snape is a feral little man

I have been planning to make a “masterpost” about this topic for a long time, but without having the books in front of me I’ll just list a few things that come to my mind, without a specific order, but I’m trying to start with young Severus.

His speech patterns: As a child/teen/young adult he can barely string a coherent sentence together. Doesn’t have to be an autistic thing, but it’s common. Adult Snape speaks very eloquently, almost to the point that it seems scripted. He gets annoyed when Harry interrupts him, which could just mean that he hates that Harry doesn’t respect him – or maybe he loses his train of thought otherwise. He also speaks in “barely more than a whisper”. Controlling the volume of our voice can be really difficult, we often either talk to quietly or too loud.

Snape’s Worst Memory, especially re: the Defense Against the Dark Arts exam. The Dark Arts can easily be read as Severus’ special interest (along with potions, perhaps). He wrote more than any of the other students, he is completely engaged with that task, his nose an inch from the parchment, and even afterwards he is still engulfed with his paper. He is absolutely obsessed, doesn’t even pay attention to his surroundings (well, until… Potter and Black).

(Also note the way adult Sev talks about the Dark Arts, he absolutely Loves that shit! What a nerd!)

Then we have the way he walks as a teenager: angular yet round-shouldered, twitchy like a spider. Autistic people can have an untypical gait. (Seems like another thing he consciously trained himself out of as an adult, again in a way that also seems a bit artificial almost. Adult Snape still walks weird, but “cool” weird.)

And we can see that he is an unpopular kid. Am I to believe that his peers hated him because they just knew he was an aspiring soon-to-be Death Eater? They just saw that he was a weirdo kid (almost exactly how Sirius describes him in GoF), an easy target, dude clearly doesn’t fit in (doesn’t want to? doesn’t know how?). Which was probably partly due to his apparrent:

poor hygiene. Executive Function issues can make maintaining proper hygiene difficult for us. Even in adulthood he still seems to struggle with it. There can be other explanations for his greasy hair, maybe he’s just like that, but maybe he just… “forgets” to do it. Maybe other things are more interesting. (I believe Rowling once said he “valued other things in him” or something along the lines.)

It also seems he struggled with social cues and misreading signals. Lily was clearly unhappy with him when they discussed their friendship, and Mulciber and Potter, but it seems he didn’t really care, vocal reassurance was enough for him to believe things were fine. Adult Sev doesn’t seem to comprehend that potions is hard for some, instead seems to genuinely believe that Neville is just an idiot boy who wants to make his life more difficult. Zero patience. He knows his craft very well but seems bad at teaching others.

He likes to keep the light in his dungeons very low, and when he moves to the DADA classroom he kept the sunlight out and used candles instead. It’s possible that’s just his aesthetic and part of his grumpy personality – but it could also be that he is very light sensitive. Maybe that’s also why he wears billowing robes: he could be sensitive to touch as well and tight fabrics can be very uncomfortable.

His outburst at the end of PoA is often read as him throwing a tantrum, snapping because he “didn’t get his way”, but it alo could be a legit meltdown. Dude had so much going on that year that at some point… well, it just has to get out somehow lol. I do know that a meltdown can look that ugly for me when I’ve been in a lot of emotional turmoil.

Tbh, his whole fixation on Lily is also so… typical. And people who don’t know better could call that “creepy” even though there isn’t typically malevolent intent behind it. It can be hard not to be like an excited loyal puppy when we meet someone who is nice to us, who is A Friend! Friend! And then he doesn’t let go? Ever? Absolute mood.

For me the greatest indicator that Rowling subconciously added autistic traits for him (I don’t think it was actually intentional) is the fact that John Nettleship, the person that served as inspiration for Severus, most likely had Asperger Syndrome.

I am likely forgetting some things here, but this is roughly it. I personally can only read Severus as autistic. And it doesn’t change anything about his character, just explains where some things are coming from. But of course there could always be other explanations for his traits and behaviour.

There was a long silence, broken only by an odd clicking noise. Fawkes the phoenix was gnawing a bit of cuttlebone.

“Would you like me to do it now?” asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. “Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?”

The Marauders weren’t social justice warriors, and James and Sirius, in particular, embodied the classic values of male success through the performance of stereotypical “macho” characteristics: as leaders, as “alphas” of the pack. Both are violent; both are cocky men who try to stand out and mark their territory. Both exhibit behaviors that have typically been excused in men just because they are men, such as abusive and reckless behavior. Their nickname for Severus stems from the idea that showing emotions—especially crying—if you are a man, is a reason for ridicule and mockery because men don’t cry. Men are supposed to be strong, puff out their chests, and keep going because that’s what men do. It’s a misogynistic and archaic mindset that continues to be perpetuated in social models and relationships to this day. And I find it incredibly hypocritical that certain people who claim to hate J.K. Rowling for being a transphobe then go on to appropriate the horribly sexist nicknames she created for a group of heterosexual men embodying toxic masculinity to bully another man for not performing the traditional masculine model expected of someone like him.

Because Severus wasn’t a “macho”. Severus was a studious introvert with a more passive character who didn’t fit into the masculine vision of the time. Everything about him, including his appearance, demeanor, and interests, is unmasculine from a hegemonic perspective given the historical context. But these people don’t care. They’re so limited, so ignorant, and so cynical that they not only ignore these kinds of nuances but even find it funny to reproduce insults that any real-life James Potter would probably have used against them.