Fanon Vs Canon: Snape Edition
Snape has onyx eyes.
Snape is described in fanfiction as having onyx eyes so often that it's arguably moved from cliché to fanon. It's canon that Snape's eyes are very black (one of the few points in which he differs physically from John Nettleship, whose eyes were grey) - the problem lies in whether "onyx" is an appropriate way to describe a black object.
You often see cheap jewellery described as "onyx" and containing a plain black shiny stone, which is presumably where the first fanwriter to use the term "onyx eyes" got the idea, but in fact the stone used in this jewellery is nearly always agate which has been artificially dyed black. Agate and onyx are both banded forms of chalcedony but onyx has tight parallel bands, whereas the banding in agate is more random (and it's cheaper).
Genuine black onyx does exist, although it is nearly always striped with noticeable white veins. But onyx comes in a wide variety of colours. Onyx whose main colour is red or a deep tan is often referred to as sardonyx, and the situation is confused by the fact that banded calcite is often wrongly described as onyx, but generally speaking "onyx" is used to refer to all chalcedony with tight parallel bands, and it's more likely to be either green or tan with off-white stripes, rather than black. Snape's eyes can properly be likened to jet (always black) or obsidian (usually black), but not to onyx (usually streaky grey-green and off-white).
Even describing eyes as black is technically inaccurate, as truly black eyes don't exist in humans. I suppose one could make an exception for Snape as we know that atypical eye colors do exist in the Wizarding world (e.g. Madame Hooch). Considering that he's half Muggle, however, it's more likely that his eyes are a very dark brown.
Snape has a narrow face and a Roman nose.
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Snape is described in canon as having a thin face and a hooked nose. This is usually taken (including by me, initially) to mean that his face is narrow and hatchet-like and that he has a Roman nose - that is, one with a pronounced bend at the bridge.
However, a "thin" face can mean two different things. Rowling's own drawings suggest that she means Snape to have a squarish but very bony, hollow-cheeked face, rather than a narrow face.
As for his nose, a hooked nose can be a Roman or "aquiline" nose but it can also mean a straight nose which is turned down at the tip, and the latter meaning is probably the commoner one here in the UK. Rowling has drawn Snape at least four times, slightly different each time. One drawing - the least accomplished and sketchiest - shows him with a classic Roman nose (as well as a grotesquely massive, almost "chibi" head and tiny T. rex arms), as does a rather more accomplished drawing showing Snape, complete with bristling stubble, striding up and down in front of the Potions class.
One, quite polished artistically but clearly intended to be cartoonish rather than realistic, shows him with an immensely long, needle-pointed nose with a slight bend at the bridge.
The fourth drawing, which is much more realistic and detailed (including more stubble), shows him with a longish, mostly straight nose with a bent tip. In this drawing she has essentially shown Snape as John Nettleship, except that John's nose ended in a humorous blob like an opossum's, and was only slightly hooked (in the sense of being deflected down at the tip).
Viktor Krum is described as looking like a bird of prey so he probably has an aquiline nose (= bent at the bridge). His nose is described as prominent once, hooked once and curved three times. This suggests that while JK does sometimes use "hooked" to describe an aquiline nose it's not her term of choice for this sort of shape, so when she calls Snape's nose hooked she probably (although not definitely) means hooked down at the tip, as is normal here.
Those illustrations by J.K. Rowling are great!
Snape was an expert on the Dark Arts at school.
This one is weakly supported by canon, but isn't nearly as firmly established as is assumed in fanon.
To begin with, Sirius says that young Severus arrived at Hogwarts knowing more curses than half the seventh years, which must mean he knew fewer curses than the other half, or the same number. Harry, the great DADA expert, so good at the subject that he is able to teach it proficiently when he is fifteen, enters what would have been his seventh year knowing, so far as we know, eight curses - Fernunculus, Reductor, Petrificus totalus, Locomotor mortis, Sectumsempra, Cruciatus, Imperius and Avada Kedavra - two of which he hasn't even tried to cast, and all but one of which he was either taught in class or found in a school library book. On this evidence, "knows more curses than half the seventh years" probably means "knows six curses", and it doesn't matter whether Sirius was being precisely accurate or not - he certainly thought that young Sev knew more curses than some of the seventh years, but not all.
