sideprince

[sideprince]

I don't say any of the following to negate your perspective or your feelings/inspiration/etc. as apologist, but feel it's important to also bring up: abuse is not just one thing, especially within a family. Abusers are not one dimensional monsters who only cause harm. I think we do victims and the general understanding of abuse a great deal of harm in perpetuating that idea. There are moments of love and affection. There is good that comes with the bad, and bad that comes with the good. Abuse and the relationships that it touches are complicated and multi-faceted.

So respectfully (and I mean that), without knowing exactly where you're coming from, my own interpretation of your art isn't that it's apologist, but that it reflects a moment of affection between a father and son that can and does coexist with the capacity for inflicting abuse, whether emotional or physical. It acknowledges the reality of these relationships.

safe.

—

on the tobias apologist train again. based on my own childhood memories of falling asleep during mass and my dad picking me up and letting me catch some z’s on his shoulder 😌

#snape art #I genuinely don't know what you mean by 'on the tobias apologist train again' OP #ie. whether you mean you're enjoying exploring an alternate relationship between Snape and his dad or #that your interpretation of their relationship is that there was no abuse #or a secret third option lol #tl;dr I don't know what your intention was but your art and the words you wrote with it inspired a whole big response in me #and I know this can be a sensitive subject and tumblr is a bad medium for communicating with people you don't know #so I'm hoping my reblog isn't offensive or detracting because I don't mean for it to be

[sideprince]

I've seen the same post a hundred times now. Sometimes it's a few days old, sometimes it's from years ago, but it's always the same. Some anti posts about how they don't understand how anyone can like Snape because he was so awful, and then there's a long reply that goes something like, "imagine this happens to you, and then this, and then this" to describe Snape's experience. Sometimes there's some James Potter hate thrown in.

Look. You can go through describing a character's entire experience but you don't really need to. Here's the thing that antis don't understand:

For all her faults (and they're big, bigoted ones) Rowling understood a really integral part of the human experience and conveyed it through Snape. Everyone needs love and to feel accepted. It's that simple. Snape became a Death Eater to seek acceptance (Rowling has confirmed this, though I can't remember the source - whoever wants to add it please do), because it was the only way he could find any.

Snape's understanding of morality, like everyone's, is subjective. Some readers understand this and some don't. When faced against a morality that says there is good and bad in the world, everyone makes choices based on their personal experience. Context is everything. Someone who experiences pain and suffering will not see the person inflicting it on them as moral. That's it. 'How can this person be good when they caused me so much suffering?' = human psychology. Most of the people who think 'I'm a bad person and deserve this' have been gaslit and abused into thinking so, because it's not a natural reaction - it's one that has to often be socialized into someone at a young age, exactly because it's not natural. Everyone is the hero of their own story; no one sees themselves as a villain, because they see the valid aspects of their own perspective.

You can write essays on how vulnerable people needing acceptance is what cults and fascists exploit to recruit vulnerable people, or on how the standard anti's un-nuanced reading of Snape both ignores canon and displays a disturbing lack of empathy or compassion, but at its core it just boils down to context. From Snape's perspective he experienced cruelty, therefore the people inflicting it must be cruel. Again, it's that simple. He was a person, like any other, except he was fictional so he wasn't even real. On the flip side is James Potter, who, for all his faults, didn't get to live long enough to get a chance to change and grow unlike Snape, and I think the Snapedom also needs to acknowledge that.

They're fictional characters representing things an author wants to say, not sports teams, not martyrs, and not all good or all bad emblems that define your identity depending on how you feel about them. It's depressing how much time is wasted arguing with bullies and trolls whether from the Marauders fandom or just random antis. I literally can't find more than three blogs to follow without this argument coming across my feed daily. I know the Snapedom is Not OK™ and that's kind why we're all here, and I know that my take is super unpopular but like Snape, I don't care what others think: this fandom has been having the exact same argument for years and nothing has changed. There's fanart and meta and fic and so much content out there appreciating this character, you're not going to change an anti's mind who's deliberately trolling in the tags, so why are you trying? What are you getting out of it? What does it give you? It's exhausting just scrolling past it.

