#i just beg you guys to give an abused brainwashed 17 year old some leniency

[verdantmoontruther]

d’you know the more i think about it, the less i think you can compare draco calling hermione a mudblood to snape calling lily a mudblood. the situations are completely different and no, i don’t actually think snape’s came from a place of blood supremacist hatred.

a friend of mine told me a story of when she was maybe 13, a kid she knew started hanging with the wrong crowd. he was 50% jewish, 50% something or other, and 100% lonely, and he started hanging with the something or others.

and you know how it goes - kid feels like he doesn’t belong here nor there, grew up in a predominantly jewish community but gets poisoned or manipulated into thinking those people - you know, the ones he grew up with, his neighbours, his teachers, his mother - they’re worse, they’re below them (and he’s now a part of the them, he has a definitive identity, and isn’t that alluring to a lonely kid like that). and the kid desperately wants the approval of these something or others, wants it like he’s never wanted anything before.

i don’t really remember the details because they was recounted to me later piece by piece, but long story short - he calls this other guy a yid. a sheeny. a kike.

that’s what i’m getting from snape - this is a poor, lonely, scared kid that was just humiliated (and essentially sexually assaulted) in front of half his school. he retreats to doing what he thinks will bring him the most comfort, get the most people to fight FOR him in HIS corner.

he weaponises his own self-hatred by projecting it onto someone else in order to win the approval of the few people that he truly believes may stick by him.

see, it’s really important that we remember that snape was half muggle himself, and loathed it. when he self-identified as the ‘half-blood prince’, the ‘half-blood’ was a reminder of his belonging to wizarding society. that’s why he took his mother’s name, too. when he expresses his hatred towards muggles by calling lily a mudblood, i think it’s moreso a reaction towards how unsafe and alone he felt in that situation, and it’s a callback to his father (a muggle), who was canonically abusive and neglectful. it’s a callback to muggle society, where he lived in abject urban poverty in the industrialised midlands in the 60s and 70s during increasing inflation and taxation, unemployment at the same height it was at during the fucking great depression, the ira bombings in birmingham, and miners’ (and other blue collar workers’) strikes, of which his father would have been a part, and which would all have become part of a cycle he couldn’t escape from had he not been a wizard. it’s a callback to, ironically, his own future, and how he would have probably continued his father’s line of work, however loathsome it was, because poverty is often cyclical, but the wizarding world gave him something to excel at (potions) and put his brilliant mind to work (he was 15 inventing his own spells).

there was a whole blow up over my friend’s situation, because it was a major dick move, but it also came from isaac who lives with his mama and bubbe across the street from the beit tfila, and you see every so often at the deli, and whose bar mitzvah you ate cake at. and it hurt because it came from isaac down the block, but it also hurt less coming from isaac down the block than if it had been tanner and makeighleigh and their billion dollar mansion.

this shit is so fucking common in minority communities, not just with mixed kids but with self-loathing full kids, as well. the amount of times i’ve had to check my own self-directed antisemitism, growing up in a predominantly non-jewish area (coincidentally, the same industrial midlands that snape and lily grew up in), is unreal.

draco calling hermione a mudblood, though? doesn’t compare. he’s a snooty pureblooded rich kid talking down to a 100% muggleborn girl for no reason but his own (or, at least, his parents’) convictions. vile loathesome evil little cockroach

so, tl;dr - was snape calling lily a mudblood a dick move? yeah, nothing can cover for that. but do we have to consider context, including the fact that that slur applies to him himself, too? yes. don’t be silly. furthermore, do i even think that snape ever held to any blood purist ideology? ... no. i don’t.