Snapedom

There was something that amazed everyone, a skill unprecedented that caused even Voldemort's enemies to exclaim in admiration. He was a brilliant wizard - the most advanced in decades. He really had power, and advanced magic. He had won awards at school, feared none but Dumbledore. His accomplishments were extraordinary. None of these elicits comment from his enemies, save one. Voldemort could fly.

There is no mention of anyone else flying unaided in the books. This was something remarkable, something he must have developed on his own. He was not a generous man; not one to instruct, to teach, to give; not one to take on protégés, to mentor or aid his followers or recruits. There is no mention of phalanxes of Deatheaters pursuing anyone freely through the air. Yet Voldemort taught Snape to fly.
( Cut for 900 words of wild justification of my own position, writing Snape and Voldemort )
But that did not happen. Voldemort took Snape under his almost literal wings, branded his arm, taught him, used him, valued him. Snape was, in my world, Voldemort's man as surely as he was Dumbledore's. Janus, I named him - the embodiment of contradictions, he who held good and evil, light and darkness, past and future, all simultaneously within himself. With sincerity.

All right, I hope no-one minds if I borrow a bit of space here for a question I have about what we're actually shown in the text regarding Young Sev's supposed rejection of an ultimatum by Lily ('me or the DE's'). I only ask because I don't have access to the actual book at the moment, I can't remember everything precisely, and I can't find the relevant section/s of text quoted online.

My question is this: in the text, are we actually shown (or told by a reliable source) that Lily ever gave Sev a clear either/or ultimatum to pick the junior-DE-group OR her, BEFORE the actual scene by the Fat Lady's portrait in which she tell's him that he's 'chosen his way' over hers? That is, did she make clear to Sev that she expected him to make a choice between them, and give him some space of time in which to make it, or did she (in the portrait scene) tell him he'd made a choice without having earlier made it unambiguously clear that such a choice was expected of him? (Remember that Sev was not exactly a genius at correctly interpreting and acting on more subtle social clues, and that therefore her unhappiness at his friendship with Avery and Mulciber would not necessarily have appeared to him to be a clear call for such a choice.)

I honestly can't remember any scene prior to the portrait scene in which she makes any kind of clear ultimatum, and yet in discussions and meta I read I keep coming across the notion that Sev rejected some such defined "ultimatum" from Lily made prior to the infamous scene itself. Do I just have a bad recall of the text, or is the "ultimatum" in actuality a persistent piece of fanon rather than a textual fact? Or is the fact that he ("speechless") doesn't deny her assertions in the portrait scene itself taken as his rejecting/failing some sort of last-minute ultimatum? I'd appreciate it very much if someone could please, please give me the relevant textual information! Thanks.

This isn't really a response to the March challenge, since I'm not going to touch on Voldemort in any depth. Hopefully I'll get my planned challenge response done in time (as usual I'm probably trying to cover too much in it). In the meantime, though, I thought I'd post some musings on a somewhat related topic - Severus, Hogwarts and the DE's - which came to me the other day when I was reading the cover story of the latest issue of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. I'll have to take a quick detour through the article and some related stuff before I get to Sev directly.



ETA: the links I originally had to the Wikipedia articles in question apparently didn't work, so here they are: (1): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting (2): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Bath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster UT at Austin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman

So is Professor Snape sexy? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. (Canon) Harry would say no, as would the Marauders, but judging by the amount of Snape fanfic out there pairing him up with various canon characters and OCs of both genders, a lot of readers would reply with a resounding "yes!"

My primary activity in fandom is drawing. As fanartists for a book fandom, we're really only bound by the descriptions in canon. Though that very freedom can be a little tricky, as we have to make sure that our characters are identifiable. Certain boxes are ticked for certain characters, and Snape is oh, so very one of those.
( Read more... )

The stanadard cliché is that Snape's hair is "greasy," due to the way that Harry describes it in the books. However, this seems at odds with the other cliché of Snape as the "Slytherin Sex God". The latter is usually thought of as a fanon invention, since Snape is ugly in canon...or is he?

I have thought about Snape's hair. It is greasy. It is black. It is shoulder-length. Snape is not handsome and he 'has better things to worry about than whether his hair has bounce.' (the_iscariot - though I may not have remembered the wording perfectly.)

Here is the continuation of my musings abut Severus' hair.
489 words.

EDIT: Sorry for the initial double post. I deleted the duplicate entry. I also edited to include the link rather than the text and tidied it.

I was browsing through some old DH rants and reviews a while back and rediscovered Dan Hemmens' excellent essay, "Harry Potter and the Doctrine of the Calvinists" posted over at Ferretbrain. Hemmens, IMHO, does a fantastic job in putting together a coherent, workable theory of just what on god's green earth is going on in the Potterverse and how it can so blatantly propose a clear double standard on just about every major moral issue it touches. My question, after rereading the article, was: what about the characters' own worldviews, within the books? Particularly Severus', considering how he fought so hard, for so long, out of an apparent belief that he could in this way somehow make up for his earlier failing/s and thereby earn something - praise, respect, or even just a respite. A change in category, if you like. Redemption. But where does he get this idea, if the world is so clearly and definitively Sorted into the Elect and the Not? You'd think seven years of Hogwarts under the Marauders would have given him a clue, but apparently not. So what gives? What IS his world-view, in comparison with his contemporaries'? Well, I've got a theory. More behind the cut.