#The thing about morality is that it's subjective #the religious leader who's a beacon of moral purity to their congregation #is a source of selfishness and pain to someone they abuse in secret #is that abuse victim immoral for rejecting the values the religious leader represents? #the congregation might think so because their definition of morality relies on the religious leader being a moral guide #the victim might not think so though because how can something be righteous if it causes suffering #look this is just an example of how perspectives can vary and I know there are more possible takes on that example #my point is that the idea that there's no clear 'good' and 'evil' there's only power/what you do with it is actually how psychology works #'good' to one person can be pain to another #'scourgify' is an innocuous household spell that cleans stains until it's used to waterboard someone #context matters more than labels like 'light' and 'dark' magic

[sideprince]

Me after starting this blog

Me: I really like Snape as a character. I should get involved in fandom so I can talk about him with other people! I bet there's a lot of great character analysis out there and interesting meta.

Me (after making a Snape blog): Oh, the fandom mostly just argues with antis? Oh. Um. OK I guess. *rifles through abandoned blogs for meta*

[sideprince]

Me: I really like Snape as a character. I should get involved in fandom so I can talk about him with other people! I bet there's a lot of great character analysis out there and interesting meta.

Me (after making a Snape blog): Oh, the fandom mostly just argues with antis? Oh. Um. OK I guess. *rifles through abandoned blogs for meta*

[sideprince]

For the snape asks, 26 and 28 if you please

26. How do you think Snape’s first day/year/etc of teaching went?

Impostor syndrome head to toe. For context, I think he was disillusioned already with Voldemort and his cause, and the threat to Lily was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. He knew that defecting meant certain death and had no one to protect him, but when Voldemort targeted Lily he cut his losses and went to Dumbledore, because if he was going to die at least it would have a purpose. Instead, he was recruited as a spy and offered protection, making defection possible.

As a result, when he took up the teaching position that was the cover for him being a spy, he knew it was for that purpose and not because he was qualified, or even prepared, to teach. He was a 21 year old string bean of compressed anxieties, teaching students some of whom were third or fourth years when he was in his seventh. I think he felt very out of place and like he was playing the role of teacher, and not like he actually was one. He knew the material better than the book, as we know, but getting students to learn it and understand is another.

However. The way he's written - his ability to silence a room wordlessly, his ability to make everyone listen more the softer he speaks, most aspects of his imposing nature - indicates he took a lot of traits on from Voldemort. I like the idea that McGonagall also mentored him when he first started teaching, and there are traces of her strictness and no-nonsense approach in him. Really, his teaching style and manner indicates a combination of influences from both.

I think his first day teaching was rough. Maybe it was when he got advice from McGonagall that something in his head clicked and he realized that a lot of teaching, like what he saw Voldemort do, was about confidence and attitude. Maybe he realized that of course he's playacting as a teacher, he's playacting his whole life now, as a spy. He had a chance to make himself over. I think he was less twitchy by then than in his school days, partly because he had grown into his body and wasn't an awkward teen anymore, and partly as a result of whatever traumas he experienced as a DE that he reacted to by hiding his emotional responses and feeling an overwhelming need to be in control of himself. He developed his own teaching style by emulating Voldemort in the classroom. It must have been a thrill and a shock when he realized it was effective and made students sit up and pay attention. It may even have been his own little act of quiet rebellion, in a way - proving to himself that Voldemort's persona was a farce, a show put on to capture his audience, and mocking him by imitating him. This would also have shown him how easily people follow anyone exuding confidence and how easily they cower in front of anyone imposing. He would have respected the students who challenged him for not buying into his charade. Tbh if Harry wasn't James' son, Snape would have respected him much more for his consistent pushback, in my opinion.

I also think his habit of writing instructions on the board instead of having students consult their textbooks was something he developed early on and instinctively, because he knew his instructions were better than the books. Maybe this was an inroad to finding his way around the whole teaching thing... when you're able to make something your own, it's easier to have confidence in it.

28. Did you make it through OotP, HBP, and DE not knowing what JKR had in store for Snape’s character? Or had those things been spoiled for you beforehand?

I feel like I'm going to bore people, I've talked about this so much, so I'm sorry if you've seen this before lol! I didn't know about Lily being a motivation but the rest was foreshadowing so overbearingly that I couldn't, for the life of me, understand why people questioned whether he was on Voldemort's side or Harry's. From the moment in PS when we find out Snape wasn't the villain and was, in fact, trying to save Harry, there was no question in my mind that any time he was framed by the narrative as villainous it was a misdirect. I talk about it more in this post but essentially, if you read him in each book without the bias that Harry describes him with, then it's pretty easy to see that his attempts to help and save Harry are consistent and ever present.

The thing that confirmed my suspicions most was the parallel Rowling drew between Harry and Snape in Half-Blood Prince:

“Hating himself, repulsed by what he was doing, Harry forced the goblet back towards Dumbledore’s mouth and tipped it, so that Dumbledore drank the remainder of the potion inside.”

