#did snape hate harry unfairly? treat him badly for a bad reason? he sure did. doesnt make the rest of this untrue tho >:0

[kohakhearts]

snape as harry’s guardian

ok so. my take of the day is that snape was harry’s only true guardian/protector/trusted adult. before anyone tries to suggest i’m vilifying the remus, sirius, dumbledore, mcgonagall, molly, etc., please know that’s not my point at all. i think each of those characters loved harry in some capacity. but none of them was fit to protect harry - his life, his soul, whatever else. sirius tried, yes. but he was a fugitive. kinda puts a damper on the whole “adopting a child” thing. and dumbledore did do a lot to protect harry. the problem there is just that...dumbledore was also a big reason why he needed any protection in the first place. i’m not here to talk about these characters, though. that’s just my opinion. feel free to reject it.

my point is that even if those characters were fit to fill the role of harry’s “parental figure,” snape is the character who fills that role the best. i actually think this is intentionally baked into the narrative. why do i think that? because snape is to lily as sirius is to james, but lily’s love for harry is elevated above james’s by the story. ergo, snape fills a larger role than sirius does in protecting harry.

i don’t think it’s a good message, but there is no denying that motherly love > all other forms of love in the hp ‘verse. the emphasis on lily’s connection to harry over james’s is in fact so emphasized that jkr made a continuity error in gof because of it (with the priori incantatem; lily should have come before james, but she came after him. i’ve seen plenty of people try to explain this away for x, y, or z reason, but imo the reason is that whoever comes second is more important. plain and simple). in dh, when he uses the stone, he’s fixated on his mother. he looks directly at her when he says “stay close to me.”

obviously, snape isn’t a mother, but “snape was a single mother” will never not be one of the funniest jokes made about hp imo but he is given a lot of feminizing traits, from his handwriting to his long hair to his patronus (edit: check out this post for more on this! super interesting stuff tbh). in fact, on the last - i would argue his partronus is less reflexive of obsession and has more to do with the fact that, in many ways, lily taught snape what love is. similarly, we see with the title of “half-blood prince” that snape feels more connected to his mother than his father. his connection to magic is a maternal one. we don’t get a lot of info on eileen, no, but there is a lot to indicate that she has more positive influence in her son’s life than tobias does.

there’s a lot more that could be discussed there, but i’d rather focus on the part about lily. at first glance, sure, his love for her looks obsessive. it probably is a little bit. but lily was snape’s first and only true friend, and it is his fault she died. uh, yeah. i’d be obsessed too. that is an insane type of grief to be carrying around - the bereavement of a lost friendship, coupled with all that guilt. dude spent his whole adult life atoning for what he did. well, never mind that. lily was also his first “out” from an abusive household. i’ll be the first person to say that like...a lot of my attachment to harry as a character comes from his abusive upbringing. i don’t think the topic of abuse is handled well in this series. i also think that a lot of times, people in the fandom downplay its effects on the characters who experience it. but like...loveless childhoods mess people up. a lot. there’s this deep, very human desire we all have to love and be loved - to have our experiences, our existences, validated. even if one or both of his parents did really love him, it doesn’t change the fact that kids like snape don’t get that at home. they have to seek it out from other people. and snape found it in lily. his whole life revolved around her. when she died, he devoted himself to her son.

which is all a very long way of saying that snape becomes a stand-in for lily. it’s all very cyclical, too: lily dies to keep harry alive, and snape keeps himself alive only long enough to ensure harry knows he has to die. isn’t that neat!

so there’s one big part of my argument: snape is harry’s best protector, because he is supposed to represent lily - his mother, the person who loves him more than anyone else. but that’s just what i see has been intentionally slotted into the narrative. i think it’s boring. and sucks because i hate the way lily is put on a pedestal by the narrative.

but! there’s more! a lot more, in fact.

imo a better basis for this is in all the things we actually know snape does for harry. some are very obvious. some are probably just coincidental, or solely symbolic. here’s a list of the top of my head, which is not exhaustive by any means:

was suspicious of and actively working against quirrell throughout ps

countered quirrell’s jinx on harry’s broom, then actually reffed the next gryffindor game

he’s the one who finds and fetches ron and harry after they crash ron’s dad’s car

he actively discourages the idea that harry is slytherin’s heir

one of those symbolic ones - he teaches harry exepelliarmus

he is hyper-vigilant in poa - under the belief that sirius black is a serial murderer out for harry’s blood

he goes after harry and co. in the shrieking shack and steps in front of a werewolf to protect them (great parallel to The Prank, js)

returned to spying despite the risk to his own life

agreed to teach him occlumency, and tbh was shit at it but he did realize what harry was dreaming about and put two-and-two together there and reported it to dumbledore

actively impedes umbridge from interrogating harry

he understands harry’s message about sirius, and when harry doesn’t come back he goes out into the forest to find him himself after alerting the order of what he thinks is going on. i’m bolding this because imo this detail and everything that happens around it is kinda huge

he gets between harry and draco when they’re basically throwing death threats at each other LOL

the half-blood prince’s book. need i say more.

