Quote from Naaga on May 17, 2023, 4:29 am

Dumbledore favoured the Marauders and treated Snape's life as worthless, as a boy or as an adult.

The fact that James's intervention in the werewolf "prank" is said by Dumbledore to have saved Snape's life, and that this seems to be regarded as heroic, is a strong indication that Sirius set Snape up so that he would actually come into biting range of were-Remus, not just glimpse him behind a safety barrier. What Sirius did was equivalent to a real-life schoolboy trying to set a class-mate up to have a close encounter with a grizzly, or to contract Aids. Nevertheless Sirius was clearly not expelled. Snape was forbidden to tell anyone that Remus was a werewolf. The Marauders, including James who had saved Snape, continued to persecute him, and despite this James and Sirius appear to have been Order members by the start of seventh year, and James was then made Head Boy. This is widely taken to mean that Sirius's attack on Snape wasn't treated seriously.

However, there are indications, to do with the number of holidays Sirius spent with the Potters in between leaving home and buying his own flat, that Sirius's attempted murder (or possibly just criminally reckless endangerment) of Snape coincided closely with Sirius's parting of the ways from his family. Hence the staff may have felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was having some kind of nervous breakdown, especially as there seems to be a history of mental illness in his family, and that it would be cruel to deprive him of his place at boarding school at the same time that he had just lost his home, or was in the process of doing so. Also it seems unlikely that Remus would have connived at putting Snape in extreme danger from himself so he was, at least in this instance, an innocent party, and it would probably have been hard to explain Sirius's expulsion to the Board of Governors without getting Remus into trouble. That some concern was shown for a student with mental health and family problems, and for one with quasi-medical problems who didn't deserve to be punished for his friend's madness, doesn't amount to unreasonable favour.

Also, we do not even know that the staff knew at the time that Sirius had lured Severus into the tunnel. We know that they knew that Severus had glimpsed the werewolf, since he was told not to talk about that, and we know that the fact that James had rescued him was common knowledge because Lily mentions it a few days later. We know that Dumbledore knows that Sirius had set Severus up by Harry's third year, but we don't know when he found that out. There is a strong bias in British schools against telling tales to the staff even about people who are attacking you, and the only evidence we have that Severus was a tale-bearer is Sirius's opinion that he was trying to get the Marauders expelled - and Sirius, though basically honest, is very biased where Snape is concerned. It could be that Snape didn't tell Dumbledore that Sirius had tried to kill him (or had, at the very least, recklessly endangered him) until after Sirius was arrested - and if neither Snape nor the Marauders told them it's difficult to see how the staff could have found out, unless a portrait overheard something.

There is nothing in the books to say - as so often portrayed in fanfics - that Snape himself was punished for having gone down the tunnel. There's nothing to say that he wasn't, either, but this detail is pure fanon, usually introduced to make young Sev seem even more hard-done-by than we know he was in the books. It probably came about because of the mistaken fanon that the so-called "prank" must have happened at dead of night and that Severus was therefore necessarily out of his dormitory after curfew. In fact, if it happened in winter Remus could have transformed, and his encounter with Severus could potentially have occurred, as early as 4.30pm if it is sufficient for the moon to have cleared the unseen horizon, or around 5.15pm if it has to have cleared the mountains around Hogwarts.

Snape was told not to tell other students about Remus, but since the staff had just spent five years trying to keep Remus's condition a secret, it's not surprising that they told Snape to keep his mouth shut. We have no evidence as to whether he was ordered, threatened, persuaded, bribed or put under some kind of magical compulsion. It must have been very unpleasant for him not to be able to discuss his traumatic experience with other students, and frightening and frustrating not to be able to warn Lily that James's circle included a werewolf and a near-murderer (although ironically it turned out not to be them she needed to worry about), but it wasn't a punishment as such - it wasn't done to hurt him.

We do not know whether or how Sirius was punished, short of expulsion - assuming that the staff even knew he had done anything to be punished for on that occasion. He seems to feel free to persecute Snape again in the underpants incident, but all we know for sure about the date of the werewolf "prank" is that it happened after Sirius's sixteenth birthday (which other evidence shows is early in the autumn term) and before the underpants incident. When Harry confronts Sirius and Remus about their bullying of Snape in the underpants scene, Remus says that James was "only fifteen", which is untrue - he was sixteen - but this may mean that Remus's mind tends to dwell on the Shrieking Shack incident in which he himself was nearly an unwitting murderer, and that at that time, James was fifteen. That would put the Shack incident prior to 27^th March of their fifth year.

The two attacks on Severus, the one in the Shrieking Shack and the one by the lake, could be separated by as much as nine months - long enough for Sirius to have forgotten even quite a severe punishment - and the fact that Snape settles down on the grass close to the Marauders, without looking around to check where they are or making any effort to avoid them, in fact suggests that they've probably left him alone since the werewolf incident and he no longer feels very threatened by them. This is especially noteworthy since he has just been confronted by an exam question about werewolves, and you would think that the werewolf "prank" would be on his mind.

