Fanon Vs Canon: Snape Edition
This is similar thread to the one I made for the general Fanon Vs Canon, this one is exclusively for Snape, to be used by me and others to share the disputed facts between canon and Fanon portrayal of Severus Snape.
My source shall mostly be Fanon Vs Canon, but I may specify other sources for my posts when needed.
Snape is gay.
Whatever the precise nature of young Snape's relationship with Lily, his attraction to her certainly isn't simply sexual, since it begins when he is nine. Later on, however, especially in the courtyard scene, he seems a bit jealous and doesn't like the idea of James fancying Lily or Lily being pally with James - and his reactions suggest that that's not just because James is a bully, or because he is afraid that Remus is a threat to her. And there seems to be a definite sexual frisson between him and Narcissa Malfoy in the Spinner's End scene. Although you can come up with alternative explanations for that super-charged scene where Snape gazes down into Narcissa's upturned face, it's pretty clear Rowling herself intends there to be a definite sexual frisson.
He's really extremely unlikely to be gay, given what we see in canon - at most he'd have to be bi. However, not only is there a sexual frisson between Snape and Narcissa and between Snape and Lily, there doesn't seem to be one between him and any of the male characters, unless you count barely-controlled hostility as a sexual frisson.
James Potter certainly seems to have assumed that young Sev was straight, or at most bi - since Rowling has said that James's persecution of Severus was partly due to James's sexual jealousy of Sev's friendship with Lily.
A bisexual male friend said to me that in his opinion, as somebody with a fully functioning gaydar, Snape is about as obviously straight as it's possible for a fictional character to be. His main reason was that, he said, gay or bi men are "always looking" when they see any other even half-attractive man and always thinking "Would I?", even if the answer is "Not in a million years." There is no suggestion in the books that when Snape looks at the supposedly very beautiful Lockhart he thinks anything other than "What a twat", or that when Horace Slughorn flings an arm round him he thinks anything more than "This is my friend. My friend is very drunk."
Nightfall Rising raised the possibility that Snape might be "demi-sexual", that is, only likely to fancy people or be able to assess their attractiveness if he already has a close, warm emotional tie with them, so that he wouldn't assess Lockhart in a sexual way even if he's gay or bi. However, he clearly does have quite close ties with Slughorn, since he comes to Slughorn's party and allows drunk!Sluggy to fling an arm around him without trying to gnaw it off at the elbow. After the killing of Dumbledore, when the staff are expressing amazement at Snape's actions, all the other staff come out with variants on a theme of "Dumbledore trusted him and I trusted Dumbledore's judgement": only Slughorn speaks of his direct, personal trust in Snape himself ("I thought I knew him"). And yet there is no sense of sexual frisson that I can see between Snape and Slughorn, and a strong one between Snape and Narcissa (whom he also probably knows well). Demi or not, the evidence still tends to indicate that Snape is straight.
The same bisexual friend commented that the gay men and gay relationships portrayed in slash fanfiction rarely bear much resemblance to real gay men and gay relationships (any more than the *!*!* Hawt Girl-on-Girl Action *!*!* stories you might find in a lads' mag resemble real lesbians), so the fact that Snape doesn't in any way resemble a real gay man doesn't preclude the possibility of his fitting into the mould of the fake gay men found in fanfiction. But one certainly cannot argue "Canon Snape is gay and therefore X", when canon Snape is so clearly intended to be straight and making him anything else requires so much special pleading.
Snape is a sadist.
The same bi friend (above) who said that Snape was straight also said that it was very unlikely that Snape would be - as often portrayed in fanfiction - into bondage or sado-masochism, because he doesn't seem to be nearly physical enough for those sort of games, and his working life is so filled with complex, stress-filled game-playing that he would want to escape into simplicity in his leisure time. Snape in his opinion would want a straightforward uncomplicated roll in the hay, or wine and candlelight, not whips and handcuffs. John Nettleship, JK Rowling's Chemistry master who she has admitted was the main inspiration for Snape - and who was as straight as it is humanly possible to be - agreed with this wholeheartedly.
Snape is often accused of being a sadist because he has a mean streak in his social interactions, and he's certainly quite verbally spiteful and a bit of a gloater, but that seems to be as far as it goes. He protects the students from physical harm, including preventing the other Death Eaters from Cruciating Harry at the end of HBP, and although he thinks he wants Sirius destroyed by Dementors (because he believes him to be out to kill Harry) he automatically conjures a stretcher on which to carry him, instead of treating him as roughly as Sirius treated him. Laineth points out that Snape's inclusion, among the memories he gave to Harry, of the scene where he cut George's ear off served no purpose other than to let Harry know that it had been an accident (and that he had tried to protect Remus) - even on his deathbed it mattered to him to let a fellow Order member know that he hadn't injured another member deliberately.
If Snape had been a physical sadist he would presumably have had ample opportunity to express it when he was a Death Eater, and yet he made so little impression as a Death Eater that Sirius, an Order member, hadn't heard even a sniff of a rumour that he was one, and according to Bellatrix his reputation among Voldemort's minions is that he is all talk and no action. If anything, his devotion to Lily and his loyalty to Dumbledore, even when we see Dumbledore emotionally abuse him, might suggest a touch of masochism - at minimum, a lack of self-interest to rival Harry's.