he heals draco after harry uses sectumsempra on him, and then lets him off tbh prety easy. harry wholly deserved to be expelled for this. snape is the one who protected him from being expelled, even though he himself was nearly accidentally killed by classmates too - and didn’t get justice for it. i’ve seen people say his choice of detention was too harsh, but i very much disagree. it was deserved. and could have served to teach harry a pretty good lesson tbh; snape just misjudges his character in such a way that it can’t do that because it’s not actually really a lesson harry needs. either way, the punishment was lighter than the crime

he kills dumbledore. maybe the poison wouldn’t have killed him first, but either way - it keeps the death off harry’s conscience

he’s the only character who ever calls harry out for casting the cruciatus curse. this is in chapter 28 of hbp, “flight of the prince.” this entire scene is super big to me. harry is throwing crucio and sectumsempra at snape, and he just blocks the spells. he lashes out once, and it’s when harry tries to use levicorpus on him - it’s an exact 1:1 parallel with snape’s worst memory. he slashes his face, just like he did to james. in this scene he tells harry “until you learn to shut your mouth and close your mind” which is...frankly, live-saving advice. even while this kid is hurling torture spells at him. speaking of torture spells - when someone else tortures harry here, snape is the one who makes them stop and forces everyone to flee, and leave harry where he is

honestly? it’s a hell of a lot more than any other adult does for harry. and what’s interesting to me is that after the first book, harry mostly stops being shocked when snape does something to protect him. in fact, in ootp, he blames what happened on snape with the full awareness that it is actually his own fault. that’s what makes this part stick out to me the most. children often do this thing where, like...they blame a parent or other trusted adult for x bad thing that’s going on. they’ll say, like, “it’s all your fault, i hate you,” etc. and one of the reasons why is because the trusted adult in question is someone they know will continue to love and protect them regardless. it’s a way of deflecting difficult emotions - things that are too large for them to handle on their own - on to an external target. self-hatred opposes the human instinct for survival. projected on someone else...it’s safer to lash out.

my thoughts? deep down, harry knows snape will protect him. he is reliable. very rarely do we ever see him go back on his word about something - to harry or anyone else. in a sense, he’s kind of predictable. his hate for harry is as normal as his determination to keep him out of harm’s way. i think this is a big reason why harry reacts so violently to finding out about snape’s hand in telling voldemort the prophecy. it’s a betrayal twice over: one, a betrayal by dumbledore for never telling him - and letting snape teach at hogwarts, letting snape watch over harry - and two, a betrayal by snape for doing something that is, yeah, unforgivable in his books. and then he kills dumbledore on the same day. suddenly he’s gone from reliable but hated teacher to some harry “hated nearly as much as he hated voldemort.”

but in the shrieking shack, he is compelled to approach him. he takes his memories. he views them, and accepts them. there is real trust there, i think. trust, which grows into respect. a name worthy of passing on to a child - because like harry, snape had no family. which leads me to their parallels.

their parallels. holy shit.

so. i’ve got a lot of issues with how harry potter is written. one of the biggest has a lot to do with this quote, from dh chapter 34 “the forest again” (my most detested chapter for a whole host of other reasons. go figure):

“hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. he and voldemort and snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here...”

people have hashed this conversation out a million times - should harry have been sorted into slytherin? i’m not here to answer that question, but i think uh. yeah. he should’ve been. that’s a way more profound story imho. thematically, it would make a lot more sense. but ask me about that some other time. i have plenty of thoughts.

anyway, what this quote tells me is that, even if they had a lot of untapped potential, there are major parallels between these three characters:

they are all half-bloods

they all have ties to slytherin house

they all came from nothing. they had no families

voldemort is beyond saving. and while the parallels are strong with him too, they’re more abundant between harry and snape:

they grew up in abusive households

they grew up wearing hand-me-downs

they were detested by muggle relatives for being magical

they were bullied and assaulted in school

they were both in some way marked by voldemort

stag patronus | doe patronus

they are “dumbledore’s men” - harry tells scrimgeour this about himself. in dh, he tells voldemort that “snape was dumbledore’s.” as it turns out, dumbledore made them both sacrifices. they were both betrayed by him in the same respect. by dumbledore’s orchestrations, they both die at voldemort’s hand

when snape starts teaching dada, hermione points out that he approaches the subject much as harry does

they both use dark arts - some of the only “good” characters we see use them on multiple occasions, in fact

like i mentioned, they play out the werewolf prank in reverse in poa. in hbp, snape’s worst memory

i think, ultimately they both see a lot themselves in the other. their mutual hatred, then, is the same sort of thing i mentioned before - self-hatred projected outward. harry gains peace and acceptance from snape’s memories. in other words, he gains peace and acceptance from seeing snape exactly how he was. when snape dies, he asks harry to look at him - in that moment, he sees him not as james potter’s son, but as lily evans’s, too. he sees, in a way, “both sides” of harry. 

do i think they ever liked each other? absolutely not. this comes from the fact that they don’t actually see each other until the very end. which is i think...a big reason why so many people struggle with the name “albus severus,” or feel like snape’s death was cheap - somehow a "redemption through death.” it wasn’t that, because his redeeming actions were done throughout the timeline of the entire series, and before that, even. but we find it all out at once, like harry does. by which point, snape is already dead, so it feels like a cop-out. but harry forgives him! ergo, he forgives himself. in a literary, symbolic sort of way.

anyway, we all know i love a good snape adopts harry story. for me, that comes down to the fact that these parallels and everything add up so that snape is the adult with the capacity to understand harry best. and if snape’s final moment in canon is seeing harry just how he is - and vice versa - yeah! it’s really satisfying to see that played out in a fic scenario where they get to actually talk to each other about it. in my opinion, there’s a lot of potential there. a lot of potential that just...can’t work in the books. and it’s really unfortunate, because more than understanding each other, they can learn through one another to understand themselves. and i think that’s a pretty cool dynamic, honestly.