[ SECRET POST #4337 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4337 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 45 secrets from Secret Submission Post #621.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

So. I have a little brother. One of his friends used to throw slurs like "f*g" around often.

He later realized he was taught these things by the environment and he was bisexual and now he doesn't use that slur.

Guess what? The opposite is true, too! You can be pretty unprejudiced before you go to school, and then leave home and encounter views and be caught up in things that prey on vulnerable people, too. Like how Snape himself wasn't even Good Enough for the purebloods, but they saw someone to take advantage of.

(Hi I'm tired of having this argument because if he was prejudiced before he met her, it sure as fuck didn't show in any of his actions or anything when it 100% would have.)

[(Anonymous)]

First, it's not like Snape was using the slur in general conversation. He reached for the slur in a moment of stress specifically to hurt someone to whom the slur would apply.

Second, I don't think that the argument is about when, exactly, Snape becmae a racist - whether it was at school or before school. The point is that Snape was a Magical Racist, and that's part of the reason that he chose to use that slur against Lily, as opposed to the idea that Snape wasn't magically racist and just randomly accidentally happened to blurt out a slur.

Third, even if you're bullied, that's not a justification for being a Magical Racist and joining a Magical Racist gang, which is also pretty strong evidence of being a Magical Racist.

[(Anonymous)]

Or, like what happens in real fucking life, the Magical Racist Gang preyed on a vulnerable young person who craved acceptance and safety, which they offered because it bolstered their numbers! You know, like real life gangs fucking do. Unless you think every single gang member was born predisposed to it.

[(Anonymous)]

I never said that anyone was predisposed to anything. Of course I agree with you that Snape made a choice.

[(Anonymous)]

Like. I'm going to be blunt. You clearly were never bullied, at least more than a little teasing. When you're isolated, it can get really tempting to chase acceptance anywhere you can get it. Because otherwise it's crushing just existing. You fall into bad crowds because at first, they don't start with the bad act. It's a gradual thing that builds up, because again, these groups are predatory. So they start off nice and simple, don't show their bad streaks, butter you up, lure you in... And slowly turn your way of thinking around by threatening to withdraw that acceptance that you've finally found. Like, shit, he was a kid.

[(Anonymous)]

"don't show their bad streaks"

According to the Pensieve memory, Lily and presumably a good chunk of the school knew EXACTLY what kinds of people Snape's new pals were, mainly because they didn't hide their anti-muggleborn attitudes at all.

(also as someone who was bullied and fell in with a bad crowd: you figure out what they're like pretty damn quick, actually)

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I acknowledge all of those things, and yes, in some ways it's a tragic circumstance that Snape was placed in. But he still did make his choice, despite the fact that the allegiances of his new friends were pretty clear, and he maintained that choice for several years, past being a kid, until it threatened Lily. I don't know what you want me to say here. The fact he was bullied doesn't change those things.

And for the record, you don't actually know me.

[(Anonymous)]

And this is why I hate Snape fans. We get it, you were bullied and clearly no one understands your /pain~~/ the way Snape does, therefore he's a poor sad woobie and not, y'know, a racist who called the one girl trying to defend him from his bullies a racial slur. Plenty of kids get bullied at school and somehow manage not to call their friends racial slurs.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm going to be blunt back. Snape was already racist when he got to Hogwarts. It shows up in his own memories and was most likely what drew the attention of the junior skinhead gang he took up with in the first place, since, as long as we're being blunt, lots of kids have shitty homelives and get bullied at school, but you're doing 99% of those kids a serious disservice when you claim that having that background gives you a good excuse to be a skinhead.

You need to stop making excuses for violent assholes before you get someone, possibly yourself, hurt. Snape was isolated because he was an unlikable little bigot with a mean streak who eventually turned that mean streak on the one person who ever tried to find the "heart of gold" under that pile of shit. And when she realized that under the shit was even more shit and decided to remove herself from that toxic situation, instead of learning anything from it Snape threw himself even more into his junior Hitler act. Multiple people were tortured and/or murdered directly because of Snape. Lily was one of them.

Everyone was a kid once, nonny. Lots of us were bullied. Most of us don't use either of those things to justify joining up with Team Ethnic Cleansing.

[(Anonymous)]

Dude, Snape didn't join some rough and tumble street gang... He joined the magical equivalent to the KKK. It wasn't an accident, and there is no defending that.
The 'bullied' excuse only goes so far- and if you want to say it warped his psyche to the point where he joined a group like /that/, (which is bullshit because he knew exactly who they were and allied himself with them from the beginning), then why does he bully his students to the point past abuse? It doesn't make sense.

[(Anonymous)]

Ugh. I like some things about Snape and will stan for him on occasion, but I’m not gonna justify his behavior with “bullied kids will do anything to be accepted and if you don’t agree you clearly weren’t bullied hard enough.”

Up through middle school most of my bullies were POC—I’m white. I got my lunch stolen, my books stolen—and ended up on the ground being kicked by a circle of kids when I tried to get the books back—got called all kinds of nasty stuff, tripped, slapped, followed home by groups of kids chanting taunts, cornered in bathrooms, had food and garbage thrown at me, kids pay each other to run up and kiss me (the other option was to kiss a toilet seat). High school was more of the same but with rich mostly white people.

