#fandoms in general spook me but i will try for snape i suppose

[sneppu]

Hello! Welcome to The Sneep Zone

You may call me Nagi

Main blog: @nagoo

first and foremost: fuck jkr. i do not endorse her. i do not agree with her. we dont do that weird shit here.

we do different weird shit instead (bask in the decadence of The Sneep)

This sideblog is for me to post all my Snape art and Snape related ramblings! I am addicted to snape fics, and have found myself needing to make fanart for some of my favorite writers. such things will be posted here!

Severus Snape is my favorite guy!

I am known to refer to him as: Sneep, Snorp, Sneb, The Sneberous Sneb, The Snebulous One, He Who Sneeps In The Dark, SneepSnorp, Mother, Sneppu, El Sneepo, Snorpo, Snib, The Best One, The Only One That Matters, The Community Boyfriend, etc.

rest assured, I am talking about Severus Snape every single time

I ship him with everyone! yes, even [insert character].

I truly and genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, do not care even a little bit about The Grievances u may have about my ships or my sneeps.

in my ideal world, everyone would love and cherish Sneep. I tend to focus on marauder's era Snape

not to be rude, but i kind of only care about Snape really. the slytherins are cool and chill too, but i mostly care about how they interact with and potentially fall in love with The Sneep. the marauders are rat bastards and i ship them with Snape in a "grovel eternally for the scraps of his affection" kind of way. I am not sorry.

dont expect nothing serious from me unless im waxing poetic about Snape or heavily projecting my own Tragic Past onto him tbh, i am just here to draw Snape and shitpost about my favorite little guy.

i dont care that he's mean.

he shouldve been meaner, actually.

he's better than me and he's probably better than you too, because i wouldve absolutely lost it big boy style.

[awed-frog]

Sorry my question was very unclear. Do you think that under others circumstances (post-war, AU...) Snape could have recovered and found peace ? ;)

No problem! Just wanted to make sure I was answering your actual question and not my interpretation of it. :)

So, my opinion on that is that - pardon my French - like most of us, all Snape needed was someone who gave a shit about him. Like, if you keep the basic elements of his life - everything that happened up to Lily’s death - then sure, the situation isn’t that rosy. The guilt over Lily’s death was not something Snape would soon forget. He wanted to die that night, and only his rigid sense of honour prevented him from taking his own life. That means that if Voldemort had been truly dead, Dumbledore would not have any reason to ask for Snape’s continued loyalty, and Snape would have jumped from the nearest cliff. 

(I always wonder about that promise - did Dumbledore care about Snape, on some level? Having known him as a student, did he feel pity for the twisted thing he had become? Or was he simply foresseing, even then, that he would need a spy again and Snape would be perfectly placed for the role?)

So, you see, with these two basic blocs in place, Snape’s life is now a mess, which is why I said in that other post that he’d been set up to fail. Because next, we have a period of grieving over Lily which is mixed with criminal trials and most likely a smear campaign in the press, and after that, more grieving and the obligation to work at Hogwarts - and man, those first few years must have been insane. We know none of the adults generally believed Snape was really innocent, and we can assume that the kids would have been equally dismissive and rude, if not outright aggressive - and I understand them: this was a generation of students who’d lived through a brutal war, lost friends and family members, so the injustice of what is basically a Nazi actually teaching them - living all safe and cozy in the castle while others were dead because of him - that must have been very nearly unbearable. I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact, if some of the older students played cruel pranks on him, or even tried to cause him physical harm. Revenge is always a tempting option, after all.

At the same time, this is exactly the moment where things could have gone differently. As I said, what Snape needed was one person on his side. If one of his colleagues, or even Dumbledore, had patiently, but determinedly, sought out his friendship, the way you do with spooked out horses, then maybe Snape wouldn’t have retreated in his guilt and pain and bitterness and anger quite so much. Maybe this is why the fandom seemed to be so happy to associate him with Hermione - her innate sense of fairness would have pushed her to try and help him, and we know that for sure because she was confronted with a very similar situation (Lupin was a ‘monster’, and he was accused of being a Death Eater) and handled it very maturely. Of course, thoughts of a relationship between a student and her teacher are fiction-only nonsense, and what Snape needed back then was not a well-meaning 13-year-old but an adult with a good head on their shoulders who could take his weight and support him.

(Another alternative was for Dumbledore to involve Snape in Harry’s life from early on - but, again, we know why he didn’t do that: he kept Harry isolated and trapped with Muggles because he was afraid that splinter of Voldemort’s soul inside him could latch on to wizards, and he kept Snape as isolated and miserable as possible so it would be believable that he was still a Death Eater when Voldemort came back.

