basin.

-Order of the Phoenix, Ch. 27

This is from the moment in OotP when Dumbledore shows Harry the prophecy in the form of him sharing a single memory he has of Trelawney making it. This single memory is described as “silvery, gossamer-fine strands” whereas when Snape extracts memories before Occlumency lessons, they’re described as being “like a thick gossamer strand.” Perhaps a fine strand is a single memory, and a thick strand implies more than one?

When we talk about Occlumency lessons and the memories Snape deposits in the Pensieve, I think most people (myself included) assume that Snape only puts three memories in there. But what if he puts three sets of memories in? As in, each strand of memory he pulls away contains a cluster of memories around a particular subject or train of thought.

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).

Obviously this is all conjecture and there isn’t much textual evidence to go on. Memories and the Pensieve have been a grey area of canon at best. Nevertheless I find the idea very compelling, that if Snape could hand over a whole series of memories as one unit in DH, it should be possible to extract them in groups as well as individual ones. In which case the question isn’t what specific memories other than SWM did Snape put in the Pensieve during Occlumency lessons, but what sets of memories? SWM may have belonged to a larger set of memories of Lily. Perhaps the other two sets have to do with his history as a Death Eater and might include his work as a spy, and his memories of childhood abuse that are personal and make him feel vulnerable? All Harry sees when he breaks into Snape’s mind is his father shouting at his mother. The extra-textual information given on Pottermore and approved by the author (boo,hiss) says that Snape’s father used to beat him with a belt… if Harry broke into his mind and saw the most vivid memories, would they be of Snape’s father shouting or of him being whipped? Wouldn’t it be the latter? Unless… it wasn’t accessible because it had been put in the Pensieve for safekeeping.

#meta

closet-keys

a lot of people who have experienced abuse do not know they have experienced it.

some people will hear this and think, well it couldn’t have been that bad if you didn’t even know.

but knowing you were abused is not a matter of severity. it is a matter of whether the forms of abuse you’ve experienced have been de-naturalized in a supportive social context, and thus made knowable as something that did not have to happen.

when people list common forms of abuse, many people will be in tags and notes saying “I didn’t know this wasn’t normal.”

it’s sad because this sentiment simultaneously misses and hits the point exactly.

abuse is normal. but what people mean when they say this is, “I didn’t know I was allowed to be hurt by this, to object to this, that anyone would ever recognize how violated, degraded, or dehumanized it feels to experience this.”

all of that is expressed through the word “normal” in these statements of realization because we all must constantly stomach being hurt, violated, degraded, and dehumanized in “normal” life, and we are taught from a young age that if something is “normal” it means we cannot object to it or escape it.

you’re allowed to feel violated by normalized forms of abuse. you are allowed to object to normalized forms of violation.

you don’t have to take on the loaded terms of Survivor and Abuser to describe things if you don’t want to or it feels inappropriate or inaccurate to you.

you can just allow yourself to recognize when people are abusing the power they have over you in ways that benefit themselves at your expense, and to recognize the ways that people with power over you coerce you to give up autonomy over your body.

something does not become less traumatic for being common and normal. the normalized trauma of being dehumanized and violated is part of what oppression is. it’s part of how subjugated classes within a population are constructed and maintained as distinct.

it’s okay to acknowledge it hurts. you don’t have to internalize it as something that was your own fault. you don’t have to suppress it forever.

you’re allowed to acknowledge that who you are was shaped by the people with power over you abusing that power.

abuse being common means you are not alone. you are in good company. we’re in it together ❤️

anabimelo

because I kinda like their friendship

#snape art

[People ask] “Are you a top or a bottom?” It’s not a political party, I’m independent!

- John Waters

#Begging everyone to stop turning sex into a binary

‘Terrified? I hope I, Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, have never been guilty of cowardice in my life! The noble blood that runs in my veins -‘

-Order of the Phoenix, Ch. 11

‘Listen - what happens when you die, anyway? Where do you go? Why doesn’t everyone come back? Why isn’t this place full of ghosts? Why -?’ ‘I cannot answer,’ said Nick. ‘You’re dead, aren’t you?’ said Harry exasperatedly. ‘Who can answer better than you?’ ‘I was afraid of death,’ said Nick softly. ‘I chose to remain behind. I sometimes wonder whether I oughtn’t to have … well, that is neither here nor there … in fact, I am neither here nor there …’ He gave a small sad chuckle. ‘I know nothing of the secrets of death, Harry, for I chose my feeble imitation of life instead.’

-Order of the Phoenix, Ch. 38

I love this little reveal about Nick’s insecurities at the beginning and end of OoTP.

threecatsinacoat

Hot take, I don't like the headcanon or the interpretation that Severus's maternal family (the Princes) are rich and influential.

I believe making them a quasi aristocratic pureblood family who would adopt Severus in a heartbeat and surrounds him with riches diminishes his story greatly.

It turns him from “brilliant half-blood poor kid who fought for every scrap of knowledge against a society that already set him for failure from his conception” into “disgraced heir who could have had it all.”