Half-Blood Prince Ch. 26

“Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face. ‘Severus … please …’ Snape raised his wand and pointed it directly at Dumbledore. ‘Avada Kedavra!”

Half-Blood Prince Ch. 27

I was a stubborn little shit about it when I first read it, and I still am: this, to me, was irrefutable evidence that Snape's actions weren't what they seemed, and that he had some kind of arrangement with Dumbledore. The parallel use of the words "revulsion" and "hatred" to describe both him and Harry, specifically their reactions and facial expressions, also paralleled moments where each of them was harming Dumbledore, at least one of them on Dumbledore's orders. I didn't notice this specific word use immediately, but not long after I finished the book I went back and compared the scenes because I knew that, as much as I think Rowling is lacking in her ability to write prose, I also knew that she was meticulous about language and word choice when setting up important narrative moments. And this isn't even a sophisticated move tbh - she used the same two words, not even synonyms, and just switched the order and used varying conjugations. It felt so obvious to me.

Tbh I still feel that adolescent knee-jerk reaction when I point this out and someone says, "yeah maybe" because to me it's just fact, and always has been. It's not a maybe. This was absolutely deliberate on the author's part, as it should be! This is how you utilize the medium of literature to tell this kind of story. A lot of other people at the time noticed it too, so I felt vindicated, but it made me crazy when I saw people read absurd theories into the text and dismiss this one lol. What can I say, I had a lot of feelings back then.

Anyway, I was excited for Deathly Hallows when it finally came out because I knew that Snape's true motivation would finally be revealed. I read that whole book just to get to chapter 33. I never doubted that Snape was on Harry's side, I just didn't know why.

#asks

[sideprince]

Can't remember which one of the Snape asks you've answered already but 13

Thanks for asking!

13. How do you think Snape treats his own house?

I don’t think he’d actually be too much different with his own house than he is with the rest of his students, the only difference being that there’s no Harry Potter in Slytherin so there’s no one he would be so insane about. I think if someone on the Slytherin side was as incompetent as Neville he’d likely be (almost) the same way with him.

The exception being with Draco as it’s quite natural to be more understanding/gentle/idk-what-word-im-going-for to the son of a good friend. I presume that he and Lucius Malloy were a kind of friend as were told, and I also don’t think the author has gone through all the consequences of the fact that Snape is essentially a sleeper agent so I’m guessing all his motives are much more elemental than strategic regarding the Slytherins.

However, it seems to be completely normal to favour your own house in the school competitions as we see Dumbledore do to a hilarious degree so there’s no reason why he wouldn’t do the same, when that kind of thing came to him attention. Like when he signs up all the practice time for the Slytherins I think ahead of a Qudditch match which is so funny and such low-key sabotage. Like you are all so crazy about Qudditch and you didn’t bother to sign your houses up for practice??

In general, I think he’d be pretty strict with the Slytherins as well, impatient with the various squabbles of youth but very conscientious with their education like he is with most of his students.

#interesting #I think it wasn't that he signed his house up for practice but that he gave them permission to use the pitch when another team had booked i

[sideprince]

Voldemort literally mooches off of everyone. Nothing he has is his. Whatever he doesn't mooch he steals. HOWEVER. Hot take but Vernon would approve that he doesn't live off welfare.

something we agreed we like about uncle vernon is that despite like, personally suffering at the hands of wizards pretty significantly (dudley’s tail, marge), vernon is like, always ready to fuck with wizards? like he is SO SCARED of them but he’s always ready to fight? please take this moment to imagine uncle vernon meeting voldemort

[sideprince]

Riddle’s extremely fearful and aggressive reaction to Dumbledore when he thinks he’s a doctor (and the fact that he assumes this at all and believes he is being lied to) has some pretty dark implications (which of course no one follows up on). Do you have thoughts?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

and yes - this has occurred to me too... which means that my thoughts come with a trigger warning for the sexual abuse of a child, and are under the cut.

the relevant scene in canon is, of course, this:

