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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.

So, do we accept that Sirius is very prone to relationships with a certain homoerotic subtext? Absolutely, like, yes. In fact, aside from Lily (which makes sense because she’s James’s girlfriend, and that gives her a kind of status validated by a man), he clashes constantly with most women he interacts with, especially when they try to exercise authority over him. For example, Molly can be annoying and overbearing, but she does have a point when she tries to call Sirius out on his behaviour, and he immediately gets defensive. Which isn’t random; Molly is a maternal figure, and Sirius hates his mother and rejects that kind of authority as a personal challenge. Hermione doesn’t confront him directly, but she does through Harry, and Bellatrix is the one who ultimately kills him. With men, he seems to have better relationships even at his worst moments; more understanding, and more awareness of male authority figures. If we leave Peter aside for obvious reasons, the only one he refuses to acknowledge as someone worthy of respect is Snape, who, ironically, tends to have a bigger issue with male figures (since they were the source of his trauma and the violence he endured) than with women, with whom he generally has more stable or at least more cordial relationships. Which reinforces that dynamic between the two of them as constant mirrors of each other under inverted circumstances, a dynamic that, in my opinion, the fandom barely explores.

But going back to the point: yes, Sirius lends himself to dynamics with strong homoerotic subtext in general, but he’s also an extremely obsessive and neurotic person, especially after Azkaban. His attachments, whether functional or dysfunctional, are very much rooted in obsession. He’s obsessed with James (and obsession isn’t necessarily negative, people often give it that connotation in a reductive way, but it’s common in people with neurotic traits and isn’t inherently bad), and his entire teenage world revolves around him to the point that he runs away and lives with James’s family for years. That obsession expands to everything connected to James: he becomes close to Lily by association, and later pours all that attachment into Harry, whom he struggles to separate from his father.

He’s obsessed with proving he’s not like his family, and his whole personality is built around being and doing everything his mother would have hated, almost to the point of feeling performative, because he still shows unaddressed Black family traits, especially in how he treats people socially “beneath” him. He has a dysfunctional, almost Oedipal fixation on his mother, reflected in how—despite having a huge house with plenty of rooms, including his own—he chooses to lock himself in her bedroom, the one he supposedly hates, haunted for a year by her screaming portrait like a constant echo he tries to escape but keeps physically returning to.

And he has an unhealthy obsession with Severus, whom he continues to pursue metaphorically even 20 years after bullying him and literally chasing him like a predator, almost getting him killed because he thought it would be funny.

The thing is, Sirius never shows any obsession whatsoever with Remus Lupin, quite the opposite. For a character so driven by pathos, impulses, and obsessions, people tend to ship him with someone he barely pays attention to, someone he never sees as an object of interest (positive or negative), but rather as a tool to reach his actual goals. Remus is collateral in Sirius’s life, always secondary. He was an excuse to act out once a month and go on adventures WITH JAMES. A tool to hurt SNAPE. And only becomes part of his emotional support circle when he has no one else left, when he’s trapped in his parents’ house and everyone else is dead. And even then, during that time, if he’s not constantly thinking about Harry, or obsessively arguing with his mother’s portrait, or drinking in her bedroom remembering his dead best friend/homoerotic obsession, all his attention goes to the moments when Snape shows up and he can take a jab at him like he’s back to being the king of rebellious schoolboys in 1976.

It's probably because Sirius himself completely and utterly rejects his class/status. We never see him explicitly take advantage of it for his own benefit. When we see him in canon era (poa-ootp), he literally has nothing. No money, Azkaban/old clothes, no shelter (aside from Grimmauld that he hates). He's not some rich asshole persecuting the poor. His life post age 21 isn't privileged, it's tragic.