Personally I think that the key lies in the fact that Snape was Sorted into Slytherin, even though he has the characteristics of the other houses (loyalty, courage, intellectual curiosity....) and doesn't seem very ambitious. With the talents that we see that he has for devising new spells and potions, if he was ambitious he ought to be a celebrated, wealthy inventor by now, doing a little teaching on the side. The solution, in my opinion, is that he is hugely competitive on a personal level, and the Hat interpreted that as ambition of a sort (along with the fact that Slytherin was what he wanted, of course). So he doesn't actually want to kill Sirius once he knows he's not a threat to Harry, he doesn't even seem to want to kill Peter, but he wants to make them admit that he's better than them, and when he is spiteful it isn't because he has a very strong urge to hurt - if he had, he would surely have had a different and much more awful reputation as a Death Eater - but because spiteful gloating is a way of keeping score. As an academically brilliant boy who was sneered at almost from birth for being an ugly little guttersnipe from the wrong side of the tracks, he must have grown up almost from birth feeling that he had something to prove.
Snape is very reserved and literally "buttoned up".
It's canon that Snape is a powerful Occlumens, a mind-occluder, who is able to conceal his true feelings and allegiance from a very powerful Legilimens, or mind-reader. During the Occlumency lessons Snape rails against "Fools who wear their hearts proudly on their sleeves, who cannot control their emotions, who wallow in sad memories and allow themselves to be provoked so easily – weak people, in other words" who will be "easy prey" for Voldemort's Legilimency. But he says this while he is white in the face and visibly angry and shaken after seeing Cedric's corpse in Harry's memory, and a few minutes later Harry asks Snape about the Department of Mysteries and watches him for a reaction, and "Snape looked agitated; but when he spoke again he sounded as though he was trying to appear cool and unconcerned." He's really not doing that great a job if Harry - not noted for his emotional acumen - can still see what he's feeling. In HBP, Harry watches Snape talking to Draco and observes "And why was Snape looking at Malfoy as though both angry and ... was it possible? ... a little afraid? // But almost before Harry had registered what he had seen [cut] Snape's face was smoothly inscrutable again."
Snape clearly tries hard to suppress or re-channel his emotions, and is able to do so well enough to fool Voldemort. Nevertheless we see him flushing and blenching, shaking and snarling, and at times verging on outright hysteria, especially in the Shrieking Shack when he faces Remus and Sirius again and must be terrified half out of his mind. We see him incoherent with emotion, traumatized by the false accusation of "Coward", and sobbing his heart out after reading Lily's letter in which she speaks about being visited by Peter who was about to betray her. [It's not clear, incidentally, whether Lily's letter was crumpled by Snape, or by Sirius - who had equal reason to be grief-stricken and enraged at the thought of Peter being welcomed by his beloved James and then betraying him to his death.] We see his younger self pleading for Lily's life and devastated by her death, howling with grief. That his emotions are so obvious, even though he is an Occlumens who works hard at suppressing his emotions, surely shows that he is at heart an extremely emotional person.
One of the reasons I say that the films and the film characters are so different from the books that they have to be treated as different stories is the way film Snape is played as this stern, confident, emotionally reserved middle-aged man whose feelings are buried so deep that they barely show as the subtlest flicker. According to The Daily Mail (15/01/2016, part of a memorial article following Rickman's death) "A 2008 experiment by a linguist and a sound engineer at Sheffield University found the 'perfect' male voice, in terms of conveying self-confidence and generating trust, was a hybrid of those of [Jeremy] Irons and Rickman" - but book Snape is nervy and distrusted. Apparently Rickman himself chose to dress Snape in tight sleeves and lots of buttons to symbolise his emotional repression: this was after reading only the first three books, but once the style of the film Snape had been established he was stuck that way. This was a tragically wasted opportunity, since Rickman showed in Galaxy Quest how well he could play a nervy, intense, ill-mannered, insecure, proud but emotionally labile, sour and abrasive yet caring book-Snape-like character.
It's said that Rowling herself picked Rickman to play Snape, so you might think that Rickman's Snape was what she had in mind, even if it doesn't fit what she actually wrote. After all she has said that Harry would never turn his back on somebody in pain, so that's clearly how she thinks of him, even though in the books he does so repeatedly. In Snape's case, however, I think the discrepancy is to do with the fact that Rowling has admitted that he was based on John Nettleship, her old Chemistry teacher. Physically, Snape in the books is John made (even) skinnier, scruffier, twitchier and less handsome. Rickman bore some resemblance to John, which I assume is what made Rowling choose him, but he was John made less skinny, less scruffy, less twitchy and about equally handsome. As a result book!Snape and film!Snape both look quite a lot like John, but not much like each other.
The idea that Snape wears multiple layers of clothing, culminating in a frock coat and lots of buttons which echo his supposed inner repression, belongs only to the films, and to fanon derived from the films - and perhaps to the mistaken idea that the dungeons must be cold, although in fact the deeper you go into the earth the warmer it gets. Book Snape wears robes and a cloak. At sixteen, in June, he wears nothing under his robes except underpants - or at least, he has no trousers on, although a shirt or vest (US singlet) is possible. As an adult we see him pull his robes up above the knee to bare his Fluffy-bitten leg for bandaging, and again there's no suggestion of also having to roll up trousers, even though this is in November. This is really what you would expect of someone who does a lot of work in a Potions lab., for the same reason that my very Snape-like Chemistry mistress Mrs Styles banned the wearing of trousers in the lab.. If you splash yourself with something hot or corrosive loose fabrics can be pulled away from the body at once, taking most of the chemical with them, but any tight leggings will clamp the corrosive substance against your skin.