“I am Professor Dumbledore.” “Professor?” repeated Riddle. He looked wary. “Is that like doctor? What are you here for? Did she get you in to have a look at me?”  He was pointing at the door through which Mrs. Cole had just left. “No, no,” said Dumbledore, smiling.  “I don’t believe you,” said Riddle. “She wants me looked at, doesn’t she? Tell the truth!”  He spoke the last three words with a ringing force that was almost shocking. It was a command, and it sounded as though he had given it many times before. His eyes had widened and he was glaring at Dumbledore, who made no response except to continue smiling pleasantly. After a few seconds Riddle stopped glaring, though he looked, if anything, warier still. “Who are you?” “I have told you. My name is Professor Dumbledore and I work at a school called Hogwarts. I have come to offer you a place at my school - your new school, if you would like to come.”  Riddle’s reaction to this was most surprising. He leapt from the bed and backed away from Dumbledore, looking furious.  “You can’t kid me! The asylum, that’s where you’re from, isn’t it? ‘Professor,’ yes, of course - well, I’m not going, see? That old cat’s the one who should be in the asylum. I never did anything to little Amy Benson or Dennis Bishop, and you can ask them, they’ll tell you!”

the surface-level reading of this scene - which is clearly what the text wants us to go for - is that riddle thinks he's about to be institutionalised for being "mad" - and, specifically, that he thinks that what dumbledore has been told is his "madness" is actually his magic.

[he is also clearly meant to be read as panicking a little bit that he's fucked around torturing his fellow children and is now about to find out...]

that riddle accepts he's a wizard so easily - and that he is so reassured by dumbledore agreeing that he's not mad - is something the text wants us to read as sinister. him immediately describing himself as "special" is set up as a precursor to the adult voldemort's delusions of grandeur - which the entire arc of the series, ending in his death as an ordinary man, is designed to undermine.

but i've always disliked this reading. the eleven-year-old riddle - a magical child raised around non-magical people - is objectively correct to describe his powers as "special" [in that they make him identifiably different from the crowd] within the context in which he lives. the word choice is nowhere near as deep as dumbledore decides - he's clearly known since he was very young that he's a wizard, but he didn't have the precise language to describe this fundamental part of himself until dumbledore offered it; prior to that, "special" is a perfectly reasonable alternative term.

and, in always knowing that he's a wizard, he also knows that he doesn't have a mental illness - but he must also know that this is something it's near impossible for him to prove.

in the real world, if i spoke to a patient who told me:

“I can make things move without touching them. I can make animals do what I want them to do, without training them. I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to.”

then i would be correct to describe them as experiencing psychosis. and i might - depending on their other symptoms - have reasonable cause to admit them [voluntarily or not] for psychiatric treatment.

riddle is - of course - demonstrably not psychotic. but it's not unreasonable that mrs cole would assume he is - the world she lives in, as a muggle [even if she's a religious one], is one in which people do not possess the ability to move objects or control animals with their minds, and if one of her charges is convinced that he can, then she's justified in seeking medical intervention.

[that psychiatric treatment in the 1930s can be described without exaggeration as inhumane is another matter...]

which is to say, i think we can easily suppose that mrs cole has - prior to dumbledore's arrival - succeeded in having riddle "looked at", and that the idea that he's mentally ill and should be committed to an asylum has been mentioned before. i think most of us would be instinctively [and angrily] wary of doctors if this happened to us, regardless of how nice the doctors in question were.

and maybe that's all there is to it.

and maybe it isn't...

in the doylist text, the eleven-year-old riddle's personality is the way it is because he's the villain of the series. where harry is preternaturally capable, even as a child, of all the things the series defines as admirable - above all, enduring difficulty without complaint - riddle is preternaturally incapable of them. he's meant to come across as unambiguously sinister - and the fact that the text repeatedly emphasises that he has control over his unpleasant traits invites us to view him as someone who is acting with full agency. that he lives in an orphanage is a trope which the text uses, like a campy horror film might, predominately to underscore how creepy he is - and the text, in keeping with its general lack of interest in states and their institutions, never really prompts us to interrogate the impact of his childhood upon the course his life takes.

[this is despite the fact that voldemort's reliving of the night he killed the potters in deathly hallows is an incredibly accurate depiction of ptsd...]

but it's also the case that the eleven-year-old riddle's behaviour and personality fits a pattern we might expect to see in a child who is being abused, sexually or otherwise:

he's aggressive, he has a hair-trigger temper, and he becomes distressed even by behaviour - such as dumbledore speaking mildly and calmly - which would not ordinarily be expected to provoke such a reaction.

his broader emotional state is fractious. his mood changes sharply, he seems to feel emotions very profoundly, he struggles to control his emotional response to things, he's extremely easily irritated, he's attention-seeking - and he particularly seeks negative attention, and he's very highly-strung. his admission in deathly hallows that he feels calm before he kills - or before he otherwise eradicates a threat or a problem - comes with the flip-side that he's someone who appears, when things aren't going well or he finds himself in a situation which he can't control, to become quite anxious. which is a trauma response.