In any case the fact that Sirius tried to kill a classmate may mean he is mildly psychopathic and lacks an automatic social conscience (he's not a full-bore psychopath, since he seems to love his friends in an emotional way), and one of the definitions of a psychopath is that punishment does not modify their behaviour. Therefore, the fact that his behaviour was unmodified does not prove he wasn't punished.

It appears that the Marauders were able to get away with continuing to persecute Snape - but then, they were in possession both of a superior sort of Invisibility Cloak and of a surveillance device which meant they could pick moments when there were no teachers around. We are told that even when James was Head Boy and was dating Lily he was able to continue his war with Snape and conceal that fact from Lily - and if he was able to hide what he was doing from a girlfriend with whom he shared a common room, he could surely hide it from the staff.

We can say that the Marauders were not watched closely and competently after the werewolf incident, since they were able to come and go from the dorm and from the tunnel. But the staff may have asked the wrong questions. If they asked the Fat Lady to watch out for those four boys trying to sneak out of the common room at night, or set a house elf to watch for students entering or leaving the tunnel under the Willow, they might not be told about invisible presences leaving the common room, or a large dog entering or leaving the tunnel. Nor do we know whether the staff had any reason to think the Marauders even might be going out in the middle of the night: if it happened in winter the werewolf incident could have occurreed as early as 5pm, because in winter the full-moonrise in the Highlands can happen as early as 4:30pm.

If we accept the prequel which Rowling wrote for charity as canon (which personally I do), then as at the summer between their sixth and seventh years James and Sirius were wearing phoenix T-shirts and so were probably already members of the Order of the Phoenix. As at a year after the underpants incident, then, a special, extra-curricular relationship did exist between James and Sirius and Dumbledore. This doesn't necessarily mean that Dumbledore liked them any better than he liked Mundungus Fletcher or Aberforth, though, just that he found them useful (rich, brave, athletic), and/or that considering that Sirius came from a very doubtful family and was Bellatrix's cousin, he preferred to have him inside the tent pissing out.

That James was made Head Boy could be evidence that his bullying of Snape and others was condoned. But it could equally mean that Snape's life was valued so highly that the fact that James had saved him (or, in general, that he saved an enemy) was enough to raise James's standing and outweigh all his misbehaviour. We're told in PoA that Percy was elected as Head Boy so probably James too was elected, but we don't know who the electorate are - it could be all students, or just all prefects, or it could be the staff. If it's the staff James could have been selected, unofficially, because he was an Order member - Dumbledore and Hagrid are certainly Order members, and Flitwick and Sprout might be, while Slughorn is Dumbledore's friend and would have been impressed by the fact that James saved one of his Slytherins.

Dumbledore twice refers to Snape's defection as his rejoining the anti-Voldemort side, which suggests that he had had Snape pegged as one of the good guys from the outset. The fanon idea that Dumbledore treated the boys as if the Marauders could do no wrong and Snape's life was worthless came about in part because it seemed a likely explanation for why Snape joined the Death Eaters. But of course, just like the staff, Snape doesn't know that the Marauders have an Invisibility Cloak and a special map which enables them to know where their prospective victims and their teachers are at all times. He would probably suspect that the staff were letting them get away with their bad behaviour (rather than that they had managed to conceal it so successfully), and he would see James, Head Boy and already (according to the little prequel which Rowling wrote for charity) an Order member, casually breaking the rules and continuing to persecute him, and getting away with it. He might well think (probably wrongly) that the staff didn't care that he was being persecuted, and if he understood why James and Sirius were wearing phoenix T-shirts he would certainly think that the Order was recruiting swaggering, rule-breaking thugs who had no respect for school rules even when it was their job to uphold them.

Dumbledore doesn't give adult Snape an easy time and is occasionally outright emotionally abusive towards him, but he speaks of him with what sounds like a certain amount of genuine affection, defends him to Harry and is touched to the point of tears by his loyalty to Lily. On the other hand the evidence that he even liked the Marauders, let alone favoured them, is thin. It appears from the prequel that he did recruit them to the Order while they were still at school - but that just tells us he had a use for them. If Snape fen can conceive that Dumbledore might possibly have recruited Snape without feeling any fondness for him, they can surely see that the same applies to James and Sirius - except that Dumbledore does show some signs of having a real affection for Snape, even if that doesn't stop him from exploiting him.

