[ SECRET POST #2283 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2283 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 032 secrets from Secret Submission Post #326.
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

[aubry]

Which - as good a place as any to clarify my point from above in case it came across this way - wasn't what I was arguing.

Somebody (and I'm irked I can't remember whom, or enough of the quote to Google and get it right) once said that a well-realised villain is one whom you can see is the hero in his own version of the story. I agree with that. Comprehensible motivation is just good storytelling.

Where I lose interest is when the narrative treats the fact of the Black Hat's complexity as a twist or revelation, and then drops any real engagement with the fact of his villainy now that he's more sympathetic. Snape from HP and Spike from BtVS are two that occur to me straight off as worthy of discussion in that regard.

[agentcthulhu]

Hey, your icon reminded me of this just now - are you also the Irish pirate grannie? It's the same icon.

[(Anonymous)]

a well-realised villain is one whom you can see is the hero in his own version of the story.

I agree with this. However, I don't think this view necessarily implies that the villain must have a sympathetic background, or that they must view their own actions as For The Greater Good. I think that's unrealistic and unnecessarily restrains the field of action, if you will. I think it's basically a result of an understanding of what constitutes realism in literature that has too limited a scope. I mean, a picaresque has a protagonist, too, but its protagonist would certainly not be interested in the moral value of their actions.

Where I lose interest is when the narrative treats the fact of the Black Hat's complexity as a twist or revelation, and then drops any real engagement with the fact of his villainy now that he's more sympathetic. Snape from HP and Spike from BtVS are two that occur to me straight off as worthy of discussion in that regard.

I agree with this.

[(Anonymous)]

Spike had an ongoing character arc during the course of the series in which he stopped serving as a villain in the narrative, so I'm not sure that's the best example.

Snape, meanwhile, was perceived as a villain by the protagonist, but was in reality on the same side as the heroes since the first book, so I'm not sure that it's really useful to consider him a villain in the first place. He was, at most, the antagonist of a minor subplot while serving as an ally in the main narrative.

[(Anonymous)]

Careful, those distinctions might just be too complex.

[(Anonymous)]

In the case of Spike, they are just excuses made by people who want to shag him. Quite simple, really.

[(Anonymous)]

But, with regards to Snape, considering his moral standing rather than his relation to the protagonists, I think there's a lot of shit that he does that's morally questionable and dickish in the extreme. Yes, in the struggle against Voldemort he's on the right side. But the question of all the other stuff that he does - particularly his cruelty and vindictiveness as a teacher - just isn't addressed.

It's treated as if his sympathetic background, and the fact that he's against Voldemort, makes up for all of that. And so the extremely cruel stuff that he does throughout the books just isn't addressed any more. As aubry said, once the sympathetic background appears, it's as though the villainous stuff that he does disappears.

tl;dr - Snape as a teacher does some stuff that's pretty inexcusable and horrible and cruel, but once his sympathetic background comes out, all that stuff just gets ignored.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, Snape does do a lot of really shitty things to the students under his responsibility. That makes him an asshole, not a villain. Sometimes "good guys" can be shitheads. That doesn't make them villains.

Revealing Snape's backstory was one of the things that cleared up whose side he was actually on -- the mystery of which, from a narrative perspective, had been the purpose of showing him being an asshole to the students. After that mystery is resolved, there would have been little point to dwelling on his shitty behavior to make the reader question his allegiance. If anything, that's a failure of the storytelling, rather than the character.

[(Anonymous)]

That's kind of my point? I guess? He's a good guy but in a lot of ways, a bad person. Which is fine, he's a morally complex character, but the way he's treated in the series, any consideration of the things that he does that are bad disappears, to a certain extent, after it's revealed that he's on the side of the angels. Which is a problem, and I agree that it's a failure of the storytelling, and I think that's all I've really been arguing. Once it becomes clear that he's good from a story-structure point of view, there's no further consideration of the things that make him ambiguous from a moral-character point of view, and that's not necessarily a good thing. I think that's all Aubry was saying to start off with.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm really not sure how it could have been handled otherwise in the narrative, though, without completely reworking huge chunks of the story. Because the ways in which Snape is kind of a shitty person and the way those traits manifest plays a role in the narrative early on; they make the protagonist, and therefore the reader, wonder whether Snape is on the main villain's side. After it's made clear that he's not, maintaining that sort of ambiguity serves no narrative purpose. Dropping that threat results in glossing over some of the character's personality traits in the last book or so, but with as much else as is going on during that time in the story, I'm not sure how significant a flaw that really is.

[truxillogical]

It could probably have been better handled by Harry not choosing to name his son after Snape just because he was one of many many people killed in the fight against Voldemort. Snape loved Lily, so there's that, but it was kind of a selfish, possessive sort of love (that inspired him to do heroic things, yes, but still). And he helped them defeat Voldemort, but, well, so did a good number of people.