Snape's mother might have had good reason to teach him curses, incidentally. According to Pottermore he grew up in the industrial Midlands and the description of Cokeworth/Spinnner's End makes it sound quite northern. If he was at the northern end of the Midlands, near Manchester, then he (and the Evans girls) was a child growing up in the hunting grounds of the paedophile serial killers called the Moors Murderers, who killed five children in 1963-1965. From 1974-1976 three teenage girls were killed by Trevor Hardy, the "Beast of Manchester", and from 1976-1981, when Snape was aged sixteen to twenty-one (covering the period when he both joined and left the Death Eaters) the north of England, including the northern Midlands, was terrorised by the Yorkshire Ripper, a prolific serial killer of young women, who must have made Snape fear for Lily's safety. This was also the era of nuclear panic when many Muggles themselves believed that Muggles were about to destroy the whole planet and all life on it except rats and cockroaches. It's not really surprising Snape joined a group who thought Muggles were dangerous and needed a wizard overseer.
Harry too was very keen on curses at eleven, although being wholly Muggle-raised he hadn't had the chance to learn any. "Even Dudley, who never read anything, would have been wild to get his hands on some of these. Hagrid almost had to drag Harry away from Curses and Countercurses (Bewitch Your Friends and Befuddle Your Enemies with the Latest Revenges: Hair Loss, Jelly-Legs, Tongue-Tying and much, much more) by Professor Vindictus Viridian."
So, the fact that young Snape knew more curses than half the seventh years probably does not amount to knowing very many curses, and does not suggest that he was any "darker" than Harry at the same age, although it does suggest that he was both precocious and combative.
Then, Sirius attempts to explain his and James's treatment of Snape to Harry by saying "James and Snape hated each other from the moment they set eyes on each other, it was just one of those things, you can understand that, can't you? I think James was everything Snape wanted to be – he was popular, he was good at Quidditch – good at pretty much everything. And Snape was just this little oddball who was up to his eyes in the Dark Arts, and James – whatever else he may have appeared to you, Harry – always hated the Dark Arts."
But this statement is highly questionable, among other things because JK Rowling has described James's treatment of Snape at school as "relentless bullying" and has said at interview that the cause of their enmity was at least partly James's sexual jealousy of Snape. The evidence suggests that Snape was, yes, probably mediocre on a broom but that he was good at pretty-much everything else, so Sirius's explanation is clearly very slanted. Slughorn makes it clear in HBP that Snape was a star student in Potions; and the fact that he was a Potions star and also able to invent his own spells suggests that he was probably a high flyer in Herbology and Charms as well; and the fact that it seemed credible to Voldemort that it would seem credible to Dumbledore that Snape should apply for the DADA post less than two years after leaving school suggests he had scored very highly on DADA as well. There's a fair degree of evidence that far from being a scorned outsider, Snape was in the Slug Club.
We see that James starts picking on Snape on the train when he knows nothing about him except that he's poor, has a rather scratchy manner, wants to be in Slytherin and is friends with a girl - and probably that both he and the girl have thick Midlands accents. James certainly began to pick on Snape for reasons which had nothing to do with the Dark Arts, unless he just assumes without question that all Slytherins must be into the Dark Arts - and if he does, that means that his assumption that Snape must be heavily into the Dark Arts may have been mostly imagination, and based on little more than blind house-prejudice. Either Sirius's assertion that James disliked Snape to any major extent because he was into the Dark Arts is a lie, because James started picking on Snape before he knew whether he was into the Dark Arts or not, or if true it's misleading, because James evidently assumed from the outset, without evidence, that Snape was into the Dark Arts. Either way, it's only very weak evidence that Snape actually was into the Dark Arts at school.
No explanation is offered as to why James should have hated the Dark Arts so much, when Hagrid performs some of them (he regularly shops in Knockturn Alley, and we're told that everything on sale in Knockturn Alley is Dark Arts-related), and when we're told in Beedle that Dumbledore himself only "mistrusts" Dark magic. And it's highly hypocritical when James himself routinely exposes innocent bystanders to the risk of being bitten and infected by a werewolf (an official Dark creature), or even killed, and when Snape is almost certainly right when he says that the Marauder's Map is full of Dark magic - bearing in mind that "Dark" seems to mean unauthorized or transgressive, rather than necessarily evil. It's exactly the sort of thing Arthur Weasley warned his children against - something which speaks as if it has a mind, but you can't see where it keeps its brain.
