sovay | All the good in the world you can put inside a thimble and still have room for you and me

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All the good in the world you can put inside a thimble and still have room for you and me

In which you learn far more about my reasons for reading Harry Potter than I imagine you ever wanted to know, and it is proven once again that fucked in the head (excuse my Hittite) may be the highest compliment that I can give a character.

From this description, therefore, one should be able to guess my primary reason. It is indeed comprised of two words. Those are: Severus Snape.*

Feel free to start running now.

(Cut for extended rambling. And also a certain amount of self-analysis. But mostly rambling.)

There, it's said. You may leave your respect for me at the door. I am well aware that there are entire fandoms out there devoted to Severus Snape and his manifest charms. I ran across a fansite once wholly devoted to Byronic portraits of Snape, looking darkly antiheroic.** What's written here, you'll have seen before; I doubt I have anything new to offer. But I haven't been able to sleep all night, and I wrote this so as to have it all down on paper, and figured: what the hell. So, without very much ado, let's talk about Snape.

I like complicated characters. (I should hope most people do.) See yesterday's interchange with

fleurdelis28: it's not solely the quality of fucked-in-the-head that interests me, because you can name any number of incurably disturbed characters at whom I don't even look twice, but there's also a certain level of moral haziness and characteristic weirdness that tends to catch my attention. This is not to say that I can't imprint on innocents, if they are suitably odd: sweet and awkward Vir Cotto, whose family despises him in the time-honored I, Claudius fashion and who proves unexpectedly intelligent and tenacious, is my second favorite character on all Babylon 5. But Londo Mollari, who could furnish an underworld river from the blood on his hands, is my first. Keeping in mind that I have not yet read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I do understand that Snape does not—so far as I know—have quite Londo's level of moral tarnish. What he does have, however, is complication in spades; and frankly, in J.K. Rowling's universe, that's oddity enough for me to sit up and take notice. ***

At first glance, Severus Snape is a total stock character. As if the sibilance and sneer of his name weren't enough to signal his role, his physical appearance is all stereotypical villainy,**** and most of his actions do nothing to disabuse the reader of this impression. Beneath his billowing black robes and lank black hair, there does not beat a hidden heart of gold. (At least, there damn well better not. If J.K. Rowling decides to take the easy way out and beatify him with love or nobility or secret heroism, it is entirely possible that I will lose most of my respect for her series. Read on.) He plays favorites with his students and does not even bother to hide the fact. He carries a schoolboy grudge down to the son of his old enemy, past most rational limits, and again makes no apologies for his behavior. Bitter, malicious, condescending and unsympathetic, always ready with a cutting remark or a penalty for the pettiest of reasons, he's a student's worst nightmare and frankly can't be that much of a delight at department meetings either. And yet, and yet . . . No, sorry, he's still an absolute bastard. And on the side of Light. And an absolute bastard.

I love this.

One does not cancel the other. Despite his hatred of James Potter, Snape saves Harry's life; despite his resentment of his tormenting schoolfellows, makes for Remus Lupin the wolfsbane potion that allows the werewolf-professor to live a reasonably normal, unmoony life; against great risks, carries out some unspecified errand for Dumbledore; and was apparently something of a double agent in his youth. He has, if looked at coldly, performed many of the actions of a hero—none of which makes him any fairer, better-tempered, or generally more fun to be around. He's not a nice person. He may not even, in the strictest sense of the word, be a very good person. (If nothing else, he displays a marvelous contradiction of degrees: on the grand scale, his moral compass seems to point due honorable; on the interpersonal level, it's swinging wildly and might stall out at any second.) But for a character who initially seemed the summation of every unpleasant teacher ever to blacken the pages of an English school novel, he has this dimension of ambiguity that does not obliterate all his disagreeable characteristics; complicates him without anything so cheap as redemption. He has multiple facets. He is several shades of grey. In short, as much as I worry that J.K. Rowling may be tipping him in one dark-and-light direction or another, he is the nearest thing to a full three-dimensional character I've seen in the whole series—of all the names that one could call Severus Snape, and there are many, "flat" is not really one of them.

