Severus Snape fandom survey
| Fan Survey | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Severus Snape fandom survey |
| Surveyor: | severusdefender |
| Date(s): | 2017 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Harry Potter |
| External Links: | Survey results, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Severus Snape fandom survey is a fan survey created in 2017 by tumblr user severusdefender. The survey gained a total of 329 responses.[1]
Extracts from survey results
14. Who do you ship Severus Snape with?
- Lily Evans 32.5%
- No one 25.8%
- Harry Potter 19.1%
- Hermione Granger 28.3%
- Remus Lupin 17.9%
- Lucius Malfoy 14.3%
- Sirius Black 9.1%
- Albus Dumbledore 7.3%
- Minerva McGonagall 5.8%
- Draco Malfoy 2.7%
- Other 27.4%*
Other characters include: Regulus Black, Severus Snape/fan, Severus Snape/happiness, Original characters, older versions of Harry and Hermione, James Potter, Barty Crouch jr, Mad Eye Moody, Arthur Weasley, Rebeus Hagrid, Narcissa Malfoy, any slash pairing, anyone who would love him, Severus Snape/reader, and Kingsley Shacklebolt.
24. What do you like about Severus Snape?Many of you said everything. Common answers include his wit, honesty, resilience, loyalty, courage, intelligence, perseverance, complexity, and redemption. Inversely some have said they liked his temper, bitterness, insecurities, coldness towards others, pettiness, lack of hygiene, and physical unattractiveness. Hilariously, someone referred to him as Walter White in reverse as he is first a spy who is forced to take a Chemistry like job as part of his cover. His backstory was another thing that attracted fans particularly his history of being bullied and abused.
25. What do you dislike about Severus Snape?Many said nothing. Common answers include his treatment of his students, ill temper, harshness, pettiness, inability to move on from his past, lack of relationship with others, and immaturity. That he joined Death Eaters is a response that showed up a handful of times. Some of the answers were basically saying it was annoying that he died. Quite a few felt J K Rowling didn’t really do much in terms of his redemption. Others felt he was too loyal to Dumbledore and Lily. Funny answers include that he didn’t destroy Umbridge, the creepy jars of pickled animals in his office, that he died at all, he isn’t real (many have also that if he were real they would get into fist fights with him).
26. How do you see Severus Snape in your head?The responses were very varied so first I’ll list the most frequent features, orientations and other headcanons. First majority saw him as Alan Rickman, sometimes tweaked in terms of age, size and orientation, etc. Adrian Brody, Shazad Latif and Adam Driver are other fancasts. Features that recurred include tall, skinny (or in that range), not conventionally attractive, greasy hair, gaunt face, black eyes, and hooked nose. The fandom also saw him as average to short with medium length hair, and dexterous fingers. As for race, majority saw him as white but a substantial portion of the fandom had nonwhite headcanons specifically Arab, Jewish, Asian, and Rromani.
The sexual orientations were also varied with asexuality in the lead followed by bisexuality, heterosexuality, pansexuality and homosexuality. Romantic orientations mentioned the most are demiromantic, biromantic, homoromantic and panromantic. Gender headcanons weren’t specified often but non binary genders had an edge with a significant number of responders seeing her as a trans woman. There were also intersex headcanons.
Many answers comprised of behavior and mental health headcanons with most seeing him at least mentally unhealthy. Depression and PTSD were mentioned regularly. A sizeable part of the fandom disagreed with commonly held headcanons. They felt Severus’ ethnic features (large, hooked nose, oily hair and skin tone) were not inherently ugly. They also felt that he was not unhygienic as he wasn’t described with bad body odour. Also I saw more facial hair headcanons than I expected.
28. How does hatred towards Severus Snape in the Harry Potter fandom make you feel?This is admittedly one of the two most important questions in the survey. I’ll explain in a separate post why but let’s get to it. The fandom felt annoyed, sad, angry, upset, disgusted, and frustrated. A lot of the hate seemed to hurt the fandom. Some of the responses were longer and gave more details such as feelings towards victim blaming, actions blown out of proportions, more attractive characters being given leeway in comparison, canon facts being twisted and fanon being treated as canon. A fraction of the fandom was indifferent.