The Potion Master's remedy for broken souls.

Snape. Who loves him?

'Professor Snape is alive and well and living inside my head'.

I typed this sentence into Google, and the first thing to come up in my Search Results was a delightful little essay from a fellow Snape-lover, who has verbalised, so nicely, just why it is that people obsess -- painfully, tangibly -- over someone who does not actually exist.

Those of you who DON'T obsess will wonder how it's possible. I can't explain, but I can tell you that typing out the words "someone who does not actually exist" felt a bit like blasphemy to me!

Back to the essay, though, "Who Loves Severus Snape?", written by a blogger named Agnieszka. Here are a few excerpts, and click here for the full essay if you need to read more! (Don't read if you are one of those people who has -- shock and horror -- not yet read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; the essay contains spoilers).

"Severus Snape is written to be loved and redeemed, but the love and redemption take place not within the text but within the experience of the reader. For the readers who love Severus Snape, there can never be real fulfillment because he is a fictional character, a creature of the imagination. But there can be real longing, as a fantasy about a fictional character is no less emotionally real than a fantasy about a living person who becomes fictionalized in the process of fantasy.

There is a similarity between loving a fictional character and loving a dead person. Both the dead and the fictional exist in the thoughts of the real and living. Rowling points to the idea that our manner of interacting with the dead is like unto the manner of interacting with fictional characters. When Harry interacts with the people brought back by the resurrection stone he is aware that they live in his imagination. At the end of Harry's interaction with the Dumbledore in the ghostly King's Cross, Harry asks

"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?"

to which the King's Cross Dumbledore replies

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it's not real?"

- from a blog entry by Agnieszka

This sums it up.

“If velvet could speak, it would sound like Rickman.”

- Sandy Bauers, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Snape fanfic: Just Plain Luna

Delightful fanfic by The Treacle Tart, written in 2006, supposedly post-DH .. The full title is Implausible, Irrational And Just Plain Luna .. Snape is in Azkaban, but rescued by a now adult Luna Lovegood and taken to a world that only Luna could have conjured.

"Everything looked like it was made of marshmallow, gooey marshmallow. Worst of all, everything was unnaturally pink. In the midst of it all stood Severus Snape in all his black-cloaked glory, standing out like a mortician in a three-ring circus."

And this ..

"She slid her small hand into his and gently guided him back outside. Against his better judgment he allowed her to do so, partly because he truly felt he had no choice, and he hadn't the strength to fight her or this place any longer, but also partly because he liked the way her hand fit in his. It had been decades since someone held his hand."

Oh .. my heart wrings a bit every time I read that. Really, JKR, couldn't you have been just a bit nicer to him?? Well, never mind .. fortunately we have all these fan-ficcers giving Snape the lives and loves he deserves. Er .. sometimes a bit MORE than he deserves .. but you shan't be seeing any of THOSE links here as some of my friends who read this blog are innocent schoolgirls.

Well, schoolgirls, at any rate.

So you won't find any pornography here. Perhaps just a kiss or two. And Treacle Tart obliges in this fanfic and makes me wish I was Luna (instead of just plain lunatic).

Snape fanfic: King's Pawn

"King's pawn, Severus. Considered in chess to be one of the most important and dangerous pieces in the beginning of the game. Always kept close to protect its ruler, the King. Almost always the first to be moved, and almost always the first to be destroyed."

- by ?

Nicely written fanfic. Snape compares the two men who dictate his life - his master, the Dark Lord and his friend, the Headmaster - and finds a common thread.

"I am manipulated by the man I call Master, and the man I call friend."

This fanfic is in two vignettes, and I love the single word that sums up so much at the end of each. Something potent and chilling about them: and the last word gets to be Snape's. Can't tell you more than that, dears, it would be a spoiler and I want you to read King's Pawn for yourself!

Snape. A severely good site on him.

I must tell you about Severely Severus, which is an excellent site created by a wonderful human being who goes by the name Whitehound, who has put together a glorious listing of really nice fanfics - nothing x-rated, and all the ones she's selected present Snape in true character.

What is Snape in true character, you might ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned it's most-amazing-man-that-never-walked-the-earth-albeit-a-sarcastic-unfriendly-dark-scary-batlike-greasy-haired-git-who-never-got-enough-sunshine. Just got to love him.

Snape. He does not really look like he looks.

The Snape in my head, that is. It's the Snape of the books that I'm mad about, not the Snape of the movies. Alan Rickman is a fine man, I'm sure, and lustworthy in his own way. And in the movies, all I get are snapshots of Snape. The personality comes across so much better in the books.

But I will say one thing for Alan Rickman: That VOICE...I don't know if Mr. Rickman always sounds like that, or if his "Snape voice" is only for the Harry Potter movies. But that voice IS Snape. It's a rich chocolate mousse voice.

And if you don't know what I mean by that, visit Cafe Y on Langford Road in Bangalore, and order the chocolate mousse. It's orgasmically delicious.

Aah.

Snape. (Obviously).

He's definitely penetrated my mind.

How could he not have? Brilliant. Dark. Wounded. Nasty. Heroic.

Yes, it's official. I am obsessed with Severus Snape. Gloriously obsessed. No matter what JKR thinks of him, as far as I'm concerned, he's the real hero of the Harry Potter stories. So this space is going to be where I mumble my way through all thoughts Snape. I'll probably post links to my favourite Snape fanfics here too. But now, to bed. All that Legilimens has given me a headache.

(Note from the future, i.e. Jan 2008 - July 21st 2007 was when JK Rowling released the last of the Harry Potter books. I had spent the previous week re-reading and catching up on the other six, and then locked myself away for 10 glorious hours - well, actually, some of them were not glorious - I wept MUCH and also forgot to have lunch) and the end result was clearly an overdose of all things Potteresque but mostly Snape. Ah, Snape. A new blog seemed only too appropriate and so on August 8, 2007 "Obviously" was created (refer his words to Dolores Umbridge in Book 5 to "get" it).
(in July 2008 I changed the labels for these posts from 'Obviously' .. you will now find them variously under Snape, fanfic, Potter)

Snape. Someone else's face.

Some years ago, I went for salsa classes but had to drop out. One of the young men there, just a teenager perhaps, was the spitting image of one of my childhood abusers. We would dance in a circle, and change partners every few bars. I tried not to look at his face when it was his turn to dance with me. But then came the step where the man stands behind the woman, crossing her arms over as if pinned, and holds her from behind. I had to excuse myself "to go to the lady's room", and walked calmly down to my car, where I broke down and wept for ten minutes.

I never went back to salsa classes. Snape's expression as he looks at Harry in this picture reminds me of that moment. Memories of evil triggered by an innocent face.