Essential Snarry Reader Interview with Acid and Sinick

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Essential Snarry Reader Interview with Acid and Sinick
Interviewer:	Aubrem
Interviewee:	Acid and Sinick
Date(s):	March 9, 2002
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Harry Potter
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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In 2002, Acid and Sinick were interviewed for The Essential Snarry Reader by Aubrem.

Some Excerpts

Sinick: Heh. I'm afraid I've got rather more fannish history than any one fan should probably have.

As a little kid I'd been interested in Star Trek (this was in pre-TNG days), but my first fandom obsession began at age nine, with Lord of the Rings. At the time Mosaic wasn't even a gleam in CERN's eye, so I joined the English Tolkien Society, and had a poem published when I was fifteen.

My second fannish obsession was Star Wars: it was fun to see the huge impact the first movie had on mundane awareness of matters fannish.

Then the Wrath of Khan (actually Khan himself) dragged me by my gonads into costume-sewing, con-going Trek fandom.

My first net.fandom was Deep Space Nine, specifically the Cardassians. My only previous attempt at collaborative fiction dates from that time: "Mastery", a zineful of BDSM stories written via unscripted emails, where snaples wrote Bashir and I wrote Garak and Dukat.

Then Darth Maul renewed my earlier interest in Star Wars, and prompted me to write some stories for Siubhan's Sith Academy parody website.

I'm a serial monogamist as far as fandoms go, and although I'm still fond of my previous fandoms, the release of the Philosopher's Stone movie kindled instant, singleminded interest in all things Snapeish: and this is one fannish obsession that shows no sign of flagging.

Acid: My fannish record is nearly blank, compared to Sinick's. I started off in Xena femmeslash fandom around '99 (and still have a bunch of old sketches somewhere to prove it).

The summer when OotP came out I read all of the books at once, mostly because I was without a computer for a week and had nothing else to do. Never really liked the first five books that much. In my defence, book six, was definitely an exception to that, but back then it was the fandom creativity that drew me in after I checked out some of the fan sites.

HP fandom with its collection of pairings and the amount of new fanfic was quite a change from my old one. I began drawing fanart illustrations for some of the stories I read and liked; never planned to start writing myself but then the first ideas for Price sort of happened and Sinick bravely volunteered to beta-read the beginning chapters. I bet she had no clue back then what she was getting into.

Sinick: I don't really have a One True Pairing, so much as a One True Character: Snape was what piqued my interest in the Potterverse in the first place, and I still find his character, background, motives, personality and problems endlessly fascinating. He's the most layered, mysterious and morally ambiguous character in the entire series, and anti-heroes and shady characters have always intrigued me. I particularly like his intelligence, his self-reliance, his sarcasm and cynicism (I would have chosen 'cynic' for my username, but that was already taken).

The Snape half of Snarry was inevitable for Snape-obsessed me, so your question really boils down to: Why Harry?

It's easy to be annoyed by Harry as he appears in canon, particularly in OotP when the CAPSLOCK-ITIS hits. But although his stupid, self-absorbed moments in OotP irritated me as a reader, as a writer I adored JKR's characterisation of Harry: his behaviour in that book is pure teenaged boy. But I think it would be a mistake to dismiss Snape/Harry because of some annoying moments in canon: almost as grave a mistake as to dismiss Snarry and other cross-generational ships as being the province of closet ephebophiles.

Acid: Snape fascinates me. His ambiguity, his sarcasm, the contents of his mind, his nose. (Er, the nose is fun to draw; the rest mostly applies to written word.) Harry, on the other hand, makes me laugh and inspires me with his every achievement and every mistake; they can be equally grand and terrible. The impossible brat sort of grew on me; I was indifferent to his character in the books until I read his interaction with Snape in some fan fiction stories and my face lit up: whoa, all that potential! Now I like his stubbornness, his optimism, his penchant for trouble, and his easy-going nature.

As for these two together... where do I begin? I like the interaction, the arguments and the banter, the irony of them -- of all people -- ending up with one another. And now I suddenly have an image in my mind of Harry, Snape, and the resulting echoing groans (No, not that kind of image, Sinick.): "Why *me*?" And the follow up: "Why *him*?"

But seriously, they have a lot to teach and to give each other, intellectually, emotionally, and physically. I like the match (or mismatch) of their individual strengths and flaws and the conflict it creates. Harry's recklessness, impulsiveness, and enthusiasm against Snape's pragmatism, caution, and cynicism. Harry with his persistence and Snape with his eternal grudges. Pessimist and optimist. 'Ugly old git' and a 'scruffy, half-blind, moderately attractive, young idiot with a quaffle for brain and ... er, well, you get the idea.' They already bring out the worst in each other and are very capable of bringing out the best as well. They have the strongest subtle chemistry out of everyone else in the books.

Acid: Despite the chuckle I got out of the title of the sixth book and the idea of Harry smitten by Snape's diary, I can be a realist on rare occasions. I imagine that the similarities and Harry's (POV character’s) affinity for the Half-blood Prince were put in for the purpose of distracting the readers from the big conclusion of book six. At least that's how I would've written it. Who knows why JKR did it. As for the resolution of that developed character link, I can only guess that she is setting up Snape to teach Harry a lesson, one that Harry would never expect to learn from him of all people. Most likely the lesson would incorporate Snape's death in some major way but let me ignore that possibility just awhile longer.

Sinick: Because I'm a hopeless packrat (I keep emails and IM logs) I can trace back exactly how and when hello_hbp all began. The first episode was posted Nov 24th. The day before, Acid emailed me with a plotbunny that she'd been bitten with for a challenge at snape100: "Harry sending notes to Snape after killing Voldemort written on the pages ripped out of HBP's textbook." Acid included some initial plot skeletons in the email as well, (which I won't repeat here for fear of possible spoilers). That morning we IMed: in the course of which I came up with the other half of the idea behind the community. [transcript of IM chat is included in the interview]