Image: The Drake Meme With The No Text Saying Snape Is A Tragic Hero, And The Yes Text Saying, Snape

Image: The Drake meme with the “no” text saying “Snape is a tragic hero,” and the “yes” text saying, “Snape is basically an incel.”

Your daily dose of Snape shade.

Heyo, I'm a snape supporter but I think I missed part of the book? I saw some quotes from anti-Snapers talking about the time he intercepted mail from Lily to Black, took the letter, ripped the photo of Lily and her family and only kept the part of Lily in it. Thoughts on the context and thoughts in general?

Deathly Hallows, Chapter 33: The Prince’s Tale

“And next, Snape was kneeling in Sirius’ old bedroom. Tears were dripping from the end of his hooked nose as he read the old letter from Lily. The second page carried only a few words: ”…could ever have been friends with Gellert Grindelwald. I think her mind’s going, personally! Lots of love, Lily.“ Snape took the page bearing Lily’s signature, and her love, and tucked it inside his robes. Then he ripped in two the photograph he was also holding, so that he kept the part from which Lily laughed, throwing the portion showing James and Harry back onto the floor, under the chest of drawers….”

——Whilst I do remember the scene happening, I don’t remember reading that Severus was crying during it.At the end of the day, it’s one of those scenes that people will take depending on their original opinion of Snape.

Anti’s will always only see Severus being creepy, being entitled to a woman who was married to his enemy, stealing something that didn’t belong to him (as the letter was to Sirius), and above all, leaving behind the portion of James and Harry on the floor as some sort of metaphor to his animosity towards the two.

But I don’t care about the anti’s. I’ve zeroed in on two things:

1. He’s crying.Severus Snape, a man who was best known for how stoic and angry he could be, has let his guard down. It’s a moment of intense vulnerability for him - imagine what would happen if someone walked in on him. I never saw it as creepy or entitled. His best friend is dead and this is the closest he has to seeing her handwriting, her affection, her laughter again and it doesn’t belong to him, but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t fucking care because it hurts so much and he’s clearly still grieving that he cannot stop the tears from forming. 

And not a single tear, but “dripping off his nose” is literally a step away from full on sobbing as he sees the face of the only person he really cared about/cared about him. It’s emotional, it’s vulnerable, it’s heartbreaking. It’s probably the last photo of Lily ever taken, the oldest she ever got to to be.

2. “Sirius’ room.”This is something I definitely didn’t notice the first time I read the passage. I had assumed Severus had taken these items shortly after Lily’s death when he was still immediately grieving. But Sirius’ room was in Grimmauld Place, a safehouse no one had access to until after Black escaped Azkaban - and there’s absolutely no way for Snape to have access to the place (let alone Sirius’ room) until after the events of OOTP.

The man never stopped grieving.Or more accurately, never learned how to grieve.

It’s obvious Severus never got over Lily’s death (as that’s his entire plight in the series), but this scene especially, makes me realize that he never knew how to deal with it. The wounds never stopped hurting not because he was obsessed, but they never stopped hurting because no one ever taught him how to take care of himself, how to accept it, how to make peace and move forward instead of just living out of spite.

It’s sad.

He’s sad.

He’s desperate for anything to make him feel remotely like Lily made him feel - my guess, is alive - that he’s willing to search Sirius’ room for it. If someone else had just taken a chance on him - really taken a chance on him (side note, this is why I really love Mentor!Snape/Severitus’ because Harry is such a kind-hearted soul who loves wholly and forgives fully, and Snape is already dedicated to keeping Harry safe, that I truly believe Harry would be such a good person for Severus to have in his life) he could have built up a life with reasons, people, things to live for, and not just a mission that kept him a step away from suicide on his worst days and numb on his best days.

That scene is Severus at his most raw, emotional, and vulnerable. It’s a scene/a side of Severus we’re not supposed to see. And it’s such a human moment, that I don’t understand how someone can read this scene and think, “What a fucking obsessive creep.” But like, some people just lack sympathy and human understanding, so whatever.

On another note, while this would have had to happened after the Order of the Phoenix was started again, it would have to be before Deathly Hallows since Moody warded the house against Snape after Dumbledore’s death. My best guess is after Sirius died (there’s no way he would let Severus wander alone) and probably after the designated place was changed to the Weasley’s, but imagine if he had just snuck away upstairs while everyone was having dinner and Molly went upstairs to round up her kids and stumbled across this.

Imagine Molly Weasley, who can’t help but fuss over everyone who clearly needs a mom, walking into Severus curled up on the floor, sobbing over a photograph.

So Cokeworth is apparently meant to be a midlands industrial town. Which means Snape probably had a black country accent and this amuses me only because it is such an unsnapelike accent.

He probably trained himself out of it but I headcanon it still slips through when he's drunk.

I just realized why Snape was so crazy in the Shrieking Shack, third book

He thought Sirius was the reason Lily died.

