5 things the Harry Potter movies got wrong

5. Snape’s Worst Memory

When long-time Harry Potter director David Yates came out in defense of Johnny Depp earlier this year, what he said was obviously very wrong. But why were we so shocked? David Yates has been making bad choices for years. It’s just that those ones were mostly artistic.

Take this one for example. “Snape’s Worst Memory” is one of the most memorable chapters in the entire Harry Potter series. Very few fans can remember actual chapters, mostly since we ignored such structure so we could read it all in one go.

But not this one. This chapter is a stand-out. It revealed to us a great deal about both Severus Snape and Harry’s parents. It not only reveals that James Potter was a bit of a knob aged 15, it also shows that Lily was once a lot closer to Snape than she was to the man she eventually married.

Yates gets the bullying right — James very much does not come out well — but he gets the “worst” part of the memory completely wrong. In fact, the final cut of the movie ignores Lily’s involvement completely (despite the fact that her part was filmed), clearly demonstrating Yates’ misunderstanding of why Snape hates this memory so much.

He doesn’t hate it because he was bullied. He hates it because that’s when he called Lily a Mudblood, leading to the end of his friendship with Lily, whom he loved.

Excluding Lily from this narrative does two things. One, it doesn’t allow the audience to see Snape’s flaws, which are necessary for us to see why his relationship with Lily broke down. Two, it means we see less of Lily, the girl who stood up for herself against bigots.

The Lily we see in the books, who shouts at James in “Snape’s Worst Memory,” is not someone who suffers fools gladly.

Lily didn’t marry James all of a sudden because he was handsome. She didn’t stop talking to Snape was a poor, misunderstood soul. She did all this because Snape became a Death Eater. Snape calls her a slur, and it is so important that we see it. Without this scene, he is absolved of his greatest sin — believing in Voldemort.

So yes, we’re annoyed about it. After all this time? Always.