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lassify · 4 months

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On Loid: Acknowledging Anya's Past

*Spoilers for Spy x Family Ch. 93*

Honestly, after reading this new chapter, I felt really... tearful? No joke I thought I was going to cry. And it wasn't even for anything crazy.

It was because I think this is the first time that Loid has asked Anya anything about her past:

The fact that Endo dedicates a significant portion of the page to this panel shows that it is a really important moment - but not just because it's about Anya's past, which we are all curious about!

I think it's also important because after Loid adopted her and said to call him her father 'from now on', he has not once asked her about her life Before. As far as we know, this is the first time.

I don't even know how to explain why this makes me want to cry. It's like their little secret. Only Loid and Anya know that she is adopted, she promised to call him "Papa" from now on (as though he has always been her father), and she has never slipped. Not once. She has completely dedicated herself to her new life, while he has maintained this distance from her, not once trying to get genuinely closer.

So, him choosing to acknowledge that in private between them feels like quite a vulnerable moment for them. Or at least, a significant moment.

We can guess that, at least initially, he didn't think it was worth asking her about her past because she was just part of the mission, and that she would return to the orphanages after the mission was over. I wonder if this moment is an indication that:

Loid is becoming curious about her past, and perhaps beginning to wonder how it affects her in the present day.

He is becoming invested in Anya as a person and as a child.

Loid has good reason to be curious about her past, but he doesn't know what we know. He probably still thinks Anya is an ordinary orphan.

So onto the second point - why be invested in Anya? Why ask her about her past? Not only is it not relevant to the mission, but it goes against his instincts as a spy. What does he have to gain from asking a child about their life before him? Where is the intel in that?

And then she answers like this:

We don't even see her face.

Endo. Does not show. Her face.

What does Loid see when he asks her about her past? I want to know. And it feels so significant that Endo chose to portray her answer like this, where the majority of her reaction is hidden from us.

Even in the following panels, we only see her eyes:

Loid has his eyes narrowed (tired? suspicious? disbelieving?) while we just see Anya's eyes looking up at her father, with few other clues as to what her expression could be.

It feels like such a tense moment. And I wanted to cry.

Here's hoping that we will start to get more snippets of genuine Loid and Anya moments - and that we start to learn more about her past. (Perhaps alongside Loid?)

#that's it #those are my thoughts for today #spy x family #sxf manga spoilers #spy x family spoilers #loid forger #anya forger #is this the start of loid and anya building that father daughter relationship?#or at least i hope #only time will tell

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saintsenara · 20 days

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Wait why are you not a fan of Snape and Hermione?? 2 nerds who care a socially awkward amount about the things they care about nerding out together at levels of romance people who can be chill and normal about things can’t comprehend?? It’s not one of my fav ships but I can definitely see it!

I headcanon that Snape picks on Hermione being a muggle raised know it all thirsty to prove and lacking self awareness because he was one himself when he arrived at school and James and Sirius picked on him for it! It’s like that you’re most repulsed by the things you’re self conscious of in yourself thing to me. Or maybe a him trying to live out being the “cool” one in that dynamic thing

But when she’s a grown woman and more self possessed like he became too I feel like that same energy ness has potential for love!

Hermione is famously respectful and compassionate enough towards all beings to be more understanding than say Lily Evans of his prickly tender ego if he had another m word style outburst and such a people pleaser she’d keep coming back for more snark as long as he peppered it with the odd encouraging compliment

And I feel like a Snape in reciprocated love could absolutely veer into inventing beautiful and helpful spells to impress his lover or sending “made me think of u 😘” notes with verses of elaborate obscure poetry territory that would be frankly the level of literary and academic courtship our Herms deserves 😌

Is it cause they’d both be the highly strung worrier one and they both need someone to ground them? Or maybe too pessimistic together and one of them needs to be the cheerful one?

anon, i genuinely love this for you - i'm always thrilled to get people explaining their love for ships in the ol' inbox, especially when they're ships i don't instinctively vibe with, and i have been won round to stranger premises than this by a passionate defence of why two characters should kiss.

where i still think snamione isn't clicking for me, however, is that the way you describe both snape and hermione here doesn't align in any significant way with what i personally think would be interesting to explore about either character in a relationship and have them still feel meaningfully like their canon selves.