Pre-15, it's implied that his family isn't the best - verbal abuse at the least + favoritism from Kreacher who was a caretaker of sorts. Not all fans interpret Walburga that way. Personally idk if there's enough evidence to say if there was physical abuse, but the shit that Walburga yells makes it pretty clear and undeniable that there was verbal abuse and the household was a toxic situation for him, with all of them being blood purists. Either way any type of abuse - even verbal - is abuse. And for some reason the majority of people are allergic to understanding that rich women can abuse their rich sons just as poor fathers can abuse their poor sons, and both leave lasting effects.

Why are Snape stans so ready to dismiss how shitty Snape treats the Gryffindors - Hermione, Neville and Harry in particular as a 30+ year old man and adult in a position of authority, and so condemning with literally teenagers under 17?

Rejecting your class does not magically erase your class privilege, and this is where your whole argument falls apart from the start. Class is not an aesthetic identity you can opt out of because you disagree with your family. It is a material condition and, more importantly, a process of socialisation. Sirius was raised as an aristocrat in a supremacist household. That doesn’t just disappear because he runs away at sixteen.

What that upbringing gives you is not just money, it gives you a way of moving through the world. A sense of entitlement, a normalisation of hierarchy, and very importantly in Sirius’s case: a normalisation of violence and domination over others. And we see that constantly in his behaviour. His treatment of Severus as a teenager is not just “kids being mean”, it crosses into cruelty and sadism. You don’t “accidentally” orchestrate a situation where someone could be killed by a werewolf as a joke unless you have been raised in an environment where other people’s lives are disposable. That is learned behaviour.

And no, he does not “have nothing”. That is simply not true. Harry inherits not only Grimmauld Place but also a significant amount of money from Sirius, which we are told comes in part from his uncle Alphard. Sirius has wealth. Sirius has assets. Sirius has a safety net. The fact that he is traumatised or that he spent time in prison does not negate that.

Because this is another fundamental issue: trauma does not cancel privilege. You can be traumatised and still be privileged. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. A person with a house, inheritance, and access to elite social networks is still privileged, even if their life is tragic. The idea that suffering somehow “levels” class differences is, frankly, a very bourgeois fantasy.

And also, classism is not defined by whether you are “persecuting the poor” in some overt, cartoonish way. That’s not how it works. Classism is expressed through everyday behaviours, through assumptions of superiority, through how you treat people you perceive as beneath you. Thinking you have the right to endanger someone’s life for your own amusement is classism. Treating a servant with contempt is classism. These things do not require you to be standing on a soapbox shouting “I hate poor people”.

“Pre-15, it's implied that his family isn't the best - verbal abuse at the least + favoritism from Kreacher who was a caretaker of sorts. Not all fans interpret Walburga that way. Personally idk if there's enough evidence to say if there was physical abuse, but the shit that Walburga yells makes it pretty clear and undeniable that there was verbal abuse and the household was a toxic situation for him, with all of them being blood purists. Either way any type of abuse - even verbal - is abuse. And for some reason the majority of people are allergic to understanding that rich women can abuse their rich sons just as poor fathers can abuse their poor sons, and both leave lasting effects.”

No one is denying that the Black household was toxic or that Walburga was verbally abusive. Abuse is abuse, and it leaves marks regardless of class. But what your argument does is flatten two completely different material realities into the same category, and that’s where it becomes deeply misleading.

Growing up in an abusive wealthy household is not the same as growing up in poverty with no resources, no support system, and no way out. Those conditions shape not only your suffering, but your options. Sirius, when he leaves, does not fall into precarity. He goes straight into another wealthy, well-connected household. He remains within the same class bracket, with the same level of social capital and protection. He is not cut off from opportunity, he is not exposed to material instability, and he does not lose his access to networks of power.

That matters, because class is not just about money in your pocket at a given moment, it is about the structures that catch you when you fall. Sirius has those structures. Severus does not.

And that difference is reflected very clearly in how both of them function at Hogwarts. Sirius is socially successful, popular, integrated into a strong peer group, and occupies a position of dominance within the school’s social hierarchy. He is not just surviving: he is thriving to the point where he can exert power over others without consequence. That is why he is able to become an abuser himself. That capacity to harm others without losing status is not incidental; it is directly tied to his position.

