good and bad Slytherins/Disappointment and Responsibility

[Judy]

No: HPFGUIDX 175301

Lanval said:
> Here's a mystery for me. Why is it that, on the one hand, so many
> Snape fans have always claimed to love Snape for his complexity,
> his 'greyness', his ambiguousness, yet on the other hand insist that
> he's the Good Guy in almost every situation involving him? If one
> were to take every argument ever fought out here, and adopted the
> pro-Snape opinion as canon, he'd be counted among the most boring,
> good-guy-under-a-dirty-cloak, nerve-gratingly noble, tear-inducing
> sob-story cliche in literature.

I don't actually think many Snape fans believe that Snape is 
the "Good Guy in almost every situation involving him." (I don't 
think I've seen a single person say that Snape was justified in 
calling Lily a "Mudblood," for example.) Instead, they believe that 
he was victimized by James and Sirius. That's a big difference. 

Lanval again:
> I've seen my share of "how dare you like the Bad Guys, don't
> you know that you're supposed to hate them, what are you, BAD?"
> But. I've seen as much condescension from the Snape(insert
> Draco/Slytherin/Random Designated Bad Guy) fandom, as in, "I LOVE
> the Bad Guys -- what an interesting, deep, intellectual reader I
> must be! what, you like the guys JKR 'told' you to like? Oh dear...I
> suppose so do the ten-year-olds..."... I must add that this refers 
> mostly to offlist content, found elsewhere on the internets.

I haven't seen this here. I've read the past few days of posts here, 
and I don't remember any personal attacks on fans for not liking 
Snape. If you say that these attacks are taking place on other sites, 
I believe you, but please don't bring these fights here. 

Lanval again:
> where are all these pure-and-stay-
> good lovable characters that *we*... sing-song praise over?
> Certainly not Sirius, Harry or Lupin, to mention just
> three whose fans' views regularly clash with that of Snape fans.

I think the reason so many fans are "singing Snape's praises" as you 
put it, is because he's being *attacked* here. No one is vehemently 
defending Harry because no one is vehemently attacking Harry. (No one 
is attacking Lupin much, either.)

As for Sirius, I don't currently see him coming in for the sort of 
attacks that Snape is currently getting. (He did get attacked a lot 
before Book 5, and he did get some vehement defenders then, just as 
Snape is getting now.) Some people are currently saying that they 
don't like Sirius and that they feel he was very unfair to Snape, but 
I don't anyone denying that he had his good points -- he cared about 
Harry, for example. But people *are* saying that Snape had no real 
good points -- he was "creepily obsessed" with Lily instead of loving 
her, he was abusive to children, etc. I even saw one person (Alla, I 
think) saying how comforted she is to think of Snape being tormented 
forever in the afterlife by seeing Lily in James' arms. Of course, 
this is fiction and readers can intrepret things as they wish, but 
it's no surprise that Snape's fans are going to respond by defending 
him.  

If you would rather talk about something other than Snape and don't 
want to see fans defending him, the solution is simple: Don't attack 
him.

-- JudySerenity, not at all swayed from her love for Snape