Obviously I am curious to know what happens to him in the sixth book, other than the spoilers I have already guessed. I am really hoping he won't die, as that would be far too simplistic an exit for so intricate a character,° and I am deeply afraid that J.K. Rowling will not be able to restrain her tendencies toward traditional melodrama where death cancels all debts and wipes out all sins. The way she's started killing off characters lately, anyone's fair game. On the one hand, I respect that: no one should survive a series simply because they're credited before the title. On the other, I personally think that having to keep living with the consequences of serious life-changing action is much trickier, and consequently more interesting; but I have no evidence that the author agrees. To the bookstore with me tomorrow, then, and we'll see how the body count rises.

Well. That's me and Snape. I did weed out a fair amount of extraneous rambling: past four in the morning, it is not always a good idea to preserve for posterity the thoughts that leap first to mind. But most of it's here.

Questions, comments, howls of outrage . . . ?

*For the purposes of analysis, I would like to state now that I will be speaking primarily of Snape-as-written rather than Snape-as-Alan-Rickman. Not that I dislike Alan Rickman, mind you; exactly the opposite holds true. I was lucky enough to catch him on Broadway in Noel Coward's Private Lives in 2002, and that was one of the best straight plays I have seen in my life. Consequently, I love him as Snape. But he invests the character with a physical and emotional attractiveness that I am not sure J.K. Rowling—at least originally—intended the Potions Master to possess, and as a result much of what intrigues me about the written character collapses into itself. (And Rickman's Snape clearly washes his hair far more often than his literary counterpart, but we’ll leave that aside.)

**Moment of incomprehension. I understand the fascination with Severus Snape. If I were inclined to draw portraits of characters I liked, and had any visual talent whatsoever, I might take a shot at him. But—he’s not handsome. He has no fallen angel's glamor. As written, he is a sharp-faced, sallow, scowling man who rarely smiles without malice and badly needs to wash his hair, and he doesn't brood like a Romantic poet: he glowers, insults your father, and docks your house an unjust number of badly-needed points. None of which precludes some romance in Snape’s life—I don't write these books, and God knows he probably needs some—but I was bewildered by this particular fan's insistence on making him conventionally sexy. Hasn't anyone noticed that unconventionally and unexpectedly sexy is so much cooler? We do not love people because they are beautiful; they are beautiful because we love them. Check out Humphrey Bogart sometime. And with all due respect and adoration for Alan Rickman, let me thank God that he is not Byronic.

***Weirdness is nothing to blink at, here. Pretty much everybody in the wizarding world is a walking eccentricity. There goes one of my primary tools of favorite-character diagnosis.

****More than any other aspect of the world J.K. Rowling had created, and that includes the massive classical references, I think it might have been her willingness to play with—and take full advantage of the reader's knowledge of—the stereotypes of British school fiction in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone that made me pick up Chamber of Secrets. The Snape-Quirrell counterpoint truly impressed me. There's Severus Snape, so clearly presented as the professorial antagonist that the reader bristles after only a few seconds of introduction. A moment later, there's poor, pale Quirrell, shellshocked and stuttering like a World War I invalid, the young professor of such great promise whose own students scare him now—who wouldn't feel sorry for him? The astute reader should be able to realize that some kind of massive switch is being set in motion, that the authorial rug is about to be pulled out from under the literary feet, but the evidence keeps contradicting the intuition. Besides, we’ve been playing to all the obvious archetypes: why stop now? Such reversals and revelations of identity are now as integral to the Harry Potter formula as puzzles or Quidditch or after-the-fact explanations by Dumbledore, but this was the first time around: I was impressed. Not surprised, because I was brought up on Diana Wynne Jones—I've practically been trained to last-minute and well-foreshadowed character flip-flops; see A Tale of Time City, Archer’s Goon, Howl’s Moving Castle, et alii—but since I'd been feeling rather disappointed that Snape seemed exactly as negative as he looked, and I had expected more complexity from a book that my parents gave me for my high-school graduation, I was extremely pleased to see that (a) my instincts were right (b) J.K. Rowling was a less conventional writer than I'd feared. So when Chamber of Secrets came out, I promptly bought it. And, in fact, didn't like it all that much. But Prisoner of Azkaban was worth the wait. Ask me about Remus Lupin some other time.

°I am already a little unhappy with his backstory as revealed in Order of the Phoenix. While I understand that J.K. Rowling might have wanted both to flesh out Snape's character (and that whole knot of characters: James, Lily, Sirius, Remus, Peter) and make him a little less flatly unlikable, the result felt unearned: I'd have been far more interested in watching the character, as an unapologetic bastard, gain the reader's sympathy through his actions in the present day, rather than receive it duty-free because of some trauma in his past. Emotional bruising only goes so far to interest me in a character. And somehow, it streamlines the contradictions. I want thorns.