When Snape defected and told Dumbledore that the Potters were in danger, Dumbledore asked Snape what he would give him in return for protecting them - as if it wasn't a thing he would do just for their sake. At a time when the Potters are in hiding and in danger, he then borrows James's Invisibility Cloak, which he knows or suspects is the one which is meant to hide the wearer from death, and then hangs on to it. In the King's Cross scene Dumbledore tells Harry that he only borrowed the Cloak a few days before the Potters died, but Lily's letter shows that he had already had it for a significant length of time prior to Harry's first birthday party, and there's a wealth of internal evidence that that party was indeed held around the time of Harry's actual birthday, not in October. In the event possession of the Cloak probably wouldn't have made any difference to the Potters' survival, but Dumbledore didn't know that when he borrowed it. To some extent, it could be said that he cheated Snape, because Snape did pay him to save the Potters, and he didn't really give it his best shot - but he let Snape down by not caring about James enough, rather than by caring about him too much.

An impression is created that James and Sirius were well-liked by almost everybody because McGonagall, Madame Rosmerta and Hagrid seem to have liked them, but that doesn't mean Dumbledore did. In the scene at the start of PS, McGonagall seems to be genuinely upset that James and Lily are dead, but Dumbledore doesn't seem all that concerned, and is more interested in sucking sweeties - even though Snape has just accused him of failing to save them. He tells Harry that James was to Snape as Draco is to Harry, which somewhat suggests that he saw James as a spoilt, arrogant pure-blood brat who was not totally evil or beyond redemption, rather than as a beloved favourite. He later tells Harry that, like Harry himself, James would not have executed in cold blood an unarmed prisoner who was begging for mercy at his feet, and I guess that makes James one better than Sirius and Remus who were planning to execute Peter in cold blood, but it's pretty tepid praise.

Dumbledore gives Remus the DADA job which Snape wants, but since he knows that the post is cursed and that anybody who takes it on will be forcibly and potentially fatally prevented from working a second year, far from suggesting that he favours Remus over Snape, this suggests that he sees Remus as more expendable than Snape. This may well be the origin of this particular fanon, however, since we weren't told at this point that the DADA post was cursed, and so it looked as though Dumbledore had cruelly trampled over Snape's aspirations in order to give the job he craved to one of his old rivals.

As for Sirius, Dumbledore presumably knew he was Harry's godfather, but he nevertheless decided to hand Harry over to the Dursleys without consulting Sirius - although it's possible he assumed without asking that Sirius had been the Secret Keeper and so might be a traitor. He was willing to believe without investigation that Sirius was not just a traitor but a mass murderer, and to abandon him to Azkaban without a trial.

Once he knows Sirius is probably innocent, he helps to save him, but later when Sirius is living at Grimmauld Place, Dumbledore cuts him out of decisions again and treats him like an annoying extra feature he has to put up with to get the house. Knowing that Sirius and Snape don't get on, and that Sirius is kicking his heels without a job to do, he nevertheless excludes Sirius from discussions and just springs it on him that his enemy Snape will be having a meeting with his godson in his house. And when Sirius dies, Dumbledore praises him in a rather tepid way, but can't resist criticizing his behaviour to Kreacher and effectively blaming Sirius for his own death.

As for the common fanon idea that Dumbledore treats Snape's life as worthless when he is a spy, and knowingly and perhaps even deliberately sends him to his death, we do not know how much Dumbledore valued Snape's life during Vold War One. The extreme emotional cruelty we see him display to Snape at that time could mean that he genuinely saw him as worthless, but it could also be that, like Snape himself, he is verbally vicious to someone of whom he is nevertheless fiercely protective. Or he could be extra angry because Snape had been his friend Horace's star student, a boy with so much potential of whom so much had been hoped for, a Slytherin in love with a Muggle-born, and he'd gone to the bad like Horace's other star student Tom Riddle. We just don't know.

In Vold War Two, however, and irrespective of how much emotional affection and care Dumbledore may or may not have for Snape, his plans require Snape to place himself in great danger but they absolutely require him to survive, at least until a couple of hours before the final battle, because he needs Snape to explain the final stage of the plan to Harry and Harry isn't going to believe it if it's just a letter. Harry shooting Snape on sight would be a disaster: Snape has to contact Harry just before the final battle, and survive long enough to give him the message. And there's no benefit to Dumbledore in Snape then dying in the last few hours of the war. He did die in the last few hours of the war but that was just bad luck, and nearly a disaster for Dumbledore's plans. Things would have gone more smoothly if Snape had still been alive and fighting for the Order - and why should Dumbledore wish the death of his agent, through whom he is still able to influence events?

In fact, aside from Harry himself Snape is probably the only Order member in Vold War Two who isn't expendable.

