loose morals and reading comprehension

tell me you love it. tell me it made you slam your laptop shut. tell me you brought it up at your college lecture about kink. key smash in all caps. quote the passage that made you think. i promise, we’ll love it.

What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?

It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.

in prince's tale he's shown to view muggles as worse than wizards:

“Wouldn't spy on you, anyway,” he added spitefully, “you're a Muggle.”

Though Petunia evidently did not understand the word, she could hardly mistake the tone.

(argument can be made here he said that in that tone as the text says out of 'spite' as petunia moments before this also uses the same kinda tone when she realises who snape's family is/that he's extremely poor.

however next scene in prince's tale, there is this moment:

“Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?”

Snape hesitated. His black eyes, eager in the greenish gloom, moved over the pale face, the dark red hair.

“No,” he said. “It doesn't make any difference.”

“Good,” said Lily, relaxing. It was clear that she had been worrying.

“You've got loads of magic,” said Snape.

undisputably hesitates here, since it literally says he does. he doesn't want to offend her/make her feel bad. does that mean he thinks it truly makes no difference just because he says that? the hesitation makes his answer seem much less truthful.

and the second part here "you've got loads of magic", now you could interpret this two ways. 1. lily was asking, or he thinks lily was asking, about whether being muggleborn makes a difference specifically in terms of her magical skills. or 2. he's saying it doesn't make any difference to him that she's muggleborn, because she's got loads of magic. personally i'm leaning more towards the first interpretation. but in which case, he's hesitating about whether muggleborns are as skilled/have as much magic as purebloods/halfbloods. which is a blood supremacist view.

-

“So she's my sister!”

“She's only a - ” He caught himself quickly; Lily, too busy trying to wipe her eyes without being noticed, did not hear him.

now again with petunia. here, unlike with the first point with petunia, this isn't in defence/spite after petunia insulted him. lily's upset that petunia is mad at her & this is his reaction to lily being upset about that. he doesn't seem to understand why lily would care what petunia thinks about her because petunia's a muggle. it seemingly makes her irrelevant in severus' eyes.

"You'd better be in slytherin"

now this point is very much a stretch in my argument but i wanted to include it anyway, just using my gsce english 'there was a blue door which means they were sad' skills /j. but anyway. it is a known fact in the wizarding world that a large percentage of slytherins were blood supremacists/there was more blood supremacist's in slytherin than other houses (i can't remember if it was also common knowledge about salazar slyrherin being a blood supremacist or not too, but maybe). now this would kinda mean nothing at all to me if not for the scene like just before where severus is telling lily everything about the wizarding world. he tells her about the dementors, about the laws, about hogwarts, etc. so he's knowledgeable about it. he'd know what slytherin is known for. he doesn't really seem to care about what lily being in that house might mean for her & also it doesn't seem like lily is aware of it? but yeah, like i said this is a stretch. ofc he could just like the values slytherin has or maybe his mother was in slytherin

But here's the thing. Snape already expresses his desire to be in Slytherin before he's even talked to James. And Lily gets sorted into Gryffindor and there's no way meeting James on the train was what sold Lily on the house. So say that James and Sirius had sat in a different compartment. Lily would still have been a Gryffindor and Snape would still have been a Slytherin.

What happens the moment the boy gets sorted into Slytherin? Lucius Malfoy shakes his hand.

And Severus Snape moved off to the other side of the Hall, away from Lily, to where the Slytherins were cheering him, to where Lucius Malfoy, a prefect badge gleaming upon his chest, patted Snape on the back as he sat down beside him. …

Snape was also known at school for being into the dark arts:

"Snape’s always been fascinated by the Dark Arts, he was famous for it at school. Slimy, oily, greasy-haired kid, he was,” Sirius added, and Harry and Ron grinned at each other. “Snape knew more curses when he arrived at school than half the kids in seventh year, and he was part of a gang of Slytherins who nearly all turned out to be Death Eaters.”

