#im still thinking about making that snape fandom argument starter kit lol

[snapedefender]

Hi! Recently discovered your blog and really love it! I've been making my way through your posts (as I'm sure you've noticed, sorry) and I've noticed that some from like 2018ish are still pretty relevant to Snape discussions today. I'm fairly new to the fandom so I was wondering: have the anti snape people just been recycling the same talking points for the past 4-5 years? That would be kind of depressing if so, since so many of these arguments are just bad and you'd think that they'd trickle out as people realize it... Or have you noticed some definite trends in the arguments and talking points surrounding Snape that have changed over the years?

it's funny bc i dont really pay that much attention to notifications (every once in a while i dive in to see if there's any responses/tags i want to respond to, but otherwise they're white noise 2 me) but i can always tell when someone's just found this blog bc a lot of times i'll get so many notifs from them in a row. so no need to say sorry! there's no bigger compliment to me than someone who wants to keep all my opinions about snape lmao.

anyway, hand to god, i'm pretty sure anti-snape people decided on their four arguments about ten years back and have just been recycling them with different wording ever since. there are arguments i remember seeing in ye olde harry potter fandom that are almost unchanged today. the pervasive idea of snape as a creepy stalker, that snape traumatized neville, and that snape willing gave up harry and james to "have" lily are the three i've noticed just have stuck around for so, so, so long. it's VERY frustrating.

to be fair, hp has regurgitated plenty of fandom discourse just by way of being a long-lived fandom with a healthy and quarrelsome fan base. but the snape arguments in particular always seem especially long-lived. i don't think i noticed exactly how repetitive they were until i ran this blog and started seeing them crop up over and over (and over and over).

in the anti arguments, the main thing i've noticed though is the same thing i think everyone's noticed about the way people talk about characters they don't like - there's so many social justice buzzwords thrown in to "prove" a character is "problematic." back in ye olde hp fandom days, there were plenty of people who didn't like snape and there were shipping wars and such (jilly vs snilly and so on) but the vitriol about snape being abusive and problematic and so on is something that's a more recent trend and is really born out of the way people need to make characters they dislike morally bad so they can feel justified in it. (the inverse is also true - the push to make james and the marauders feminists and such all comes from the desire to make characters we like better/less "problematic.") there's been a much steadier shift from "i don't like snape and i think he's mean" to "i think snape is actually the most evil, abusive character who traumatizes children for fun and doesn't mind killing babies" (all arguments i've seen at least once if not multiple times lol).

on the flip side, from the pro-snape camp, i feel like the arguments around snape have become more nuanced and there's been a lot more mining of material. that said, there's also a lot more defensiveness - whereas before there could be a live and let live attitude about anti snape people, now it really does feel like you have to defend on all sides just to say something about a fictional character you like. so that leads to a lot more snappish discourse than there used to be over snape on both sides tbh.

but aside from discourse, the trend i've really loved seeing is how much more we've pushed to examine snape's identity - the uptick in ace!snape and trans!snape headcanons, the queer shipping with snape, and so on are much more varied than back in the old days where you basically had... snilly as a major pairing and snape as a het white dude and that was it. (at least in my corner of fandom!)

#im still thinking about making that snape fandom argument starter kit lol #i really have done and re-done so many of these arguments over the past 4ish years it's wild