dungeonsblues:

thegreatsnapescape:

thehalfbloodsev:

Hard Concept

I wonder how Snape antis are able to connect with people in the real world.

One of the many reasons for which I like Severus Snape is because he is human. He has flaws, but ultimately, he is good.

Yes, he is a complete arse when it comes to his students, but wouldn’t you be?

Snape has a horrible childhood: his father was most likely abusive, his mother was probably too lost to help him or love him in any way, he was poor and neglected, and he had one friend. Wouldn’t you cling onto that friendship for dear life?

If your answer is no, and that it would be obsessive to do so, then evidently you have never felt lonely before. You have never experienced the lack of any display of human affection. Severus was starving for it, he was just a boy, and he didn’t even know how to behave in a normal way socially.

Then he has such ambitions, such hopes for a new life at Hogwarts, where he tells himself that everything will be better, but no, because he has to go through relentless bullying for the mere fact that he exists.

As he doesn’t know how to show love and he doesn’t know what people appreciate, he probably thinks that Lily will only like him when he likes himself. And how does he like himself? Powerful, strong, knowledgeable, respected. He sees that Lily likes James Potter, and thinks that she does because Potter is respected and popular (as in he holds power). He doesn’t understand how Lily could like him now, because he doesn’t like himself. So he starts his journey towards the only thing he knows will give him power, and because of this, he loses everything he has ever cared about.

Snape is full of spite, there is no denying. But it is only understandable when one thinks about everything he has had to endure because of other people’s cruelty or because of his own mistakes.

So I cannot fathom how antis relate to normal people in life. It is impossible to find a flawless person, and if you can’t forgive Snape after eighteen years of the deepest remorse, then why would you forgive anyone who has ever made a mistake in real life?

It brings me to think that you only relate to human angels who do nothing wrong, and that is so shallow that I can’t even begin to imagine life lived that way.

Everyone makes mistakes. Severus Snape has made many mistakes. James Potter has made many mistakes. Harry Potter has made many mistakes. Every well written character, as every human being, makes mistakes.

But being able to see past them and understand the motives behind them, being able to understand the consequences that bring people to seek redemption is what, ultimately, makes people capable of love.

So when I see how antis slander Severus Snape and demonise him, ignoring every good thing he has ever done in his life, I wonder how they come to accept people in the real world.

It’s a good point and basically what bothers me most about all of the rabid hatred toward pro-snappers on here

especially for me, as someone who’s life story aligns eerily in many ways with snape’s (minus the membership in a magical supremacy cult but there’s always tomorrow!) i am always left wondering, “If you hate a fictional abused character who has made some mistakes in life and tries to atone for it but doesn’t fully recover from his past and doesn’t come out kinder for it and remains bitter and mistrustful… what do you think of REAL LIFE people who were abused and have made some mistakes in life and try to be basically good people but never fully recovered and retain their bitterness?” Because those people are not outliers or statistical anomalies… as much as the media would LOVE to convince you that all victims of abuse rise above it and come out “the bigger person” in the end and learn the ~true value~ of kindness and compassion… that’s not the universal experience. It happens, sure, but I wouldn’t even say it’s the most common result. I’ve met far more abuse survivors who still deal with trauma years after the fact than ones that are rainbows and sunshine. So if all it takes for a snater to condemn someone as subhuman is a little bit of assholery and bitterness… yikes. I’ve got that in spades, and at the end of the day, I’M not a war hero, so what have I got going for me, yeah?

but also i have literally drawn parallels between myself thoughtlessly using slurs when I was 15 and snape using “mudblood” when he was 15, and you would not fucking believe a snater honestly told me that *I* could be forgiven because “surely you didn’t know any better back then and you realize your mistake” and in the same sentence condemned snape because “well it’s just unforgivable that was his best friend and he was old enough to understand all of the socio/political implications involved in the use of hateful language” like holy hell, and i told them at the end of the day I hurt real people with real slurs used against real minorities and Harry Potter is made up, blood status doesn’t exist, and “mudblood” is a functionally meaningless word. And yet. 

So idk maybe they’re all hypocritical and suffer from cranial-rectal inversion. 

…unpopular take, apparently, but this looks a lot like the same old “if you have a reaction to X in fiction you must necessarily have the same reaction to X irl,” only repackaged and cast in the other direction. And I thought the whole point of saying “it’s fiction” was to point out that people don’t treat and react to fictional characters/actions/situations the way they treat and react to real people/actions/situations, and that they shouldn’t be expected to because the idea that you can predict how a person will behave, or deduce what they have gone through, from their fictional tastes is fundamentally fallacious. Not just fallacious because it comes from the wrong side – inherently so. And I mean, there are perfectly nice people out there (far better people than me) who absolutely detest Snape — I know quite a few of them. And they all seem perfectly capable of understanding that no one is harmed when you hate a fictional character and gleefully bash them when the topic comes up. And they also understand that real people are hurt when you do that to actual human beings. I don’t think that’s a very complicated thought process to follow, and most people are actually capable of instinctively grasping it. (Not to say there aren’t also assholes, but, unfortunately, their assholery would remain undiminished regardless of the nature of their feelings for Severus Snape). I mean, we call foul when people say, “You like someone who mistreated children in a book so you obviously like people who mistreat children irl” so I don’t think it’s fair to consider “You hate an abuse victim in fiction so you must obviously be vile to abuse victims irl” a valid statement.