Snape is very punitive.
This is an interesting one because it's so deeply established that fanon builds upon fanon, until even most people who like Snape believe that he is always handing out detentions, taking large numbers of points, even manhandling students, although they seek to excuse him for it. Yet, this is almost 100% pure fanon. Snape in the books is substantially less punitive than McGonagall, generally takes points in quite small numbers, and is never seen to take points from any Gryffindor other than the Trio, apart from one incident where he takes 10 collective points from Harry, Ron and Neville for brawling. He is never seen to lay hands on a student, except when he hauls Harry out of his Pensieve: it is McGonagall, not Snape, who seizes a student (Draco) by the ear and physically grapples with him.
This fanon probably came about because Snape is very often seen taking points from the Trio, in a niggly sort of way, and people didn't notice how small the number of points he was taking was - and also because it is stated in GoF that "Snape loved taking points from Harry, and had certainly never missed an opportunity to give him punishments", although this is not actually borne out by the text.
Canon Snape is verbally aggressive, ill-mannered, confrontational and nagging, and quite a negative person. He seldom praises a student, and then only in a grudging, northern way (he comes from the sort of area where "not bad" is the height of praise), he frequently takes small numbers of points - sometimes apparently just because he is in a bad mood and looking for someone to take it out on - and I don't recall him ever giving out points; but the idea that he repeatedly takes large numbers of points or hands out detentions to a greater extent than other teachers is pure fanon.
Over the course of the books, we see Snape take 277 points as compared with McGonagall's 235, but these include an exceptional 70 points taken from Harry at the start of HBP when Snape was in an unusually bad mood, having been unexpectedly bounced out at by a Patronus resembling the werewolf which had once nearly eaten him, and then forced to abandon both his dinner and his newly Sorted first-years - not to mention that Draco may have already warned him that Harry was trying to ruin their carefully laid plans.
Snape's point-taking as recorded in the books breaks down as follows: one lot of 70 points; one lot of 50 points; two lots of 25 points (in the form of 50 points split across two people); seven lots of 10 points; five lots of 5 points; three lots of 3⅓ points; two single points; plus there was one occasion where he was planning to take 10 points but was distracted by McGonagall's intervention. 2532⁄3 of those points are taken from the Trio, 3⅓ from Neville and the remaining 20 from Hufflepuff and/or Ravenclaw (different editions differ as to the house allegiances of the canoodling couple in the rose garden). Except for the one incident where he takes 10 collective points from Harry, Ron and Neville for brawling no points are taken from any Gryffindor other than the Trio. His most typical number of points taken is 10 and his average just under 14.
McGonagall's point-taking breaks down as follows: four lots of 50 points; one lot of 20 points; three lots of 5 points. 70 of those points are taken from Draco, and the remaining 165 from assorted Gryffindors - 110 from the Trio, 50 from Neville and 5 from Angelina Johnson. Her most typical number of points taken is 50 and her average 29. She also seems to be more controlling than Snape: after the Norbert incident she initially says that she will take 50 points from Gryffindor, then trebles it to 50 points each apparently just because Harry made a small noise of protest.
However, although she takes more than twice as many points at a time as Snape, we see her take points in far fewer lots than Snape - eight lots of points spread across five occasions, to his nineteen lots (or sixteen if you consider that he took fifty points spread across two people, and ten across three) distributed across twelve occasions - which goes some way to explaining how he is portrayed in fanon.
Harry has a joint Gryffindor/Slytherin class with Snape and seems to have only Gryffindor-only classes with McGonagall, which explains why he mainly sees them take points from Slytherin and Gryffindor: he rarely sees them interact with the other houses. You could argue these results two ways.
You could say that the fact that McGonagall takes points mainly from her own house and Snape takes points mainly from a rival house shows that McGonagall is fair-minded and Snape is biased.
Alternatively you could say that the fact that even McGonagall, their house-mistress, takes a lot of points from the Trio, and we never see Snape take any points from any Gryffindor other than the Trio (except for the brawling incident), shows that both teachers honestly consider the Trio to be especially badly behaved and take points from them accordingly. You could say that we just don't know how many points McGonagall (who according to Pottermore has a lifelong grudge against Slytherin because a Slytherin player fouled her during a Quidditch match when she was about eighteen) takes from Slytherin in class, since Harry does not witness her teaching Slytherins, and that Snape takes no points from his Slytherins in class because they are well-behaved, or he at least thinks they are. At least twice we see Slytherins wait until Snape's back is turned before misbehaving in class, so they evidently think he'll punish them if he catches them at it.
As for detentions, at the end of HBP Snape gives Harry six or seven detentions for slashing Draco, but McGonagall says that this is lenient and she would have recommended expulsion if it were up to her. Neither of them knows Harry was acting in self-defence, and it's reasonable for both to assume that he was trying to kill Draco, because his godfather Sirius had tried to kill Snape at school, and his friends the Twins had carried out a life-threatening attack which left Montague seriously injured the previous year. In fact Harry is much better than Sirius and the Twins and seemed cautiously sympathetic to Draco's tears until Draco tried to Cruciate him - but Snape and McGonagall don't know that. Snape seems cruel when he forces Harry to go over James's and Sirius's detention notes and forego courting Ginny, especially as by this point Snape believes (not entirely correctly) that Dumbledore has raised Harry to die: but not knowing that Draco had tried to Cruciate Harry, he must believe that Harry has turned into a carbon copy of Sirius and tried to murder a Slytherin classmate, and that his grief and anger over Harry's fate had been wasted on an unworthy object.
