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It’s also pretty annoying when a certain fandom is capable of redeeming fucking Barty Crouch Jr. but decides to bash Snape for no reason or simply remove him from the narrative so their classist bully faves don’t look bad.

i simply just dont like snape! honestly, i dont even really dislike him, he’s just not a character i care about. which is fine! people are allowed to not care about other characters. in fact—i even find him an interesting character sometimes. me not caring about him isn’t because of classism—in fact, it has nothing to do with his financial position, i didnt even know he was poor to be fully honest. i simply dont care for him.

and im not bashing snape here, if you’ll see my original post. i am simply saying i dont enjoy how many snape fans—or the ones ive encountered—are disrespectful when people either dont care/like snape or bring up criticisms of his character. i personally dont gloss over the marauders’ bullying or barty’s cruel actions, but i also dont gloss over snape’s bullying of innocent children.

You made a post saying that it’s impossible to hate Snape because Snape fans immediately jump down your throat. And I explained that you can absolutely dislike the character and nobody is going to come after you for it by default. If people push back or respond to you, it’s usually for a number of specific reasons. If you’re identifying yourself with those reasons and taking them personally, maybe it’s because you do those things. Because honestly, if you don’t, why would you feel called out?

What I did was explain why Snape fans usually react the way they do, and I gave you the reasons for it. You decided to take that personally. I don’t know whether you do those things or not. I gave you an explanation. I never said that you do them. And I think I express myself pretty clearly. So either you struggle with basic reading comprehension, or you’ve taken it personally for some reason.

That said, there’s really not much else to say.

There are certain arguments people make against Snape that are deeply classist. They are classist because they completely ignore his socioeconomic background and his family circumstances. And if you ignore someone’s socioeconomic and family context while making moral arguments about them, you’re engaging in classism.

Am I saying that you personally make those arguments? No. I’m saying that a lot of people do, and that’s one of the reasons why they get pushback. Not that you do it. If you don’t do those things, then you’re not going to get hate for it.

But don’t play the victim and claim that “every time you say something negative about Snape, people attack you,” because that’s simply not true. If you just say something like, “I can’t stand him because I’m a huge Harry, Ron, and Hermione fan and he was awful to them,” nobody is going to come after you for that. No Snape fan is going to start attacking a Golden Trio fan who dislikes him because he treated their favourite characters badly, because we completely understand that perspective. They’re your favourite characters and he was, frankly, a massive arsehole towards them. Of course it’s understandable that you wouldn’t like him. Now, if your argument is, “He joined an extremist group, he was a racist, he was basically a Nazi,” then people are going to challenge that for a number of reasons.

And there’s also the fact that plenty of people adore characters like Barty Crouch Jr. or Evan Rosier, presenting them as fascinating, nuanced, misunderstood favourites, when they were essentially elitist terrorist arseholes who practically worshipped Voldemort. It’s not even that they were particularly attached to each other; what they really wanted was to suck up to the Dark Lord, and yet they’re fan favourites for reasons I genuinely don’t understand. Barty Crouch Jr., as an adult, spent an entire year teaching children while actively traumatising them and physically assaulting them, so I don’t really understand the double standard there. So when a Snape fan sees someone viciously bashing Snape while simultaneously being a huge Barty Crouch Jr. fan, there’s obviously a pretty significant degree of cognitive dissonance.

What Snape fans often see is this: the upper-class man from a respectable family, with political connections and social privilege, becomes a fan favourite. Meanwhile, the man who grew up in extreme poverty, who lived in what was essentially a slum, who couldn’t even afford proper clothes because his family couldn’t buy them and had to wear his mother’s old things, and who isn’t conventionally attractive, is the one who receives all the hatred. So why are you taking this personally when I never attacked you in the first place? I told you how the situation tends to work and why people react the way they do.

That being said, it’s very interesting how triggered people seem to get by the word classism. Could it be because we’re culturally and socially conditioned to overlook the actions of elites, but not those of people who have been socialised as marginalised? Could it be that the fact your favourites are canonically privileged, upper-class characters actually has quite a lot to do with the way society conditions us to be inherently classist unless we make a conscious effort to deconstruct those biases?

Nobody is asking you to like a character. But it would be nice if people stopped pretending that the reason they like certain “villains” has nothing to do with the fact that those characters aren’t poor or unattractive. The fact that the poor, unattractive character either repulses you or leaves you completely indifferent isn’t some random coincidence.

The point of his character is that you're not SUPPOSED to like him until you finally put the pieces together and realize he's the good guy. The point of his character is to acknowledge his wrongs as much as his rights and love him for that. For his growth and development.

I love him so much. I love his flaws and I love how he grew from his past.

it never clicked in my brain that that’s what he is - a twist Hero. Because you only ever see that applied to a twist villain. In fact, in all the media I’ve consumed, Snape is probably the only twist hero I’ve ever seen. Not a bad guy that has character development over the series and turns out good by the end. A guy that you hated right along with the main character up until it was suddenly revealed that he was working WITH the mf all along. And then the pieces all fall into place.

