#snaters

It’s astonishing how casually they erase the violence he endured in his formative years—systematic bullying, public humiliation, attempted murder—and somehow believe it’s justified or irrelevant just because he grew into a bitter, emotionally damaged adult. As if that personality came out of nowhere. As if social isolation, poverty, neglect, and abuse don’t leave a mark.

And what’s worse is that these same people will turn around and offer endless compassion to other characters whose traumas are more palatable to them. The fandom bends over backwards to defend their favourites, but when it comes to Severus, suddenly trauma doesn’t matter. Suddenly it’s all his fault.

This isn’t just about character interpretation, it reflects a broader issue in how society treats trauma survivors, especially those who are lower class, emotionally repressed, or don’t perform their pain in a way that’s comfortable to others. Severus was a working-class kid in a hostile environment, with no safety net, no support system, and no institutional protection. And to this day, people are still blaming him for how he turned out, rather than the structures and individuals that failed him and harmed him in the first place.

First of all, I’m the first person to say that comparing the Death Eaters to Nazis is politically inaccurate and honestly kind of lazy. The structure of Voldemort’s movement is not equivalent to historical fascism in the classical sense. Fascist movements like Nazism relied on mass propaganda, populist rhetoric, appealing to the working class, mobilising huge portions of the population through nationalist discourse, fearmongering and social alienation. Voldemort does not do that. Voldemort recruits primarily through aristocratic blood supremacy networks and old-money elitism. It’s a cult-like supremacist inner circle, not a mass political party built around public mobilisation.

But even putting that aside entirely, what genuinely blows my mind is how people talk about Severus joining the Death Eaters as if he was some fully formed 35-year-old man with a stable support system, financial security and emotional maturity making calculated ideological decisions. He was seventeen. Seventeen. Poor. Isolated. Abused. Socially alienated. Raised in violence. Repeatedly humiliated. Surrounded by people who either enabled his abuse or directly participated in it. And the only group offering him protection, belonging, validation and power was a radicalised extremist circle. And people act shocked that he got recruited?

I’m sorry, but some of you desperately need to leave fandom spaces and interact with actual human beings. Because in the real world, vulnerable teenagers get radicalised all the time. Into cults. Into gangs. Into extremist politics. Into abusive religious groups. Into criminal organisations. That’s literally how recruitment works. You target vulnerable people who have unmet emotional needs and no stable support systems.

And what makes this discourse even more exhausting is how deeply classist it is. Because let’s be honest here: if Severus had been a rich traumatised aristocratic boy from a respected family, half of fandom would be writing 800k redemption arcs about his “complexity.” But because he’s poor, socially awkward, visibly traumatised and emotionally dysregulated, people reduce him to “evil incel nazi.” Which is funny coming from fandom spaces that constantly scream about mental health awareness, trauma, neurodivergence and social justice until the traumatised person is unpleasant, angry, difficult or comes from a background they subconsciously look down on.

Because here’s the thing people don’t like admitting: trauma victims are not always nice. They are not always soft. They are not always emotionally articulate. They are not always healthy. Sometimes they’re bitter. Defensive. Volatile. Socially maladjusted. Hypervigilant. Sometimes they lash out. Sometimes they become deeply unlikeable before they heal , if they ever heal at all.

And Severus never got the chance to heal.

Some of you genuinely talk about a heavily traumatised, abused teenager recruited into extremism the same way conservatives talk about poor kids getting recruited into gangs: with zero structural analysis, zero empathy and zero understanding of how human vulnerability actually functions.

And yes, people can change. This is another thing fandom spaces seem incapable of understanding. Human beings are not static moral caricatures. I’m nearly thirty. I have met people who left cults. People who left extremist political groups. People who escaped abusive ideologies. People who were raised in deeply reactionary environments and later completely changed as adults. That happens constantly in real life. But apparently fandom morality has become so puritanical and chronically online that some of you think a person should be permanently defined by the worst thing they were manipulated into at seventeen, even if the rest of their life is spent trying to atone for it.

And honestly? A lot of this discourse reeks of people who have never interacted meaningfully with anyone outside their own social bubble. Because if you actually work with vulnerable people, poor communities, abuse victims, former addicts, ex-prisoners, traumatised individuals or radicalisation survivors, your perspective becomes a lot less simplistic very quickly. But instead fandom spaces are full of people who claim to care about nuance, rehabilitation, trauma and systemic violence while simultaneously reducing a traumatised abuse victim to a one-dimensional moral failure because he wasn’t “nice enough” about his suffering.

but what are we?

Like, it honestly blows my mind that there are “Snape fans” who hate the Marauders — especially James Potter — yet still read,write,support James/Snape, Lupin/Snape, Sirius/Snape, and all that. It’s DISGUSTING to call yourself a Snape fan, constantly drag the Marauders, talk endless shit about them, and then turn around and show your pathetic hypocrisy by shipping Snape with them.

I don’t care if you ship Snape with the Marauders as long as you’re actually a Snape fan who also likes the Marauders — or at least doesn’t actively hate them. But hating on the Marauders (acting like they’re the only demons in this world), while simultaneously reading fics about Snape getting railed by James? That’s just peak stupidity. At the very least, try being consistent.

Saying stuff like "The world doesn't revolve around your pussy," "Are you sure things are alright at home?" Or, "and that's why your dick is small," are all cruel and inappropriate. These are from two separate people, two from a Snape lover and one From a Snater.

I understand being upset, but online, these are never okay to say. These are sexual comments, whether you like it or not, or one of them is simply mean. Because truly, what if that person isn't okay at home? Or what if that person has trauma related to their body? What if they were assaulted, harassed, or struggled with their body image? That's mean. I don't care how childish that sounds, you're being mean. No one likes meanies, and if you do, you're also probably a meanie. Don't be a bully.

I'm not even talking about those in the Marauders fandom, just people who hate Snape in general. It's like liking Snape is a personal insult to them. Especially on tiktok, there's always at least one person under any Snape post going "WELL ACKTULLAY-" about something we know Snape did (and it's usually completely skewed to make Snape look bad, instead of looking at the situation from his pov too and realising that actually, he's making a rather reasonable decision for someone in his place, especially when it comes to his teaching). Do they think we exclusively read fanfiction or something? Of course we know what his flaws were, and I love him more for them.

But in all seriousness, when did don't like, don't read stop being a thing?

I feel like maybe the Marauders fandom and just the HP one in general might be some of these kids' first fandom, hence the lack of etiquette (someone, under a video bashing on someone else's Tomarry video about WHY they enjoy that ship, said they expected to see vile comments hating on it and were disgusted that nobody did. That's insane). But also, I don't quite buy that nonsense. My first fandom was the MLP one, way back when I was like 10, maybe 11. I definitely ended up reading weird things (and okay, actively seeking out the weird too), but if I saw something I didn't like, guess what? I simply ignored it and went about my day, even before I learnt "Don't like, don't read" (incidentally, I think I learnt that phrase from seeing it on fanfiction introductions).

And I just keep seeing these kids commenting all these hateful, puritanical nonsense, and I just don't get it. Where does that come from? Maybe I was the exception as a kid but it's just baffling to me. And it's worse when I see people close to my own age doing it (albeit I'm only 21 so I'm not that old) because it's just so childish.

Whenever I see hate about Snape's love for Lily, I can't help but think people actually never experienced love. 

I've lost someone I loved with everything I was for 11 years, and yet we never happened to have a romantic relationship. It's been about 9 years now since their passing. I kid you not that if their child (whom would've been conceived with someone I despised) got in my care in any way or form, I'd care for the damn kid.