Pause for a moment to consider what McGonagall would do to any student who pulled that "There's no need to call me 'Sir'" stunt on her - but Snape settles for a detention (one of only two detentions we see him give to Harry, prior to the Sectumsempra incident), and doesn't even seem all that angry. [This scene may be based on a real incident in which John Nettleship, Rowling's own Chemistry master who she has admitted was a major inspiration for Snape, discovered that a student had drawn a wild, snarling caricature of him - and thought it was a hoot.]
Snape's questioning of Harry in their first lesson together is often held up as an example of his being unfairly harsh, but in fact the internal evidence (see below) indicates that the questions he is asking Harry relate to a first-year textbook which Harry has in fact read. So although his reference to "our new celebrity" is a bit spiteful, his quizzing of Harry is perfectly reasonable, and if Harry had been polite and said "I'm sorry sir, I did read the book but I don't remember that bit" Snape would probably just have harrumphed and accepted it.
Really, the story of Harry and Severus is one of crossed purposes and missing information. If, right at the outset, somebody had said to Snape "Harry's uncle is very shouty and overbearing, so don't push too hard or he'll automatically dig his heels in", and had said to Harry "Snape is going to be a bit twitchy around you because your dad bullied him the way Dudley bullies you, so make nice and try not to put his back up", they would probably have got on fine. But by the time each of them found out what the other one's problem was, they were locked in a feedback loop of "I hate you because you hate me because I hate you."
Snape is, of course, sometimes punitive and unfair in the way he takes points from people for doing something one week, and for not doing it another week. This is probably because he's so tired he can't remember what he said the week before - bearing in mind not only his gruelling schedule (see below for how we know he is working about a 100-hour week) but the fact that he is mainly based on John Nettleship, who at the time Rowling knew him was half out of his mind with severe chronic insomnia. It seems fairly clear, for example, that when Snape asks the class how to tell the difference between a ghost and an Inferius, and then gets angry when Harry very reasonably replies that one is transparent and the other isn't, he mistakenly believes himself to have said "What is the difference...?" rather than "How can you tell the difference...?" There may also be an element of looking for any excuse to deduct points from anybody who gets in his way when he's exhausted, on the principle that he can reduce his stress by passing it on to other people.
As the teacher of a subject which is compulsory right through from first year to fifth year, Snape has to teach 24 classes a week. In Harry's year, for example, he teaches one two-hour and one one-hour class for combined Slytherin and Gryffindor students, and the same for combined Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. He does the same for every year from years 1-5, and then probably one two-hour and one one-hour class for students from all four houses in each of years 6 and 7. That's 36 hours in the classroom, plus preparation for those classes - if we assume 15 minutes to prepare for each class that's another 6 hours. Then even if he only sets an essay for each student once a fortnight there are about 650 students at Hogwarts and he's teaching about 520 of them, so that's 260 essays a week, so even if he only spends 10 minutes on each essay that's another 43 hours. OK, he doesn't have to commute, and he doesn't have to cook or clean or shop unless he wants to, but he (and every other teacher who teaches a subject which is compulsory from first year, except Hooch) is working about an 85-hour week just teaching his subject, and then on top of that he has his duties as Head of House - which must surely take up at least several hours - and in the later books his duties for the Order and for Voldemort.
Only McGonagall - who has her duties as Deputy Head in place of Snape's need to put in time pretending to be serving Voldemort, and who appears to teach some single-house classes as well - has a schedule which is as gruelling as Snape's. It's not surprising if Snape is irritable and sometimes inconsistent, and McGonagall seems to have little interest in (or energy for) pastoral care of her house students.
Prior to the Sectumsempra incident, over the course of six years we see Snape give out just seven detentions. Of those seven detentions two are to Slytherins and five to Gryffindors, including two to Harry and one to Neville. In addition we see him once give lines to Vincent Crabbe, a Slytherin, so if you count that as a detention-type punishment as well, Snape's detentions split as five to Gryffindors and three to Slytherins, which hardly suggests massive bias.
[I suspect that the reason Snape is perfectly willing to give his Slytherins detention, but doesn't take house points from them, is because he is very competitive and wants to win the House Cup and then gloat at McGonagall. In addition to the two detentions he gives to Harry there is an incident where he tells Harry to tidy the desks after class, but there's nothing to say whether this is any kind of punishment or just Harry's turn on some sort of rota.]
Over the same period we see McGonagall give out twenty-two detentions, of which six are to Slytherins and the remaining eighteen to Gryffindors. These include seven to Harry and two to Neville. In addition we see her punish Neville for writing the common room passwords down by cancelling his Hogsmeade visits for the rest of the year and forcing him to stand outside in the corridor and wait for a classmate to let him in to the Gryffindor common room, for weeks, at a time when she believes that a mentally deranged mass-murderer is roaming the halls of Hogwarts with a big knife, paying especial attention to Gryffindor [OK, there are security trolls around, but it must still have been terrifying and at least somewhat dangerous].
