So Many Harry Potter Fans Completely Erase Snape's Past And Write It Over To Make Him A Snobby Rich Kid

so many harry potter fans completely erase snape's past and write it over to make him a snobby rich kid who speaks like he's 40 year old count and i think it is so interesting.

because it proves to me that the reality of snape being a kid living in a poverty stricken and abusive household on spinner's end makes you all uncomfortable.

i sure know it made me uncomfortable to re-read the books for the first time and see all the comments about his greasy hair and sallow skin with the new knowledge that these were markers of his poor upbringing. we've heard the saying how being poor never really goes away. snape keeping these two markers as an adult is the author's way of doing it. he's an adult with a better income now but he never quite shakes off spinner's end.

he also stays there as an adult as a way to punish himself, if the front room described as a 'padded cell" is any indicator. he can't move on and he won't allow himself to, and dumbledore won't allow it either. it is he who twists the knife with harry's eyes and tells him this is the only thing he can do to prove he truly loved lily. despite you know, dumbledore apparently not believing this dhe to his shock at snape's patronus 17 years later.

both times in snape's past when he butts heads with petunia is because she insults his background, something he cannot control. she calls him the 'snape boy' from spinner's end, a clearly 'turn up my nose' moment. harry goes through most books referring to snape as 'snape' because snape is a bully and therefore does not have harry's respect. many times adults correct him to say professor. and his first name isn't said often. so this puts a distance to him, almost others him to this 2D character. but 'snape' is an actual person, with feelings and a past, present and future. so severus snape doesn't take kindly to people insulting his family which is why he claps back at petunia.

we also know snape is a muggle name, his muggle father tobias' name. we only find out in book 6 that snape is a half blood. because what wizarding family do you know with the name 'snape'. and prince isn't part of the sacred 28 either. when harry breaks into snape's memories accidentally in occlumency, seeing those three quick snapshots of his life, it's the first time snape starts to become a real person to harry.

moreover, 8 year old snape is described as dirty, unwashed, wearing clothes that are so mismatched it looks deliberate. he hasn't got clothes of his own, wearing an adults jacket and a woman's smock. snape's family either cannot afford to properly clothe or wash their child or they simply don't care too. when petunia insults him again, this time instead of his father she goes for his mother, as she points out snape wearing his mother's blouse, we get another example of underage magic as he causes a tree branch to fall on her.

now despite this, we know it is likely snape really did want to cause her harm due to her insult. snape already is shown to have poor social skills and snaps rather quickly at any point of animosity, but he was also raised in an abusive household. his father whipped him, and shouted at his mother and god knows what else. makes sense that an 8 year old responds to tension with either insults or violence, mirroring his home. snape is also very reluctant to talk about his homelife at all, ending the conversation very pointedly with "he doesn't like anything much." so it's not surprising that a child raised in this kind of environment would respond violently. even worse, he does it without really realising what he has done considering he looked confused when petunia and lily ran away.

on platform 9 and 3/4, snape is eager to get out of his muggle clothes and when put next to james potter, the stark difference between someone who has been loved and adored and someone who hasn't is explicitly put in the books. and lastly when snape calls lily a mudblood after being yanked upside down exposing dirty underwear, lily points that out. her way of saying 'don't you dare say you are better than me - im filthy? how about you wash your clothes.'

all in all, i think the fans write over this backstory because people do not want to give snape any sympathy. he's not the right kind of sympathetic character. he's an unpleasant adult who made terrible decisions. therefore his tragedy doesn't count. it's much easier to hate him when in your head, snape is a rich, snobby supremacist, rather than a penniless, neglected and woefully misguided teenager.

odd that peope can understand the impact of certain characters childhoods like sirius, regulus, draco or harry and how it affected their actions as teens and later adults...

but not snape.

in fact, snape is probably the poorest character in the entire series apart from maybe voldemort, although the orphanage didn't seem underfunded or anything. fans characterise lupin as poor but there is little evidence for him being poor as a child, more as an adult. i've seen people say this was because of the fact that his father worked at the ministry and arthur weasley worked there and he is not rich but the weasley's are poor because there are 7 of them living on one income. and we can assume lupin's muggle mother worked. if anything, lupin's childhood was comfortable but became unstable due to them constantly moving after he was bitten.

abd that's pretty much it, we don't know too much about anyone else. the dursleys are middle class as are hemrione's dentist parents and while the weasley's are poor, they are not poverty stricken - ron never goes hungry. snape also never really adresses his muggle past either. he doesnt bring it up ever. for all his 'life is unfair', he never speaks about that part of his life, choosing to solely reference the marauders. and the two main bullies, james and sirius both being rich kids bullying the poor boy is not lost on me. especially when they constantly reference his greasy hair all the time.

poverty greatly affects a person well into adulthood and we see with snape; it never really goes away. sure he's well spoken now, and doesn't wear mismatched muggle clothing but the remnants are still there. in fact, one of the reasons he hates harry intially is because he thinks the boy has been pampered. quite unlike his upbringing. so i think it's telling how many people refuse to acknowledge its very existence or the how it shaped snape as a person.

becuase i think it all makes you feel really uncomfortable. why else would you ignore or completely erase it?

