On the Good ’Ship Granger/Snape
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | On the Good ’Ship Granger/Snape |
| Creator: | Red Hen |
| Date(s): | Pre-Book 7 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Harry Potter |
| Topic: | Snape/Hermione, Snape/Lily, romance fic in general |
| External Links: | http://www.redhen-publications.com/granger-snape.html |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
On the Good ’Ship Granger/Snape is a meta essay by Red Hen that discusses various topics including the titular ship.
Excerpts
And, to return to the predominent subject here, the highly conventionalized fanon Granger/Snape dynamics are a thoroughly representative example of one of the most predominant “foundation” story templates that drive the Regency juggernaut. There are some others, as well. But this particular one is solidly one of the top 3 in that paradigm, being only a lightly skewed variant of the “to reform a rake” model.Which right there probably explains most of the otherwise inexplicable “sex god” hyperbole attached to “fanon” Snape. (In any pairing.)
LupinLover’s ‘Over the Silver Rainbow’ appears to have the distinction of being the first serious attempt at a Granger/Snape romance to have been posted on ff.net. Or at least no one seems to be able to recall anything — apart from some mild S/M which was about power rather than romance — significantly earlier. LupinLover’s fic was posted in September of 2000. I sought it out after reading A Letter from Exile, (which was posted in December that same year) and skimmed it.
Frankly, I didn’t think it was particularly good. I’ve since learned that the author was about 13 when it was written, which at that point in the fandom was uncharacteristically young to be dealing with this particular pairing. (The inimitable Mr Rickman had yet to add his unwitting contribution to the popularity of this particular ’ship.)
LupinLover’s youth was ample explanation for the clumsiness in its handling. The characters’ motivations were thin and the attraction between the principals dumped in without any sort of backstory. Overall, it seemed less of a soap opera than a soap bubble. But it does appear to have been the first serious attempt at SS/HG, so far as anyone has since been able to determine. The author removed it from the internet a year or two afterward. She was older by then and the level of purely technical expertise on display in it, more than a decade ago now, was such as might be highly embarrassing.
Textualsphinx’s spin-off/response appears to have been the real watershed for this particular pairing. Not all fans may care for Textualsphinx’s overtly “literary” style of writing, let alone her distinctly feminist slant on the subject, or her handling of it (although more of them certainly do), but no one can call it unimpressive. And it has certainly inspired far more successful attempts at emulation/contrasting viewpoints/rolling one’s own than LupinLover’s original fic.
However, I tend to suspect that all of this is really begging the question. I very much contend that ‘Over the Silver Rainbow’s’ “original fic” status as the “first” Snape/Hermione fic was primarily a matter of chance. The summer of 2000, after all, had seen the release of ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’. Once GoF was out, I think that this particular pairing’s debut into fanfic became inevitable.
As to the ins and outs of the underlying plausibility of a SS/HG attraction; if one sticks to canon evidence, I tend to agree that there isn’t much. Let it be said, however, that it has been pointed out, exhaustively, that to a quite late point in the series, the only young man Hermione Granger is known to have formally “dated” for any length of time in canon (if one ignores Cormac McLaggan) was both older than she, and, physically, a pretty fair extrapolation of an adolescent Snape look-alike. That detail hasn’t been lost on the fans, either.Which is one of the reasons that some of the best stories which explore this particular relationship have the two of them “meeting” as potential romantic protagonists in some context other than a Hogwarts classroom. Usually in some context far removed from the classroom. But even very small differences in location can serve. Even a removal to the Hogwarts staff room is often regarded as quite sufficient.
But the fact remains that one cannot really see much likelihood of even a minimally canon-compliant ’ship launching from the Potions lab. (Certainly not now!)
Not that such couldn’t be done, or that it isn’t, in fact, being done, just that this projection simply isn’t as likely as one which postulates sending them both in different directions for a few years to let Hermione mature and develop a bit more, and to put Snape into a situation where he isn’t defending his home turf. Leveling the playing field, as it were.
I am willing to speculate that in most cases, the germ for the concept of the Granger/Snape pairing is the invocation of the generic cultural ideal of the “Marriage of True Minds”. This particular ideal is one of a standard set of cultural icons (The Attraction of Opposites/Perfect Counterpart, and The Star-Crossed Lovers are a couple of the others) all of which can be tweaked into a lot of different sub-variants. But the most common requirement for this particular class of tale is that both parties must be demonstrated to at least have minds.
Well, there is no question that this much is supported in canon. Hermione is at the very least a much brighter than average child, and if Rowling had the guts to fly the flag openly would be readily accepted as falling within the “gifted and talented” range.
It should be noted that Rowling has never actually stated that she does. And her depiction of Mis [sic] Granger throughout the series suggests that Hermione is merely a tightly-wound overachiever, and precocious with it. But then, Rowling only seems to value raw intelligence within rather narrow limits. Rowling’s whole love-fest for the Weasley family strongly suggests that raw “intelligence” or worse, “intellectualism” is emphatically not one of her fetishes. It took until OotP before we met even one Ravenclaw apart from Penelope Clearwater who we glimpsed briefly in Book 2 and never saw again, even though she was still at Hogwarts to the end of the year of the TriWizard Tournament, or Cho Chang who has never been more than a sweetly pretty distraction on the sidelines.
And, keeping this firmly in mind, we can also see that until Book 6, canon Snape was never depicted as being anywhere close to the level of genius that fanon Snape is almost always depicted, either. (And he is still is not depicted as being particularly “culturally-enriched”, which is a widespread fanon Snape trait.) But he has nevertheless always been admitted to be clever — or at any rate, “no fool” — and he has always been a sharp observer of whatever is going on around him. What is more, he usually only goes astray in his interpretation of these observations due to his determination to assign the worst possible motives to everything and everyone. Canon Snape is clearly an intelligent man who is blinkered by his own biases. Perfect anti-hero material, in fact.