The common idea that Dumbledore knowingly left Snape to be accused of his murder, with no means of proving that he was acting under orders, is just about canon-compatible but not supported by canon. To begin with, there seems to be no reason why Dumbledore would have ended up on top of the Astronomy Tower, dying in front of Harry, had Draco not succeeded in bringing Death Eaters into the school and setting off the Dark Mark - and Draco's success appears to be a totally unexpected event. Without that, Dumbledore would presumably have entered the castle through the main doors, dying of the poison which Harry had fed him, and would have gone to Snape's office where Snape would have finished him off (to make sure that the mastery of the Elder Wand didn't go to Voldemort). As far as the Order knew, Snape would simply have been "unable to save him" and the blame, if any, would have landed on Harry.

Even aside from that, it's not necessarily true that no evidence was left to show that Snape had been acting on Dumbledore's orders. They would both have to be very, very careful about what that evidence might be, because if things went pear-shaped and Voldemort won, any evidence that Snape had been on the Order side all along could be the death of him. But there are a couple of avenues which could be explored, but which Voldemort probably wouldn't think of because he wasn't actually looking for evidence that the apparently loyal Snape had betrayed him.

We don't know if portraits are allowed to testify, but if they are, Dumbledore's portrait can exonerate Snape. In addition, Hagrid heard part of the argument where Snape was trying to get out of killing Dumbledore, and it would probably be possible to retrieve the whole conversation from his memory using a Pensieve. We see in the Snape's Worst Memory scene that the Pensieve seems to include things which the subject probably did not consciously hear, although they might have been able to if they'd been listening hard. Snape doesn't give any sign that he has heard the Marauders discussing the fact that Remus is a werewolf, although Harry hears this conversation in Snape's Pensieve memory, and when they are under the tree Harry hears James and Sirius winding themselves up to attack Snape, while Snape stands on the grass nearby, apparently oblivious because he is concentrating on something else. So although Hagrid only consciously overheard the tail-end of that conversation, he must have been drawing near to Dumbledore and Snape during the earlier part, and the whole conversation is probably accessible in his memory where it could be used to clear Snape - if anybody thinks of it, and assuming that the memory-extraction process works on a half-giant. We know it works on house-elves.

It's true we don't see a Pensieve used in court - but acording to Pottermore they are very rare and fiddly to use, so even if they are admissible one probably wouldn't expect them to be seen in court in cases where the use of one wouldn't add much to the evidence. A Pensieve memory would have been useful when Harry was examined over his casting a Patronus to protect Dudley and himself from Dementors, since there was no witness in court except the plaintiff until Mrs Figg faked it, but in that case the Ministry wasn't that keen on knowing the truth, plus it would have had to take the time to teach Harry how to extract memories to start with - whereas Snape already knows how, and one hopes that in the event of an Order victory they might genuinely want to know what his true allegiances were.

Quote from Naaga on May 17, 2023, 2:59 pm

Snape has long hair.

It's usually assumed that Snape's hair is markedly long whenever he appears, but the evidence for this in the books isn't clearcut. JK Rowling has done at least four drawings of Snape [see: Snape has a narrow face and a Roman nose], all showing him wearing a high-collared "Dracula" cloak which is modelled on a real coat belonging to John Nettleship, Rowling's real-life Chemistry master. In one of these drawings his hair seems to be very long and trailing down his back (although if it is it seems to be emerging through the back of his collar - this is the least well-thought-out of the drawings). In one it is crammed inside his collar in a way which suggests that if it were hanging straight it would be just past his shoulders. In two it is bobbed at a point midway between his jawline and his shoulders. Rowling has admitted that Snape is mainly based on John Nettleship, whose hair when she knew him was worn in smooth wings and ranged from about half an inch above the jaw to about an inch above the shoulder.

As a young child, before Hogwarts, Snape's hair is said to be overlong and poorly cut. As a teenager his hair is said to be "jumping" as he walks, which suggests it's longish but above the shoulder, otherwise weight and friction would hold it still. When he defects to Dumbledore in 1980 his hair is "straggling".

In the first book, when Harry first meets Snape, his hair is never described in any way which suggests that it is long, which moderately suggests that it isn't. By the start of Harry's second year he has shoulder-length hair, so if it wasn't already long when Harry first met him, he must have been growing it since partway through the first book (unless he grew it magically). His hair is also described as long early in third year. It seems unlikely he would chop it short just to grow it again almost immediately, so it's reasonable to assume that it remained long throughout second year and into the start of third year.

In books four and five, however, his hair is merely described as forming curtains, which frame and sometimes cover his face. His hair must be at least around chin-length and very mobile but we don't know if it's any longer, and as with the "jumping" hair, it's probably no longer than just above the shoulder, otherwise it wouldn't swing freely across his face.

He has long curtains of hair in the Spinner's End scene at the start of HBP - so his hair must be just above the shoulder - and long hair when Harry sees him at the start of the autumn term. His hair length isn't mentioned again until just before the final battle, when it again forms curtains of unspecified length.