Re-read this bit in Half-Blood Prince again and thinking about how blatantly it seems to be telling us that Harry is biased against Snape and our impression of him thus far has been clouded by seeing him through Harry's eyes (emphases mine):

‘The Dark Arts,’ said Snape, ‘are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible.’ Harry stared at Snape. It was surely one thing to respect the Dark Arts as a dangerous enemy, another to speak of them, as Snape was doing, with a loving caress in his voice? . . . ‘He tried to jinx me, in case you didn’t notice!’ fumed Harry. ‘I had enough of that during those Occlumency lessons! Why doesn’t he use another guinea pig for a change? What’s Dumbledore playing at, anyway, letting him teach Defence? Did you hear him talking about the Dark Arts? He loves them! All that unfixed, indestructible stuff -‘ ‘Well,’ said Hermione, ‘I thought he sounded a bit like you.’ ‘Like me?’ ‘Yes, when you were telling us what it’s like to face Voldemort. You said it wasn’t just memorising a bunch of spells, you said it was just you and your brains and your guts - well, wasn’t that what Snape was saying? That it really comes down to being brave and quick-thinking?’ Harry was so disarmed that she had thought his words as well worth memorising as The Standard Book of Spells that he did not argue.

Half-Blood Prince, Ch. 9

There's a direct contrast being drawn from one scene to the next between Harry's perception of Snape and Hermione's less-biased, more critical one. Where Harry hears a "loving caress" for the dark arts in Snape's voice, Hermione hears the passionate, determined explanation that Harry gave a year earlier - one based in a firsthand understanding of what it takes to protect oneself from harm against dark magic.

This is also the first scene in this book where we see Snape teaching a class. The first time he shows up in the book is when he's entrusted by Tonks to deliver Harry safely to the Great Hall from the school gates. So the first encounter with Snape in HBP is as Harry's protector, be it begrudging or not, and the second is one where an immediate parallel is drawn after between him and Harry, Hermione questioning the latter's bias and hinting to the reader that judging him based on Harry's perception may not paint an accurate picture of Snape. Through the rest of the book we see Harry have an increasingly hostile relationship with Snape while developing a great fondness for the Half-Blood Prince, despite it also being Snape, only Harry doesn't know that, so he's able to see his humor and cleverness.

This theme is a dominant one throughout the book, though it doesn't become clear until the end when we find out Snape was the Half-Blood Prince, but by then our impression of the Prince is murky given the unexpectedly violent outcome of Harry trying out Sectumsempra (and it can be argued he's to blame for doing so against another person instead of finding out what the spell does in a safer way), and our impression of Snape is even worse given that he'd just killed Dumbledore. We don't find out until the next book that Snape had been fighting on the same side as Harry the whole time, risking - and eventually losing - his life for the same cause. In retrospect, Rowling (boo, hiss) spends a lot of time in HBP dropping breadcrumbs that Harry's impression of Snape - and thus the reader's - is affected by bias and thus inaccurate.

Thoughts on Snape?

I think he is a very good representation of a man who felt insecure in his manhood; his male ego was permanently wounded by James' bullying and he decided to make it everyone else's problem by being the most insufferable teacher at Hogwarts. Add to this that he is a halfblood and only his mother was around, iirc? Snape, Voldemort and Harry all act like foils of each other in that sense, but whereas Voldemort fixated on his blood status as the main reason for his insecurities, Snape fixated on Lily. His character is all about male entitlement, he was obsessed with her at Hogwarts and then showed to have no boundaries as he went into her house to cradle her dead body in front of her traumatized kid. He only saw Lily as a trophy to be possessed, which you can see from the way he hated Harry, because Harry reminded him Lily wasn't his and that Lily had sex with another man. His interest in the Death Eaters was only secondary to his obsession with Lily and I think Lily rejecting him pushed him toward joining the Death Eaters, because, once again, his male ego was bruised and he needed to replace it with something else.

He remained mysterious up till the end and his back-and-forth with treason was very compelling to read about. So I hate him (as a "person") but he is such a good character narrative-wise and he is very interesting to study

Slytherin and Eton: A Primer on the British School System.

