Tag: murder

Developing Severus

██████ ▌ Holmes Speaks.

After crawling through the Severus Snape tag I uh. I feel the need to make a PSA or something here, cause wow. Boy howdy is my boy not fitting trope or canon; and here’s why. ( I knew he was off canon but I forgot how off? I need to reread the books, I forgot about half this stuff cause I turfed it and then blotted it from my memory or something, I don’t even know. )

I picked Severus up as a muse after Prisoner of Azkaban was released as a book. Meaning I had a lot of ideas set for who he was and how he behaved and what his family was like and what his friends were like before J.K. Rowling released GoF, OOTP, HBP and DH.

As each book was released, I altered things to fit. The names of Severus’ parents were shifted as were the names of his best friends to match canon information, but the vast majority of Severus’ childhood and school years were things I had set in stone prior to OOTP – DH and I had to work around canon information as it was brought to me. This has resulted in a FrankenSnape and I’m not even remotely apologetic for it — and I swear to Merlin’s striped pyjamas if I never see the term ‘Snape Apologist’ again it will be too soon. ( I can’t even deal with the vitriol in the tag omg. I forgot how much the fandom hated this dude. I forgot how much I shook my head at the canon dude, oops. )

The TL:DR version:

My Severus is a lot of bad and undesirable things but he’s not:

  • A child abuser  
  • Obsessive
  • Friendzoned
  • Ever going to throw anything in the direction of a student. Ever.
  • A misogynist ( He could be classified as a misandrist? )
  • Racist ( Canon Snape might not be either? IDK I’m mixed on that front; my Severus plays a phenomenal racist but in private moments and when he’s not in persona or around people he feels the need to impress he’s actually very disgusted with himself for what he has to perpetuate. I also saw a friendly reminder that canon!Snape told Phineus Black to shut up for calling Hermione a mudblood, when he was alone with the portrait and nobody could hear. I looked into it – this is indeed canon, not fanon, so there is that for the argument canon Snape grew out of his indoctrinated racism. To be blunt though, my Snape is not racist, but he did have racist ideas in his youth he has since overcome.  )

The Long Version: 

When I first started with Severus I had him set as a pureblood with a borderline supremacist father and a mother from a very liberal pro-Muggle and Muggleborn household. It was honestly my intention for Severus to stay morally gray and as more details came out his mother would be the ultimate influence behind most of his choices despite and because of her loss. While the addition of further information allowed me to expand on that there was an enormous discrepancy between my Severus and the canon, and that was how much of a dick to kids he was. 

Way back then, my arguments were that we only ever see Severus interacting with Harry’s class and we really have no idea what he’s like in other ones. What is more, he is a Head of House and that, traditionally speaking, means he is responsible for the overall wellbeing of a literal hoard of children and teenagers. ( I’ll be posting Head of House duties later but anyway ) Severus clearly had a passion for defending Slytherin and considering how openly biased against Slytherin the rest of the school was, I always considered that to be a very apt balance. 

Gryffindors were so pointedly favored that I honestly saw them as an allegory for privilege, and Slytherins an allegory for delinquency. As someone who came from a very privileged home and was brought up in a group home despite how ‘well off’ my family was, I saw a lot of things growing up that made me really admire Severus’ brutal manner of protest. When all you get is a whole lot of yes and a whole lot of you can get anything you want because you’re this it breeds its own dysfunction. When you’re presumed to be a certain way because of something beyond your reasonable control, that too breeds dysfunction. And I always loved how Severus seemed to recognize that and act as something of an unyielding countermeasure. As someone who believed in Slytherins and told Gryffindors no. 

I did feel he went kind of far sometimes but at that point in time my world wasn’t being bombarded with PC headlines and ideology. ( I was living in a goddamn group home PC did not freaking exist, lmfao. ) I just really liked the character and picked him up – and as things came out basically cherry picked what I liked and would say on whatever site I was on at the time in the spoiler thread ‘So this scene, this scene, this scene and this scene all stay. The rest can go hang, that’s NOT my Severus. I’ll edit my app / shipper later with new details’ and off I’d go and be done with it. 

As a result, my Severus will never be book or movie canon Snape. He just won’t ever fit that mold. Heck he would probably duel canon Snape on sheer principle alone. My Severus is a shit – he is a complete and utter asshole when and where it suits him, he has done monstrous things, and many of them he is not even apologetic for – but he is a very different shit from the canon shit. It’s an important distinction, trust me.