So, it's perfectly canon-compatible to assume that Snape's hair is just above the shoulder throughout his adult life, but the idea that it must be so is to some extent fanon. It's equally canon-compatible to say that his hair was a bit below the jaw when he was young, but at some point after his defection he cut his hair short and it was still short when Harry met him. He stopped cutting his hair partway through Harry's first year and grew it out to shoulder-length, where it remained for a year, or possibly grew a bit longer. Some time after the start of PoA he trimmed it back to a little below the jaw and it stayed there until partway through OotP when he let it grow down to just above the shoulder again, where it was during the summer of 1996, and then further down right onto his shoulders where it was in early autumn. Some time between early autumn 1996 and spring 1998 he cut it back up to just below the jaw.

No explanation is given as to why Snape's hair always seems greasy - personally I've tended to assume that it was a magical manifestation of his own low self-esteem, just as Harry's resolutely untidy hair is a manifestation of his defiance. Other possibilities are that he avoids any kind of soap which might get into his mouth, because it reminds him of when James forced soap into his mouth on the day he lost Lily (so we are to understand that the bullying has scarred his entire life), or that he simply never got into the habit of washing his hair every day because he grew up in a house that had no bathroom and just a cold tap.

There are some common ideas in Snape fandom which turn up often enough to qualify as semi-fanon, and which attempt to explain away the greasy hair as not greasy, or at least not due to poor hygeine. In some ways this is irritating, because part of the point about Snape in the books is that an awkward, ugly child, a scruffy, ill-favoured man can nevertheless be a great romantic hero. However, all these ideas do have some actual support.

Rowling has admitted that Snape is inspired by her own Chemistry master and Head of Science, John Nettleship, and John fitted Snape's description closely, except that his long nose ended in an amusing blob rather than a hook, and his eyes were grey. Other than that, he was thin and intense with long straight black hair which fell in wings either side of his face, a fierce manner, fishbelly-white skin and snaggly teeth. Although it's not mentioned in the books, Rowling even draws Snape as wearing a cloak with a distinctive high "Dracula" collar which is actually the collar of a coat which John wore when she knew him, and which probably prompted the comparison between Snape and a giant bat. But John was actually strikingly handsome, in a hungry, Gothy sort of way, especially at the age that Rowling knew him, and fastidiously clean. His bad-tempered manner and scruffy appearance at that time were mainly due to a combination of acute insomnia and being so insanely busy at work that he barely had time to pee, let alone to tidy his hair and scrape off his five o'clock shadow.

Also, irritatingly, the fact that Snape's hair is described as "jumping" when he is a teenager and as swinging in curtains across his face as an adult kind-of supports the common fanon idea that his hair isn't greasy at all, but very clean and fine and so shiny that it can be mistaken for oily. The cleaner and finer the hair, the more mobile it is. His hair is presumably intended really to be greasy, since so much emphasis is placed on this in the books, but if it really is as greasy as Harry thinks it is then the fact that it also seems to be very mobile is problematic. Possibly Snape is, like John, fastidiously clean and washes his hair every day, but like Harry's roadkill haircut the greasiness always comes back in a few hours. When Harry looks at him and sees his hair as jumping, or as moving in curtains across his face, it's just been washed, and when he looks at him and sees "greasy" it's later in the day. At the very least he must wash it or spell it clean often enough to explain the many incidents where Harry sees it as freely-moving curtains.

The idea which one occasionally sees in fanart, b.t.w., in which Snape is portrayed with heavy features and a little beard, isn't even derived from the films. It belongs solely to the illustrations included in some American editions, and is completely unsupported in canon.

Quote from Heatherlly on May 17, 2023, 6:48 pm

I've always assumed that Snape's hair is shoulder length, which is exactly how I like it. 💚

As for it being greasy… I don't think that has anything to do with him being unwashed or unhygienic. If he was, he would've smelled bad, which would've been reflected through Harry's POV. Harry obsesses over his supposed flaws, especially the physical ones… we would've heard about the greasy, smelly dungeon bat in every other chapter. 🙄

I think Snape had naturally oily hair and just didn't know how/couldn't be bothered to take care of it properly. That could include not washing it every day, even if he does shower daily, using the wrong shampoo, or even washing it with regular soap. The last one in particular would make anyone's hair greasy… it would also make sense in context with his childhood. If the Snapes used cheap, regular soap for everything because they couldn't afford shampoo, I can see that becoming a habit he carried into adulthood.

Hell, that makes so much sense that I'm making it my new headcanon. Snape assumes his greasy hair is unavoidable, never realizing that the soap he's used on it all his life is the problem. 😂

Quote from Naaga on May 18, 2023, 1:39 am

I headcanon his hair has natural tendency to get greasy no matter how hard he tries to wash it. It explains his hair is jumping in some scenes and called greasy in others, it gradually gets greasy later in day.