You can say that there's a selection bias, because heads of house are mainly responsible for disciplining their own house, and so Gryffindors get to see McGonagall give detentions to Gryffindors; but the fact that both McGonagall and Snape hand out roughly three quarters of their detentions (not counting Vincent's lines) to Gryffindors and a quarter to Slytherins does tend to suggest that they both have the same opinion of the two houses' relative incidence of misbehaviour.
Indeed, if you include Vincent's lines as a detention Snape only gives 62% of his detentions to Gryffindor - a smaller proportion than McGonagall does. This may be because Harry apparently only sees her teach Gryffindors-only classes, but nevertheless McGonagall certainly appears more punitive than Snape and she also takes greater risks with student safety. Some of Snape's detentions have a petty element which suggests that the dirt-poor, working-class half-blood likes to take the rich spoilt pure-bloods down a peg or two by making them do house elf work, but they aren't dangerous. McGonagall on the other hand sends four first-years into the Forbidden Forest by night when she probably knows that Voldemort is around (and Hagrid then sends two of them off unsupervised into a wood which he knows holds giant man-eating spiders); she forces Neville to stand outside in the corridor when she believes that there is a mass-murderer on the loose; and when she sees false!Moody repeatedly slamming ferret!Draco against a stone floor as he screams in pain, she protests at the Transfiguration but not the savage beating, and allows Draco to be dragged away by his abuser without even checking him for broken bones or internal injuries first.
Snape is the more nitpicking and hyper-critical of the two but he and McGonagall both embarrass Neville in front of the class, Snape by warning Lockhart that Neville is potentially dangerous in a duel (which is rude of him, but may well be a sincere concern) and warning Remus that Neville is a bad choice to demonstrate a spell; and McGonagall by suggesting in front of the class that Neville is likely to let them down during the ceremony to welcome Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. Yes, Snape is being quite nasty to Neville but there seems to be no teacher-training in the wizarding world: he learned his teaching skills, such as they are, from his own teachers, including McGonagall, who is punitive and insensitive, and Dumbledore who is at times outright emotionally abusive. It is McGonagall, not Snape, who seizes a student (Draco) by the ear, and who seems to approve of somebody being tortured with Crucio and thrown through a sheet of glass just for being rude to her.
Snape nags Neville for things which he believes (rightly or wrongly) that Neville could help if he tried, such as carelessness and bringing a badly-controlled pet into a room full of flames and cauldrons. As Neville's head of house McGonagall ought to know that the boy has some kind of problem with memory and that constantly changing the password would put him under a lot of strain. Neville couldn't have predicted that a friend's cat would steal his list of passwords, which he was keeping inside the password-protected area where no-one who didn't already know the password ought to have been able to get at it. Of course, McGonagall doesn't know about that part - but she doesn't ask. Instead, she punishes Neville severely and for weeks in a deliberatly humiliating - and potentially life-threatening - way. It's stated in the book that she does lock Neville out as punishment, not as a security measure.
There's a slight anomaly in canon. During the only detention which we see Snape give to Neville, he sets him to disembowel horned toads for potion ingredients. It seems likely that JKR intended Snape to be being as nasty as McGonagall here (who orders Hermione to Vanish kittens, which from what we're told elsewhere effectively emans killing them), and to have spitefully forced a boy who loves toads to dissect toads - even if they were already-dead toads. However, where there's a conflict between what's on the page and authorial intent what's on the page is generally considered to be canon, unless the author outright says "This was a printing error which will be corrected in the next edition". And what's on the page says that Snape had Neville dissecting horned toads, which are a type of lizard which resemble toads only in having a wide flat head and body. There's no way anybody who was familiar with toads could remotely mistake a horned toad for one - they have a long tail, and claws, and are covered in spiky scales - so this detention should be no more upsetting for Neville than any other dissection.
[That Neville, whose parents were tortured into madness by Death Eaters, should have as his Boggart a teacher who apparently gives him one detention in six years and never that we know of does anything worse to him than nag and snarl, is an anomaly - especially when you see how McGonagall treats him. The simplest explanation is that Neville, with his family connections to the Aurors, knows that Snape is a former Death Eater.]
As for Snape's repeated threats to have Harry expelled, they seem to be just his way of letting off steam. When he really has something serious on Harry he doesn't use it. McGonagall says Harry should have been expelled after cutting Draco, but Snape only gives him detentions. When the Trio throw Snape into a wall and knock him out (accidentally, but he isn't awake to know that) he thinks they have been Confunded by Sirius. Whatever their reasons for believing Sirius innocent they still attacked a teacher, but he doesn't even complain about it or take any points.
As Headmaster, Snape presided over the regime of the Carrows, who are said to have punished students very cruelly. We know Snape was sent to take that post by Dumbledore, in order to protect the students, so he presumably toned things down as much as he could without breaking his cover. But note that according to Filch, in the past students at Hogwarts were punished with lengthy sessions of extreme physical torture. In the first book he says that "It's just a pity they let the old punishments die out ... hang you by your wrists from the ceiling for a few days, I've got the chains still in my office, keep 'em well oiled in case they're ever needed ..." and in HBP he extols the use of thumbscrews. Hanging by the wrists is an extreme torture which tears the shoulders out of their sockets. We don't know how long ago this was, assuming Filch is telling the truth, but it was recent enough for the equipment to still be in good order.
