Snape essay.

[icarus]

Article on Snape by cordelia_v

I was scooped by daily_snitch, but this is one very interesting article, thought-provoking - and timely, considering the recent furor of Snape-love after JKR's comments (which I have not read and am not going to read :D ). I'm sort of uncomfortable rec-ing it, because, well, she's very kind to Primer to the Dark Arts. *checks head* Nope. Not swelled. *goes on to discuss*

When I first came to fandom, I was a Harry/Ron shipper, but was quickly lured into Snape Genfic, namely the unfinished The Long Road To Damascus by Morrighan.

After that, I was in search of the "perfect Snape," fascinated by the variation in portrayals, from the very sympathetic to the quite nasty.

While I don't enjoy Morrighan's portrayal of Lily (too idealised for me) her Snape seethes with vitriol, and her teenage version is the most convincing I've ever read. Particularly impressive as the story was written in 2001. Her Snape is almost absolved from his "light" side by the saintly presence of Lily, which gives Morrigan free reign to have Snape be truly vicious, even after his transformation.

I found I had a preference for the nastier "uncool" portrayals (although I enjoyed the rebellious young Snape in Arithmancy & Flowers which, ahem, schmevil took down, but ha, ha, I still have a copy). For the most part, every Snape I read, I thought, "darker, he's darker than that." Whether that's from the books or Morrigan, I can no longer tell. cordelia_v makes a point that someone who's made Snape's choices would not feel a great deal of guilt. That says better than I ever could my feeling about the many portrayals of Snape I read.

To reviewers who felt Snape was more noble than portrayed in Primer to the Dark Arts, what I answered was that Snape ranked sleeping with a student very low on his list of crimes.

I have to say that A Wizard Song, If You Are Prepared, and Civil War didn't have any influence on Primer to the Dark Arts -- for the simple fact that AWS and IYAP (the third part where the story really took off) were both written after Primer was published in Dec 2002 (I posted the beta'd version on FA after it was complete on ff.net).

As for Civil War... er. I was a Harry/Ron reader when I joined this fandom. My angst tolerance was low. I didn't read (couldn't read) Civil War until after I read IYAP. (After IYAP, well, I was immune.)

You see, I was new writer in 2002, but my second HP fic ever was Primer to the Dark Arts.

But I read all of Sushi's humour short fiction, Telanu's Tea series up to Corresponding (and the Coffee series, and...), as well as everything I could lay my hands of Cybele's (which, since I didn't have her website, was limited to what was on Walking The Plank). I also read all of Minx's works, though Jade I didn't discover until much later, along with JayKay and Diana Williams.

The Snape that really influenced Primer to the Dark Arts is not who you'd expect. It was rushlight75's Rite Of Passage and Through A Shattered Mirror (as she well knows; I wrote pages upon pages of email praise as soon as those stories were posted on Walking the Plank, and read them while I was writing Primer). I felt her Snape struck just that right balance between darkness and pragmatism (particularly in Rite Of Passage). Her Snape is a real person one could actually get to know, though you may or may not like him, who's no more moral than anyone else.

Did I say no fandom tonight? Ha.

Comments

[cordelia_v]

I held back on responding to this, at first. You've got enough going on in your life, at the moment. And also I like hp-fictalk's policy about this, which says that when someone posts a comment about another writer's story or essay, that the writer herself should wait a bit, before jumping into the discussion.

But I found your comments about the sources for the "Primer" Snape to be very interesting, and illuminating. It lead me to go read Morrighan's story, which is a gem. If you ever add a "story notes" section to your website (which I would encourage you to think about), then you could incorporate this. You could also add the post you put up after you gave us "SNAFU," in which you explained all the research you had to do for that part of BMFI.

I'm also rather embarrassed that I got the chronology wrong in my essay, about what was published when. This is a fundamental, cardinal error for a historian to make; thank God for the anonymity of LJ, eh? I'd have to resign my position, if my RL name were on that essay. :-)

I was frustrated, when I was writing the piece, because I couldn't find out the exact publications dates for each story. So, I ended up relying on other fans' sites, which commented on what was an "earlier" fanfic, and which came later. "Civil War" was always named as the earliest big piece, and "Primer" was referred to in several places as the most recent major HP/SS novel. But that's really sloppy research, of course. Is there any way one can find out when something was originally published, that you know of? Fanfic authors' own websites often note when the story was uploaded to a site, but often it was published elsewhere, much earlier.

At any rate, that's probably a detail that concerns me more than it does you. Historians are usually unattractively detail-obsessed and literal-minded. Hermoine, in fact, is really a future professional historian, although most hp fans don't see that. She's not going to be a future Charms professor, ah no: she's going to replace Binns as History of Magic professor. I'm going to write an essay on that (why Hermione is really a historian, and how history ought to be taught at Hogwarts). I expect that at least 2 other people in the entire world will want to read that one.

Thanks for the response. I'm so pleased that you liked my essay.