Making his maternal family rich and powerful subtly (or not so much) reinforces the idea that worth and talent are backed by old money and blood, even when the narrative of the books and the fandom pretend to critique the blood supremacy culture established in the books.

Giving the Princes a rich and noble status and therefore, making Severus return to this wealth he was deprived at first is transforming his story to the colonial fantasy that Harry Potter (as a series) already is.

danadiadea

It also doesn't even work with the text, since if the Princes were a well-known, influential family, why would Hermione struggle to find anything about them but Eileen's single old photo and afterwards, a tiny note in the newspaper about her marriage? The word "Prince" clearly didn't ring the bell for any of the characters as a last name of some magical aristocrasy. It's even plausible that Prince is a completely muggle last name, and Eileen herself was a muggleborn, or a halfblood with paternal muggle/muggleborn heritage. Definitely way more plausible than Severus' grandparents being some kind of brunette Malfoys.

gilderoy-lockhart-n1fan

Wait, aside from being gorgeous, I'm also like, super confused.

Your Patronus form changes when you either fall in love or get traumatized, like, canonically, man, it's either true love or trauma.

But then, how come Tonks's Patronus changed to become a wolf like Remus's and Severus's Patronus changed to become a doe like Lily's, but Lily and James had different Patronus? While the same animal, they're not the same Patronus at all!

Wouldn't this mean they weren't really in love, since that's what makes it change?

How come Remus's Patronus didn't change to mirror Tonks's? Doesn't this mean he didn't love her that much? (Probably why he tried to abandone her with their newborn, smh/j)

Like, if anyone fell in love with Severus their Patronus would also become a doe, not a stag, that's how it canonically works.

Everytime I try to get a straight answer from people, it's either: "Oh, Severus's Patronus changed bc he was infatuated/obsessed with Lily and didn't actually love her" and I realize this people don't know the canon and are instead making things up so they can hate on Severus. Or "They were always like that because they were destined to be together! Aww" yeah, no. You made that up without evidence, if they were in love with each other, Lily would have a stag and James would have a doe Patronus.

I wrote a meta on this recently that digs into this, but “true love” isn’t a canonical reason patronuses change. A “great shock… an emotional upheaval” is the only reason we’re given for why it happens in the books.

Personally I believe Severus’s patronus changed when he found out Lily died.

^^^ good delicious meta

tiny HC difference: I don't think he knew how to cast a patronus before Lily died. The Patronus' only use (before Dumbledore invented talking with them in OotP) was to ward off Dementors. It is a niche, rare, difficult spell barely anyone learns how to do. You don't learn it at school, almost no jobs require it - and Death Eaters don't need it as Dementors ally with them. Also not their brand.

So it was always Lily, because the memories and feelings used to form it in the first place are from her (what else would his happiest memory be? What happiness did he have other than her, both then and beyond?)

Canonically we don't know what James' Patronus was. His animagus form was a stag, and it's Harry's Patronus that recalls his dad by also being a stag, but it's unclear in canon whether James even knew how to cast a Patronus let alone what form it took. We also don't know whether Lily knew how to cast one or what form it took -- Snape's patronus implies that the doe symbolizes Lily, but this seems like clumsy writing on Rowling's part, implying that if James' animagus form is a stag, then Lily would embody the female counterpart. Snape didn't know James was an animagus, though, (as we learn in PoA), so there's no canonical reason he would associate does with Lily. Also the female counterpart to a stag is a hind, but that's just me being nitpicky.

Also (because I'm a horrible pedant, I'm sorry, I don't like it either): Patronuses have more than one use. For example, we see Order members use them to communicate with each other. Snape, in particular, also doesn't think a Patronus is the best way to ward off a Dementor:

Having wasted a lot of time worrying aloud about Apparition, Ron was now struggling to finish a viciously difficult essay for Snape that Harry and Hermione had already completed. Harry fully expected to receive low marks on his, because he had disagreed with Snape on the best way to tackle Dementors...

Half-Blood Prince, Ch. 21

The only way Harry knows to tackle Dementors is with a Patronus, so I think it's safe to assume that was the argument Snape disagreed with. Which implies that whatever Snape's reason was for learning how to cast a Patronus, it wasn't to ward off Dementors. Very possibly it was to communicate with Order members as per Dumbledore's preference.

@dirty-dirty-muggle does a good job saying the 'don't know James' patronus' thing in their yummy meta, so I didn't think to mention it - but it is very true. We don't know shit about James

But I do think we do have enough evidence that Lily could cast a doe.

‘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. (DH ch36)

This is what Harry deduced from seeing it's history himself. Maybe he was wrong… but I doubt it:

From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe: she landed on the oŃce łoor, bounded once across the oŃce and soared out of the window. Dumbledore watched her ły 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. (DH ch33) (I don't know why the text has done this. It's fine on the PDF. 'oŃce łoor'? It's interesting tho I'm gonna keep it hehehe)

Dumbledore also recognizes the doe as Lily. Maybe the Lily-Doe connection is purely Severus' perception. Maybe he told Dumbledore that, to him personally, a doe symbolized Lily - and Harry got the wrong idea and spouted nonsense.

