What Backstory Would You Have Wanted for Snape?

[reinalobelia.livejournal.com]

Hi, first time poster, long (long, long, long) time lurker. I almost want to apologize for making this post, as it's about one of the most (and yet not enough?!) oft-repeated complaints surrounding DH, namely the handling of the motivations behind one Severus Snape.

A tl;dr background of myself: I read the first six books some time in 2006-7 and become absolutely consumed by the series. And then DH broke my heart to pieces with its release. I spent the next 5 years recovering those pieces and healing, and thankfully I was still able to find fans whose opinions still jived with mine up until 2012, when I woke up one morning and finally threw the series away in disgust and through weariness. For reasons unknown to me, I've started dabbling with fandom again recently - I suspect I'm probably in that stage where I need a new hobby but have nothing new to fall back on so I'm nostalgic. Because I was a fan for so short a time before the series concluded, I've always almost felt like I was never a "true" fan since I wasn't part of most of the discourse pre-DH. And yet I consider myself as being from "that generation of HP fans", and not the newer generation made up of so many Snape-haters I see on more currently relevant social media platforms like Reddit and Tumblr. I hope that doesn't make me sound elitist but, well, fuck it, lol (we can swear, right??).

And that brings me to why I'm here: it's amazing how the general sentiment in fandom has shifted so drastically from the loudest voices pre-DH saying how much they love Snape to the present post-DH era, where he's reduced to a friend-zoned, incel, Nice Guy {insert whatever other labels anti-Snape fans attach to him}. The point I'm really trying to make is: I feel almost completely out of touch with most places discussing Snape on the Internet except for DTCL. I truly want to thank you all for still being around, from the bottom of my heart. I hope this is okay, but I particularly want to thank torchedsong for making her post also talking about how Snape was flattened as a character - it made me realize there are still people around in the fandom who remembered the potential he used to have.

And now to come to the title of the post. I want to wholeheartedly reject the "Lily as end-all, be-all" motivation. So I was wondering:

- What would YOU have liked for Snape's motivation to have been for becoming Dumbledore's man?
- What kind of scenario do you imagine led him to make the change?
- Prior to the release of DH, what were you /hoping/ for his motivation to be?

I have to admit that I struggle with these questions myself. For example, a number of slash fans played with with idea of Snape's motivation to have been Regulus Black. And honestly, while this would have been less of a character-destroying reveal (not that JKR would ever actually go down this route), it would make the matter of Snape's opinions regarding blood politics and his moral development more complicated. So an additional question:

- What kind of motivation/catalyst would you have liked for Snape to realize that not just violence but any kind of discrimination based on blood is wrong? (Unless you would have been fine for him to just have a personal, selfish motive behind betraying Voldemort, that's fine too).

Thank you ♡

Comments

Re: snape's motives

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of the Snapes in Spain! I also love all of your ideas above. Here's another: as I said years back on my live journal, if Lily was supposed to be Sev's only motive--why wasn't she really his only motive? In addition to having his own family considerations, why wouldn't he have joined the Death Eaters not to impress her, as Rowling insists, but to protect her?

I have no problem with Severus loving Lily. I don't even have much of a problem with their relationship as depicted; it's believably youthful and shallow (on Lily's part). I do have a problem with it being his only motivation, and I have a real problem with James's abusiveness.

Sev might have thought: Lily wants a powerful, wealthy pureblood bully. I'll never be a pureblood, but I can be wealthy and powerful and I can win her from that bully. Or, he could have thought: If I join, I can keep her safe from the Death Eaters.

There are many, many possibilities that are deeper and more believable than what we were shown, IMHO.

Re: snape's motives

[sunnyskywalker]

Imagine if Eileen and Tobias and maybe Dudley were the characters to get the happiest endings. The contrarian part of me is tempted by that idea.

Whenever teen Sev and Lily annoy me too much, I remind myself of some of my high school friendships and cringe and feel more sympathetic toward them. I'm okay with the general idea of the love backstory, and with them both horribly bungling Human Relationships 101. It just... needed better execution. Complexity. Nuance. James either not leading the Abuser Red Flags Parade or his true horribleness being acknowledged somehow. Or at least JKR not chastising her fans for liking "bad boys" without including James in that group.

He could also have thought that she would realize the Statute of Secrecy was harmful and that he was noble to work toward overturning it (unlike those scofflaws with their motorbike and their high-speed chases). Without Secrecy, she would have known what her powers were earlier, Petunia wouldn't have disdained her as a freak, Severus wouldn't have been isolated and would have been respected instead, Muggles wouldn't get Obliviated every other Tuesday, and they might even have some rights if attacked. Or at least he might imagine it would have happened like that. Yeah, just about anything would be better than what we got. Or rather, didn't get--that backstory has more holes than story.

Re: snape's motives

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes! Yes to all of this. I know Rowling was following Wuthering Heights point for point, so that James had to be Hindley to Severus's Heathcliff, but why was she doing that? Why couldn't she let her characters breathe and be themselves?

Oh, well.

Re: snape's motives

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the thing about Hindley is that his true horribleness IS acknowledged! Love your ideas about how overturning the Statute of Secrecy might be better for Muggles, as well as Wizards.

Re: snape's motives

[sunnyskywalker]

Yeah, I think a very important part of WH is that it isn't romantic in the lower case-r sense. (Iirc, the initial reviews thought it was about human cruelty or something like that, and only after the author's gender was revealed did they suddenly interpret it as a love story.) All the characters are isolated, deprived, and disturbed in their own ways, and they all hurt everyone around them. It doesn't go well when a story tries to be "Wuthering Heights, but the romantic version."

Terri did a good analysis a while back of the Pride and Prejudice parallels, with Sev/Lily/James as Wickham/Lizzy/Darcy, and how HP doesn't fit that either once you break it down. (E.g., in Darcy actually taking Lizzy's criticisms to heart and reforming despite thinking he'd never see her again vs. James not particularly agreeing with Lily's criticisms but cleaning up his public image so she'd think he did.) There are obvious surface similarities, but the meaning and characters turn out to be completely different, yet the story is structured in a way that isn't satisfying unless you pretend it has the original's meaning.

A well-done story which references characters and scenes from both books in a coherent fashion could be interesting, but what we got reads more like bits of P&P and bits of WH grafted together at random. With magic.