[i will say, though - because i always think it's worth reiterating my fandom commitment towards being neither a cop nor a priest - that i literally don't give a shit about either the age gap or the student-teacher dynamic. i know that's an objection to pairings like snarry and snamione which lots of people do express. but i will never be one of them.]

the primary reason that i don't vibe with many of the more... sapiosexual hermione ships [by which i mean not only snamione but tomione] is that they hang on the idea that hermione's intellect expresses itself in a way we never actually see in canon.

or, the idea that snape and hermione are intellectually compatible [and that they would enjoy hanging out being nerdy about stuff] is just... not true.

throughout the seven-book canon, the way that hermione shows herself to be clever is that she displays an excellent memory and an enormous capacity to rote-learn. her intelligence is overwhelmingly demonstrated - both in the classroom and during the trio's year on the run - by her being able to regurgitate swathes of information, very usually verbatim from the source she got it from.

she is clearly able to use this ability to retain information to understand the theoretical component of magic in a way neither harry nor ron ever manage, and she is able to use this understanding of theory to work out how to perform spells which are ahead of her expected level on the hogwarts curriculum.

and this is intelligence - and i want to be very clear that i'm not trying to suggest that hermione shouldn't be thought of as intellectual, or that her academic achievements should be devalued. but it isn't the way snape's intelligence manifests itself.

because hermione is never shown - at any point in canon - to be a particularly creative or experimental thinker.

she places an enormous intellectual trust in disciplinary authority - teachers and textbooks - and is frequently rattled when these are revealed to be partial or incorrect, as we see in her shock at hogwarts: a history not mentioning house elves or her anger at harry getting better results by following the modified instructions in the prince's textbook [despite knowing nothing about the theory underpinning them] than she does with the "official" ones.

she also regards the gatekeeping of inquiry which disciplinary boundaries enforce to be a positive thing and she never displays any inclination to step beyond them. she dislikes the spells in the prince's textbook because they aren't ministry-approved - and i must say that i think the idea that she'd be won over by a man creating spells for her is wishful thinking...

she is immediately mistrustful of anything she can't find something she regards as an empirical source for - notice, for example, that she only comes round to the idea that prophecies might be real once she encounters them in the ministry of magic.

even when we see her using magic on her own terms - the jinx she uses on marietta edgecombe, for example; or the protean charm on the da coins - the magic she's using is sophisticated, and is being applied in a way which wouldn't be classroom-sanctioned, but it's not magic which is being used in a way which is removed from the spell's original purpose. the protean charm on the da coins is impressive because it's a flawless execution of newt-level magic by a sixteen-year-old. it's not impressive because hermione is using it in a strange, experimental, or radical way.

[in contrast, the dark mark - which harry notes the coins mimic - is clearly a spell voldemort himself invents.]

snape, on the other hand, is an experimenter. he's someone who clearly sees magic as a creative force which he has every right to shape as he sees fit by adaptation and invention. and he's someone who evidently rejects the logic of disciplinary gatekeeping - one tension in his relationship with dumbledore prior to half-blood prince is that snape evidently retains an enormous intellectual interest in the dark arts [which, as he tells us, are an area of magic which is feared precisely because they can't be neatly contained within disciplinary boxes - they are ever-changing, unfixed, mutating...]

and it's these conflicting views of what magic is and how it should be used and thought about which is the cause of the intellectual incompatibility we see between snape and hermione in canon.

he is unequivocally in the wrong for his dismissive classroom manner towards her - because he is an adult and she is a child. but he isn't wrong in principle that hermione just repeating what she's read in the textbook and refusing to synthesise her knowledge [she always goes massively over word limits! she never gives answers in class in her own words!] isn't actually a demonstration that she understands the material. [and therefore something a good teacher would guide her through conquering... snape having no interest in doing this is his own fault.]

and - from a snamione-specific perspective - it's all the evidence snape needs that, actually, they're not going to enjoy hanging out chatting about academic pursuits. hermione values knowledge like a dragon hoards treasure. snape wants to take that treasure, melt it down, and turn it into new and weird things.

once again, i don't think this a flaw in either of their characters - it's just something which is. and i don't think it's an insurmountable obstacle to writing snamione, because i believe any ship is possible if an author has enough nerve. but it's an aspect of both characters' canon personalities [and hermione's above all] which never seems to make it into snamione fics - all of which, as far as i've encountered them, are beholden to an idea of hermione's approach to academia which is considerably more flexible than we actually see in the books.

of your other points, i'm not particularly convinced by the idea that snape sees his younger self in the teenage hermione. this isn't just for the reasons outlined above - hermione isn't trying to prove herself in the same way he was, which was by creating and experimenting in a bid to be noticed and considered impressive - but also because of the massive gulf in their respective class backgrounds.