The point of his character is that you're not SUPPOSED to like him until you finally put the pieces together and realize he's the good guy. The point of his character is to acknowledge his wrongs as much as his rights and love him for that. For his growth and development.

I love him so much. I love his flaws and I love how he grew from his past.

But I find that supposed moral superiority some of you have really out of place, the kind where you go, “I love Snape but I don’t deny the bad things he did.” I don’t know, Mariana, but HONESTLY, I don’t think he did anything wrong. A lot of characters i love and enjoy a lot did very very terrible things, Severus is an angel if you compare.

Intention ≠ actions.

You may think he's a saint compared to other characters you've seen, sure. But I don't care about comparing him to other characters.

We clearly have different views on complexity and morality of characters and I won't engage any further with you. You can analyze my interpretations without attacking my character because you know nothing about my morals and nothing about me. I respect your points of view and what you had to add to the conversation. But what I don't tolerate is that you're implying my views are inferior to yours or like I'm stupid because you have more knowledge of media than I do, its disrespectful.

So I don’t know what this person thinks an incel is, maybe to them it just means a man who respects your decisions, because let’s remember that when Lily tells him she doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore, Snape accepts it and leaves her alone. So maybe this person thinks incels are just men who respect boundaries.

On top of that, besides telling them it’s pretty bad to just make things up like that, it’s also pretty shitty to talk about someone’s personal hygiene as an insult, because there can be many reasons why someone struggles with hygiene. For example, they might come from an environment where they weren’t taught good habits because there weren’t resources like Snape, who is canonically poor. People seem to forget that Snape is canonically poor and even wore women’s clothing because it was his mother’s and they had nothing else. It could also be due to mental health issues. And it’s pretty ironic, because this person talks a lot on their Tumblr about mental health and how important it is. Sure, but then you go and use poor hygiene as an insult, when you should know that people with mental health issues or neurodivergence often neglect hygiene during episodes.

Anyway, after pointing all this out to them, and also telling them it’s a bit hypocritical to claim they care about queer issues while basically just taking attractive rich boys and turning them into twinks so they can hook up with each other, and after pointing out how cynical and hypocritical that is we ended up saying that the way they expressed themselves was pretty sad. And after all that, instead of responding to the arguments from everyone involved, this person just blocked all of us, because clearly they had no arguments left.

The question I always have about these people—the ones who show up on a post and start saying all this nonsense—is: why do they block afterwards? Like, I’m the first one to reblog something and tell the person who wrote it that what they said is complete bullshit and that they can fuck off. But I never, ever block anyone. Because if I go looking for a fight, I deal with the consequences.

Okay, this is gonna be so fucking long lmao.

The thing with Sirius is that, on one hand, I’m not going to talk about fandom Sirius, because fandom Sirius, for me, isn’t really Sirius Black. What they’ve done with him is basically a teenage fantasy from some low-budget Netflix-style series for Gen Z. So I don’t consider that to be Sirius Black. The Sirius Black who’s 1.70 m, skinny, wears crop tops, and acts like a 2010 Justin Bieber fangirl, that’s not Sirius Black, that’s something they invented, it doesn’t fit canon.

So I’m going to focus on canon Sirius, the Sirius Black in the books. Even people who claim to be fans of canon Sirius, who say all their theories, metas, and headcanons are based on the real Sirius—the one we see in the books—I still deeply disagree with what they say. They have a very idealized idea of him. Even fans of canon Sirius, who are aware of his flaws, still see him as the classic romantic rebel: the teen who grows up in a very conservative, right-wing family, rebels against the family’s establishment and the status quo, leaves home, gets a motorcycle, seeks freedom, joins a countercultural or political movement, fights for liberty and justice, basically the archetype rebel fantasy. And people forget that Sirius isn’t interesting because of that.

Sirius isn’t interesting because he’s the archetypal rebellious teen who rejects his conservative parents and seeks freedom. He’s interesting —and tragic— because, no matter how hard he tries not to resemble his family, no matter how much he tries to do the opposite of what his family would do, and no matter how much he positions himself at the polar opposite of his family’s ideology, he ends up reproducing the exact same archetypes he was taught. You can’t just run away from your family and be free. If you want to truly unlearn all the toxic dynamics, behaviors, and ways of reacting instilled by your family, you have to work on yourself. And the first step is accepting that you are your parents’ child, a product of where you grew up.

Sirius constantly demonstrates this. He treats Severus terribly, just as Bellatrix might. What’s the difference between Bellatrix and Sirius? Bellatrix doesn’t try to kill Severus, but her contempt and lack of respect toward him is exactly the same as Sirius’s. Her disrespect toward house-elves is the same as Sirius’s toward Kreacher. The ferocity with which Bellatrix despises “the other”—whether political enemy or personal adversary—is mirrored in how Sirius despises others in his social circle. He’s a reflection of his family and upbringing.