So let’s pin up my Severus against canon Snape:

My Severus is viciously protective of women and children. While tough in the classroom out of necessity, outside of it he is actually surprisingly supportive and approachable. For Slytherins this is a known fact from Day One in that castle, but some Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs and even Gryffindors are privy to the understanding over time and as need dictates. 

This stems from his pledges to himself and his reasons for accepting Head of House at the end of his first year of tenure at the school ( it is canon he was head by age of 21 and I do accept that ) as much as it does his own childhood, his sense of morality ( which while grey, has some firm stances that are never crossed ) and his determination to not be the man his father was. So while he will be a right mean son of a bitch in class, if he notices he went too far on a student he will make amends where it is possible. He never made amends with Harry’s group because of reasons related to subterfuge, but also he was never as downright ridiculous as he was in canon.   

Yet on the flip side of that seemingly shiny coin, he’d kill or torture a man in a heartbeat. Severus has no qualms attacking men and being downright devastatingly brutal about it. If he happens to find something in a man deplorable, Severus has a vindictive sense of internalized justice and just enough of a mean streak to act as accuser, punisher and executioner all in one. He enjoys a good fight now and then, and he takes genuine pleasure in seeing people he feels ‘deserve’ something, get it. 

Severus killed his own father when he was nineteen years old and he did not do it in a bloodless wizarding fashion. That murder was brutal and he’s proud of it. He felt justified in making his father take the abuse he meted out over years in the course of a single night. Severus is a fucked up cookie. I won’t lie. But he has his moral areas too. He won’t fight someone he feels does not deserve it. He will avoid the fight or deescalate it if he can. If he were to be profiled and hunted down for his crimes in the muggle world he would be considered a vigilante killer and a mercy killer depending on the situation. (Killing a man to spare him torture is something Severus was tortured over during the first war, and he doesn’t regret it. It was self preservation as much as it was moral preservation. If he helped them escape, he’d be a traitor to the Dark Lord. If he let them suffer horribly, he’d be a traitor to himself.) 

Severus is violent, will do what it takes to survive, and will take blame and violence upon himself if it means protecting someone he cares about. Severus has virtually no self value and is consistently working to prove himself to people who may in fact actually care about him. He perceives himself as an exceptionally useful tool and is happy to prove it. He never fully understood the concept of being cared about without gain or reason – to him if he couldn’t provide something, he wasn’t necessary. His mother and Lily were the only exceptions to this; he knew and genuinely understood that they cared about him simply because he was him. Not even with his best friends, his brothers he adores above all others, does Severus believe he is anything more than useful or convenient but – and this is a big but – he cares very deeply for them and this is why he will never hesitate to take pain for them, to take blame for them, to be their shield when they need it. He was never able to protect his mother, so he takes a deep personal pride in being able to protect the people that let him call them his friends, and the people to whom he feels he owes a debt.

Severus does not yield or back down easily. Severus can and will be cruel and downright wicked. But his morals when it comes to women and children and the people he cares for are staunch in stone. He would lay his life down for any of his students if he had to. ( He also has a martyr complex tied deeply to his depression but that’s beside the point ) He respects women by default and distrusts men until he has reason to believe they aren’t out to cause him trouble, and depending on the situation, will seek to prove himself to them if they are in a position of authority or will do his absolute best not to bother them. He tends to stay out of people’s way as much as he can, honestly. And he sucks ass at social endeavors. 

The man is a mess on a lot of different fronts. He’s petty. He has severe PTSD and horrible coping mechanisms. He can hold a grudge until the end of time. His primary defense mechanisms are sarcasm and being meaner than you. He has an overdeveloped sense of guilt and debt. He takes more blame than he should. He has a lizardbrain when it comes to a lot of things. He’s paranoid and his response to fear is always to fight. ( Meaning, sorry kids, but if you scare Professor Snape his dumb ass will yell you into next week. Not because he’s a violent scary asshole but because he literally has no idea how else to respond to the fact you just scared the living shit out of him. )

But he never goes out of his way to be mean to children. Outside of the classroom he is a very different support system for his Slytherins, and students in general.He’s a hard task master and he demands perfection and he yells when he’s scared, but he’s not a bully to kids. Might be a monster to their male parental unit though.

And with that, I am never going into the Snape tag again, goddamn.