I also like the soap theory, Snape after discovering his soap was the culprit, "My life is a lie." 😹😹

Quote from Naaga on May 18, 2023, 1:41 am

Snape is a highly-cultured polymath.

The idea that Snape is highly cultured, and in many fanfics is able to play a range of musical instruments, is not impossible - but it would require some explanation, given his poor background.

It's canon that he has at least enough books to line the walls of a smallish room at Spinner's End, although we don't know if they cover a wide range of subjects, or even if they're his or inherited from his parents. For all we know they could be a complete Britannica and his dad's old Zane Greys. We know that he is (or was as a teenager) a brilliantly innovative and intuitive potioneer, is able to invent his own spells, is a passable but probably not brilliant duellist, has a fine dramatic turn of phrase, and is able to devise a complex logic problem (the puzzle concerning the bottles of potions towards the end of the first book) and set the result to quite competant verse - which does suggest that either his Muggle primary school was quite good, or that he reads more than just textbooks, since nothing in wizard education seems designed to encourage the development of any sort of literary style.

Whether he has much more education than that, or can play an instrument etc., depends on unknown factors. I have him in one of my own fanfics able to play guitar because Lily's parents bought her lessons when she was fourteen and then she taught her pal Sev on the side, and many Muggle schools taught students to play the recorder, but it seems unlikely Snape's own parents would have paid for any extra lessons for him, or that he could have learned how to play anything expensive unless it was provided at school. We don't know how good his Muggle primary school was, or whether there might be extracurricular music or literature clubs at Hogwarts. [It's been suggested that since his mother's name was Eileen he might be part Irish and have gone to a Catholic primary school, which would explain why he evidently wasn't at the same school as Lily.] We don't know whether he was proud of his working-class roots or whether he tried to disguise them by polishing his accent and manners - or whether Slughorn or Lucius helped and encouraged him to do so.

It certainly isn't necessary to be posh in order to be a Death Eater, since we have the horrible examples of Amycus, Alecto and Greyback. It could be argued that the fact that prior to HBP so many fen assumed that Snape was an aristocrat is evidence that he has tried to raise his apparent class and has done a good job, meaning that he might well have studied deportment, learned to play the cello etc. etc.. I suspect, however, that this belief in Snape's high social status is mainly the result of his being played by Alan Rickman, with his smoothly educated and up-market voice.

The fact that Snape spits on the ground after refereeing a Quidditch match in the first book could be evidence that he still has very rough, urban-underclass manners. On the other hand there's some evidence he's a bad flyer - in his memories Harry hears a girl laughing as young Snape struggles with a broom, and the fact that he learns to fly without a broom may mean he feels he needs to - and during the match George Weasley aimed a Bludger at him while he was in mid air, and Harry nearly accidentally knocked him off his broom while diving after the Snitch. It may well be that Snape is spitting because he has nearly been sick from fright and shock, and has a mouthful of stomach acid.

It is a curious fact that the fanon version of Snape often ends up as John Nettleship (handsome, romantic, fastidiously clean, his greasy hair due to insomnia and potion fumes etc.). John actually was something of a polymath - an award-winning folk-singer and an accomplished jazz musician who could both play and teach a wide variety of instruments, as well as being a prominent local politician, a scientist and historian (he had had research papers published in both fields, and ran the local history group), an astronomer, an excellent photographer, a highly amusing humorous writer, a not half bad cartoonist, a lifelong campaigner for the rights of the downtrodden and the closest thing Caerwent had to a resident Druid priest. But all in a raffish, bouncy and often mildly risqué way, and he was still quite working class - he really didn't do the sort of suave sophistication often attributed to Snape.

Quote from Naaga on May 20, 2023, 1:37 pm

Snape deliberately broke Harry's vial of potion after the Pensieve incident.

We do not know whether or not James and Sirius really did strip young Severus and display his genitals at the end of the "Snape's Worst Memory" bullying scene, or only threatened to, but assuming that they did, Snape almost certainly believes that Harry has witnessed this and is laughing at him because of it. From his point of view Harry has been complicit in a minor sexual assault against him, and he behaves in an odd and traumatized way, initially blanking Harry out. This is consistent with a known psychological phenomenon whereby people who have suffered a sexual assault in the past and have coped with the aftermath, but then suffer a second assault, are often catapulted right back to their starting point and lose all the progress which they had made in recovering from the first assault. It is quite on the cards that Snape would, at least for a week or two, regress to thinking and acting as if he was a humiliated sixteen-year-old again.

Then Harry takes a completed potion up to Snape's desk, and turns to walk away. Behind him, his vial falls to the floor and breaks, and Snape gloats over his misfortune.