And this, well, was the heart of it all, wasn’t it? Again, Snape was set up to fail because Dumbledore wanted him there - it was essential to his plan that, even after twenty years, Snape would be this dark and mysterious figure - the lonely Potion Master nobody really knew, the one who was still suspected of practicing the dark arts and probably tortured puppies and prostitutes during the summer holidays. If Snape had become someone normal - liked and appareciated by colleagues and students, patient and good-spirited - it would have been impossible to send him back as a spy to Voldemort. If nothing else, Voldemort would have read his memories and saw too many incriminating things. So here you see the extent of Dumbledore’s - was it cold-heartedness? it was something. Harry and Snape, the abandoned boys, were both manipulated from the start - Harry into a life where he could ‘test his power’ and show his true morality, so that Dumbledore would be sure Harry would do the right thing and kill himself at the right time, and Snape into the solitary and miserable existence he endured for twenty years - day after day when the only thing keeping him alive was the promise of redemption. Which, of course, Dumbledore took from him when he told him Harry would have to die. Whooopsie.)

So, I don’t know. Maybe if things had gone ‘my way’ and Snape had had a friend, Voldemort would have won. Maybe not. Maybe Snape would have found some peace had he survived the war. Maybe not. After all, had he lived, he would have had to face the same thing he’d faced twenty years before - only this time Dumbledore wouldn’t have been there to help him. Kingsley would have needed to tesitify in front of some committee to say that yes, Snape did give them information about what Voldemort was doing, but was his knowledge of Snape’s activities enough for the jury to be certain Snape was working as a double agent for Dumbledore, and not Voldemort? Death Eaters, after all, would have many stories to tell about his involvement in murders and torture, and nobody would readily forget his period as Hogwarts Headmaster, when he’d been uncapable (or unwilling, many would say) to stop the Carrows from abusing the students. All this means that the best case scenario for him would have been, again, the same thing that had gone down twenty years previously: an acquittal, but at what cost? Many in the wizarding world, including quite a few journalists who would see the opportunity to denounce a wrong or make a quick buck, would keep on believing he was a Death Eater who’d got off scot-free. He certainly wouldn’t have been welcome at Hogwarts, and he never particularly liked teaching, but where would he have gone then? In the books, Snape was much younger than in the movies (he wasn’t even forty when he died) - he had his whole life ahead of him, especially if we consider wizards age much more slowly. Me, I probably would have traveled, escaped to some other country, but I believe that at that point, Snape needed some kind of recognition - that’s why he was so angry when Harry called him a coward. A part of him knew he’d paid his debts, and wanted out. He wanted that to be acknowledged by society - he wanted to be thanked, perhaps, for his many sacrifices. He was smart and talented - he could have been the greatest Potion Master of the twenty-first century if he’d been free to experiment - if he’d been given the money and resources and trust to do so. He wanted to finally clear his name, and that’s why he would have stayed. Harry would have helped him, of course, but I doubt this process could have been completely successful.

So, I don’t know - probably my best case scenario for Snape would be him surviving the war, surviving the trials, and setting up some kind of laboratory somewhere. People would have needed to come to him because there are potions only he can make - he could have supplied St Mungo’s, in time (of course, that would have taken a particularly charitable head healer or something, because, man, imagine buying your antidotes and blood-thickeners from a known mass murderer), would surely have perfected a cure for lycanthropy. But, again, he would have needed some kind of human presence - my best-case scenario would involve someone actively interacting with him, getting to know him, and liking him - a friendly old apothecary, maybe, or the wizarding equivalent of a PhD student looking for experience in the field - ideally, of course, someone who could teach him about love, as well as friendship, but I believe a true friend would have been enough, in a way.

Ultimately, though, it’s all speculation. It’s difficult to find some leeway in a well-built story - in JK Rowling’s world, every character did exactly what they were supposed to do, and you can’t move a piece without making the whole thing collapse. Because if Snape hadn’t died, would Harry ever have believed him? Wouldn’t he have suspected a trap if he hadn’t seen Voldemort himself kill Snape himself? Would his wish to bring Voldemort down at any cost have trumped his hatred and distrust for Snape? I don’t know, but I’m not optimistic. 

(Still, though - if you want some sugar, I like this story a lot, and I find it pretty believable, canon-speaking - and certainly more uplifting than the books.)