As recently as the 1960s, in the early days of Dumbledore's Headmastership, the then caretaker, Apollyon Pringle, caught Arthur and Molly canoodling out of hours and Arthur was punished in some way which left him physically scarred for life ["'Your father and I had been for a night-time stroll,' she said. 'He got caught by Apollyon Pringle – he was the caretaker in those days – your father's still got the marks.'"]. In Harry's fifth year Umbridge doesn't seem to have any concerns that she will get into trouble for using a Blood Quill on Harry and forcing him to spend hours at a time having his skin cut open, and she is able, apparently quite legally, to authorize Filch to whip students. Whatever the Carrows do, punishing students with outright torture is a Hogwarts tradition.
The only punishment that we know Snape himself gave out during his Headmastership was more of a surreptitious pat on the back. When McGonagall sent Harry, Hermione, Neville and Draco on a midnight detention with Hagrid in first year they were children, and she knew that Hagrid would collaborate in punishing them by giving them scary and difficult tasks. When Snape sends Ginny, Luna and Neville on detention with Hagrid they are young adults, and he must know that Hagrid will probably throw a party for them - but he puts it about that they have been cruelly punished, as a sop to the Carrows.
Incidentally, much has been made of Rowling having called Snape "cruel" - but she also calls the Twins cruel, specifying that Fred was the more cruel of the two.
Snape's questioning of Harry in their first lesson was unfairly hard.
Harry's very first Potions lesson is often seen as evidence of how punitive and unfair Snape is, because of a fanon idea that the questions he asked Harry were unreasonably difficult. Snape certainly makes a rather uncalled-for snide remark about Harry being a celebrity, but it is very likely that Draco - a whiny, sneaky kid who is away from home for what may well be the first time in his life, and who knows his new Head of House as a family friend and quite possibly as his godfather - has already told Uncle Severus that Famous Harry Potter was nasty to him on the train, and has presented it as Harry being rude and self-satisfied. And Snape has already looked up at the Sorting Feast and seen Harry apparently glaring at him - in fact wincing with pain from his scar, but the two expressions are almost identical - so he will think Petunia has raised Harry to hate him; and like Harry he probably associates that meeting of his gaze with Harry's with a sense of the presence of evil which is in fact coming from Quirrell.
The sequence of events is that Snape makes his keynote speech, to which Harry listens fairly attentively (although the idea that he makes notes belongs to the films). Harry and Ron then turn to look at each other instead of the teacher. Snape will want to know whether they are genuinely confident and knowledgeable enough to feel they don't need to pay attention, or are just slapdash. He must be very wary of Ron, since his most recent experience of the Weasley family is the Twins, who are often outright criminal: indeed we later see George launch an unprovoked physical assault on Snape which could have killed him (he tries to knock Snape off his broom in mid-air by aiming a Bludger at him). Snape will be wary of Harry too for a wide range of reasons, and will want to know if Harry will be the Potions star his mother and many of his father's ancestors were; but having an awkward and difficult personality he tries to find out in a clumsy way.
So he asks Harry a series of three increasingly easy questions. Questions two and three could at a pinch be answered by an informed Muggle (bezoars, for example, were described on The Antiques Roadshow on 4th September 2016), but Harry can't answer any of them. He isn't apologetic about it, either, but stiffly resentful (because he associates critical, overbearing adult men with Vernon - but Snape doesn't know that), and just as he told Vernon to give a job to Dudley so he tells Snape to ask Hermione - whose insistent hand-waving is intrusive, since Snape had asked questions specifically of Harry, not of the whole class.
Because the first question related to the Draught of Living Death, which is a NEWT-level potion, there's a fanon assumption that Snape was asking Harry impossible questions; but in fact there are several clues that Snape is asking Harry about items from a first-year textbook which Harry has actually read. Snape's comment on Harry's failure to answer is "'Thought you wouldn't open a book before coming, eh, Potter?'",and Harry's answering thought is "He had looked through his books at the Dursleys', but did Snape expect him to remember everything in One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi?" It seems clear that Harry believes the questions relate to his first-year Herbology textbook.
The fact that Hermione knows the answer - even though at this point she has probably been to Diagon Alley only once, a few weeks ago, and won't have had time to do much extra reading - tends to bear this out. Indeed, Hermione says on the train that she has learned all their set books by heart, and that she has "got a few extra books for background reading", and then mentions three books on recent wizarding history - not in-depth Potions texts. And you have to wonder why Rowling would choose to write Harry as thinking that the questions related to a textbook he had already read, if she didn't mean this to be so. She has already established that during the previous month at the Dursleys Harry had found that "His school books were very interesting. He lay on his bed reading late into the night ... "
The fact that Snape asks Harry about asphodel, aconite and a bezoar even suggests that he may have deliberately chosen questions relating to entries near the beginning of the alphabet and therefore of the book, to increase the likelihood that Harry would have read them.
There may have been a secret message buried under the question, because in the Victorian Language of Flowers the combination of asphodel and wormwood means something like "my regrets follow you to the grave", with bitter sorrow linked to a lily, and if so it would be unreasonable to expect Harry to understand the message. But he didn't need to understand it in order to answer the questions - just to remember what he had read within the previous four weeks. If he had just said "I'm sorry sir, I did read the book but I'm afraid I don't remember that bit" Snape would just have harrumphed a bit and moved on, but instead Harry's coldly cheeky response (which is really aimed at Vernon) escalates the back-and-forth hostility which began with Snape's remark about celebrities.
