Just a little Snape musing...

[valis2]

rickfan37 did her own build-a-snape here and mentioned this really excellent point:

Here’s the Urbane!Snape myth again. I don’t know, and we’re given no clue in canon. I simply don’t believe he’s a closet opera buff and spends his spare time humming along to great arias, or that he can quote Dante or Shakespeare at will.

It really made me think of something new. I've always been a bit apprehensive about fics where Snape quotes Byron and listens to Bach.

I think what really is happening is that giving Snape these "pretentious" hobbies is a way for an inexperienced writer to "shorthand" their characterization of him, because in just a sentence of quoting/playing classical music, they set him up (in their minds) as a certain sort of character, aloof, mysterious, educated, etc. It's a short-cut.

The thing is, the sort of character they're trying to develop is not canon. Snape is a pure-blood, and would most likely know very little, if anything, about the Muggle world (his matchbox comment notwithstanding). And I'm certain that most pure-bloods wouldn't want to involve themselves in any sort of Muggle-world scrutiny.

So authors who attempt this short-cut are really doing canon a disservice, when what they really need to do is discover what would make him an aloof, mysterious, and educated character in Rowling's world.

Just my little musing for the moment.

Comments

Re: The Snitch sent me

[valis2.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, thank you for the link.

Re: The Snitch sent me

[lanjelin.livejournal.com]

Well, this is what Rowling herself says about it:

So this is the name of everyone in Harry's year. And all these little symbols mean what house they're in, how magical they are, what their parentage is because I needed this later for the death eaters and so on and the various allegiances that would be set up within the school.

So I guess it means it really does show who has muggle heritage and who does not.

The entire interview is transcripted here (http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/2002/0000-BBC-Interview.htm).

I found some screencaps here (http://www.fictionalley.org/harryandme/).

The left symbol is apparently gender, the right is which House they belong to and the middle column is magical heritage. By comparing them to each other you see that those with two magical parents (like Crabbe and Goyle) have a star with a circle around it, those with one magical parent has a star and those with no magical parents have an "n" in a square.

From this we find out that there are apparently two Slytherins with only one magical parent: Tracey Davis and Millicent Bulstrode. However, since she changed Queenie Greengrass to Daphne Greengrass, people have taken it as evidence that the list is unusable. (I just think she realised a mistake; Queenie sounds like a dog.)

Re: The Snitch sent me

[valis2.livejournal.com]

How fascinating! I can't believe I've never seen it before.