he's extremely isolated. the text presents the fact that he has no friends as a deliberate choice - "lord voldemort has never had a friend, nor do i believe that he has ever wanted one" - and his relationship with everyone else he ever meets, including his fellow orphans, as defined by the text as exclusively involving him controlling, manipulating, and punishing them. or: he is always the more powerful person in the pairing. but this need for control can be read as self-protective just as easily as it can be read as sinister. there are hints in canon that riddle is not just some malevolent force in the orphanage preying on mild-mannered innocents. for example, billy stubbs, the owner of the rabbit he kills, is targeted by riddle as revenge: “Billy Stubbs’s rabbit... well, Tom said he didn’t do it and I don’t see how he could have done, but even so, it didn’t hang itself from the rafters, did it? [...] But I’m jiggered if I know how he got up there to do it. All I know is he and Billy had argued the day before." on the rare occasions billy turns up in fics, he's usually - i find - written very like neville - sweet and guileless and a bit pathetic. but the alternative reading - especially when we take into account that riddle attacks the rabbit rather than billy himself - is that billy is someone he would be afraid to physically confront. indeed, it's striking that voldemort - at all stages of his life - is described as being quite physically fragile. not only is he very thin, but he's always cold and his heartbeat is described several times in canon as irregular. i think this is supposed to be a comment on the physical changes he undergoes the more horcruxes he makes - although the idea that the soul would affect the heart doesn't actually align with how the series understands the soul to relate to the body - but it can also be interpreted perfectly legitimately as something he was experiencing prior to splitting his soul. i am committed to the headcanon that riddle was quite a sickly child - and that this is one of the things which drives his fear of death - and i'm also committed to the idea that his obsession with magic is because the enormity of his magical power makes up for his physical lack. he can defeat - and humiliate and frighten and remove the threat of - billy or dennis [or even an adult man?] with magic. without it, if they were to physically overpower him, then he wouldn't be able to throw them off.

he is extremely nervous about being alone in a room with dumbledore - someone he doesn't know, and who he assumes is connected to a profession [and, maybe, who knows any other doctors he's been previously made to see...] of which he is frightened.

he doesn't trust or confide in anyone - which, as a child, means particularly that he doesn't trust or confide in adults in positions of responsibility. he's clearly uneasy with the idea of finding himself in the subordinate position in an adult-child relationship when dumbledore offers to take him shopping for school supplies - potentially because he's worried that dumbledore will try and dictate or restrict what he's allowed to buy unless he behaves in a certain way... and i am always very struck that dumbledore says in half-blood prince: "He was very guarded with me; he felt, I am sure, that in the thrill of discovering his true identity he had told me a little too much. He was careful never to reveal as much again." this is presented in the text as evidence that dumbledore is the only person of whom voldemort is afraid - by which the text means that voldemort acknowledges that dumbledore knows that an ordinary man, mortal and unimpressive, lurks behind the mask of unassailable power he has created for himself; and which the text thinks is a good thing. but we can also read it as a self-protective act on riddle's part. in his excitement, he offers dumbledore information [that he is known to be a liar, that he is in trouble a lot, that mrs cole dislikes him and is disinclined to believe anything he says] which would give dumbledore - or anyone in a similar position of power and presumed respectability - cover to abuse him, safe in the knowledge that he would be unlikely to be believed if he reported it.

he doesn't appear to feel safe in the orphanage and he's frequently absent from it - by his own admission, he spends a huge amount of time wandering around london on his own, which may even involve him staying away for several days at a time. nobody appears to notice or care about this.

he's very independent - which the text again presents as evidence of his deliberate self-isolation and rejection of the bonds of love and friendship - and his independence is unusual for a child his age [i.e. that he is capable of doing all his own shopping for school].

his knowledge of violence - i.e. how he designs the trip to the cave to be maximally psychologically devastating for dennis and amy and devoid of repercussions for himself - is also more advanced and methodical than would be expected in a child of his age. again, the text uses this to emphasise how inextricable the child-voldemort is from his adult self - and also, to some extent, to underscore the intellectual brilliance [his magic is also more advanced than is normal for a child] which his narrative archetype [the exceptional villain who is defeated by the everyman hero] requires. but we can also read it as evidence of his own victimisation. a common sign that a child is being sexually abused is that they display a knowledge of sexual behaviour which is more advanced than is reasonable for a child of their age - for example, knowing in detail how a sex act is performed, or fluently using sexual slang which they have no chance of knowing either from age-appropriate settings like school-based sex education or conversations with a parent or trusted adult, or from the sort of enthusiastic hoarding of rude words and phrases all children enjoy as they grow up. riddle's precise, clinical knowledge of how to manipulate, frighten, torture, and control can be seen as something similar. if he can - at eleven or younger - methodically break down another child until they're "never quite right" again, then this is because he's learned how to from someone.

