Happy Birthday To Severus Snape! The Edition Is Done In Shuffles

“Peter Pettigrew awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a little rat.”

Sirius and Peter make me believe in karma. The dog and the rat suit them so well. I still don’t understand the connection between James and a stag, but Peter as a rat? Absolutely and the dog fits Sirius perfectly too.

I may not be Hindu, but sometimes it’s hard not to believe that a fly could be the reincarnation of an annoying person who wasted their life nervously wandering around. After flying so many times, maybe its few neurons align with the life of a fly. And doesn’t that remind you of Peter?

I don’t hate him , I actually find him an interesting character , but honestly, the way his Animagus form reflects his personality deserves an essay.

Am I the only one who thinks the song "Seven" by Taylor Swift you can perfectly relate it to Severus and Lily's childhood friendship? I've been trying to understand what the song means and why Taylor wrote it to learn more about the song's lyrics.

The phrase that resonates with me the most is this one:

“I've been meaning to tell you

I think your house is haunted

Your dad is always mad and that must be why”

https://www.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/s/rk5aT7uN0z

'the temptation of saint anthony (first series),' ten lithographs by odilon redon; french c. 1888.

severus snape and the ongoing theme of “insufficient masculinity” (aka homophobia/transphobia)

snape is introduced at a young age wearing a “women’s blouse”, which petunia uses to mock him

snape, when appearing to neville as a boggart, wears neville’s grandmother’s clothing when neville uses riddikilus on him

during “snape’s worst memory”, james turns snape (who he sees as a potential romantic rival) upside down and strips him/humiliates him in an attempt to impress lily, and after snape yells at lily and calls her a mudblood, lily covers up her (justifiably) hurt feelings by commenting on his dirty underwear

snape’s patronus, confirmed by jkr to be a symbol of “true love, love everlasting”, unlike james’ stag, mirrors lily’s patronus by being a doe (which much of the fandom considers to be a sign of obsession, despite never levelling the same accusations against tonks’ wolf patronus mirroring remus’)

most, if not all, of the significantly positive/grounding forces in severus’ life are women (eileen, lily, narcissa, mcgonagall) 

feel free to add more if u can think of any

It seems like you somehow manage to have one foot in the marauders fandom and one in the snape fandom and I’m so impressed. How do you do it?

Also, since you get to see both sides of things I’m wondering what you like the most about each fandom?

Ok this is an interesting question! Honestly I think I’m able to do this, and do this enjoyably, because I really try to make an effort to not moralize. This hasn’t always been how I interacted with fiction in the past, so it’s been a tricky process of learning how to do this with consistency. But it is something that I think is very important for me to do, not only because I have a better time in fandom when I'm not moralizing, but also because it inspires a sort of self reflection and allows me to practice empathy in a way that’s feels more analytical than emotional/inherent. And in the case of navigating two fandoms that have a built in tension between them, this becomes especially helpful.

The tension between the snape and marauders fandom almost always comes down to moralizing. The back and forth arguments between fans are usually rooted in the idea that the other character is not only morally flawed, but more morally flawed than theirs. If you look at any anti Snape or anti James post there’s an underlying agenda that’s trying to prove one is worse than the other. This is pretty irritating to me because I find it to be very boring, silly, and just missing the point of the characters and themes. But this is also irritating because I find that it's ineffective in producing any real meaningful analysis on these characters. Because the goal is not to understand that character, but to condemn them.

(This doesn’t mean that I think you shouldn’t examine the behavior of the characters, just that assigning a moral judgment to that behavior outside the world of that character leads to heavily biased analysis (meaning making it personal and about your standard of morality leads to a messy understanding of the character and story))

Going back to the tension between these fandoms, I think when you’re busy trying to prove how shitty a fictional character is you have a hard time separating them from their fans. Because it’s not really about the character anymore it’s about you and your personal feelings and beliefs.

I very frequently run into posts talking about “snape defenders” and “marauders defenders”, like this is some kind of battle where a side needs to be picked, and then picking a side is a reflection of your morality and politics (I’ve seen marauders fans imply that “snape defenders” are fascists or fascist sympathizers and I’ve seen snape fans call marauders fans “class traitors”, all in the last couple days mind you).