Tobias Snape

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  • Muggle
  • Born to an affluent family he cut ties with at a young age
  • Devoutly religious man whose belief in God and Christianity took a darker turn as he aged
  • Believed in working for what you get in life
  • Was a skilled football player and dancer; particularly the waltz
  • Taught Severus about the bible, religion, God, angels and many saints
  • Taught Severus to play football and hacky sack
  • Taught Severus how to make coffee
  • Taught Severus how to cook various meals
  • Taught Severus to run quickly
  • Taught Severus a high pain tolerance
  • Taught Severus to abhor alcohol
  • Taught Severus fiscal responsibility
  • Taught Severus to abhor abuse toward women
  • Taught Severus to abhor abuse toward children

Dysfunction breeds dysfunction, and the case of Tobias Snape is no different. Born to a father with a tumultuous past and a mother who had killed her own uncle for acts of violence against her younger sister, one could make the argument that nurture lead Tobias to becoming the man Severus grew up under.

In an ironic twist, Tobias was much like Severus in that he was determined to be nothing like his family in any way. He distanced himself, ran away and found his own way through life, through school, through work when school didn’t pan out. Tobias was an optimistic man, a man who believed in a righteous and loving God rather than the vengeful and angry one his parents wished him to believe in. He was someone who believed that if you wanted something, you had to work for it, and if you put your all behind everything you did, you would be rewarded. He didn’t believe in hand outs any more than he believed in living on money he earned only by right of birth, and that was in a sense his downfall in the end.

Tobias met Eileen at a community dance. It was pure chance that they both happened to be there, sheer luck that they happened to share two dances, but after that he could not get her out of his head. He perused her with the same relentless diligence he had everything else in his life and despite the fact she was often odd, he simply found himself more and more fascinated by her.

Tobias’ brothers took issue with Eileen on sheer principle of the fact the youngest getting married first was insulting to their fragile egos. Fights frequently broke out between the young men and whenever they were caught at it, somehow, without fail, the fault would be Tobias’. Again and again his brothers undermined him, and he nearly lost Eileen due to the reputation that began to form that he was violent and unbalanced. Yet she observed one of these occurrences, and she stood up for him. She was the first to ever take Tobias’ side in a family argument, and while that sealed his obsession with her, it also locked Eileen into the belief that when it came to fights with his family, Tobias was not the one at fault.

They were married for six years when Tobias’ father passed away very suddenly under suspicious circumstances and his mother’s cancer took a turn for the worse. For the first time in six years Tobias involved himself with the family again. He stayed by his mother’s bedside as his brothers argued over who would inherit her house, father’s gold, the wines in the cellar, the antique clock, the war mementos. Held her hand as she listened, barely able to speak, as her sons cared more for what they would gain from their parent’s deaths than for the fact that she was struggling to say her final farewells.

In the end, Tobias was the one she turned to. She tried to make amends as best she could before she asked him to do something unthinkable, but he did it anyway. He pulled the plug on her, killing her at her request without the awareness that one of his brothers witnessed his action without the context of the request. Tobias had spent the whole of his life hounded in one way or another by his family, and in his one attempt to do right by a mother who had done little well by him, he invited hell upon himself.

Tobias began drinking shortly after his mother’s death and the fights between him and his brothers began to escalate considerably. By the time Severus was five years old, his father had one brother out of five, a scarred face and a bitter hatred of joy. Eileen believed in him even when the final brother disappeared, and Tobias fell into a place that was impossible to console. On his good days, he was the man she fell in love with, on his bad days, he was the man she’d protected.

When his bad days began getting worse, when they began focusing on her, or on their son, she blamed it on grief. On something she said, on something Severus did. Because it wasn’t Tobias’ fault; she’d learned that. The cycle was formed. Tobias no longer believed in a loving god, or a vengeful one. He believed in a convenient one, and he taught Severus to do the same.

Severus never knew about his uncles. Never knew the story of his grandmother and how she died. All he knew was the father that used to tell him of angels and the benefits of hard work, the laughing man who showed him how to keep a football kicked up, turned into the nightmare that kept the fear of nonsensical things – like monsters under the bed or in the closet – far at bay by being so much louder and more frightening than they could ever be.

Severus had no reason to sympathize with his father, or empathize with him. Killing Tobias, for Severus, was an act of catharsis. Of therapy. It is his greatest crime and the one he will likely never come to regret. What he never learned was how familial murder was historically tied to him and how futile his father’s efforts to change his fate turned out to be.