he keeps secrets. and he also goes out of his way to extract them. his grooming of ginny in chamber of secrets - he manipulates her into confiding things she wants to keep to herself, promises he won't tell anyone, and then uses the threat that he will to get her to do his bidding - is an absolutely textbook example of how abusers use the idea of secrecy to control their victims. it doesn't make his abuse of ginny any less inexcusable if we assume he learns this from being on the other side of things.

dumbledore understands his little cache of objects as trophies he's taken from victims - and the text takes the view that dumbledore is correct in this assessment. that hoarding trophies is something widely associated with serial killers means that this is yet another thing which underlines how creepy - and how like his adult self - the child-voldemort is. but it's also the case that the adult - and teenage - voldemort places a lot of emphasis on gift-giving as part of his control over other people. the two most obvious examples in canon are wormtail being given his shiny hand as a reward for helping voldemort get his body back, and slughorn being buttered up with crystallised pineapple before voldemort asks him about horcruxes. the text thinks this is sinister - and one of the reasons it does this is because gift-giving is a grooming tactic. the text also clearly thinks this isn't behaviour voldemort has learned from the other side. and yet a common sign that a child is being abused is if they have possessions it doesn't make sense for them to own [i.e. a child from a low-income background who is suddenly decked in designer clothes] and which they can't or won't explain how they came by. riddle's cache isn't luxurious - although he's so poor that a yoyo or a mouth organ probably is a luxury to him - but there's also nothing in canon which precludes the objects being presents, rather than stolen goods. if the spell dumbledore uses to make the box rattle is caused by a statement which is both relatively ambiguous and dependent on dumbledore's subjective personal morality - is there anything in this room he's acquired through nefarious means? - then the spell would still work as it does in canon if riddle was an abuse victim given the objects as "rewards". dumbledore's tendency to locate right and wrong in the individual and dumbledore's belief that good people should steadfastly endure misery means he can be written entirely canon-coherently as someone who would think a victim who appeared to collude in their own abuse - such as a victim who "offered" a sexual act because their abuser promised them something if they did - was behaving consensually, manipulatively, and nefariously. and it's worth noting that when riddle doesn't know what dumbledore has done to make the box rattle, he is "unnerved". when he realises dumbledore thinks he's stolen the objects - and that he has no interest in forcing him to admit this aloud - he is "unabashed". perhaps because he's just received proof that an experience he doesn't want to talk about is still secret...

on the other hand, the objects could indeed be stolen - because petty criminality and anti-social behaviour, especially in pre-teen children, is also a sign of abuse.

he can be extremely obsequious - when dumbledore tells him to watch how he speaks he becomes "unrecognisably polite", he ruthlessly flatters slughorn, and he is cringingly deferential to hepzibah smith. the text understands this as evidence that his apparent charm is only superficial - another trait associated in the popular imagination with serial killers [and it's striking that so much about the young voldemort - handsome, charming, seemingly quiet and polite, true evil lurking underneath the mask - is exactly like the pop-culture persona which has been created for ted bundy...]. voldemort himself agrees that his charm is performative in chamber of secrets: “If I say it myself, Harry, I’ve always been able to charm the people I needed. So Ginny poured out her soul to me, and her soul happened to be exactly what I wanted." but his obsequiousness is also a fawn response - a way of minimising a threat by attempting to please the person issuing it. he becomes "unrecognisably polite" - after all - in response to this: Dumbledore raised his eyebrows. “If, as I take it, you are accepting your place at Hogwarts - ” “Of course I am!” “Then you will address me as ‘Professor’ or ‘sir.’ ”  Riddle’s expression hardened for the most fleeting moment before he said, in an unrecognisably polite voice, “I’m sorry, sir. I meant - please, Professor, could you show me - ?”  riddle could reasonably interpret what dumbledore says here as a threat to prevent him attending hogwarts - even though dumbledore evidently doesn't mean it in this way - and he switches to being fawning because this is something he really doesn't want to happen...

do i think that any of this is what the text was actually going for? no. and nor do i think that reading riddle as a victim of abuse excuses the violence which the adult voldemort goes on to perpetuate.