…Or maybe, as an Order Member, Lily Potter learned how to cast a Patronus, and it was known to be a doe. (with or without input from James' anything. They don't need to match.)

As for the Patronus' use as a messenger:

I mentioned Dumbledore inventing it around OotP - and that was somewhat incorrect? Oops.

I could have sworn it was mentioned directly in the books - but it seems the information that Dumbledore invented speaking via Patronus was actually from the authors old website:

Members of the Order use their Patronuses to communicate with each other. They are the only wizards who know how to use their spirit guardians in this way and they have been taught to do so by Dumbledore (he invented this method of communication). ( https://web.archive.org/web/20110806214330/http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/faq_view.cfm?id=99 lovely looking website... black yellow cyan... )

BUT - that doesn't seem to be in the books. My general rule is 'Authors word unless contradicted' (and for Pottermore: 'unless contradicted - or it seems really dumb')

So, to me, it is a recent spell modification Dumbledore invented himself for the Order's use - and is not common knowledge. People do not learn how to cast a Patronus just to send messages.

Though it's understandable not to listen to things outside the books.

In the books, still, the only people we see use Patronus' are the Order - and they use them a lot. They know what all of eachothers are. The ability for them to speak isn't mentioned at all until the Order is well back together AND Dumbledore has agreed to let Harry in rather than block him out.

“Was that a Patronus?” asked Harry, who had seen Dumbledore send messages like this. “Yes, I’m sending word to the castle that I’ve got you or they’ll worry. Come on, we’d better not dawdle.” (HBP ch8 - about Tonks' patronus)

I think this is the first time it is explicitly mentioned a Patronus sending a message…? Specifically 'word' as well, not just like... having their patronus show up somewhere like a signal

Severus disagreeing with the 'the best way to tackle Dementors' is really interesting. That's a nice blink-and-youll-miss-it catch! But to be a significantly horrible-er pedant:

That doesn't mean a Patronus has some other use aside from Dementor-dealing or secret-newly-invented-message-sending.

It doesn't even mean that Severus disagrees with using a Patronus - he might be disagreeing with like... a method of casting or someshit. (Because he is the highest order of horrible pedant. <3)

But it MIGHT mean that. Maybe. Death Eaters and the Ministry 'tackle' Dementors by allying with them, making deals with them. They're reasonable creatures!

They'll bury the dead, gather information, follow orders - withhold on immediate feeding for the promise of more reliable situations. Give them a gaol, promise them fresh inhabitants to replace dead ones - and they manage it all until a better offer comes up.

That's a far more permanent method of keeping them in-line than simply filling their bellies every time they show up like a buffet. I could see him making that sort of argument. (Pulled out of my own arse ofc!!! He doesn't actually say any of that.)

You're not 'ruining anyone's fun'. You're adding to a Tumblr post that people can choose to engage with or ignore at their own leisure. Nobody has a gun to their head to respond, add, argue or whatever - it's all their own choice. For fun. I think Pedantry is fun, anyway :^)

These are all very good points. I personally tend to stick with canon being as what's strictly in the books, but sometimes clarification from the author can be helpful. Also good point that a Patronus doesn't necessarily have any other use just because they aren't the only way to fight off a dementor!

Thank you, my little pedant heart is so full right now.

gilderoy-lockhart-n1fan

Wait, aside from being gorgeous, I'm also like, super confused.

Your Patronus form changes when you either fall in love or get traumatized, like, canonically, man, it's either true love or trauma.

But then, how come Tonks's Patronus changed to become a wolf like Remus's and Severus's Patronus changed to become a doe like Lily's, but Lily and James had different Patronus? While the same animal, they're not the same Patronus at all!

Wouldn't this mean they weren't really in love, since that's what makes it change?

How come Remus's Patronus didn't change to mirror Tonks's? Doesn't this mean he didn't love her that much? (Probably why he tried to abandone her with their newborn, smh/j)

Like, if anyone fell in love with Severus their Patronus would also become a doe, not a stag, that's how it canonically works.

Everytime I try to get a straight answer from people, it's either: "Oh, Severus's Patronus changed bc he was infatuated/obsessed with Lily and didn't actually love her" and I realize this people don't know the canon and are instead making things up so they can hate on Severus. Or "They were always like that because they were destined to be together! Aww" yeah, no. You made that up without evidence, if they were in love with each other, Lily would have a stag and James would have a doe Patronus.

I wrote a meta on this recently that digs into this, but “true love” isn’t a canonical reason patronuses change. A “great shock… an emotional upheaval” is the only reason we’re given for why it happens in the books.

Personally I believe Severus’s patronus changed when he found out Lily died.

^^^ good delicious meta

tiny HC difference: I don't think he knew how to cast a patronus before Lily died. The Patronus' only use (before Dumbledore invented talking with them in OotP) was to ward off Dementors. It is a niche, rare, difficult spell barely anyone learns how to do. You don't learn it at school, almost no jobs require it - and Death Eaters don't need it as Dementors ally with them. Also not their brand.

So it was always Lily, because the memories and feelings used to form it in the first place are from her (what else would his happiest memory be? What happiness did he have other than her, both then and beyond?)