In the courtyard scene, which takes place some time in fifth year a few days after the werewolf "prank", Lily accuses Snape of being friends with somebody who tried to cast a Dark spell on somebody called Mary Macdonald, and Snape says it was "a laugh, that's all". It's not clear whether he means "It was Dark magic, but it was funny" or "He was only kidding that he was going to cast a Dark spell". We also don't know the circumstances, whether it was a duel, an attack, self-defence or what. The culprit was called Mulciber and a Death Eater called Mulciber would later be famous for his use of Imperius: if this is the same guy he may well have tried to Imperius Mary, in which case it was creepy but how sinister it was would depend in part on what he was trying to make her do. It could be anything from having sex with him to clucking like a chicken but the fact that young Snape says it was a joke suggests it was towards the chicken end of the spectrum, or he believes that it was. All we can be fairly certain of is that, like Remus with the Marauders and Harry with the Twins, young Snape had a tendency to make allowances for bad behaviour by his friends.
At any rate, Lily doesn't accuse him of performing Dark magic himself, and if she thought he had done so, she would surely have said so. So Snape apparently did not have a reputation for performing Dark magic, as at some point early in fifth year, or at least not one that Lily believed - despite the fact that as a dirt-poor, working-class half-blood Slytherin he must have needed anything he could get which would improve his street-cred.. He had some dodgy associates, yes - but at a time when Voldemort was on the rise and actively recruiting Slytherins, almost everybody in Slytherin would have had some dodgy associates. He doesn't seem to have had a reputation for Dark Arts at the end of fifth year, either - otherwise James would surely have given Lily a better reason for his persecution of her friend than "he exists".
So, Sirius is being economical with the truth when he suggests that James disliked Snape because Snape was into the Dark Arts. If that was ever a factor, it was a factor after fifth year, and long after Sirius had tried to feed Snape to a Dark creature to conceal the fact that he and his friends were practising to be illegal Animagi. Indeed, it may well be that Sirius asserts that Snape was heavily into the Dark Arts and arrived at school knowing a lot of curses in an attempt to conceal from himself, as well as from Harry, that he had joined in enthusiastically in what Pottermore calls their "relentless bullying" of Snape, and instead convince himself that Snape had been so powerful and deadly that four on one was fair odds.
Also, any reputation for Darkness which Snape may genuinely have garnered at school may have been at least partly a pose intended to scare off enemies. Rowling definitely thinks of some Slytherins as putting on an act in re. the Dark Arts, because on Pottermore there's a "welcome to Slytherin" letter, supposedly penned by a Slytherin prefect some time after Vold War Two, which includes the following: "It can be fun, having a reputation for walking on the wild side. Chuck out a few hints that you've got access to a whole library of curses, and see whether anyone feels like nicking your pencil case."
What's left? Snape must genuinely have had some reputation of being involved in the Dark Arts, at least as an adult, because he tells Bellatrix that the reason Dumbledore didn't give him the DADA post was because he, Dumbledore was afraid that he, Snape would relapse back into his old ways. Almost certainly it was because Snape was too valuable to risk him in a cursed post, but this explanation needs to sound convincing to Bellatrix, so he must have a reputation as a Dark wizard by this point, and he does seem fascinated by Dark magic when he describes it to the class in HBP. Always bearing in mind that "Dark wizard" cannot equate to "intentionally evil wizard", since the wizarding world believes that it is possible for a fifteen-month-old baby to be a functioning Dark wizard.
Rowling has said at interview that Snape drifted away from Lily because he was "drawn to loathesome people and acts", but on the page we see that Lily is clearly already drifting away from Snape in the courtyard scene, at which point she is accusing him of having friends who are into Dark magic, but not of performing it himself. She must be already drifting away, because she knows that he had a terrifying, life-threatening experience a few days beforehand, this is the first time she has spoken to him since the event, and yet she doesn't even ask him how he is, but launches straight into criticising him - and then prefers to believe James's word over his as regards the werewolf incident, even though it is Snape who is telling the truth.
Whether the acts Snape was drawn to were more loathesome than routinely putting innocent bystanders in danger of being bitten by a werewolf (the Marauders); plotting to let off a deadly gas inside a school, beating a small child's pet to death for fun or imprisoning a classmate in a small box and leaving them potentially to die of thirst (the Twins); violently attacking a terrified child and trying to turn him into a livestock-animal because you don't like his father (Hagrid); badly scarring a girl's face for life to punish her for being loyal to her mother (Hermione); or torturing somebody with agonizing pain and then throwing them through a sheet of plate glass just for being rude (Harry) we aren't told.