You wanna know how many racial slurs I used in retaliation? Zero. You wanna know how many of their kids I’ve treated like shit since? Every week some of my work hours are in my old neighborhood, and I run into the children of my bullies fairly often—but it’s also zero, because I’m not an asshole. You wanna know how many white supremacist groups I joined? Zilch, because I’m not a monster.

Also, Snape was a kid. He grew into an adult who bullied children in his care. Even if he finally realized that belonging to a terrorist group was wrong, he still never stopped hurting people for shit they had no control over. He acted like Harry and his friends existed solely to piss him off when they were just kids. That’s not okay. Joining Hitler Youth Magic Edition wasn’t okay either.

[(Anonymous)]

Okay but does it matter if it was from before he met her or some time while he knew her? Either way he developed those prejudices, and by the time he said that to her he still had them. It might actually be worse to me if he started thinking of her that way after they became friends :/

[(Anonymous)]

It matters in the sense that when you know where it stems from, you can cut it off in other people.

I don't find it worse, considering all that had happened between them at that point. They'd begun drifting, she dated a guy who relentlessly bullied him (which yeah, can feel like a massive betrayal when said bully "got better" but never once fucking apologized to you, because then you wonder if they really even feel sorry or changed at all or are just putting up a front because they want in your friend's pants), all the while the only people offering him any kind of acceptance being a bad crowd. Which, I will reiterate what I said to the anon above: that's what real world gangs do. They're predatory. They prey on vulnerable youth. Like people who are bullied. People who have shit home lives. ETC.

It sucks he became such an awful person. It doesn't change that he does, but fandom has a distinct tendency to decide that if you do bad things you were always bad and evil and that you couldn't have possibly been a victim of circumstances that led you down a really bad road (which deserves a little sympathy but not anything that excuses the actions, because they could have been better).

[(Anonymous)]

She only started dating the guy who bullied him AFTER she ended her friendship with him (and only because said guy DID change; Lily wasn't stupid or weak-willed by anyone's description of her ever). Snape was ALREADY hanging out with those people WHILE Lily was still friends with him. She said so. That was the crux of their fight. She gave him lots of chances and encouragement to knock it off (while calling James an insufferable toerag, so that is not a factor at all at this point).

[philstar22]

All of this. If nothing else, Lily dating James is evidence that James changed. Lily hated James when he was bullying. There is no way she would have gone out with him if he hadn't actually changed, and there is certainly no way she'd have married him.

[(Anonymous)]

(ayrt) But as we've learned from previous Snape Stan arguments, it's more important to hyperbolize and assume James never ever changed one bit than to defend Snape's canonically awful adult behavior.

[(Anonymous)]

I wish more people would remember that at least a year passes between Lily ending her friendship with Snape (end of fifth year) and starting to date James (sometime in seventh year). But hey, gotta claim Lily left/ignored Nice Guy Snape for Popular Jock James! /s

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, I think the issue is that this Lily incident was the start of his path to join a genocidal hate based terrorist group, so that makes it difficult to excuse earlier, smaller acts of magical racism. Also, Snape can have been a little bit fantasy racist before meeting Lily and also not have been a bad person. Lots of kids are kind of racist, even if it’s not malicious, because they’re still developing (Ron I think was even kind of shown to be a tiny bit fantasy racist?), and that can often be made malicious by outside forces, like you say with Snape falling in with a bad crowd. Idk, both can be true? But anyway I think the point people generally are trying to make though isn’t about Snape’s eternal badness, but more pointing out that his fantasy racist beliefs were something he really felt, which is often downplayed.

[(Anonymous)]

"when said bully "got better" but never once fucking apologized to you, because then you wonder if they really even feel sorry or changed at all or are just putting up a front because they want in your friend's pants"

Why would James have bothered apologizing to the guy who literally joined the magical KKK though? Like, assuming he changed and had regrets about his past behavior, the guy you're saying he should say sorry to was part of a gang advocating for the deaths of nonmagical people. Why even bother?

(Also why do Snape-defenders have such little respect for Lily Evans?)

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe James shouldn't have terrorized and sexually assaulted Snape in the first place.

[(Anonymous)]

There we fucking go

there it is

[(Anonymous)]

That isn't what gangs do, you realize that right? Preying on weak-willed individuals is more of a cult thing.

[(Anonymous)]

That is literally what gangs do. I've literally researched this for multiple school projects. They start recruiting when they're young and vulnerable or otherwise desperate. Cults do it, too, because it's a method that works.

[(Anonymous)]

Others have already mentioned most of what I wanted to say, so I'll just point out that Lily didn't start to date James until their seventh year. That's more than a year after the end of her friendship with Snape in fifth year.

[(Anonymous)]

I honestly thought that either this fandom was too past it to have Snape apologists or the existence of said apologists were greatly exaggerated. I feel like I've spotted a rare species in the wild. So thanks for that, I guess?