This is, I warn you, not an actual essay with a proper argument, just some ranting thoughts about how Severus fits into the Potterverse in light of Hemmens' theory. I intend to come back later and post a proper essay on the subject sometime, with more coverage given to just why the notion of Severus as a Catholic (in the character of his world-view, not necessarily in formal practice) makes a lot of sense to me. In the meantime: I do hope no-one takes offense at anything I say here - I'm not attempting any kind of judgment of any religious tradition, merely examining how the implications of Hemmens' theory work out on the level of the characters themselves and their world-outlooks. That is: how a Potterverse character's view of the world can clash, or not, with the view of the world the books themselves lay out, and what this can mean for the characters, including - of course - our poor dear Sev.

Link to Hemmens' article, a definite read if you haven't already: http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-161.html

I didn't have time to do a full-blown essay this month, so here's a bit of meta and a few fic recs...

There's obviously a certain parallel between cooking and Potions; as I have Hermione say in one of my fics ("Phoenix Rising"), "When you think about it...cooking is almost like Potion brewing. You have to add just the right mixture of ingredients--" In reply, Snape snorts derisively. This is because although I think that Snape would probably be good at cooking, I also think that he would regard it as something mundane and trivial in comparison to the subtle art of potion-brewing.

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Back when I first read PoA and learned about Snape's adversarial relationship with the Marauders, my first impression was that he was a lonely kid who followed them around because he envied their closeness. In my Snape/Lupin ship essay I wrote:

My favorite philosopher, Sirius Black, advises, “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

(Note, by the way, that this dictum posits that the “man” has “inferiors”—a little Black showing, do you think?)

I propose a variant on this: if you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at what his enemies REALLY think of him.

If you can ascertain it.

Bearing in mind that actions speak louder than words.


( “Through )

This entry will be a bit more informal than my other essays, because I really couldn't decide how Snape's fellow teachers and Order members felt about him--which was why I suggested it as a topic, because I was curious about what the rest of you think.

This is really a reply to Bohemian Spirit’s July question about Severus the Death Eater and especially to an anonymous comment on Death Eater activity in the 70’s.

Anonymous said, “I also wonder how active the DE’s were during Snape time at Hogwarts? How many killings were going on at that time, or was there more talking and recruiting happing at that time? And did these young people know what they were getting into, or was it romanticized?”

What do we know, from canon that the Death Eaters were doing in the seventies? What did they really do, what did their enemies claim they were doing and what did Riddle do (overtly or in secret) as opposed to what he asked his followers to do…? What did Severus, and Regulus, and Lucius, and Bella, and the other children of Hogwarts really think they were joining?

(Includes a detailed analysis of the MoM raid, and what that can tell us about Evul Death Eaters™.)

It’s very long and pertains only indirectly to Severus even though it’s inspired by BoS’s July question, so I’ve posted it on my own lj. Here it is.

http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/10552.html#cutid1

There was an interesting discussion here on the asylum about whether Harry's testimony would have exonerated Snape with the Wizengamot if he had lived. My own personal feeling is yes, but with some reservations. Harry is a flawed hero and certainly did some things that I do not agree with (such as casting Unforgivables), but he did very heatedly defend Snape to Voldemort. Well, on second thought, perhaps "defend" is not the right word; it was more like he was throwing Snape's true loyalties back in Voldemort's face, to show him that his supposedly devoted servant was Dumbledore's man all along.

That's the question I often see coming up in discussions about Snape's Death Eater days--did he have to kill or not? It's quite interesting that the fandom perception has changed dramatically between the time that Order of the Phoenix was released and the time that the series ended.

Here's something that occurred to me and I thought you all might enjoy!

I'm sure most of us remember that JKR tried to brush aside the witch burnings as inconsequential by saying "but they're ~magic~! fire doesn't hurt them, it just tickles!"

If that's the case, then why did, in the very first book, Snape's potion puzzle involved stepping through fire? Certainly the fire was brought about magically, so perhaps it was innately different than average fire (though that seems unlikely when it seemed pretty much unremarkable in every way).

Anyway, I just found the irony of this situation a bit humorous. On the one hand, she wants to make the point that magic can be dangerous from early in the books; but she uses average dangers brought about by magic to do so. Then she wants to prove that muggles are hapless by nature and could never truly battle any wizard to ever hold a wand, to eliminate all possible valid arguments for the DE cause (not that her attempts worked very well), by essentially saying that Snape's trap was utterly pointless and could have been overcome by anyone who knows the old "tickling fire" trick.

Pick a side and committ, JKR!

What did Luna know, and when did she know it?

Every time I write Luna, I keep revising forward when she started having suspicions about Snape’s true loyalties. Or, perhaps, when she stopped having suspicions.

( Lovegood )

I just thought--in the fic Sincerest Flattery by Alison, http://occlumency.sycophanthex.com/viewstory.php?sid=5384 ,
Lily casts a patronus--and two boys watching her doe cast theirs in
imitation of hers. One mirrors it, the other casts what he thinks to be
the doe's mate (and finds in it his animagus form, a question with which he'd been struggling).

But James, of course, gets it wrong: the buck, not the stag, is the
doe's mate. We thought it was JKR being ignorant--but it was James.
Snerk, snerk.

But it gets better. Technically, a stag is the 5th year form of a male
deer of certain species. If it ever matures further, a stag turns into a hart.

Which James never did. Oh, sometimes JKR does get things right!