Yes, he might exist on a different political spectrum, which is why people find him “cool,” but all the attitudes he learned from his mother, he never deconstructed. He’s still classist. He knows that despising Muggle-borns is wrong, so he redirects his discrimination toward other targets acceptable in his social environment. But he hasn’t actually worked on himself. The years of therapy required for someone raised in Sirius’s environment to deconstruct all those attitudes would be enormous. That’s a huge part of his tragedy.

He sees himself as a hero. He has a big image of himself, he sees himself as a rock star in his youth, pre-Azkaban, because leaving the family wasn’t just an act; it was a way to defy his mother. His whole problem with his family comes from his relationship with his mother. At his core, he isn’t rebelling against family ideals, he’s rebelling against his mother’s ideals. He has a toxic, dysfunctional dependence on her, which resonates later when he’s locked in the family house for a year, drinking in her room. Why her room and not any other? There must have been empty rooms, but he chooses hers, and even imagines a hippo in there destroying things while he drinks and cries.

His mother’s authority haunts him his entire life. He tries not to be like her, but he ends up behaving similarly. She would behave this way toward a muggle, he behaves that way toward other people. Many people miss this, and as a result, they overlook the most interesting aspect of his character. I wouldn’t call him a hypocrite, because he isn’t aware of it. He thinks he’s doing everything right, but in reality, he’s just a rich kid from a very conservative family, raised to believe he’s superior, where violence and even sadism were normalized, and Sirius internalizes that.

Normalizing a near-homicidal attack on a classmate just because he dislikes them? Normalized violence. Constantly assaulting students at school? Normalized violence and sadism, clearly inherited from his family. Many of his behaviors are reflections of the Black family’s attitudes. He’s on a different political spectrum, but the thing is, not understanding that aspect of Sirius seems to me like leaving out a huge part of his character, and I think it’s a waste of hours and hours of analysis on a character, starting from a premise that I consider wrong and very superficial, honestly. Because I think it’s way more interesting to analyze Sirius not as a victim of trauma just because his mommy yelled at him or hit him. First of all, we don’t even know that his mother hit him, there’s no evidence that Walburga was a physically abusive person. That’s totally a fandom invention. And also, we don’t have clear knowledge that he was abused in his home. What we know is that he and his mom had a very dysfunctional relationship.

To me, simply reducing Sirius to “he was abused at home, escaped, became a hero because his family was awful, they were all right-wing racists, rich aristocrats, horrible and evil” and that’s why we admire him— girl, why are people so basic? Why are people so naïve? Why are they so bland? Do you see what I mean? Why do people simplify the narrative so much?

You have a character with a toxic attachment to his maternal figure, which also shows in how he interacts with women in the series and how women perceive him. Remember that both Molly and Hermione judge him very harshly. Hermione is essentially Rowling’s voice in the narrative, and we know that for Rowling, Molly is the ideal mother who cares for her children. So narratively, Rowling is telling us, “This is what she thinks of Sirius.”

The fact that Bellatrix—a woman—is the one who kills him, and that the female figures he interacts with always have some conflict with him, fits perfectly with the theme of his problems with his mother. The fact that both he and his mother have such strong personalities aligns with why their confrontations were so intense and why he eventually leaves home. It also fits with his absolute rejection of everything social, ideological, and economic tied to his mother. But rejecting those things doesn’t mean he stops being her son, doesn’t mean he stops being part of his family, and doesn’t mean he ever worked on himself to deconstruct the attitudes he inherited during his childhood. Attitudes that are classist, violent, normalize problematic behavior, and ethically questionable.

It’s not that Sirius is irresponsible, it’s that he’s used to doing whatever he wants because he grew up in a family that believed they were above others. They could do whatever they wanted, however they wanted. This is also seen in Bellatrix. So discarding all these factors about Sirius takes away… a lot of what makes his character interesting.

I don’t usually talk about him much, because he’s not in my top 10 favorite characters to discuss (also don’t a problem to do anyways it’s interesting to analyze) but he’s a character I analyzed a lot back in the day because he reminded me of people I’ve known; people from extremely conservative, religiously strict, messed-up families. People from politically far-right families who rebelled against their parents by adopting a completely opposite ideology: leftist politics, unions, activism. I’ve been very involved in grassroots politics, not online politics, but in associations and field politics, and I’ve met many “Sirius Blacks” in real life. They had good intentions, but then you’d go to a bar with them and if the bartender was slow, they’d treat the bartender like trash, because that’s how they were raised to see service. Just like Sirius does with Kreacher: “service is service.”

I found that to be a fascinating reflection of how these kids from oppressive, conservative families behave: they rebel against their parents by adopting the opposite ideology, but without deconstructing the values they were taught, so they always end up being the same archetype. That’s what interested me the most.