but i think it is a reading of his characterisation which is both canon-plausible and interesting - a strange, sickly child with a reputation for cruelty and dishonesty being abused by the respectable doctor who is constantly called in to treat his coughs and wheezes, who buys him little presents and charms him into telling him secrets, who then [to paraphrase the teenage voldemort] feeds him a few secrets of his own, safe in the knowledge that nobody will ever believe him if he tries to get help.

and i also think this a reading which is sincerely important.

a significant contributor to the prevalence of child abuse - no matter what exact form this abuse takes - is that we are culturally conditioned to imagine that both the abuser and the victim will look and behave in a certain way if the abuse is "real".

and this means, all too often, that we take child abuse more seriously when the victim is "sympathetic" - when they're from a stable home, and their family are respectable, and they do well in school, and they're polite and sweet, and they look innocent, and they behave perfectly appropriately for their age, and nobody would ever dare to say that they come across as older than they are, and they're white, and they don't have a history of lying, and they don't have a history of attention-seeking, and they don't have a criminal record, and they're not abusive themselves, and there's absolutely no way of suggesting that they colluded in their abuse, and the perpetrator was someone who looks like a child abuser.

someone who is creepy, low-status, ugly, unpopular. someone who everyone can tell is socially abnormal, someone who nobody would ever intentionally permit to be around their children. not someone who is charming, well-respected, attractive, rich, popular, trustworthy. not someone who has a loving family and a happy home. not someone we might be friends with.

but many perpetrators of child abuse are these second group of people. and many victims of child abuse are "unsympathetic", when their social positions and reputations are compared to their abusers' own.

they lie. they steal. they're attention-seeking. they're vindictive. they have trouble distinguishing between imagination and reality. they're violent. they're bullies. they hurt animals. they abuse other children. they take drugs. they're mentally-ill. they come from broken homes. they're in the care of the state. they're dirty. they're poor. they're odd. they're behind at school and badly-behaved in the classroom. they do things which allow their abuse to be dismissed as something they brought upon themselves - they speak or dress in certain ways, they pose provocatively in pictures and post them on the internet, they are known to be sexually active outside of the context of their abuse, they lie about being over the age of consent, they engage in sexual behaviour with an adult abuser in a way which appears [even though it isn't, and there's never a circumstance in which it will be] to be consensual or for their own personal gain, they are flattered by the attention they receive from someone who is important or attractive grooming them, they have complicated - and not always wholly negative - feelings towards their abusers.

and they are still - unequivocally - victims, and what happens to them is still - unequivocally - abuse.

tom riddle is an unsympathetic victim - not only of any potential abuse, but also of the horrors of his life which are explicit on the canon page: that he is raised in an orphanage; that he is grieving; that he knows nothing about his family; that he is thought to be mad.

the absence of any institutional response to his childhood experiences - dumbledore, by his own admission, discloses nothing about riddle to his fellow teachers - is a flaw repeated again and again in the worldbuilding of the harry potter series.

hogwarts - and the wizarding [and muggle] state more broadly - doesn't intervene in any case of neglect or abuse, from harry to snape to voldemort's own parents. the series' individualistic morality means that we aren't supposed to interrogate these collective failings. and the series' black-and-white view of good and evil - and its general belief that violence is fine if the person it happens to "deserves" it - means that it has no interest in examining the ways that poverty, isolation, and neglect are risk factors; that straightforwardly unpleasant people can still be victims; that victims can go on to become perpetrators without their victimhood ceasing to matter; and that the abuse of children usually takes place not in silence and secrecy, concealed in ways which make it fine for adults not to notice it and not to intervene, but in plain sight.

this is knowledge it never hurts to refresh. thinking about lord voldemort's childhood might be an usual way of doing so... but it is an effective one nonetheless...

#meta #great meta #yeah I think the reading of Voldemort as a villain for the sake of evil is flat and uninteresting #I've never liked the idea that Rowling put forward that he couldn't love because he was conceived under a love potion #ie. that because he was the product of rape he was a sociopath #people don't inherently wage cruelty and violence on others #it's almost always the result of trauma and unregulated emotional responses that are more intense than they'd be under healthy circumstance #and with Voldemort being how he is as an adult and the backstory being his growing up in an orphanage in London in the 30s #it seems obvious there's trauma there even though I agree - I don't think the author intended it to be there #I don't know #sometimes I look at Rowling's writing in HP and think she's an incredibly good study of people's character who doesn't know it #as if she doesn't have the empathy to understand people but is good at observing them and putting those observations on the page #but sometimes I wonder if she - with her own abuse trauma and the understanding that comes with it of expectations of 'good' victimhood #if she just assumes that everyone reading her work will understand it from her perspective and connect dots and draw conclusions #that she would herself even if not all readers understand trauma - let alone in the way abuse victims do #but then I look at the contempt with which she speaks about characters like Snape and Voldemort #and how she's a blonde white British lady whose personal narrative has been made more sympathetic in the press than it might be #(ie. that she's described and even self-described as having lived in poverty yet she went to Exeter -not on scholarship as far as I know- #and wrote HP in cafes which are expensive to eat in if you're supposedly on welfare and even if you aren't #so Rowling - a nice looking blonde British lady with a sad backstory of hard work and single motherhood - is painted as a 'good' victim #and since she doesn't seem like the kind of person who has a lot of empathy for people different than herself #and whose ego seems to have been intensely affected by her fame and success #I can see her reflecting the bias against abuse victims who don't meet the demands of being a 'good enough' victim