Heck, and I say this as someone who quite likes woobie-Snape and read/wrote my fair share of Snape/Lily fanfic back in the day and talked about asphodel and wormwood and how smug we were gonna be when it turned out we were right--the way it plays out, anything heroic Snape ever did still seems spawned out of that twisted, possessive love he had for Lily. It's a selfish sort of heroism (one more motivated by grief and guilt than the need to Do The Right Thing. Also, I imagine it's easier for a man like Snape to face death without being brave, figuring his own life isn't worth anything now). Which is, y'know, fine and makes for an interesting character. I just wish that, after the books got reasonably complex, we got Harry naming his son after the man and calling Snape "the bravest man I ever knew" as if doing heroic things, for whatever the reason, makes you A Good Hero.

[(Anonymous)]

A lot of that can be attributed to the Death Equals Redemption/Never Speak Ill of the Dead tropes. Snape may have been an asshole when he was alive but after he died (revealing his 'sympathetic' backstory) Harry was able to retroactively justify his behavior to fit with his new 'heroic' status.

So once he was dead a) Harry felt guilty about hating him since he died helping him defeat Voldemort and b)being dead, Snape could no longer continue to act like a dick, thus giving Harry no further reason to dislike him and allowing Harry to entertain the illusion that he would have stopped being a dick once he was no longer pretending to be the servant of Voldemort.

[aubry]

Those are completely fair points.

My reason for lighting on Spike and Snape (beside the fact that they're from big fandoms and are famously divisive) is less to do with the consistency of their own character arcs, and more to do with how their redemption plots effect the wider moral landscape of the text.

In both cases they start out as antagonists. Snape's not a (known) murderer like Spike, but he's unjust, closed-minded and a bully who abuses his power. A quintessential villain for a child protaganist. As Harry matures he learns more about Snape. However, I'd argue the books, having humanised Snape, then avoid ever addressing the implications of his bad behaviour in earlier books. When we're left with Snape on a posthumous pedestal in the epilogue the implication is that Harry learned to see the bigger picture. But ought all sins be forgiven like that? (Your own answer might be yes to that - it's just that I think that it's a niggling discord rather than a deliberate question on which the book closes.)

With Spike, I think the fallout is markedly worse. By the time Spike gets his soul back, there's so little difference between souled!Spike and chipped!Spike that it raises the question of whether the distinction between human and vampire is morally sustainable at all. If any vampire could potentially go on a Spike-style redemption programme, should we review our opinion of Buffy's habit of sticking stakes through them? Again, the last two seasons run shy from tackling this sudden looming question head on.

In both cases I'm inclined to think that rendering "baddies" more sympathetic came at the expense of clarity in the hero's moral arc.

[(Anonymous)]

While you make a reasonable enough point about Snape's unfair and hurtful behavior as a teacher, I'm not sure how the narrative could have gone any other way. From the first book, Snape is set up as the grudging ally who would eventually make the Heroic Sacrifice so that the protagonist could succeed. It would be really hard for Harry to have said, "Wow, this guy made the ultimate sacrifice to help save us and defeat the Pureblood Supremacists... but he used his authority to mistreat the kids he supervised, so fuck him and his heroic death." I think the better message there is that a person doesn't have to be perfect in order to do the right thing in the end, and that you don't need to like someone personally in order to respect what they've done. I thought the books at least touched on those ideas a bit, but I last read them about five years ago, so YMMV.

With Spike, I was actually really interested in the way Spike's redemption brought up the question of the nature of vampirism and the morality of the Slayer. How morally culpable are vampires for their actions -- can they choose to do otherwise? The conclusion I came to is that it very much depended on who and what the person was in life; as a mortal, Spike had a deep capacity for selfless love that was not entirely eradicated by becoming a vampire (see his devotion to Dru). Thus, his period of enforced pacifism and socialization with humans allowed him to re-develop some rudimentary moral reasoning within a very narrow in-group, and when that in-group had a strong moral compass, he was able to stumble along in that general direction with only vague prompting. It was a specific confluence of factors that would be impractical to replicate for any significant number of vampires, and probably wouldn't work on the majority of them anyway (for instance, it would never have worked on Angelus), so I don't think that it wholly undercuts the work of the Slayer -- but I like the fact that it removed the hard binary of human/monster. It made the setting richer, and I think it complemented the other themes of the later seasons well (for instance, Season 6 was all about how humans could be just as monstrous as any demon -- so why can't a demon go the other way, and become more human?).

[(Anonymous)]

There are several ways to portray a good villain. A villain doesn't have to feel they are the hero of their own version of the story to have a motivation for what they are doing, or have a backstory that explains their character. Sometimes a great villain is the shadow of the protagonist, having traits and beliefs that the protagonist shares, or those less desirable that the protagonist denies. It's all the matter of how well the villain is written, regardless.

I never got into Buffy, so I don't know about Spike, but Snape was never really a villain, at least not the sort that the Death Eaters themselves are. He has many antagonist qualities, sure, and does some things of questionable morality, but it kind of becomes clear along the way that he's a complex character that cannot be easily put into any catagory. At least that's how I see it. When I was reading the book, it was becoming clear that Snape wasn't becoming the villain that I had expected or wanted, but somehow I felt satisfied with his story arc, even appreciated it, even if a lot of HP is flawed.