In another interview Rowling said that Snape joined the Death Eaters in part because he felt isolated and needed to belong to something stronger than himself, and in part because he hoped it would impress Lily - no mention of being drawn to the Dark Arts, so she evidently doesn't see it as his major motivation. Hoping that joining a paramilitary organization might impress Lily isn't nearly as stupid as it sounds, btw. The Death Eaters in Vold War One weren't as violently opposed to Muggle-borns as they would be in Vold War Two, since Rowling says that they tried to recruit Lily (Pottercast #130), 17th December 2007: "... James and Lily turned him down, that was established in Philosopher's Stone. He wanted them, and they wouldn't come over ..." - although she did say later that it was very unusual for the Death Eaters to try to recruit a Muggle-born). Snape sees his own mother stay with a sour, angry man, he may by that point have known that Petunia was engaged to a blustering loudmouth, he sees Lily date a bully who had threatened her with violence ("Don't make me hex you") - it's quite natural that he would suspect Lily of being turned on by thugs, and he could be right.
To me it's clear that whatever Dark Arts Severus learned or invented, he started to do so at Hogwarts, and in his latter years there at that - by the mere fact that the Marauders were able to bully him "relentlessly" per Rowling, with everything indicating this went on with success throughout their Hogwarts years, not just after they gained their Animagi forms, the Map, and James's Invisibility Cloak (it is possible, but I find highly unlikely, that he had it from day 1).
If nothing else, a student who knows (not knows of) more curses than your average seventh-year to begin with is an extremely dangerous target to bully, and while the Marauders might have the guts to consistently try to victimize them (James and Sirius dragging James and Peter along), I doubt that they would be consistently successful as they are clearly indicated to have been with Snape.
If Snape had such options to fight back, he would have used them; and there would be indications in canon that he had. Dumbledore would comment on it when in private; Lily would have absolutely reamed him for it in the conversation after the Shack incident; and there would be no talk of James Potter saving a skilled Dark Wizard from Wolf!Remus, who might be a serious threat of death even for the gifted but young student of magic Severus actually was, but would've been a walkover for the Snape who knew advanced curses before he stepped into Hogwarts who Sirius was pushing that one time (and probably many other times off-page). None of the adult Death Eaters, even less powerful ones, seem to fear Fenrir Greyback much, and that's an adult, experienced, integrated werewolf pack leader, not a sub-adult weakened by his wolf-form's self-harm and his own loathing of it.
Now, in real life, fighting one against two - never mind four! - is a fiendish disadvantage (according to experts, which I'm not but can read and hear), but with magic, one has more options, even without getting into fanon spells. There is magic to hit multiple people at once, or to protect oneself from attacks by multiple people without the immense, very quickly impossible, tax on one's stamina and reflexes needed to do so without magic, armour, or solid cover.
In fact, I'm trying to work on a longfic whose MC is a student in Severus, Lily and the Marauders' year who walks into Hogwarts with a small arsenal of Dark Arts and other fighting spells already in place (there are what I believe to be very good reasons for this given their proper attention in the text). And without going into details and outright spoilers, I can tell you their relationship with the Marauders is never going to be that of a constantly and successfully abused victim.
Yeah, I agree with your points @motanulnegru.
In fact, I'm trying to work on a longfic whose MC is a student in Severus, Lily and the Marauders' year who walks into Hogwarts with a small arsenal of Dark Arts and other fighting spells already in place (there are what I believe to be very good reasons for this given their proper attention in the text). And without going into details and outright spoilers, I can tell you their relationship with the Marauders is never going to be that of a constantly and successfully abused victim.
Really interested to see how it turns out.
Snape was an abused child.
This is an unusual one in that it is fairly strongly supported by canon - just not as strongly as is assumed in fanon.
It's canon that Snape's mother was sour-looking even before her marriage. What seems to be Snape's father is seen shouting at what seems to be his mother in front of a very upset infant-or-early-primary-school-age Severus. He is sent out scruffy and unkempt in ridiculous-seeming, mismatched hand-me-down clothes. He tells Lily that his father doesn't like magic, or anything much, and he is tense and stressed about the situation at home. At King's Cross, when he is preparing to leave for Hogwarts for the first time and ought to have been quite bouncy and keen, he stands next to his mother with his shoulders hunched, suggesting he is either in pain or he expects her to hit him or shout at him.
As an adult he seems to have a tense, watchful manner which could mean he grew up being randomly attacked, although it could just be the result of being bullied, or of his precarious position as spy. I'm inclined to think he really is an abuse survivor, because he isn't put off by Lily's frequent coldness or by Dumbledore's occasional outbreaks of outright emotional abuse, he doesn't seem to understand why Lily is upset that Petunia is angry with her, and the fact that he seems to care a lot about his students, or at least about their physical safety, doesn't cause him to be pleasant to them. This all suggests that he comes from the sort of family where people are randomly unpleasant to their nearest and dearest, without it terminating their relationships.
