Snapedom

Some of the comments on Oryx_leucoryx's post on who knew Severus was a Death Eater (7/30) made me realize that there are actually people out there who have not read Whitehound's excellent essay, "But Snape is Just Nasty, Right?" which examines ALL of the canon evidence on Snape's behavior....

http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/good_or_bad_Snape.htm

If you read it a while ago, she's recently updated (with a lot of good insights into the nature, particularly, of his favoritism towards Slytherin children)--and she pulled out separate essays on the questions of when/how the Potters went into hiding

http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/Potters_in_hiding.htm

and

"Sectumsempra and the Nature of Curses," which examines what makes a spell "Dark Magic", a curse, or a jinx.

http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/Sectumsempra.htm

Her other essays are very well worth reading too!

There's been a lot of interesting debate about the flying issue: did Voldemort teach Snape to fly, as McGonagall assumes, or was it Snape who taught Voldemort, as many Snape fans have suggested?

Werewolves. I believe that Severus' antipathy to werewolves was due to something he believed to be Remus’ betrayal. Remus had never tormented him. That would have meant a great deal Severus, as a lonely teenager. There are two times we read about Severus following someone and spying on them for his own ends. One is Lily, in the playground, (which naturally implies more such incidents.) The other is his spying on the Marauders.

The books speak of him hiding in the bushes, watching Lily with hunger. He was not a predator, but despite everything, despite planning and cunning, he was something much more innocent. He wanted a friend.

I believe it was in the same spirit that he watched the marauders. It is true, he was amongst a gang of Slytherins, who nearly all turned out to be Death-Eaters, but they were Slytherin. They were the powerful rich old families, pure-blood, wanting for nothing. The demands put on the neglected boy we see on the train must have been enormous, and they would have had to be hidden, must be demonstrated immediately even as they were developing.

How lonely he must have been, would have been, even had Sirius, James and probably others, not tormented him while their followers jeered.

He would have noticed Remus with them, shabby and poor as himself, another boy who would have been an outcast. He would have seen the apology in Remus' eyes, the awkwardness, the inability to prevent his friends, the disinclination to participate. Intrigued, he would have watched, noticed the illnesses, the absences, perhaps scratches and minor wounds. In his mind he would have conjured sympathy in Remus - not pity, but possibility of understanding, fellow-feeling, even... even friendship.
( cut for 728 words )

There are many Severus'. And each Severus has his own canon. In that of my Severus, I have made certain choices. It is certainly due to the influence of my friend's story that I have taken these positions. Since it was written the Snape-shaped hole appeared. This delighted me.

Voldemort is the only other person in the books who is mentioned as flying, and when they learn of it everyone is amazed. He is in the habit of arbitrarily punishing and rewarding. Snape had killed Dumbledore, the only person who Voldemort feared. In my world, it is not only Headmastership of Hogwarts he is granted, and a seat at the Dark Lord's right hand, but the gift of flight.

It has been argued, when I mentioned this in the Voldemort writing, that the Dark Lord was not inclined to give or to share knowledge or skills. I think, however that he was capricious, and it pleased him to act with benevolence as well as cruelty. 'A Merciful Lord,' he said, and perhaps he wanted to prove himself a generous one also. He would want to bear positive attributes, to show himself that he was a wise and good leader of men. If he had been a hard and vicious man always, I do not think he would have gained power and followers from the high old families.

It is true, he punished his followers, either with immediate Crucio, as with Thorfinn, or with long-term elaborate harm such as turning Draco into a murderer in vengeance against Lucius. Nevertheless, I believe that the service Severus rendered him, of that he believed Severus rendered him, was significant enough to warrant significant reward.

In my canon, Severus is aware of what price he paid for his gift. He knows it is blood money or meant to be blood money. On the one hand, when he flies he thinks of Dumbledore, of killing him. On the other hand, flight is wonderful, and the physical feeling is free, the control and solitude - all are at once triumphant and peaceful even in the midst of war. It is a beautiful miracle. It is another tool in an array of personal tactics. It allows him to... escape, to literally rise above. Wonder and horror.

( cut for length and more prosaic details )

words: 1019
warnings: none

Snape and werewolves--as a Snupin shipper, this is a subject dear to my heart! I think that there are a couple of different ways you can look at Snape relating to werewolves...

I proposed the Squib Snape challenge, but to be honest, I find it very hard to picture Snape as a Squib. Maybe that was why I suggested it, to get other people's viewpoints on the subject. It's just that, for me, magic seems such an intrinsic part of Snape that it's difficult to separate the two.

In response to 00sevvie's response to my Severus and Voldemort post.
00sevvie is a brilliant name, by the way. I am all admiration.

I hope I've answered some of your questions. Again - its really too long for comments. And again, I ramble on and on and on... I love to talk about Snape.

( cut for 2500 words of rambles )
He is the perfect adjutant - capable, with nothing to lose and nothing to gain. To want - anything - is to be cheated, to lose. From Voldemort's point of view, love can turn to hate, belief can turn to a feeling of betrayal. Severus is useful. Usefulness does not fail. Usefulness is what he gains from Dumbledore, why he serves him as well, and there are the years of use teaching and perhaps spying on his young charges during the time in which Voldemort was vanquished. Usefulness is what he gains from Voldemort. That is why he is valued by Voldemort, because it is pure and it is hunger, even terror that he will fall into nothingness.

What joy, you ask? Memory. And the things he always loved. Spells, potions, Slytherin House, learning, understanding from wizards. The hope for a fleeting, momentary look or hand of approval, praise, trust. A striving for redemption through service, penance through work.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about Snape and Voldemort...was Snape really the Dark Lord's right hand man, and if so, was he always, or did this only occur after Voldemort's return post-GoF? And how did Voldemort manage to recruit Snape and the other Death Eaters in the first place? I've seen it pointed out in other posts that what we see of Voldemort doesn't paint him as a particularly cunning or charismatic leader. It seems that aside from Bellatrix, most of the Death Eaters are serving him mainly out of fear.

All right, since it’s the end of March and I apparently have time to write insanely long responses to other people’s challenge entries, I might as well go ahead and attempt to put my thoughts on Sev and Voldie into some kind of order. J Be warned that this is not a proper essay arguing a point, but merely a long (very long!) ramble about my thoughts on different aspects of Sev and Voldemort’s relationship. Tangents, long detours, etc. may be ahead.

 

Sorry to make a separate post for this, but for some reason the site won't recognize my attempts to comment on the original post at any length (it keeps giving me an error message). However, I found the essay interesting and thought-provoking, and wanted to respond somehow. So I'm writing a separate post - I hope this is ok.

Janus:

As I said in my short comment to your post, this is a very interesting essay, with a perspective I haven't come across before. On a number of points I agree with you, particularly about using real emotions as a method of occluding, creating a 'face' for the legilimens to see. It accords pretty closely with my understanding of Sev's Occlumency. And yes, he is a complex man full of contradictions - verbally brutal to his students, yet willing to charge into danger when he thinks they're hurt, full of resentment and hate but also deeply loving, a DE and a member of the Order, etc.

However, I do have real questions/confusion on some points. Please don't feel attacked - I agree with you on some things, and for the rest I honestly am interested in hearing your response. I guess I'm trying to get a better understanding of your Sev's psychology. Please correct me where I misinterpret things!

This might be pretty long.

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.
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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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