I’m going to be honest and say that whenever this pops up it’s gets pretty frustrating, frustrating because it feels like people are just using these characters as avatars for larger discussions they actually want to be having, but because these characters have specific stories, motivations, and complexities it makes this extremely messy (want to vent about the cult of conservatism that's growing all around us? Bring out the Snape Ken doll and talk about how he deserved his bullying (if he even was bullied)! Hate feeling the weight of capitalism on your chest while the class divide grows larger and larger? Call James “bourgeois scum”!)

(Or as @sideprince wisely said, it’s a way to be political without actually engaging in politics)

So yes I find this tiring, but I also really get it. I have done some form of this myself plenty of times. I am not immune to moralizing or having these same type of strong emotional reactions to a fictional character. In fact, I had this very recently when I watched “Girls” for the first time last month. Until maybe this week I felt a strong hatred for the character “Adam”. This hatred came from seeing him do something in a scene that I considered to be morally repugnant. The scene itself was incredibly graphic and triggering to the point where I had to stop watching the show for a couple days. The disgust response firing in my brain made it so I was incapable of viewing his character as anything but a POS, and all the complexities of him were lost because I refused to engage with them. So all his actions after that were viewed with a moral judgement from me. I mean even when he was being funny, sweet, or just interesting I felt incredibly annoyed because I desperately didn’t want to like him. However I was cognizant of the fact that I was having this sort of moral reaction to fiction because this is a show that is defined by its complex, complicated, and realistic characters, who have all done some very questionable things, and yet he was the only character getting this treatment in my head. So feeling frustrated with my own hypocrisy I decided that I needed to start approaching this differently.

So I made a choice to look at his action, the one that I found disgusting, and start breaking it down: Why did he do that? What was it saying about his relation to shame, power, control, violence, sex, gender, etc.? How else has he reacted to those issues in the show? I kept asking those types of questions, on and on, until suddenly I wasn’t just thinking about the disgusting act itself, but the character. The act stopped being about my own feelings and trauma and became about him.

That’s what I do with the marauders and snape, that’s what I strive to do with any fictional character, because to me that’s the most enjoyable way to engage with fiction. And I find that the fun I have in fandom is greatly limited when I’m pissed at a character, because it makes it difficult to interact with others who are their fans. If I see that someone is playing with that character, a little voice would go, “but what about my anger?” followed by a sharp sting. That type of anger, that moral anger, is personal, but this character is public, it lives beyond me and my feelings. My anger is mine, it never belonged to the public.

And I have at some point felt that same type of moral disgust/anger for both the marauders and snape. But I zeroed in on what specific action was making me feel that way, tried to understand why I had that reaction in the first place, and then went back to the action itself and tried to contextualize it within the character and story so it was removed from myself.

That’s how I’ve been helping myself with the moralizing issue. I’ll still have these reactions in the future, I might even have one on here, but I'll keep working on it. Because either way I love all of these characters and I want to continue to be able to exist in both fandoms without having to choose a side, or even lean a certain way. When you're not trying to win the war on which character was the Shittiest™ the pressure turns off and you can just enjoy these multifaceted characters with their many flaws and many strengths.

And as for what I like most about each fandom: I adore the snapedom because I've always felt that the best meta in the entire hp fandom came from there. Honestly the whole reason I love snape so much wasn't because I ever felt particularly identified with him, but because I read a billion incredible metas and analyses about him and truly came to appreciate his complexities.

For the marauders side I think I really enjoy the camaraderie, there are a lot of really sweet and cool people I’ve talked to on here and that's always been a blast!