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I'm doing that irritating thing of skipping the main point of your post in order to comment on something you mention to explain that main point. Sorry.

But it made me wonder if you were reading Manda Scott's Boudica series? There's a character in it who I think would meet your specification (and I won't say which one, in case you haven't read it, and can be persuaded to). And she writes much better than J.K. Rowling...

I have not read Manda Scott's Boudica series. (I tend to be something of a strikeout with historical fiction, unless it's Mary Renault, Steven Saylor, or Mary Gentle in certain lights; and Celtic historical fiction tends to set off warning bells, unless it's Rosemary Sutcliff; but I am willing to try most things once. What do you like about it?) I assume this grew out my general parameters for favorite characters?

And she writes much better than J.K. Rowling...

Yes, but most people do . . .

And she writes much better than J.K. Rowling...
Yes, but most people do . . .

Ha! Now, I was being too polite to add that...

Yes, the thing that brought Boudica to mind was indeed your stated preference for characters who are morally ambiguous and "fucked in the head". Which is just the best description I can imagine for the way one of the characters develops - but

greythistle reminds me that this occurs through the second and third volumes, so unless you are enjoying the books anyway, gratification may be deferred beyond what is acceptable.

What I like best about the books? I think it's that they are fantasy that feels like historical fiction : she has clearly gone to some trouble to write consistently with the historical facts, in as far as they are known, but within that space she has constructed a society which is almost entirely imagined. I also enjoy the sort of mad intensity with which she writes, so that everything is just that bit heightened.

Hm. For really good character work, I'll put up with a lot. (Besides, I read quickly. I doubt it would be that much sacrifice of my time.) When next I visit the library, otherwise known as tomorrow, I may look for the first book. If it doesn't work out, so be it. But if I do like the character, I will certainly let you know!

Curiosity--does said character appear in the first book or subsequently? (I did my best to read Dreaming the Eagle (http://www.livejournal.com/users/greythistle/92101.html), but it had to return to the library.)

Good point: see above.

And now I shall go and see what you had to say on the subject...

(here via friendsfriends; I have just finished HBP and will attempt not to spoil it here)

Brava! You have caught the essence of Snape, and his contradictions, lucidly. Perfectly, even.

Personally, I dislike Snape for many of the same reasons as you apparently like him. DESPITE all the good things he does, he's still petty, nasty, mean, and spiteful. For no good reason. (Well, certainly none I can speculate on here.)

One thing, though:

[Rickman] invests the character with a physical and emotional attractiveness that I am not sure J.K. Rowling—at least originally—intended the Potions Master to possess, and as a result much of what intrigues me about the written character collapses into itself.

My understanding is that JKR consults on the movies, and particularly, has given the actors some specific directions about their characters. As a result, while the movies aren't canon, I'm disinclined to dismiss hints derived from them as irrelevant. Personally, I think he's not nasty enough onscreen, nor quite as threatening as my inner image -- but enough that I can forgive his not being, say, Christopher Lee in his prime.

I'm adding this post to my memories, if I may, so that I can refer other folks here rather than reiterate what you have said so well.

My understanding is that JKR consults on the movies, and particularly, has given the actors some specific directions about their characters.

See, I hadn't realized that—this is what happens when you have an author who's around for the filmmaking. Neat! Now I'm curious if character work from the movies ever goes the other way, into the text . . .

I'm adding this post to my memories, if I may

I'm honored. Glad it made sense to someone other than the four-in-the-morning inside of my brain.

Well, the movies indicated Ron+Herminone well before the books did. Don't know if that counts, as by the time it showed up on screen it was already showing up in the books.

I'd always assumed Snape would survive to book 7 because he's the obvious person to make the last Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher -- the job that whacks everyone who takes it.

---L.

Be still my heart. Vir, Londo, and Snape...all in one essay. Having read HBB I am only further confused by Snape's duality, but not disappointed. There continues to be unrepentant evil, unflinching good, and everything in-between in Rowling's characters. Snape does his contradictory dance between petty tyrant and noble, self sacrificing good guy.

Oh, don't even get me started on Londo and Vir . . . (How do you feel about the Regent of Centauri Prime?)