Snape selectively and unfairly targets all Gryffindors, and constantly criticises Gryffindor.
On the train on his very first day at Hogwarts, Snape says to Lily that he hopes to be in Slytherin, James butts in and makes a rude remark about Slytherin and Snape counters with a suggestion that Gryffindor's value brawn over brain. When Snape referees a Gryffindor/Hufflepuff Quidditch match in the first book Wood fears that he may be eager to take penalty points from Gryffindor to ensure a Hufflepuff win (which will probably make a Slytherin victory in the end of term House Cup more likely). Snape does indeed award one fair and one unfair penalty to Hufflepuff, after the Gryffindor team have put his back up by physically assaulting him; but we later learn from Quirrellmort that he was really there to protect Harry, and that he had pretended that his aim was to rig the match in order to disguise his true motives. Here endeth all the canon evidence that Snape is biased against Gryffindor.
Ron does say in PS that he's heard, presumably from his brothers, that Snape favours his Slytherins - but not that he specifically dislikes any one of the other houses. Percy tells Harry that Snape wants the DADA post, but doesn't mention any house bias.
This fanon came about because we constantly hear Snape take points from Gryffindor, but in fact aside from one incident where he takes 10 collective points from Harry, Ron and Neville for fighting, we never see him take points from any Gryffindor other than the Trio. Prior to the Sectumsempra incident, we see him give one detention to Neville, four to the Trio and three to assorted Slytherins over the course of six years. We're told during the first Potions lesson that he criticises almost everybody in the class, including the Slytherins, except Draco (who seems to have genuine Potions ability); and at no point are we told that he targets Gryffindors in general, as opposed to the Trio and Neville, for any punishment or criticism. Twice we are shown Slytherins waiting until Snape's back is literally turned before misbehaving, showing that they expect he'll be angry with them if he catches them at it.
If he has a bias in canon it's against the Trio and perhaps Neville (although Neville is genuinely a bad and dangerous Potions student), not against Gryffindor - but McGonagall also is seen to punish the Trio and Neville more than she does anyone else, which suggests that mainly the Trio are just worse-behaved than anyone else (or, when compared with e.g. Draco, not as sneaky about it).
Incidentally, although there's no canon evidence that Snape is biased against Gryffindor, it's Pottermore canon that McGonagall is biased against Slytherin, because a Slytherin player fouled her during a Quidditch match when she was about eighteen.
Somebody - anybody - calls Snape a "greasy git".
This is perfectly canon-compatible, since Snape is repeatedly described as having greasy skin or hair, but it's still pure fanon. The word "git" - an extremely mild expression which is probably a corruption of "get", i.e. "offspring", and translates roughly as "annoying person" - is used of Snape but also of many other people. Filch, Quirrellmort, Dudley, Ron, Pigwidgeon the owl, Hagrid, Percy, Viktor Krum, Marvolo Gaunt and Griphook are each called a git once during the course of the books. Gilderoy Lockhart, Ludo Bagman, the Weasley Twins and Harry are each called a git twice. Snape is called a git three times, and Draco four times. Nobody in canon, either in the books or the films, ever calls Snape a greasy git. They might do so off-stage, it seems perfectly feasible, but nobody ever does it where we can see it.
You're on firmer ground with that other fanon insult for Snape, "overgrown bat" or "great bat of the dungeons". The only person who ever actually calls Snape "an overgrown bat" out loud in canon is Quirrellmort, but Harry thinks of Snape silently as an overgrown bat, a large, malevolent bat and (in DH) a bat-like flying shape, and once suggests to Ron that Snape might be able to turn into a bat. It's a curious point that it was Quirrellmort who put the idea, and even the phrase "overgrown bat", into Harry's head - and that this suggests that Voldemort himself thinks of Snape as a bat.
Snape was an isolated, scorned child.
We can see in canon that as a small child Snape was poor and ragged, from a markedly dysfunctional family and possibly abused. His great eagerness to make friends with Lily may mean he has no other friends, or it may just mean that he has no other friend who is a magic-user, with whom he can share that important aspect of his life.
The fanon idea that Snape was friendless at Hogwarts is one which seemed to be indicated by canon when it was first proposed, and which is weakly supported by Rowling's interview comment that Snape joined the Death Eaters in part because he was insecure and needed a group to belong to. As a dirt-poor, working-class half-blood in Slytherin his position must have been precarious - but the idea that he had no friends at all has really been canon-shafted, especially by DH. It came about because Snape says that the Marauders always attacked him four on one, suggesting that he had no friends to stand by him, and because we're told that Harry thinks he seems to be unpopular with the crowd who watch James and Sirius bullying him; also because he seems to be naturally on his own after his DADA OWL, rather than hanging around in a crowd.
Sirius did say that Snape was part of a Slytherin gang which included Rosier, Wilkes, Avery and a couple called Lestrange who at some point married. However, if the Lestrange couple referred to were Bellatrix and Rudolphus (as opposed to Rabastan and some unknown partner), Bellatrix is a minimum of five years older than Snape, and nine years older if you acept JK Rowling's diagram of the Black family tree as canon, so it was felt that this list might refer to people Snape became friends with after he left school.