Hace tiempo que dejé de investigar sobre el eneagrama, pero algo que tengo claro es que soy un 9. No me puede estar dando un ataque de ansiedad y pensar, “pero por qué estoy teniendo uno si mi vida es tan tranquila” y aunque me digan exactamente los síntomas de la ansiedad y resuenen con mi manera de actuar recientemente, sigo pensando que esto no es algo ajeno a mí. Y aún lo sigo pensando, realmente no sé por qué paja tengo ansiedad jajaja

Hace poco vi una reseña de la película el faro, y en esa reseña analizaba las referencia simbólicas para dotar de la película una visión más “mágica”. Hablaba del infierno, pero un infierno parecido al de Dante, el castigo como trabajo duro. La repetición infinita hasta llevar a la persona a la locura. Más que pintar el infierno como algo profundamente doloroso con castigos con un coste físico elevados e inhumanos, te lo pintaban como un dolor más psicológico e invisible a primera vista. Un dolor aparentemente leve pero, tan repetido que te encaminaba a la locura. Y me sentí identificada, al final, entiendo que este dolor es el que sentimos todos diariamente, pero que sea habitual no quita que sea también dañino y perjudicial.

La inercia es horrible, pero desgraciadamente a veces es un hábito inconsciente, se me hace más fácil ver estas cosas cuando mis problemas están alejados de mí, cuando siento que pertenecen a otra persona, porque si no… minimizo “estos pequeños problemas” hasta que se acumulan. En el momento que están en frente mío sigo creyendo que esos problemas son tontos y que puedo seguir adelante. (Perdón por poner referencias de películas hasta en la sopa, pero el mar es lo único que me tranquiliza y con solo pensar que esa única cosa que me tranquiliza en algún momento me puede dar miedo o ansiedad me vuelve loca, pero esta vez de verdad)

Bueno, me voy a poner a ver H20 y así se me pasa jajaj.

I've been looking for a post like this since I learned more about autism! ∞🏳️‍🌈

Talking to your autistic friends about autistic snape like

Snirius flirting stage. They are really normal

I feel like every couple years I reevaluate whether I could return to running trans Snape week. I kind of can’t believe that was 5-10 years ago now. I was a whole-ass teenager at the beginning and boy did it show lol.

So much of fandom has changed and rearranged itself since then. Most of the blogs that created trans Snape works back then are defunct now. It makes sense: those who are most inclined to create trans-focused works are also the most likely to be hurt by *gestures to the entirety of the JKR-inclusive transphobic genocide machine*. Lots of folks wanted nothing more than to get away.

But honestly, it’s how the fandom/internet behaved in the wake of it all that burned me the most. Staying in fandom at all, even (maybe especially) for the sake of creating intentionally trans fanworks, was seen as a moral betrayal that deserved any punishment the internet could deal out. The death threats and suicide bait were frequently—and ironically—indistinguishable from the hate from anti-trans JKR-defenders. I’m not ready to risk all that again.

Especially as the new HBO show comes to pass, I am steeling myself to see it all the old discourse reemerge. Needless to say I won’t be interacting with any of the new canonical works. Anything that gives JKR money or a larger platform is verboten in my own personal books. In the words of that Fred Rogers meme going around, often appended to posts about AI, “your own imagination is far more wonderful.”

But that’s always been the central tension for me: I’ll always stay here in my tiny corner of fandom. I love it here. Small though it is, it means the world to me. Chronically online teenagers (which is, I think, who they typically are) have an outsized view of the impact small fanworks have on the larger political/media zeitgeist. The idea that making trans Snape fanworks for 0-10 notes on tumblr in any way supports JKR is frankly ridiculous. So I have no qualms on that score.

But I think… I am still very much burned by all that happened here 5 years ago. How quickly fandom at large abandoned trans creators (hi hello lol) who wanted to remain in community.

Somehow, staying in fandom but avoiding making trans content ended up being the deeply, deeply ironic “solution.” I’m still not sure how this happened, but boy did it ever. Just what Dr. JKR ordered.

As soon as I realized that the ballet!AU was destined to become a trans!snape fic, I abandoned it. But I still want to work on it and put more of it into this (very very tiny) tumblrworld. The truth is, I miss the freedom and joy with which we spoke and wrote about trans Snape back then. I miss it so much. It taught me that I was okay. My little slice of heaven.

There’s more to say but some of it I’m keeping to myself.

The world has changed and the fandom has changed and I have very much changed, but I haven’t ever shifted the grief (resentment? lack of courage?) I feel around this. So I rewrite essentially this same post every couple of years.

I made a Severus Snape playlist on Spotify. I hope you like it :)

I saw a Snape playlist here on Tumblr recently, I had this playlist for a long time so I decided to post it.