Meta Monday

[sassy_cat]

As promised, a bit of meta for your Monday.

We all know that Severus Snape was a man who wanted respect and recognition, even an Order of Merlin. Within HP fandom, he's been both loathed and romanticized, but recently, there's been a strong resurgence of Snape hate.

How do you think Snape would react to fandom?

Comments

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[vhizen]

Hello, everybody who is still reading. I don’t read much anymore in the fandom, I guess for the best if it is all about hating Snape again. Or loving Snape unconditionally, for that matter. I agree so very much with akatnamedeaster and perverse_idyll in this thread.

I’d add a few thoughts to your deliberations, if you don’t mind.

Laboriously, I have been theorizing on the HP books for years now - many of you have been. I had the hope that with the years people would read more and be less influenced by the movies (their simplistic rendition of the books); however, the readers keep on having strong, definite opinions on the characters, very often through a black-or-white reading of the world. I guess here is the deal: we are all different people, and if the mainstream is comfortable with ‘’unconditionally hating’’ or ‘’ unconditionally loving’’, so let them be…This is what Snape learned me. IMO, he would dismiss the fandom - his haters and his lovers, all of them with a simplistic opinion of him. The idealistic idiots who think he is a vulnerable victim, the pathetic fools who love the romantic and protective lover in him, the unwavering Gryffindors who believe he is a loser and the pitiful Hufflepuffs who see him as an undignified stalker.

Snape would be pleased to get recognition, but not from everybody, not from the broad audience - he is not a Gryffindor, craving for obvious glory. If once he wanted to be loved and respected, finally he was hated and despised but precisely, he took pride of being misunderstood by people he did not respect. Being so proud, he is too happy to be in right of sneering in our faces of fangirls, dismissing us for loving or hating his masks and for not seeing his real self. And when I tried to paint him, I thought ‘’Come on, Snape, don’t be that elusive and for once look at me in the eyes’’ and he kept sneering at me, let me see his eyes only for a split second, and then occluded and gave me one another mask again (and each mask shows a small part of him, so it looks real; but it is not the entire real Snape). And very often, I read comments and fics and see my or other fanarts and don’t see him at all - and he would laugh at us for being that easily mystified and bewildered...