If there was that sort of random aggression in his family, we don't know whether it was physical or just shouting.
If he was a beaten child, though, then as with Vernon it would go some way to explain his verbally aggressive manner to his students. It would mean that he had a kind of broken thermostat for aggression, and felt that so long as he wasn't actively hitting anybody (and the only time we ever see him lay hands on a student in anger is to pull Harry out of his Pensieve) he was being pleasant.
This is supported by an article on Pottermore entitled The etymology of Defence Against the Dark Arts professor names. The canon status of this article is intermediate, as it's one of the "lists of facts" essays which was probably not written by Rowling herself, but at the same time it's a thorough, detailed piece, not just filler as some of these lists are. It describes Snape as having had a "desperately lonely and unhappy childhood ... with a harsh father who didn’t hold back when it came to the whip".
There's also the fact that he seems to be looking for a father figure, and isn't a great picker. As a student he becomes a Potions star, the same subject taught by his head of house Professor Slughorn. It may be that he already knew he was fascinated by potions as a boy, and wanted to be in Slytherin in order that the then Potions master would be his house father. The fact that he doesn't seem to know that it's unlikely that Muggle-born Lily will be Sorted to Slytherin suggests that it is not his mother's house and he doesn't know much about it, and wanting to have the Potions master for a house father would explain why he was nevertheless so keen to get in. Slughorn was probably fairly satisfactory as a father substitute, but after Severus leaves school he attaches himself first to Voldemort and then to Dumbledore - both at least potentially abusive towards him, but that doesn't seem to put him off, suggesting that he's used to it.
Nevertheless, if you ignore Pottermore, it's perfectly possible to give Snape a canon-compatible family background in which his mother is tired and irritable and his father depressed, but no worse than that. The ridiculous clothes he wears as a child could just mean that he, or his mother, is trying to approximate wizard robes using Muggle clothes.
Snape would not have cared about Harry had Harry not been Lily's son.
This is derived from something JKR said in an interview. However, we see in the books that Snape sprints through the castle in his nightshirt because he thought he heard someone scream; runs ashen-faced through a closed door without checking what's on the other side because a girl's voice screamed "Murder!"; risks being sacked by Umbridge to prevent Neville from being throttled and is controlled by Dumbledore with the reminder that if he takes risks and gets himself killed he won't be able to protect the students, which Dumbledore evidently expects Snape will consider to be a more important issue than his own survival. We see him clutch at a chair-back when he hears that Ginny has been taken into the Chamber of Secrets, and turn white and shaky when he sees Cedric's dead body in Harry's memory.
Clearly, therefore, Snape cares about all the students, at least as regards their physical safety. Presumably, then, what Rowling means is not that Snape wouldn't care about Harry at all, if he weren't Lily's son, but that he would care about him no more than he cares about any other student. Which is actually a fair amount.
Snape's title "Potions master" means that he is an acknowledged master of the art of potion-making.
A [Subject] master, a.k.a. a schoolmaster, is a male teacher at a British secondary school - which is why the Headmaster is called the Head-master. The female equivalent is a mistress, as in Headmistress.
It may well be that Snape has some high professional qualification - it's certainly canon that he has a real flair and creativity in his subject - but if it involves the word "master" he will be called a Master of Potions (or possibly of Magic or of Philosophy) or a Master Potioneer, and this will be in addition to his being Potions master, which is simply the name of his job at Hogwarts. He will certainly not, as occasionally seen in fan fiction, be addressed as "Master Snape" since in British English that is an old-fashioned, formal way of addressing a very small male child who is too young to be called "Mister Snape".
Since the only teachers we hear referred to as masters at Hogwarts are Dumbledore, Snape, Slughorn and Flitwick, the Headmaster and three current or former Heads of House, it may be that in the wizarding world the term is reserved for teachers with a certain degree of seniority, but it's still going to be a job title, not a professional qualification. The fact that Snape calls himself "master of this school" confirms that. It clearly doesn't mean "I am the lord of this school", which would be ridiculous since he clearly isn't: it means "I am a male teacher employed at this school", in the same way that Irma Pince might style herself "librarian of this school".
Note that in real-world Britain "Professor" is the title of a senior university lecturer, not a school-teacher, so the nomenclature of Hogwarts positions does diverge to some extent from Muggle custom. However, the puppeteer who operates the Punch and Judy show is traditionally dubbed "Professor" and so are some stage magicians, so JKR may be implying that some stage magicians are real wizards.
