#romanstatues

I like your Snape reading quite a lot. I dislike the fanfic Snapes that turn him all monster or all misunderstood hero. He’s a bad guy, bigoted and awful, and some of that was his choosing, and some of it wasn’t.

Exactly, yes. I am also super intrigued by the way that Lily is pretty clearly coded as middle class, and the way Snape is written as working/lower class, and then how James is clearly upper class.

Also the way the narrative regards Hagrid and the Weasleys, who are similarly coded as quite poor but not of poverty, and Snape, who clearly has that in his background. I think it ties back to JK and how she was writing from a place of being broke but not poor, but I'm too tired to articulate it all now.

Basically, I am really interested in class and Harry Potter.

fuckyeahdiomedes replied to your post: 

I remember one fic that had someone trying to figure out whose side Snape was actually on and he said that he was on the side of all the innocents who were going to get caught in the crossfire

...that strikes me as a little implausible. I am definitely pro-Deepening Snape's Characterization, but also he is a fundamentally selfish, ambitious character. I mean, this is the guy whose unrequited crush had to die before he realized being a magic nazi was a bad idea. I'm still not convinced he's renounced his anti-Muggle prejudice, he's just...more into getting revenge on Voldemort.

(Then again, I'm not sure he's anti-Muggle so much as really arrogant. You have to ~deserve his respect and Muggles like his father and his grammar school classmates--oh yeah, Snape would have gone to state school--aren't worthy. Also, he's an angry douche.)

Unless the line is meant to show how self-deluded Snape is? Because anyone who can spend 20+ years in love with a woman who has refused to speak to you and then whose death you caused is probs not seeing the world as it is. I do like the headcanon that Snape sees himself as a kind of angry young man outcast-type, who's very innovative and no one really understands because he's too clever and thoughtful for them.

The thing is, it would have been really easy to fix a lot of the Wizarding World’s gaps by having crossover with the Muggle world. It’s the forced separation that makes it so unbelievable, and it’s not like dominant cultures don’t steal things from other cultures and then quietly erase the face that those things originated elsewhere. You could have still had the Pureblood narrative! Just…with trade between the two cultures.

Anyway.