It's usually assumed that it's canon that Snape himself deliberately knocked Harry's vial off the desk, and that's certainly possible - but in fact it's only implied, not stated. It could have been knocked over accidentally, either by Snape, by the swirl of Harry's robes, or by another student... as wynnleaf has pointed out, we aren't even told that Harry himself thinks that Snape knocked the vial over deliberately.

Even if he did, it's just nuisance-value. All the evidence suggests that Hogwarts uses the exam system which was normal in British schools when Rowling and I were girls. The only results which have any effect on your future are the state exams at the end of fifth and seventh year: marks given for course-work and for other years' exams exist only to tell students whether they are doing as well as they will need to do to pass their state exams.

Note also that Harry seems sure that if Snape actually marks his well-made potion, he will mark it highly, whatever else is going on between them. Harry does not expect that Snape will ever allow personal bias to affect his assessment of a student's performance (at least in regard to something as objective as a finished potion), even when he is in great emotional turmoil.

[Snape does seem very unfair in sixth year when he asks the class how to tell the difference between a ghost and an Inferius, and then criticises Harry for saying that a ghost is transparent and an Inferius isn't - but it seems from his reaction that he mistakenly believes himself to have said "What is the difference...?" rather than "How can you tell the difference...?"]

Quote from Naaga on June 1, 2023, 2:28 am

Snape applies for the DADA post every year.

This one is almost canon. Percy says in the first book that it's common knowledge that Snape wants Quirrell's job; Umbridge says (and Snape agrees) that Snape originally applied for the DADA post and that he has applied for it "regularly" ever since (which may or may not amount to every year); and Snape tells Bellatrix that Dumbledore won't give him the DADA job in case he relapses back into his "old ways". When Snape is finally given the DADA job in HBP, Harry thinks he can detect a look of triumph on Snape's face (although it sounds like it's pretty well hidden, if it exists at all and isn't just Harry's imagination).

The big question is, why does he apply for it? It isn't very credible that Snape should have watched a succession of DADA teachers leaving after only a year, for fifteen years, and that he should be knowledgeable enough about the Dark Arts to be able to teach defence against them, and yet not at least suspect that the post is cursed, even if Dumbledore hasn't told him it is. Is he so arrogant that he is sure he will be able to overcome the curse?

If Snape knows that the post is cursed, and specifically that it's cursed by Voldemort, that raises a whole new set of problems. He and Dumbledore must surely at least suspect that the curse won't attack a loyal Voldemort supporter, or at least suspect that Voldemort will expect them to suspect it. It's true that both Quirrell and Crouch Jnr. ended up dead, but Quirrell's was a special case and in any case he probably didn't bear the Dark Mark, and Crouch had Polyjuiced himself into the form of somebody who wasn't Marked.

The mere fact that Voldemeort originally sent Snape to apply for the DADA post suggests that the curse would not affect somebody who was Marked: otherwise, why go to all the trouble of inserting a spy into the staffroom at Hogwarts and then tell them to apply for a post which would ensure they would only be there for a year? Or if the deaths of Quirrell and Crouch were just due to the risks they were running, and not to the DADA curse, it could be that the curse doesn't affect those who are truly loyal to Voldemort and that Voldemort told Snape to apply for the DADA post because he was already a bit suspicious of him, and thought that if Snape was not loyal the curse would reveal it.

If Voldie thinks that Snape would think that the curse won't attack a loyal, Marked Death Eater, and he knows that Snape originally applied for the DADA post and has the reputation of still wanting it, then for Snape not to apply for the DADA post periodically would be tantamount to admitting to Voldie that he isn't a loyal Death Eater, and therefore expects the curse to apply to himself - assuming, that is, that Voldie would expect Snape to know or suspect that the post had been cursed by Voldie.

Similarly, if Dumbledore gives Snape the DADA post and then he loses it at the end of the year in a way which suggests that the curse has been activated, that would prove to Voldie that he isn't a loyal Death Eater - or at least they would have to fear that it would, since they don't know the exact terms of the curse. So Dumbledore and Snape are locked in an endless cycle where Snape has to apply for the DADA post and Dumbledore has to refuse him, until they get to the point where they know Snape will have an unimpeachable reason for leaving just before the end of term and hence before the curse gets him, without rousing Tom's suspicions.

Of course, it would probably have been possible for Dumbledore to give Snape the DADA post for one year only and then remove him from the post before the curse could hurt him, as effectively happened with Remus. But then he would have had to take on an alternative Potions master/mistress for just one year, if Snape was to have his old job back. He wouldn't want to have to make the existence of the curse more obvious to other applicants by having Snape leave the job without explanation or by telling the new Potions professor in advance that he was hiring them only for a year, nor would he want to make it look like Snape couldn't handle the post and had been demoted. So for these reasons also Snape could only have the job at a point when they both knew he'd be leaving at the end of the year anyway, and in a way which wouldn't attract suspicion to the job itself.