hermione is really posh - and, while she's obviously subjected to discrimination at hogwarts on account of her blood-status, she also comes from a family with both the financial resources and the cultural language to make her familiar with the vibe of the elite muggle boarding schools hogwarts is a pastiche of.

the teen snape - in contrast - stands out from his cohort in that he is visually identifiable as working-class [which does appear to be genuinely unusual at hogwarts]. his class background is something which clearly drove a lot of the marauders' bullying of him [i'm sorry to the girlies who think james and sirius targeted him out of some righteous desire to stamp out his prejudice - it was because he was poor and uncouth] and which he still has a chip on his shoulder about as an adult.

this - again - is not an insurmountable barrier to a snamione relationship [as it's not a barrier to thousands of real-world partnerships and friendships]. but it is something an author needs to grapple with if they want to make the pairing - at least, in my opinion - seem plausible. but the standard vibe seems to be that snape would be comfortable in the grangers' home fairly quickly, and that he'd be delighted to have hermione swanning around offering suggestions for how they could do up spinner's end... instead of him resenting this as the unwelcome meddling of people who've never had to worry for money.

i'm also not particularly convinced by the idea that hermione would get over being called a mudblood - especially by an adult man. while i think it's completely plausible that she'd handle this differently than lily [although lily's reaction is entirely justified - and i don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater of contextualising the teenage snape and the motivating factors behind his decisions by pretending that cutting off your friend because he called you a slur is a petty, ill-thought-out, or unreasonable move], i don't think that her reaction would be automatically forgiving.

hermione is compassionate towards kreacher when he calls her a mudblood because kreacher is a slave, whose prejudicial views are inextricably bound up in the magic used to oppress him [i.e. that if he received an order to use the term, or to refuse to serve a muggleborn food, from his masters, he would have to punish himself violently if he disobeyed it]. she is not - quite rightly! - compassionate towards someone like draco malfoy when he calls her one, since he is a free person with full agency to choose not to do this.

could she forgive him - or snape - for using the term? sure! absolutely! but i don't think it's a given - and i also think she'd expect a demonstration of how sorry snape was which wouldn't necessarily align with how he'd think he'd demonstrated his regret.

i do agree that - as you say - hermione is a people-pleaser, and she definitely has a far greater tolerance for being treated cruelly by people she wants to impress [especially authority figures - including snape himself] than either harry or ron. and i think this has the potential to introduce an extremely thorny dynamic into a snamione fic - in which the power dynamic inherent in the age gap [which, to reiterate, i think is completely fine for an author to enjoy] is compounded by hermione being unwilling to anger or contradict snape [which is a vibe - as i've said in answer to an ask about harmony - we also see in her relationship with harry... it's also obviously exactly how snape's relationship with dumbledore works.]

on a couple of the more minor characterisation notes, i'm afraid that the idea of snape as a great romantic has never hit for me. it seems really bound up in the way alan rickman portrayed him in the films, which i've always found a bit toothless. i also don't like the trope of "actually snape's really hot" which seems to always accompany it - ugly, odd men to get to bone too!

[what he would be - i think - is a magpie. get ready to be handed odd stones and bits of leaves on dates.]

i also think they're highly-strung in ways which differ enough to mean they'd just annoy each other. hermione is highly-strung in that she flusters easily and is very poor under pressure, but she's actually pretty emotionally stable [and i'd dispute that she's a pessimist - this is a girl who thinks that she's successfully eradicating slavery at hogwarts by knitting hats; she's pretty robust, funny, cheerful, and idealistic]. snape is highly-strung in that he has a hair-trigger temper and is very emotionally volatile, but he's obviously an extraordinarily good liar, very quick on his feet, and very good under pressure. he'd think she panicked too much [and over insignificant things he didn't care about], she'd think he tanked the vibe of a date by taking offence at someone breathing too loudly.

where are they similar? well, they have a shared self-serving streak [hermione is appalled by behaviour from harry and ron she considers perfectly moral when she does it]; capacity for cruelty; tendency towards secrecy; tendency towards pettiness and pleasure in the misfortune of others; loathing of flying a broom; cutting sense of humour; stubbornness; resilience; clear dislike of slumming it in nature; love of puzzles; and a weakness for red hair.

i think you could make it work on the grounds that they'd probably have the time of their lives being haters together - especially, i feel, about rita skeeter.

and - y'know - because love is weird.

#asks answered #asenora's opinions on ships #snamione #hermione granger #severus snape #is this an “i'm in danger” one?#only time will tell

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