Snape has always appeared collected that far in the series and it always struck me as odd that he has such a huge and bloodthirsty reaction and then calmed down towards Sirius in OOTP.

Has everyone already known this?

How DARE Snape take away Lupin's chance to teach children about werewolves- about HIMSELF and make the kids write an essay on how to KILL HIM. Like imagine Remus coming back to his office after the full moon and being greeted with a stack of papers to mark on how to kill him. And people still call Snape the hero of slytherin.

Said Snape…

An analysis inspired by my username :)

There are about 300* times in the series that Snape’s delivery of dialogue contains additional descriptives beyond “said”, giving us insight into his tone. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what this can tell us about Snape’s character. And if you’re a fic writer looking to have your Snape reflect canon!Snape as much as possible (or even if not, and you’re looking to make choices that will distinguish him from canon!Snape), I figured this might be a helpful resource.

[Adverbs] Snape says things…

...softly or quietly, most often, followed by coldly, coolly, or icily, and then smoothly, silkily, or sleekly.

This trend holds when we look across not just adverbs modifying “said” but all verbs of speech. Here's how those descriptors are used across the books in the series:

And here's what that looks like split up by the different eras in Snape's life:

Snape is most often described as saying things “repressively” or “dismissively” as well as “calmly”, “slowly”, or “deliberately” in his double agent days, which are adverbs that convey a certain amount of control over the conversation, information, and his own temperament. Taken together, this may reflect his increased caution and the high-stakes nature of information at this stage.

Although Snape displays little patience for those not at his level even in his teenage years (“just shove a bezoar down their throats” comes to mind), his dialogue only reflects this with adverbs such as “sharply” or “curtly” once he has established himself as an authority figure. We will see a similar pattern below with verbs and adjectives conveying impatience.

[Verbs] When Snape doesn’t simply “say” something, he…

...Most often is expressing a negative emotion: shouting, yelling, bellowing or snarling and spitting. The largest portion of Snape’s shouts occur in HBP, specifically in Flight of the Prince, as he tries to direct the Death Eaters to leave and faces Harry. But looking across these first two emotionally-charged categories, about 30% of these (perhaps not surprisingly) occur in Prisoner of Azkaban, where Snape is spends a notable chunk of the book in an extremely emotional state.

However, he's not always shouting or snarling; approximately 15% of the time when he is not simply speaking, he is whispering or hissing, which complements the 25% of the time that he is speaking softly or quietly.

Let's look at this in relation to Snape's timeline:

It's fitting that the majority of Snape’s inquiries occur after Voldemort’s return, when he returns to his double agent role, gathering intelligence.

I also think it’s interesting what we don’t see in Snape’s school days. In childhood/school there’s relatively little superciliousness—instead, we see more argumentation; Snape argues, demands, pants, splutters, and backtracks.

Snape’s brand of snippy impatience and condescension (sneered/snarled/snapped, etc) is most evident in his days as a professor (before Voldemort’s return through his years as a double agent). In his deep cover years it declines; he no longer has the time and he’s focused on the task at hand.

Let's now look at the adjectives used to describe Snape's tone. Snape says things in a tone of voice that is…

...Most often soft, low, or quiet, followed by cold or icy, and then by sneering or sardonic. I find it fitting that Snape’s tone is described as impatient in GOF and HBP, both books in which Snape spends the year on tenterhooks, waiting for the axe to fall.

When we look at how these adjectives are distributed across Snape's lifetime, we can see that Snape’s vocalizations described as “terrible” only three times, and they occur at pivotal moments: Lily’s death and his own. Additionally, Snape’s unconcerned or bored tone comes out during his double agent years, and 3 out of the 4 times it is used as an affectation.

Misc. notes: It is also notable when there are a lack of descriptors surrounding Snape’s speech altogether. There are definitely fewer in the first two books, likely given their shorter length and lower reading level. However, there are three moments in Deathly Hallows that, taken together, really stood out to me: The Dark Lord Ascending, Voldemort’s visit to Hogwarts to take the Elder Wand, and Snape’s meeting with Voldemort in the Shrieking Shack (that is, up until the moment of Snape’s murder, during which he protests and lets out a terrible scream). The lack of any description of Snape's speech is a neat nonverbal way to convey to us readers the effect of Occlumency.

Anyway, hope this was interesting, and I’d absolutely love to hear any additional insights you all pull out of this!

*This is by no means meant to be the definitive, exhaustive analysis of Snape’s speech. This was completed doing simple searches for dialogue with “Snape” (didn’t have the raw text to write a script or anything), so it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed several instances of Snape speaking when referred to as “he” and the dialogue in question is several lines away from his name. However, I believe those cases are relatively few, so I’m fairly confident that I have a majority of the instances in which Snape’s dialogue is described with an adverb, adjective denoting tone, or with a verb other than “said”. It’s likely the remainder would follow similar trends if they are dispersed sporadically throughout the series.