#beautiful fan art: anastasiamantihora

[perverse-idyll]

Snarry fic rec: Reconciling Lily’s Eyes by persepolis130

So, if my previous rec Rapture was too romantic for you, here’s something to wash the taste of romance out of your mouth. It still exists in what I’d call the muddy middle ground of Snape interpretation, but the mud is considerably greyer. For the record, middle-ground Snape is still Dark, sarcastic, suspicious, and above all Not Nice to Harry, but at the same time he's fascinating, amusing, skilled, and a source of reluctant erotic attraction. It's hard to rank the stories in the middle spectrum with exactitude, because Snape's most irresistible when he's being a fuckwad and a tragic hero, a stubborn bastard and a damaged soul, so judging degrees of obnoxiousness can get a little subjective. But this particular blend describes most of my favorite Snarry fics.

Example: Reconciling Lily’s Eyes by persepolis130

I will say upfront, Persepolis' fic has perhaps the most physically unattractive Snape I've ever encountered, and that includes canon. She's merciless about his appearance and his lack of evident sex appeal. He's the perfect antidote to all the Slytherin Sex God fics in fandom. What's more, he's a total basket case on every possible level. Harry, for his part, is a whack job obsessed with treating Snape as his own personal redemption project. They absolutely and repeatedly do not understand each other. Harry's a screwed-up and screamingly self-centered teenager who needs an instruction manual to find his way around an emotional clue, Snape is… well, about the most unsocialized, self-pitying and self-punishing excuse for a survivor ever set loose in a ship fic. Also decidedly pervy. Together, they're a train wreck of humongous proportions.

Yet this is, by God, one of the funniest, most sarcastic, most distinctive Snarry fics I've read in all my fandom years. As well as one of the most surprisingly tender. Persepolis has a gift for dry, deadpan, absurdist humor, for creating scenes of lunacy and emotional chaos. Through it all, Snape and Harry push each other from comedy to melodrama and back, with occasional jaw-dropping forays into extremely unglamorous but disturbingly hot sex. The only other fic I can think of offhand that treats sex with the same sort of impatient, unpretty directness, while at the same time persuading the reader of how perversely hot it is, is A Bittersweet Potion series. I mean to say, the encounters between Snape and Harry, with their mess and unpleasantness and emotional pathology, shouldn't be sexy, yet by some miracle they are. They shouldn't work, yet they do. This is the definition of Snarry in a nutshell. The whole saga's told from Harry's POV, and it may take a scene or two to catch on to the off-kilter voice of the fic. Once you do, it becomes scathingly funny and exasperating and touching all at the same time. The episodes in an American wizarding school swing between the hilarious and the neurotic. Eventually the reader comes around to believing that these two mental cases have earned the right to drive each other crazy, and it would be wrong to inflict them on anybody else. But even Harry's stubbornness has to break in the face of repeated slapdowns, and the relationship, such as it is, smashes on the rock of Snape's self-hatred. Yet even with a wedding to Ginny in the offing, Persepolis pulls off a virtuoso piece of comic writing, squeezing tension and farce together while setting up a reunion scene that made my heart ache. It's difficult to describe this fic accurately because it charges right through all the fanon clichés and stomps them flat. Set aside plenty of time for it, because it's addictive and once you're hooked it will be hard to stop reading. And after you've recovered from the experience, there's a sequel to look forward to, with Snape being his evil, pervy self and traumatizing the Weasleys for life.

As a fellow fic writer, I envy the way Persepolis mixes absurdity, goofiness, high comedy, heartbreak, sexual grunginess, personality disorders, and vows of true love into one totally unique and astonishing fic. I happily admit it’s OOC. But it works for me in the context of Persepolis' re-casting of the characters as flaming neurotics. Harry's endearing, but he's also totally wiggy. Snape’s ambiguity and the violence of his emotional landscape are crucial aspects of his personality for me, but he's so bonkers in this fic that if it had been a purely serious narrative I might have clicked away. The humor gives it a different, madhouse kind of spin that overcomes the dubiousness of the situation.

This isn’t for everyone (I’ve had some readers recoil, unable to persevere past the sex scenes), but for those of us who love it, we love it hard.

As a bonus, here are two pieces of art based on this fic:

Reconciling Lily’s Eyes by paranoiac-lo

Run Away with Me by AnastasiaMantihora