Slytherin occupies an odd place in the Harry Potter fandom. In canon, while it is the house with the second most development, that development is almost entirely negative, with the house and a large quantity of its students acting antagonistically throughout the piece. Heck, Hagrid, the lovable gruff figure who acts as Harry’s (and thus the audience’s) introduction to the magical aspects of the series explicitely calls them the most evil house before Harry has even seen the castle. This, along with Draco Malfoy’s terrible introduction (Malfoy will be covered in detail later in the piece) and the fact that Harry is already having to distance himself from Voldemort by the time of the sorting, is the major reason that Harry chooses anything but Slytherin. While the house, or rather its representatives, are sort of given more naunce later with Slughorn, Malfoy’s Draco and Narcissus, and Snape, the core example of how it is treated in the series comes just before the final battle, when the entire Slytherin student body either sides with Voldemort (Crabbe and Goyle, and to a lesser extent Parkinson who is willing to hand over Harry to save herself) or refuses to fight the good fight at all. 

The weirdness comes from the fact that Slytherin is probably the most popular house to self identify as within the active fandom. Aside from having traits many consider positive associated with it (cunning, loyalty and ambition), it is also treated as the outcast house to the rest of the school, particularly the Gryfindors. The treatement of Slytherin therefore sticks in a lot of fan’s nerves, and understandably so. The notion of Houses, defining people at age 11, is already a weird way to handle things, after all, and defining an entire group of them as evil from the start? Yeah that’s not great, particularly if you identify with aspects of them. I myself would probably be a Slytherin or a Ravenclaw, so I can understand this distaste. But…here’s the thing. The reasons for treating Slytherin this way are not entirely diagectic in nature. The house is the centre of a massive pile up involving world building, characterisation and most importantly some fairly blunt and pointed social commentary about the British School system and society at large. 

It’s been a running gag that what racism is to the American political discussion, classism is to the British. This is not entirely true (for one thing we are certainly not over racism or xenophobia here), but there is a nugget in there. British society is heavily class stratified society. We have some of the worst mobility in the developed world, and much of our political system is dominated by a very small part of society.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is that there is a particular branch of the schooling system that dominates government, known as the Public Schools. That name can be confusing at first. The original group of Public schools vastly predate the mandatory schooling system; the oldest of them predate Columbus’ birth by over a decade. Not his voyage to the Americas, but his birth. The original idea was that they would take promising boys who normally would not get an education, due to them not coming from families who could afford them to be educated, hence the name Public Schools. Nowadays these are all elite private schools, not linked to the department of education. While approximately 7% of the population attend these schools, 33% of the members of Parliament (MPs), 50% of the Peers in the second chamber of government and 70% of the top judges are educated here. Heck, of the 54 Prime Ministers who have led the country, 32 were educated at one of three Public schools; seven at Harrow School, six at Westminster School and nineteen at Eton College. Compare that to the 9 prime ministers educated, as I was, in state schools. These institutions form part of the basis for a web of connections that defines a lot of the elite parts of British society, not just in politics but in business, in media and in higher education as well; the “old boy’s club” that provides a barrier to entry for a vast swathe of society. While supporters of these systems will note that efforts have been made to overcome this, with around 310 of Eton’s pupils receiving financial assistance, but that means that the remaining 1,000 students come from families that can afford the £12,000 per term fees, and these students are only male. The idea that this system is anything close to meritocratic is not just laughable, it is the equivalent of starting a discussion on orbital dynamics with the word’s “assuming a heliocentric universe”. Another point to make? The entire House structure comes from these schools. Eton has 25 Houses, and in this case they are literally houses; they are where the boy’s sleep at night, since it is a boarding school. While not unique to Public Schools, they are heavily associated with them in British culture. I’m adding this in because Rowling didn’t just make up the concept of splitting the children into groups. As a teenager she attended Wyedean School, which notably historically had a four House system (oh look it’s almost as if there might be a connection), before abandoning it as the school grew (I can’t find anything about when this happened, but it could well have been after Rowling studied there). Hogwarts itself, while it is an individual school, is also a condensation, celebration and condemnation of the British School system as a whole, being the only wizarding school in the UK. Umbridge isn’t just a single throughly unpleasant inspector, she is a stand-in for OFSTED, the body responsible for school inspections. It’s notable that in Harry’s year in Gryfindor,  you have, among others, the dirt poor Ron, the muggle born Dean and Hermione, the Irish half-blood Seamus Finnigen (and given that this was written in the 90′s holy shit is UK and Irish relations another can of worms I am not going to open here because this already too long but will be glanced a bit at in a later bit of this essay). It’s honestly hard for me to not read Gryffindor and Hufflepuff as stand-ins for the UK state schools, Ravenclaw for the private schools, and Slytherin as the public schools. Remember what I said about how Slytherin is treated as the outcast part of the school? Well, it is honestly treated much like the rest of the UK school system treats the private school. How is that? Well, when it snowed in my school days and we all went to the main park, the one thing that would immediately unite all the state and a lot of the private schools was the arrival of the public school kids (particularly since they tended to try and pick snowball fights with everyone while throwing classist insults around). Slytherin is in many ways the house of privilege, and not necessarily earned privilege. Lucius Malfoy, until his ousting when he plays his hand too hard in the second book, is the leader of the Board of Governors and escaped Azkaban despite his crimes, while it is explicitely stated in the first book that Slytherin has won the House cup for repeatedly in the previous years, mainly due to Snape bestowing preferential  treatment on his own House (and yes I do think it was fine for Dumbledore to pull that last minute switch, since Harry Ron and Hermione had just legimately just prevented Voldemort from returning. That kind of deserves some credit. The Neville bit might be pushing it but again, the timing was just pretty tight). But there’s more to what Slytherin represents, and this comes back to what I was saying about how charactisation is involved in this pile up, particularly the characterisation of Slytherin himself. Specifically the characterisation of him as a rascist shitfucker. I know that’s blunt but so it is the characterisation. He left a giant monster behind for the sole purpose of having it one day unleashed on a load of kids for the crime of not being born to magical parents, and Slytherin the house has historically been defined as much by its stated qualities of cunning and ambition as it has been by this continuing tradition of racist ideology. The Sorting Hat song is not the full picture as to what defines the Houses; they have grown beyond that, both in universe and in fandom. This characterisation comes back into social commentary because, yes, the UK has had and still has a long history of racism and xenophobia, from our imperial history to the Troubles in Ireland to how Eastern European and muslim immigrants are treated now. So why does Slytherin House still bare a stain from Slytherin the man? Well, in a word, it’s tradition. Remember what I said about the age of these institutions? Yeah, that’s not a joke. The Public School system, the Oxbridge higher education that it feeds into, are heavily influenced by traditions that have grown up over the ages. Heck, it used to be that in Eton, the youngest boys in the House were basically servants to the older students and staff, a practise known as “fagging” (I am not even joking). Wizarding society in general is also heavily steeped in the past; the steam train of the Hogwarts express, for instance, or the very concept of the Houses themselves. Heck, while it is never confronted directly, quite a few characters talk about how the Sorting isn’t the best idea, most notably the Sorting Hat itself. Slytherin the house has passed down the ideals of Slytherin the man in its culture, just as the UK has passed down racism, classism and xenophobia in ours. If Voldemort is the embodiment of these issues at their most violent, then Parkinson is them at their most passive; she is willing to go with Voldemort’s demands to save herself, and is willing to accept the racism and classism throughout the books. This is what I meant by a collusion between characterisation, world building and social commentary. The books were written while Rowling was viturally penniless, and a lot of the social commentary in them reflects this, including the way Slytherin is portrayed. Is it fair to the characters of Slytherin? Should she have been more naunced about it? Well, yes. There’s a reason I called it a pile up, but if you are treating the resulting mess as simply being in universe, you are going to miss a lot of important aspects about why she created it the way that she did.