With or without the marauders, Snape would not have become liked outside his house at such a time of war. He holds anti-muggle views. He is fascinated by the dark arts. He is a Slytherin (which can't have had a good rep during the war).

He's already dreaming of becoming a Death Eater before he and Lily stop being friends. Otherwise how could she know and say this as they fall out (remember he does not deny any of these allogations):

"You and your precious little Death Eater friends — you see, you don’t even deny it! You don’t even deny that’s what you’re all aiming to be! You can’t wait to join You- Know- Who, can you?”

JKR confirms that he thought Lily would be impressed by him in DE robes. Meaning, yes, without James, Lily and Snape might have stayed friends longer, but his friendship with Lily was never going to stop him becoming a DE.

Having said that, what is interesting is that the Marauders might have been part of the reason he stayed a DE.

Because here's the interesting thing: Regulus and Draco both become Death Eaters very young, just like Severus (though they are even a bit younger than Severus), but they become disillusioned with being a Death Eater, clearly put off by what they are being asked to do. JKR confirmed the final straw for Regulus was Kreacher but she summarised his defecting as him not being prepared for the realities of being a DE.

Snape though? Totally okay with it all. Until Lily is put at risk, that is. The violence he saw (and possibly contributed to) did not put him off the way it did Regulus and Draco.

Why not?

Regulus and Draco both come from stable households. Even if the fandom likes to pretend that Regulus was regularly tortured, there is nothing to suggest that he was anything other than a beloved son from a stable home. Draco's the same. (Draco was also forced into it a little bit more than Regulus, but frankly Draco was more than keen to join).

Severus, though, not from a stable home. So maybe Tobias Snape and Snape's childhood was violent enough (we don't know exactly what was going on but we know it wasn't a happy home) to make him more prepared for the rough realities of what being a DE looked like.

That alone may explain it all. But considering that he was bullied, I think we should feature that in the question as well. Who failed Snape? Everyone who wasn't his beloved DEs. The headmaster. The teachers. The other students. Especially the marauders. Being a DE put him at odds with his former bullies. And being bullied will have hardened him.

That's not to say the marauders should be held accountable for anything other than their own choices which was to bully Snape. Snape made his own decisions, and as I've often said and will say again (but louder this time): SNAPE KNOWS THIS!!! SNAPE TAKES ACCOUNTABILITY FOR HIS OWN ACTIONS. He does not spend the prince's tale telling Harry how it's all the marauders' fault. He shows Harry who he was before he ever met James, shows Harry that he had anti-muggle views from a young age. Snape's aware that he fucked up and he's to blame and does not spend his last few moments alive creating a tapestry of being bullied by James. The only bullying he shows Harry is not about the bullying but about the fact that he lost his best friend that day. Because of something he said.

James: "Merlin's balls, that's an impressive sight, Padfoot. I'll give you that. But I bet mine is bigger than yours in its... advanced stage."

Sirius: "Advanced stage, eh? You're so sure about yourself, aren't you, Prongsie? Let's see, then."

James: "What – now?"

Sirius: "Yeah, now. Go on. We need proper data."

James: "...Okay. But only if you do it too. For comparison."

Sirius: "Fair enough."

Feeling like grooming Sirius a bit before his date with James and Remus, whenever that may be 🙌🏻🎆🎇

"Maybe I'll break the tradition,"

has more depth than all the Slytherin characters combined. Do you guys really understand how much courage it must have taken him to say this? People love to portray this scene as, "Oh, Sirius was obsessed with James and he chose whatever would keep them together," but... I simply don't think so.

​Sirius grew up in a cult, surrounded by an insane amount of propaganda and his family's emotional projection since he was the heir. (And he was probably the perfect fit for the heir, too. I like to think Orion and Walburga saw his bravery, charm, audacity, defiance and arrogance as a "strong personality" and high-fived each other because their firstborn wasn't some passive, soft-headed bloke (like Regulus) who couldn't properly represent the Noble House of Black. I know Sirius probably resisted their wants and argued with them even pre-Hogwarts, meanwhile Regulus did everything they wanted and the most prominent thing about him in those years was his submission—although I don't think they even once wished for Regulus to be their firstborn. They liked Regulus's behavior, but they wanted Sirius to embody it.)

