toft

I read Julad's fic Night-blooming Heartsease (HP, Snape/Neville, a companion to Resonant's fic Transfigurations) the other day for the first time, and it got me thinking about how important Harry/Snape fic was to me way back when, and how different fanon versions of characters and pairings look after some distance from them. Because the thing is, it's a lovely story and I cried, but objectively speaking, Snape is horrible and abusive to Neville through the whole story, never recognizes it, never apologizes for it, and Neville just... gets used to it and eventually rises above it and starts to see Snape as a human who's suffered, and they grow to respect each other. But Snape doesn't actually change, they just start to see each other differently. There's a truly harrowing bit midway through the story where Snape propositions Neville because he's miserable and he thinks Neville and he could comfort each other, and Neville is too terrified of him to say no. They make out for a bit, Snape notices Neville is unenthusiastic, asks him if he actually wants this, Neville says no, and Snape is absolutely furious with him for thinking he's a rapist and throws him out. So like, yay for wanting enthusiastic consent, but Snape doesn't ever acknowledge that there's a problematic power differential between them that emerges from him having been an abusive teacher with power over Neville that Neville still feels, even if they're no longer within the institution that gave Snape that power. The other thing I found troubling is that Neville's POV makes him seem really, really young, and that moment in the fic I found excruciating because Snape is propositioning someone who is still in the mindset of finding him a desexualized, terrifying schoolteacher, and Snape doesn't realize that Neville is in that mindset even though he's still treating Neville that way.

All this isn't to criticize the story - it's more just noticing things that were totally ubiquitous about the way Snape was portrayed in Snape/Harry stories and other Snape/the younger generation stories of that time. I remember sometimes noticing at the time and not liking the fan version of Snape that was rather like a fan version of Rodney McKay that came later where he's just horrible to everyone all the time and it's treated fondly by everyone in the story (ESPECIALLY in the SGA fics where Rodney's a professor and John's his TA, oh my god), while there was some stories that dug into his behaviour a bit more; I suspect now even they would not be enough for me, and/or I'd be much more squicked by the power dynamics than I was. But I feel very ambivalent about it.

I've encountered in fandom in more recent years a fairly blanket condemnation of Snape as being totally awful and abusive, which again, is partly because the conversation has moved forward and perception of the books has shifted, and partly because I think for sure there was a lot of romanticization of Snape - around Alan Rickman being wildly sexy, definitely. And I can't disagree with that. But I've never been more devastated by the death of a fictional character, which was partly because of the backstory JKR eventually gave him; I felt so powerfully for early Snape - so trapped, so bitter, so resentful, unable to move on from his adolescent humiliation because he has literally been trapped at the scene, trying to do the right thing in his own distorted way, so brave. Dumbledore's systematic refusal to see abuse on the individual level in the name of 'safety' kept Snape teaching in Hogwarts the same way it kept Harry with the Dursleys; Snape was like a miserable old cat who consistently scratches and bites people, whose owner keeps insisting that he's lovely, really, it's fine for the children to play with him. And then JKR gave him this ridiculous overromanticized attachment to Lily which made his fixation on Harry even more weirdly sexualized than it already was, and also coopted him into one of her creepy compulsory heterosexuality everyone-falls-in-love-once-when-they're-fourteen-forever narratives. I just wanted him to escape and have the chance to grow into a better person. In the HP books, nobody ever gets to escape their upbringing.

And I don't know now whether my increased discomfort with Snape pairings is because I'm older and a teacher now, or because generally my awareness of issues of consent and power has changed because the conversation has moved forwards, or I'm just not as caught up in my love for those characters anymore. Because the thing is, I still think that Harry/Snape was a great pairing for me because when I was reading it was between about Prisoner of Azkaban and Order of the Phoenix era, and a lot of resistive criticisms to JKR which seem obvious now weren't then, but Snape-centric fic was thinking about them.

Harry/Snape in particular, as I remember it, was this place where people were thinking critically about Dumbledore and his complicity in Harry's abusive childhood, about the invisibility of queerness in the books, about intergenerational trauma, and about being an outsider. Snape is trapped by Dumbledore and his own choices in an eternal adolescence, while Harry is thrown by Dumbledore into a premature adulthood, so that they are both awkwardly at odds with their own age group and with the wizarding world. It was such an angry pairing. I really, really identified with those versions of Harry and Snape, which in retrospect I suppose was partly because I also felt thrown into premature adulthood by my personal circumstances, where I was in the middle of a fairly classic eldest-child-in-a-divorce situation with an abruptly overinflated sense of responsibility for caring for my brothers. I don't identify with either side of that pairing anymore with anywhere near the same intensity now, but I feel like I'm still interested in the problems with the books that that pairing highlighted.