“what will you give me in return?” is such an insane thing to say to someone who historically has Fuck All. even more insane to say when you are Aware that they have literally fucking nothing

So many people who say that Snape can't be a victim in the situation with the marauders because he hurts them (and/or others, e.g. calling Lily a mudblood) in return have clearly never seen an abusive relationship before and while I'm genuinely so, so happy that their life experience has allowed them to avoid it, it makes me scared that when they do come across one, they're going to pull this same shit.

Y'all... very, very rarely in a situation of peer or domestic abuse is the hurt one-sided. Often, because of the fact that the abuser has skewed the power in the relationship so far in their direction, the victim lashes out, too. Sometimes in self-defense, sometimes in anger or desperation, sometimes even proactively to avoid what they think will be a more dangerous situation later.

The misconception that victims never fight back or hurt their abusers makes it harder for many victims to realize that they are in abusive situations at all. (For example, no matter how many boxes they can check on any 'are you in an abusive relationship' questionnaire, they can't be being victimized, because they, say, threw a book at them that one time.) Abusers use this to discourage their victims from seeking help; many people think that since they're not the "perfect victim", they won't be believed. And esp in domestic situations, abusers also often hold these incidents over the victim for increased control and to justify even more abusive behavior ("you make me do it").

It's all about the fear, the control, and the power dynamic; the victim doesn't need to be morally perfect nor have done nothing wrong in the relationship to "deserve" the label. They may hurt the abuser back, take out their anger on innocent people, or even become the abuser in other relationships—and that doesn't make them not a victim themselves.

Was the way Snape reacted to the abuse by his peers—calling Lily a mudblood, developing hexes, and using them back—good? No, obviously not; his violent responses to being victimized and his concurrent radicalization led to some very dark places for him. Doesn't change the fact that he was a victim. Does his being a victim excuse his choice to join the Death Eaters, turn over the prophecy, and bully his students? Nope; he had agency and he made the wrong choices. But he's still a victim.