Bad ass crazy, wasn't he? ::g:: I don't often find people who share my infatuation with Babylon 5 bad guys, should that be morally conflicted persons?

Well, the Emperor Cartagia is full bore loony and vicious with it—"Humor is such a subjective thing, don't you think?"—and consequently a great deal of fun to watch. The Regent's only got a disastrous sense of humor and a sadly thwarted wish to redecorate the palace, and I am surprisingly fond of him. All right, I might simply have transferred my high-school obsession with I, Claudius to fourth-season Centauri Prime. But if you're going to put an obsession somewhere, Babylon 5 is a good place!

. . . May I ask about Bester?

Bestor, the psi-corps....there's another bad guy with a heart of unremitting evil, yet strangely soft about some things. I enjoyed Bestor a great deal because I am a long time Star Trek fan and the contrast of this character with Chekov was fun. His hatred for mundanes was a beautiful thing, and another parallel of sorts, to HP.

Bester is probably Walter Koenig's best role: I loved the scene where viewers' suspicions about the name were confirmed. (My father and I had been almost one hundred percent certain, but there was still massive re-reading of The Demolished Man to celebrate.) And yes, I hadn't considered it as a Harry Potter parallel before, but his devotion to his lover Carolyn—true and unarguable as it is—does not at all get in the way of his absolute assurance that mundanes are the way of the past, nor does it soften his blank-check morality. He shouldn't be trusted farther than he can be thrown. He has no qualms about using other people until they break. He loves the woman who will bear his child. He sees no contradiction in any of these behaviors . . . I did like that.

And for those that haven't read it, I highly recommend the Bester books by J. Gregory Keyes.

I didn't read those, even though I really like J. Gregory Keyes' Waterborn and Age of Unreason; I was worried that a trilogy about the character would make Bester too easily explicable. They worked?

Add another voice to what'll whisper in my mind when I finally crack HBP. Thank you. You've articulated in large part why I find Snape interesting as a character.... Lots of JKR's readers may have been or may be Hermionelike, but the fact of self-ID is what fleshes her out. Observation of facets beats their imposition, for me.

I haven't tried to read widely on lj for character reactions; a couple of posts I've seen have discussed HBP!Snape with insight. Would it be impolite to link to them in a comment? (Perhaps best to wait till you've read the book.)

Feel free to link. I already know two major spoilers from Half-Blood Prince due to incautious browsing of livejournals yesterday, but I had guessed both of them already (and one of them nearly as soon as the book's title was announced) and was not very surprised: although now very intrigued to see how it's done. If I'm feeling really spoiler-shy, I can always ignore the comments, anyway.

Lots of JKR's readers may have been or may be Hermionelike, but the fact of self-ID is what fleshes her out.

Hm. Because Hermione is not a character who interests me so much, I had never considered that. I've had two or three friends now compare me to her—mostly in that they think I need a Time-Turner—but I don't identify with her at all. Do you think many readers do?

Okay, then: the longish paragraph in the middle of

pegkerr's post (http://www.livejournal.com/users/pegkerr/479740.html) and

junediamanti's longish essay (http://www.livejournal.com/users/junediamanti/137229.html).

Re: Hermione--prior to OotP, she was the female char of the kids' generation most mangled in fanfic. Not everyone writes Sue, deliberately or inadvertently, but I find the sheer range of (re)characterizations telling. There's just enough on the page for some readers to seize upon bits: people told off for knowing everything(tm), perfectionists, those who workworkwork, who organized or wanted to organize recuperative crusades, who had unruly hair, who always receive(d) good marks.... And one proceeds thence, it seems, while ignoring all the other traits. (Then there's the posts saying so on lj and on one Y! Group where I lurk; that's even more anecdotal because I can't claim to achieve an even sampling of data, nor would I want to have it.)

Just read both of those posts. I think they may have eaten my brain. But useful to keep in mind—especially since I have no familiarity with Harry Potter fandom whatsoever, and hadn't realized quite how many people had pinned their hearts on a sexily Byronic Snape.

By the way, can you explain the term "shipping"? I assume it refers to the pairing-up of characters, but what's the origin?

Someone who focuses on a particular relationship/pairing is known as a "shipper," and writing a fic with that relationship is "shipping."

---L.

Where did the usage come from?

Is question asking for "short for (relation)ship" or "fanficdom"?