Severus, on the other hand, exists in the exact opposite conditions. He is poor, isolated, already being abused at home, and completely lacking any meaningful support network. He is not in a position to exercise power: he is in a position where he is consistently on the receiving end of it. So when you try to draw a parallel between the two, what you are actually doing is erasing the role that class and material conditions play in shaping both vulnerability and agency. These are not comparable experiences, not even remotely.

“Why are Snape stans so ready to dismiss how shitty Snape treats the Gryffindors - Hermione, Neville and Harry in particular as a 30+ year old man and adult in a position of authority, and so condemning with literally teenagers under 17? “

Because the comparison itself is flawed from the start. You are trying to equate two dynamics that operate on entirely different axes of power.

A teacher being harsh, biased, or even openly unpleasant is not the same as a group of socially dominant teenagers systematically targeting a poorer, socially isolated student over the course of years. One is an institutional dynamic that can be criticised within the framework of professional conduct. The other is sustained peer abuse reinforced by social hierarchy and lack of intervention.

And even within that, the way Snape is framed in the narrative complicates the picture further. He is not universally perceived as a bad teacher, Hermione, who is consistently positioned as intellectually reliable within the text, acknowledges his competence. More importantly, his role within the story is not limited to being “mean to Gryffindors”. He is actively, repeatedly, and at great personal risk working to keep those same students alive. He is operating under constant threat, maintaining a double role that requires him to perform hostility while simultaneously protecting them. That doesn’t make him kind, but it does fundamentally change the moral framework. You cannot isolate his unpleasantness from the context in which he is literally ensuring their survival year after year. Reducing him to “a mean teacher” while ignoring that is not analysis, it’s selective reading.

“How can yall just dismiss the 3 years he served Voldemort as him being "young/a child" - its very likely that he was murdering muggles/muggleborn students, or sitting by and watching others do it. As bad as the Maurader bullying was, being an adult death eater is a whole new level of worse.”

Because the text itself does not support the version of events you are implying. There is a tendency in fandom to fill in gaps with the worst possible assumptions, but canon gives us specific information that contradicts that reading.

We are explicitly shown that Snape fears for his soul when confronted with the act of killing. That fear only makes sense if he has not already crossed that line. If he had been routinely murdering people, the moral weight of that request would not be framed in the same way. Additionally, his function within the Death Eaters is consistently presented as that of a spy and informant, not an executioner. The narrative does not associate him with acts of direct violence in the way it does with other characters.

But even if you want to bring the discussion into the realm of war, then you have to be consistent about what that entails. The Order of the Phoenix is also engaged in a war, and war necessarily involves killing. That applies to Sirius, to James, to Lily, to Moody… none of them exist outside of that reality. War is not a morally clean space where one side is untouched by violence.

What your argument ultimately ignores, though, is the context in which Snape makes his choices. He is seventeen years old, coming from a background of poverty, isolation, and sustained abuse, with no support network and no viable alternatives. The Death Eaters, for all their ideology, are the only group offering him structure, belonging, and a sense of future. So when you ask why he didn’t choose differently, the question becomes: what were his actual options? Join the Order? Align himself with the same social group that humiliated him, endangered his life, and never once intervened to protect him? Trust authority figures who consistently failed to act on his behalf?

You are framing it as a moral choice made in a vacuum, when in reality it is a decision shaped by coercion, by exclusion, and by material conditions. Expecting a traumatised, isolated teenager to align himself with his abusers over the only group that offers him safety is not a reasonable expectation. It ignores how people actually behave under those circumstances. And this is where the broader issue comes in: your entire argument treats Sirius and Snape as if they are operating on equal footing, as if they have the same resources, the same support, and the same range of choices. They do not. One is a boy with wealth, social capital, and networks that protect him even when he leaves home. The other is a boy with none of those things.