​I also like to headcanon that Walburga never once truly believed Sirius betrayed the Potters. Because yeah, he was her firstborn—her fierce son with a sharp personality, the perfect fit for the Black heir. She knew her baby, and probably loved him too, just improperly. I know this fandom loves to make her an evil, overly sadistic parent to the point that it leans into misery porn, but I like to think of Sirius's relationship with his parents as something much more emotionally destructive.

​I personally think the fact that she never once disowned him properly is enough evidence stand-alone. I mean, why did they let Sirius take all of that fortune—and even let him leave it to whoever he wanted (as Harry got it at the end)?

(Because disowning Sirius completely and legally would mean admitting defeat. It would mean admitting that they completely lost control of him. Instead, they kept him on the family registry and left the fortune intact. So it felt less like an amputation of a limp for them and more like a bad decision their teenage son made.)

​Do people know how much courage it takes to even think about doing something outside of the standards when you grew up in a closed environment like that? It took Draco until the end of the seventh book to do something—to lie to his aunt and tell her that it wasn't Harry Potter.

An eleven-year-old is a child, a middle schooler, roughly even conscious. I like to think his House sorting was something he thought a lot about beforehand. (Maybe he even decided to follow the first friend he made to their House, so it was really all because of James, but not about James. Or maybe he decided to walk up to that Hat mumbling to himself, "Anything but Slytherin," just like Harry did. Or maybe it was a total shock for him like everybody else, though I don't think so.) It was something he thought and stressed about.

​I like to headcanon that Andromeda married Ted Tonks just the summer before Sirius's first year, so it was like a double whiplash for the family, you see? It was also what gave Sirius the daring to even hope for another way than being a Slytherin.

Why? Because in cults, the conformity relies on the illusion that no alternative exists. The entire illusion shattered for everyone that summer. Andromeda, by marrying a muggle-born, provided a cognitive opening- a containment breach for the whole politic superiority complex Blacks had built their noble bloodline onto.

​And well, when he finally did get sorted into Gryffindor, he immediately sat next to Lily (a muggle-born) canonically—remember? Do you see the immediate difference in the path he would take for the rest of his life? Sirius getting sorted into Gryffindor was one of the most powerful rebellions in the whole franchise, purely because of the emotional labor it put 11-year-old Sirius through.

​It was hard. It was hard. Seeing through the propaganda at 11 is hard. Realizing maybe your parents are not that great is hard. Accepting it is somehow even harder. I like to think Walburga was the kind of mother who shows affection— but only if her sons are "good enough." She'll hug them, make them sit on her lap, and kiss their faces, but only after they do something that aligns with her values, proving to her that her two children are taking the path she wants them to take. I don't really know what practices those could have been, but I know that offering affection as a rewards for compliance was 100% more effective than fucking Cruciating them constantly (I honestly hate this headcanon with a passion, do people even know how systematic emotional oppression in abusive families work?)

​It's harder to leave your family if you could just not speak, and suddenly your mother is waking you up by caressing your hair and your father is asking about your day at the dinner table. There is a saying,

A baby cannot hate a mother without the mother first hating the baby,

and I agree. But if you were made to believe that you could simply prevent your mother's hate by being a good boy, wouldn't you have tried to do that? It is a survival instinct for a child to try to comply first before completely rebel. Wouldn't you try to fit yourself into her standards at first, work hard for your mother's love to actually earn it, and then look at the ceiling of your room at night trying to decide whether you could live like this forever or not?

If love is a form of transaction which uses your autonomy as it's currecy, how much could you really afford? Or how much would you be eager to sacrifice to afford more?