---L.

The first; I could tell the second from context. I had kept seeing people talk about ships sinking, which was leading me to look for more a maritime origin than the term evidently has. Thanks!

Anyway, I've just finished the book, so spoilers are now irrelevant. : )

I've already finished HBP, and I won't spoil anything for you except to say that what Snape is rather important in this book, and a lot of what he does has thrown a lot of fans of the series into a flurry of arguments for and against him.

Personally, I hate and love what happened, because Snape is made even more shades of grey, but I need to shut up now.

Hey, I'm glad to hear he's still a character one can argue over. And I love your icon.

(On the subject of hamsters, may I point you in the direction of an elemental one? The scenes do not appear to have been posted in any kind of story order, but some of them are marvelous all the same. The hamster-ferret conversations are my favorite.)

Ignoring all the Potterstuff, but:

We do not love people because they are beautiful; they are beautiful because we love them.

Yes.

I am allergic to pretty.

Nine

We do not love people because they are beautiful; they are beautiful because we love them.

It's one of my favorite folktales.

Snape has always been one of my favorite characters because of his complexity - he's not a nice man, he does things that are extraordinarily nasty, and yet he clearly has a strong sense of honor. I wanted to comment on his backstory from OotP. One thing that's particularly striking abou the Pensieve scene with Harry is how *controlled* he is throughout. When contrasted with his rage when he *truly* loses his temper (ie with the Sirius incident), one has to suspect that he set up the carefully selected scene for Harry's viewing pleasure. The question is why - but I'm not certain. The obvious one is to protect his cover from Lord Voldemort - if the Occlumency lessons weren't successful, then perhaps he needed to cut them off before LV could see from Harry what Snape was doing. Whatever the reason - I think JKR used it less as a ploy for us to feel sympathetic to Snape, and more as a plot device.

when he *truly* loses his temper (ie with the Sirius incident)

If we're talking about the scene near the end of Prisoner of Azkaban, I have always felt a little odd about that. I don't have copies of any of the books to hand, but total blind hysterical fury has never seemed particularly in character for Snape; he seems someone who has spent so much of his adult life entirely banked, indrawn. Even given the intensity of his hatred for Sirius, I had a hard time believing he would lose all control like that. (Or perhaps J.K. Rowling was still getting a handle on what a really angry Snape would look like.) Thoughts?

I agree. In general, Snape is tightly controlled, cool, and utterly manipulative.

In what I argue is the setup scene he behaves no differently; I believe the best description is cool rage. He's white, he's shaking, but all he does is throw a jar of cockroaches after Harry as he flees. While he acts angry, I think that's all it is, an act. (Maybe he wants to cut off Harry, but maybe he wants to show how horrible James and Sirius were - not dissimilar from Harry's detention in HBP.)

In PoA, at least in my version, we get CAPS LOCK SNAPE. He bellows, he roars, his face is all twisted up, spit flies from his mouth. I think it shows he's completely lost it. His face is all twisted up - and now that I think about it, this is not unlike the "Flight of the Prince" scene in Book 5, where we get CAPS LOCK SNAPE again with a demented, inhuman face, looking like he's in as much pain as a burning Fang. He hasn't injured Harry until now, only deflected curses, and it's only when he really loses it that he whips a hex across Harry's face.

Which begs the question - why is he so upset? I know this is way off topic of your original posting, but if he's truly an evil Death Eater, would killing Dumbledore do it? I think not - he'd be gloating. And he's in control of his emotions enough that merely being called a coward wouldn't set him off that way, either.

Our wonderful, complicated Potions Master only gets better with age!

And he's in control of his emotions enough that merely being called a coward wouldn't set him off that way, either.

Whereas being called a coward after you've screwed up your courage to kill the only person who ever really believed in your loyalty, for reasons you can't explain in the middle of a crowd of Death Eaters, might sting a little . . .

(As you can see from this, I am holding out for the hope that Rowling hasn't moralistically shunted Snape off to the Death Eaters without a backward look: that would disappoint me extremely. Of course, now we have to wait two years to find out for certain . . .)

Given our dear Ms. Rowling's history of misdirection and red herrings, I would be willing to bet on our hope. =)

Mind you, if Snape turned out to be all secret sweetness and light, I'd be just as annoyed . . . : )

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All the good in the world you can put inside a thimble and still have room for you and me

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