[sideprince]

hello beloveds ☺️

[sideprince]

“what will you give me in return?” is such an insane thing to say to someone who historically has Fuck All. even more insane to say when you are Aware that they have literally fucking nothing

#meta #great meta

[sideprince]

nerd

#snape art

[sideprince]

Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort as dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy’s shell.

#accurate tags #am dying #it's a climactic moment but lacked the communal catharsis the book builds to by having everyone watch the two of them battle

[sideprince]

JK Rowling watching this scene at the premier, her eye twitching with terfy rage at the sight of a man in a bra

[sideprince]

in books 1-5 literally harry ron and hermione were constantly like ‘it is either malfoy or snape’ every time anything bad happened and they finally gave it up by book six because they were wrong every time but by book six it actually was both malfoy AND snape who were responsible for the Antics 

[sideprince]

I like to think that, because he looked so much like his dad, there was a sitcom-hijinks level moment where Riddle Sr.'s parents looked from him to the kid in the doorway and back to him and said, "how are you doing this?"

thinking about how Tom Riddle was seen at the door to the Riddle house when he went to kill his father and grandparents even though he could’ve apparated straight inside

He literally knocked just so he could do a dramatic reveal.

[sideprince]

Shoutout to Alan Rickman whose character study of Snape was so spot-on from the get go that he helped design the Snape costume, including and very specifically the number of buttons and length of the sleeve, years before OoTP came out and he had any way of knowing about what happens in SWM.

These are just my personal headcannons about Severus’s Clothing:

1. It is his armor against the rest of the world, a physical way to represent the shutting out of others, a kind of bodily Occlumency that makes him feel safe.

2. It is impossible as an adult to do to him what the Marauders did to him as a child, I.E strip off any part of his clothing. There are so many layers and buttons I image it makes him feel physically and sexually safe as well. No eyes where he doesn’t want them. No hands where he doesn’t want them. No Wands to remove what he doesn’t want removed. (Could he possibly enchant his clothing too; to make it impossible for someone besides himself to undress him?)

3. On a lighter note, it’s Victorian chic as hell. It’s Screaming Byronic Hero from a million miles away. Like something out of a Mary Shelly or Dracula novel, just so romantic and sweeping and refined looking. Goth King we stan.

[sideprince]

Not to mention she's writing this TO Sirius. It's like a plea for help, an attempt at influencing him, the subtext being, "you're his friend, your opinion matters to him, please help me because the second Dumbledore gives his invisibility cloak back the only thing keeping him from ditching me again is you telling him to get his shit together."

Of course, this is all just reading into the text - if I'm honest I don't think Rowling considered Lily's perspective at all, she just wanted to drop some exposition and set up the moment when we see Snape take the second page of the letter. Rowling, after all, said in an interview that James and Sirius were bad boys and that all women know how it is (I'm paraphrasing), implying that all women are attracted to reckless, dangerous men. A hell of a mouthful from a woman who had, by the time she said this, left her violently abusive first husband - who James' character is very obviously based on. So I also read Lily's words in that letter as both Rowling's subconscious coming through and asking for help, and her conscious self suppressing it and deliberately ignoring it.

there's like virtually nothing you can say to me or quotes u can throw in my face to convince me that 20 year old Lily was fine and ok with her husband (a.k.a basically the only person she has around) sneaking out at night to. what. annoy muggle police officers? So many people say "oh no she was talking fondly" and I never got it bc I've always read it as her coming across as annoyed. annoyed but trying to tone it down giving that it was a letter to Sirius. Like imagine you're 20 year old with a newly born baby having to live in almost complete isolation in the middle of a war and a half of the parental unit just decides to dip every Wednesday for #boysnight like what