Quote from Naaga on June 24, 2023, 12:25 am

Snape is an aristocratic pure-blood

This one has been so well and truly canon-shafted that it has ceased to be fanon, but there are still a lot of older fanfics out there which talk about Lord Snape and Snape Manor etc., and the idea is still not quite dead. There's an otherwise good WIP called Proximity, started as recently as 2014, which still describes the Snape house at Spinner's End as large and old with huge doors and a massive cellar, and ditto a good Snarry called Promises to Keep, written in 2008 (when the events in The Prince's Tale must have been fresh in the writer's mind),

2up2downs in Lancashire
which has Snape's house at Spinner's End surrounded by woods, even though it's clear from the canon description that it's intended to be a terraced (U.S. "row house") Victorian mill-worker's "two-up-two-down". That is, it would have a smallish kitchen and living room downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs with a tiny landing about 30" wide by 3ft long and originally no bathroom, just an outdoor lavatory in a shed in the (probably paved and about 16ft-square) back yard, although it might have had a loft conversion and an extension at the back added since. Sans any later extension, the "footprint" of the house would probably be about 16ft wide by 20-25ft deep. It would either front directly onto the street or have a tiny front garden, the width of the house and probably around 4-6ft deep, and separated from the street by a low wall or metal railing.

[The Snapes might however have had an allotment - a sizeable garden plot, usually used to grow vegetables and situated not next to the house but a small distance away and forming part of a field of similar plots, all let to neighbouring families for a token annual rent. If you want Snape growing herbs, or young Sev and Lily playing in and out of flowers and beanstalks and garden sheds, a neighbourhood field of allotments is the way to go. Note however that if a family doesn't already have an allotment, the waiting-list to sign up for one can be years-long.]

Sometimes the problem seems to be that the author just has no idea how small a small working-man's house in the UK would be. The otherwise generally good fanfic Snape's Boon by amr seems to be trying to portray Snape's house as small and scruffy but gives it four floors, multiple rooms and passages on each floor and at least two bathrooms, all of which would be more at home here in a successful stockbroker's house, or a very large farmhouse.

Even though we now know that Snape's father was a Muggle and that he grew up in a dirt-poor industrial suburb, it is still possible that his mother's family, the Princes, were pure-bloods, and if you need to write Snape in a grand setting you can write him staying with his grandparents, or inheriting a house from them. However, there is a certain amount of evidence that his mother wasn't a pure-blood either.

When Bellatrix and Narcissa Apparate to the riverbank near Spinner's End, Bellatrix speculates that they are the first of "our kind" ever to visit the area. She probably doesn't mean the first witches or wizards, because she knows Snape and Pettigrew are already there ahead of her - although it's just about possible that the "we" she's speaking of includes the two wizards who are some hundreds of yards away. She may mean "posh people like us", but there's a good chance she means pure-bloods. If she knows that this is Snape's childhood home - which we don't know - then the implication is that Snape's mother Eileen wasn't "our kind" and wasn't a pure-blood, or if she was she wasn't from a posh family.

Young Snape's calling himself The Half-Blood Prince carries a suggestion that the Princes are hot on being pure-blooded and he is sticking two fingers up at them, which would suggest they are an old, posh family. If so, and if Bellatrix knows this and knows that Spinner's End is where Eileen lived, then when Bellatrix says that she and Cissy are the first of "our kind" to visit the area, she doesn't mean members of the old, grand families - so she may mean they are the first pure-bloods. So if the Princes are posh, Eileen is probably a half-blood, the daughter of a Prince wizard and either a Muggle woman or a Muggle-born witch.

Another possibility which has been pointed out to me is that Bellatrix could mean "pure-bloods who are not blood-traitors", in which case Eileen could be a pure-blood whom Bellatrix has blanked because she married a Muggle. However, the Princes do not appear on Pottermore's list of the top twenty-eight pure-blood families, which was compiled in the 1930s, round about the time Eileen must have been born. It may be that they were excluded from the list because Eileen was born, and wasn't pure-blood.

It should have been obvious from the first that Snape wasn't an aristocrat, because he tries far too hard. Real aristocrats do as they please, because they are sure that whatever they feel like doing must be the right thing to do because it's them that's doing it. The name was also possibly a clue. There has been speculation on the Lexicon and elsewhere that Rowling called Snape Snape because it resonates with the words snap, snappish and with snipe in the sense of taking verbal pot-shots at people, but there is also the expression "guttersnipe", which means a child from a very poor and low-class family.

Quote from Naaga on June 25, 2023, 2:39 am

After last post, I'm done with Fanon vs Canon: Snape Edition from madasafish site. If anyone finds some Fanon vs Canon facts related to Snape, feel free to share them in this thread.