Against this, in HBP Snape talks to Draco about Draco's covert activities, and says "You were certainly alone tonight, which was foolish in the extreme, wandering the corridors without lookouts or back-up. These are elementary mistakes –" which does sound as if he's speaking from experience about precautions he himself had taken as a boy, and would suggest that he was part of a group who tried to guard each other's backs - although it's also possible that the experience he had was of being the person who did not have backup. Either way, and even if he had several friends who were in the same house and year and doing all the same elective classes, he would still have to go to the lavatory or the library on his own some time, and possession of The Marauder's Map means that the Marauders would always be able to wait until he was on his own. Therefore, the fact that the Marauders always attack him when he has no-one to stand by him isn't hugely significant.
The fact that he's on his own after the DADA OWL (a compulsory subject which everyone in his year must have sat, or at least it was in Harry's day) could mean that his friends had gone on to an exam for an elective subject he wasn't taking, or that they were in a different year. Or he might just have been a bit of a loner when he was preoccupied with his studies, even though he did have friends. We now know that he was friends with Lily until after that OWL, and yet he didn't seek her out to sit with her after the exam: perhaps because he wants to concentrate on picking over the exam paper and he knows Lily won't want to (although she does produce a book after she's dipped her feet in the lake). And we know that Lily complained about his friendship with Avery and Mulciber. So he wasn't totally isolated, and we know Avery was his friend while still at school so probably Rosier and Wilkes were as well, if not the Lestranges.
Then, he was certainly friends or close colleagues of some sort with Lucius at some point in later life. We don't know whether this friendship began at school, but Sirius needles Snape about being "Lucius's lapdog" and Snape reacts badly. This could mean that there was a sexual relationship between them - widely expected at boarding school, although if it happened at school it would have to have been at least technically abusive, since Lucius must have left school when Snape was thirteen - or that Sirius has a history of annoying Snape by implying a sexual relationship with Lucius even though there wasn't one. Or he could have been Lucius's "fag" - a junior boy at some boarding schools who acts as secretary and valet to an older boy, something like an officer's batman, in return for protection and patronage. Either way, Snape may have been under Lucius's protection for his first two years at Hogwarts.
Then, we know that the Half-Blood Prince was using his sixth-year-standard Potions textbook by some time early in fifth year, because he worked Levicorpus out in the margin, and that spell became fashionable in fifth year. The fact that Slughorn uses him as a yardstick of sixth-year Potions excellence, praising Harry's (borrowed) performance with "never had a student produce finer on a first attempt, I don't think even you, Severus – ", suggests that Snape may have worked out at least some of his improvements to the Draught of Living Death prior to the first time he brewed it in class - or, if he modified it on the fly, he already had a good knowledge of what sort of modifications might work, and then he ran it again later to produce the even better version Harry found in his book.
Yet, Spinner's End doesn't seem at all the sort of place which could hold a Potions laboratory, at least while there were still three people living there, and young Snape's discoveries as detailed in his book sound as though they would have taken more work than could be done just by experimenting in class. The implication is that Slughorn allowed young Severus, and probably Lily, to have the use of a laboratory in which to do some out-of-hours research. Even if they used the Room of Requirement, the ingredients would probably have to be brought in and most likely obtained from Slughorn, so it's very likely that Slughorn favoured Severus and facilitated his research. That they have a good relationship is borne out by the fact that Snape comes to Slughorn's Christmas party, mingles with actual students and allows drunk!Slughorn to fling his arm round him, without trying to gnaw it off at the elbow.
Slughorn likes to add promising students to his collection, people who are likely to do well. Sometimes it's because they come from wealthy families but he also seems to have been very keen on Muggle-born Lily, so he doesn't care about blood-status or family position if a student has obvious talent and potential.
Also, even if Lucius was a conscientious prefect who took an avuncular interest in Slytherin first years, you have to wonder why he would forge a connection with a much younger, half-Muggle, working-class boy when in later life he would claim to be strongly opposed to magic-to-Muggle marriages. This comes up in Beedle: Lucius wrote to Dumbledore demanding that all books which showed marriage between wizards and Muggles should be removed from Hogwarts in case they encouraged Draco to "sully the purity of his bloodline". Even if Lucius's interest was predatory, young Severus would be a peculiar choice of victim.
Everything falls into place if we assume that young Snape (and probably Lily too) was a member of the Slug Club, and entered Lucius's orbit there as one of Slughorn's rising stars: one to whom Slughorn granted special laboratory privileges. His unpopularity with the crowd in the underpants scene would then be due not to his being scorned and friendless, but to his being perceived, and resented, as a Teacher's Pet - a male Hermione who hadn't had the luck to make friends with a popular Quidditch star whose reflected glory might have given him protection.
Snape is Draco's godfather.
It's canon that Snape has some kind of friendship or close working relationship with the Malfoys which probably began at school. There is nothing in the books to say that he is Draco's godfather: it's certainly possible, but his concern for the boy could just be because he is a family friend and a conscientious Head of House.
Somebody I know, who comes from a "showbiz" family and claims to have known Tom Felton well as a teenager (and I've no reason to doubt that this is true), once told me that Tom told her that JK Rowling had told him, as part of the background to his character, that Snape was indeed Draco's godfather. This is far too tenuous a chain of evidence to be considered canon, but it's suggestive.
