#and in his personal life where his BEST FRIEND had horrendous results after death aka getting posessed by fucking kenjaku

[comfreyhollywings]

every time i look up the tag of gojo satoru - i want to scream at the mischaracterization the poor man's going through 💀

[procrastinatingfeminist]

Re-imagine Snape

Someone recently went through pretty much every Snape-positive meta, sometimes with my own additions, that I reblogged (thank you, sweet person!), and for one, wow! I hadn't realised I had so much of it floating on my blog. For another, rereading one of the posts brought something to the forefront that I was too emotional at the time to formulate.

I sometimes struggle to with understanding criticism of media, when the critical voices come from people with a very different lived experience from my own. I am a cis white female who lives in a country with socialised healthcare, I am fully aware that I am insulated by privilege and accept that there are certain things, that I will never fully understand. Doesn't mean I shouldn't at least try. There is an exercise that I found useful, even though it falls back on the use of... very narrow stereotypes.

When 50 Shades of Grey suddenly went mainstream, I found the best way to explain why I disliked the franchise, despite it's fanfic origins, was to substitute the names of the protagonists with arabic sounding ones. Anastacia and whatshisname Mr. Grey became Aisha and Yusuf. And suddenly the fact that the male protagonist demands authority over what the female one wears, eats, where she lives, what she buys, who she socialises with and what she talks about, all outside of their sex play, stops sounding edgy and kinky, and starts looking a whole lot like abuse. Because we are conditioned to recognise abuse only when applied to certain groups, when viewed through certain lens, and it was easier to identify what my exact problem with 50 Shades was, only when I fully leaned into the stereotypes, eliminating my blind spot.

Now, reimagine Severus Snape as a black boy/man. He grew up poor and disadvantaged, in a town/part of town where most people had similar struggles. His home was abusive and neglectful, and he is socially awkward, whether as a result of the neglect or because it is something inherent to him, it doesn't matter. Despite having gained access to an elite school and showing talent, it is clear that his upbringing makes him an outcast. He is discriminated against and is further sidelined, subtly and overtly, by other students, by teachers and by the Headmaster. He is sorted into a House where the majority of racists are sorted into. He is denied access to networking opportunities by Professor Slughorn, despite his show of aptitude. He is constantly and viciously bullied by boys from very rich, very privileged families (I know, that only Sirius and James are from Ancient and Noble Families, but they are also the main driving forces behind the abuse at school; Peter and Remus were at best characterised as hangers-on), and his teachers ignore it; to the point that when his life is endangered the Headmaster outright refuses to even publicly aknowledge any wrongdoing by the responsible parties. He has no recourse against bullying, because he is much more in danger of being expelled himself if he retaliates in kind than to receive justice if he follows the acceptable course of action; and we don't really know how much bullying or peer pressure of participation he was under from his own housemates.

He will have very quickly realised, that even if he manages to finish the school he will have a very hard time to be compensated fairly for his work, despite his talents; because people will look down on him either because of his class background, or his race or his lack of social graces. And his only friend, a white girl, despite sharing the disadvantage of class and race (in the sense that she is also not a pureblood, since blood purism was used as a metaphor for racial inequality), she had a very different experience than him. One - she didn't grow up in an abusive household, two - because her family wasn't quite as poor as his, since, you know, her dad didn't drink away all their income; and three - she was planted into a much more socially flexible environment to make connections, aka the Gryffindor house.

Hell, even the way that some parts of HP fandom insist on hypersexualising the relationship of two prepubescent children is consistent with the portrayal of black boys in media. Because a thirty year old white man is a considered a child, but an 11 year old black boy is seen as a man. And if he is a man, the only thing he could want from this innocent white girl must be sexual in nature. Thus all the accusations of a 9-yr-old Severus stalking Lily somehow making sense.

And while I am not going as far as to equate the Death Eaters to Black Panthers, I do remember that the latter were often vilified as violent thugs and armed gang members, when what they actually wanted was to create a unified, defensible front, to be able to provide a safe, nurturing environment for their weakest members. Circling the wagons, if you want. If the Death Eaters weren't comprised of bigoted purebloods with more ambition and money than ability, but of muggleborns and muggle-raised halfbloods who would seek to increase their bargaining power in the Wizengamot and with potential employers, how quickly would they be labeled terrorists, intent on destroying the traditional pureblood ways? They wouldn't even have to kill a single pureblood.

What if they vowed to never accept less payment for services than what is fair, to never accept abysmal working conditions (except maybe to gain the mastery and then adios, motherfucker) and contracts with immoral stipulations; to invest in each others entrepreneural ideas instead of finding investors from pure blood families; at best accepting loans from Gringotts, because if anyone understands unfair treatment, it is goblins? What if they wielded their combined buying power among their own businesses and charging purebloods horrendously; what if they only apprenticed the children of their own circle, especially if the halfblood master of the field was the exceptionally gifted one and thus much more sought after among purebloods? Their social and financial power would be significant enough for a potential Minister of Magic to invest into courting their voting bloc, and for the Guilds to consider representing their interests. They wouldn't have any power on the Wizengamot, not at the beginning, but not every pureblood family was aligned with blood purists, though it is a big question, whether they wouldn't ally themselves with their former enemies once they perceive the ‘unpure’ as a threat. But if they would at least gain one pureblood family as a dissenting voice in the Wizengamot, as an avatar to promote more egalitarian laws... and then reinforce their message by applying the financial pressure... it is not unreasonable that at least some changes will be made. If this sort of power is what Severus imagined to gain from joining the Death Eaters... I can't actually fault him for that.

But I went off on a tangent. The point is, that Snape is one of the few characters who genuinely regretted his actions, but was still perceived as a criminal and a convicted felon, who only escaped imprisonment because an old white privileged man still had something to gain from pressuring him into a life of service and danger. The way his character arc is handled is also reminiscent of the discussions of the school-to-prison pipeline and incarceration rates in the US. And when he died, he died an ignominous death that no one but Harry Potter even valued. No one else would ever see him as a hero. No one else named their child after him, not even Draco, in whose protection Snape was so invested. He stayed a footnote in history, his contributions to the war effort forgotten or attributed to the man that manipulated him; the man who was lauded a hero and managed to finagle a  state funeral while Snape bled out on a dirty floor in an abandoned shack and no one knows where his body is, still vilified as a Dumbledore’s murderer and Voldemort’s bootlicker.

What I am saying, is seeing Severus Snape as conceptually a black man changes a lot in how i perceive his character, despite not changing even one word of canon.