Lets go with snumbledore, (snape really has a weakness for powerful men + redheads)
this is so true and real, anon.
i’m weirdly into snumbledore, because i think it’s really one of the best ships - and, really, probably one of the only ships - which can show dumbledore actually doing some self growth.
because, obviously, it starts out with the potential for horror baked into it. snape and dumbledore have a vast power imbalance at pretty much all points of their acquaintance, and would even without the fact that dumbledore is the one person who keeps snape out of azkaban and who uses that fact to leverage control over him in the mission against voldemort. the age gap is colossal. dumbledore sends snape out to potentially die every time he goes off to voldemort, which requires him to have a certain detachment from snape as a real person.
and - and this is the crucial one - dumbledore’s recognition of himself in snape is pure self-loathing - "you disgust me" - which manifests itself as punishment [dumbledore allowing snape to be humiliated in front of his fellow teachers in philosopher’s stone - as quirrell says about snape’s decision to referee a quidditch match which dumbledore attends anyway, rendering quirrell too afraid to try any funny business - and fudge in prisoner of azkaban; not stopping the presumed-to-be-real moody searching his office in goblet of fire; making him give harry occlumency lessons in order of the phoenix, even though he undoubtedly realises that they will be disastrous; and not letting him teach defence against the dark arts] externalised against snape as a way for dumbledore to soothe his desire to punish himself.
but then this stops in the hazy couple of weeks between the end of order of the phoenix and the beginning of half-blood prince, when snape saves dumbledore’s life after he puts on the ring-horcrux and then does the agonisingly brave thing of agreeing to kill him once it’s no longer possible to contain the curse, and their dynamic equalises.
it’s always really striking in half-blood prince that dumbledore is completely over harry’s sniping about snape - in the earlier books he has admonished him for not using snape’s title, but otherwise looked the other way when harry complains about him, but in half-blood prince he straight-up tells him to shut up. [he also, strikingly, very nearly gives the game away and confesses why snape switched sides - the one thing, as we discover in deathly hallows, which he promised not to do - when harry finds out towards the conclusion of half-blood prince that it was snape who reported the prophecy to voldemort.]
dumbledore coming to recognise that snape - whatever his other faults - is brave, loyal, steadfast, and trustworthy [hence why he lets him teach defence against the dark arts in half-blood prince - he no longer fears what snape’s intellectual interest in dark magic may lead to] is sincerely the most profound example in the series of dumbledore - who tends to pick a view of a person and stick to it, as the eleven-year-old tom riddle can attest - realising that his initial judgement of somebody was mistaken.
[as an aside, i think that this is the implication behind the "we sort too soon" line, shown in deathly hallows and spoken by dumbledore to snape in harry’s fourth year. i’m not the biggest fan of this - i hate the implication that snape displaying an admirable trait like courage would mean that he wasn’t a real slytherin, that house can be understood positively too! - but i do recognise that it’s supposed to be interpreted as the beginning of dumbledore coming to understand who snape actually is.]
and within an equalised dynamic, snape and dumbledore are actually very well matched. they’re intellectual equals, they both have a shared experience of guilt and grief, they both had difficult childhoods, their aesthetic senses are charmingly divergent, snape being so emotionally feral is good for someone as emotionally repressed as dumbledore, and so on.
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