Rec & Snape Meta

[lightofdaye]

A rarity here from me. First Meta and secondly Snape meta. I'm not expecting this to be a great relevation to proper snapefen but here we go...


I am a bit of an protagonist centred orthodox as characters are concerned. I like good guys and dislike bad guys.

Now Severus Snape is intentionally a more complex figure than that: A person who while thoroughly horrible and unpleasant was nevertheless most definitely on the side of the good guys. Cynically one can still say it was his own selfish reasons rather than moral principle or anything of the sort, but still that's the side he was one.

I recently read a fic by torino10154 at hphet centred on Snape's very earliest days of teaching, which got me thinking a bit. (and is definitely worth checking out)

It's Deathly Hallows I think (or else fanon) that refers to Harry, Snape and Voldemort as the three lost boys of Hogwarts and it occurs to me that Snape is a very great foil to the other two in that sense. They didn't know about Hogwarts and their lives were a lot better went they went there. Snape knew about Hogwarts and expect his life to be a lot better there but every indication was that it just wasn't. He was unpopular, widely disliked and bullied by the Marauders and generally seemed to have an unpleasant time of it.

I've always like the retextualisation of 'Snape's Worst Memory' that's done by the Prince's Tale, in that it's not his worst memory because he was bullied by James one time as I might have thought from just OotP but because that's when he losts Lily's friendship which was probably one of the best things about his Hogwarts days.

Adding that together you beging to realise why Snape would not want to suddenly be back teaching at Hogwarts just a few short years after leaving it. Especially given that it wasn't his choice but was at Dumbledore's insistence. None of this really excuses what an utter dick Snape is to his students but it does go a way to explaining it.

Comments

[paulamcg]

I’m afraid I’ve loved good guys as my protagonists. Although I’ve found Snape perhaps the most fascinating character to read about both in canon and in fanfic, I’ve started writing more about him only recently.

I didn’t quite remember such a canon fact that Dumbledore wanted Snape as a teacher and that he himself wasn’t that eager. (Identifying with Lupin, I must have made the mistake to assume it was a dream come true.) And it took so many years to get the position he wanted. Oh, now it just occurred to me… Why did he want to teach Defence when he clearly was a genius at Potions. Or was he as remarkably good at Defence, too? At least at Legilimency.

I, too, enjoyed meeting young Professor Snape in Torino's fic.

[lightofdaye]

i may be getting confused with Treleawny who definitely was at hogwarts for her own good, though she didn't know it.

but i thought snape was there basically because he had no where else to go. it is true he always wanted the DADA job for whatever reason

[paulamcg]

it is true he always wanted the DADA job Yes, I thought so, too. And I’ve checked now: in OotP (17) he tells Umbridge that he’s been professor at Hogwarts for fourteen years. He also says that yes, he first applied for the DADA job, and yes, he’s applied for it regularly ever since. We can assume that this is true, but we can only guess why. Did he prefer the Dark Arts or the defence against them to Potions, even though he seems to be so innovative in and so proud of the the art of brewing potions?

In any case, on the basis of that dialogue in OotP, it looks like he wanted a job at Hogwarts. But I remember reading somewhere – whether in one of the seven books, or elsewhere, I don’t know – that Dumbledore wanted to have an eye on him. I can’t find the information on whether he came to teach before or after Voldemort was defeated. In the lexicon it says it was c. 1980. (I write my fanfic only on the basis of the first five books, and I don’t know the last two very well.)

[sportivetricks]

Oh wow, I had never thought about Snape's Hogwarts experience being such a stark contrast to Tom and Harry's! Snape is such a heartbreaking character. Second only to Dumbledore to me in terms of favorite characters. They have a lot in common, actually, both being haunted and driven by regret. Weird, I guess, that I never read fic featuring either of them, but they're kind of sacrosanct to me as JKR wrote them.

[lightofdaye]

oh I never knew that.

glad you found the meta interesting :)

[pauraque]

I agree with your take on this, and I think this is one of the things that the movies (which I generally enjoyed) got wrong, or at least didn't make clear enough. As great an actor as Alan Rickman was, I felt he was miscast as Snape simply because he was too old for the role. In the first book he's not more than 30, and he never lives to see age 40, whereas Rickman was in his mid-50s when the film series started. I think Snape's young age is important to understanding his behavior, his choices, and his sacrifices.

[lightofdaye]

That is a very good point. Snape's older actor is matched by older actors for James and Lily in the mirror and in flash backs.

It's probably a mix between wanting the recognition and acting ability of Rickman as well as audience expectations of how old parents of people 'should' look in the case of James and Lily.

[pauraque]

Yeah. Something I've thought about (which would have been difficult or impossible to get across in the films) is that when Harry is 11, he would naturally think of teachers and parents as being "old", but as he got closer to adulthood himself, he would have had the realization of just how young his parents were when they died, and how young Snape was too.