Humans have been called Pan narrans, the storytelling ape, and in general we see that as a good thing. Building narratives is a form of play and like all imaginative play, it helps us to prepare in advance for situations we haven’t met yet. One of the manifestations of this is fanfiction, which is basically an attempt by readers to add new material to an existing story.
It is not, by any means, a new phenomenon. The first fanfiction scene in the modern sense, with fans of a story writing new not-for-profit material and then circulation it amongst themselves, was Don Quixote fandom in the early seventeenth century, but the Don himself was written as a fanfiction parody of sixteenth century Spanish superhero stories. And the basic process, of adding new material to a pre-existing story and setup, is common to all historical novels, and to novelisations of myths and religious stories. Other than the fact that the author made money from it, Le Mort d’Arthur is a fanfic of the Arthurian mythos, and all those weird Mediaeval Lives of the Saints and stories about the childhood of Jesus are absolutely fanfiction.
The problem with being a storytelling ape starts when people can’t tell the difference between stories and what really happened. This is what gave us the Blood Libel (invented by the Romans to tell about Christians, and then used by Christians against Jews) and the Children’s Crusade. The combination of Hollywood, which takes real stories and makes them sound like fiction, and the internet, which takes fictional stories and makes them sound real – or at least as real as the Hollywood version – has made this even worse.
In fiction fandom we call the process of generating new information which people then accept as true “fanon”. It’s what happens when one of we storytelling apes makes up something to fill in a gap in the original, canonical text, and then shares it with somebody else, who shares it with a third person, and a few hundred passes down the line people have forgotten that it started as conscious fanfiction, and vaguely assume that it came from the canon text itself.
In the Harry Potter fandom I most often see this in relation to a group known as Snaters (Snape haters), who also demonstrate another problem with shared storytelling: the fact that a skewed, biased narrative can be used as a form of virtue-signalling. If you don’t buy into the new narrative as reshaped by your group you are [a Nazi; Zionist scum; a godless Commie; a shill for Big Pharma; a slave of the Patriarchy] an enemy, regardless of the actual facts of the original story. Believing the fanon and treating it as canon, whether in the fanfiction world or in real-world politics, becomes a requirement to prove that you are The Right Sort of Person.
For anyone who may be reading this and doesn’t already know, Snape in the Harry Potter books is a difficult, spiky character, and legitimately not everyone’s cup of tea. He was born a dirt-poor working-class north Midlands boy, severely abused and neglected, and subject to vicious and “relentless” bullying at school by a quasi-criminal gang of posh boys known as the Marauders, including public torture, humiliation and minor sexual assault. As a late-teen he briefly joined the Death Eaters, a populist but fairly extreme mass political movement, who were clearly winning in a struggle with their current government, and must have seemed like a good career move. In proportion, the number of Death Eaters in the wizarding world when Snape joined would scale up to a party with around thirteen million members in the modern USA, and it’s canon that the Death Eaters presented themselves to potential recruits as wanting to rule the Muggles (non-magical humans) and Muggle-borns (magical humans with two non-magical parents), not murder them: so it was a bit like joining MAGA, then realising that ICE were killing civilians. Snape was probably never very enthusiastic – there was never even a rumour that he was a member, and we’re told he never killed anyone. When he discovered that the group he had joined were often outright terrorists and that he had accidentally put a former childhood friend named Lily in danger from them, then even though she had dumped him and married James, one of his persecutors, he begged his leader, Voldemort, to spare her. Not trusting Voldemort’s promise he then defected in an effort to make doubly sure of saving Lily, even though he expected to be tortured and killed as a result.
He became a double agent working for the Order of the Phoenix, a semi-legal paramilitary group who were in opposition to the outright terrorist paramilitary group, but his former friend died anyway, triggering the temporary collapse of the extremists but leaving Snape guilt-struck and traumatised. He then works as a teacher to protect Harry, the son of his former friend and his former tormentor, but he dislikes the boy, who is cheeky and difficult (having his own less extreme experience of neglect and abuse) and whose resemblance to his bullying father is triggering to Snape. As a teacher he is effective (has a high pass rate) but is often harsh and overbearing, and the abuse and trauma he has suffered have left him generally bitter and angry, and sometimes rather petty, spiteful and unfair. [Also sarcastic as hell, but in the UK that’s a positive thing as sarcasm is a very highly-regarded form of humour here.]
But he also works tirelessly all his adult life to protect Harry and to prevent a resurgence of the extremists to whom he had genuinely belonged for only about eighteen months in his teens. As a double agent he risks torture and death from both sides on an almost daily basis for years. He saves the lives of anyone he can save, even if they are nothing to do with Lily, and even if they are people he doesn’t like and who don’t like him. His life is spent, as I wrote in one of my online essays, “Doing the Right Thing with exemplary courage whilst bitching about it the whole way”.
So, he’s definitely a Marmite character: the fanwriter duj once said that he is a red-hot chili pepper in the lives of all who know him. But what is absolutely not in doubt in the books is his courage – Harry describes him as one of the bravest men he ever knew – and his capacity to love, and the fact that as a schoolboy he was bullied “relentlessly” by the Marauders. That’s the author’s own description, in an official, published work.
When he and Lily quarrelled at sixteen he made one attempt to apologise, and then when she told him to go he accepted it and left and never went near her again, but he still risked his life to protect her. He did his best to save both friends and strangers, and even his former tormentors, once they had ended up on the same side. The author has stated that he sacrificed himself and saved the world because of his ability to love. The fact that he felt great love, and that Voldemort, a psychopath, didn’t understand that, is the crux and climax of the series. The final full chapter is actually called The Flaw in the Plan and it’s explicit that the plan referred to is Voldemort’s, and that the flaw in it is that he didn’t understand that Snape would never truly serve the leader who had killed the friend he loved. That is absolute, cast-iron canon and much of the point of the whole series, and denying it is equivalent to claiming that Sherlock Holmes is unobservant, Don Quixote has a firm grasp on reality or Casanova is asexual.
So, there are people who don’t like Snape because of his often difficult and abrasive personality, and that’s fine: it would be a very dull world if we all liked the same things. But the Snaters not only hate him with an obsessive passion, but deny all his good points even when doing so means flatly contradicting what’s in the books (and where relevant, the films). They deny that he was ever bullied, deny his capacity to love, and sometimes even deny his courage, then attack people for preferring the canonical version to their own personal re-write. And I do mean “attack”, because some of them threaten to kill or rape anyone who likes Snape, or really do vandalise their cars. Many of them either deny that he was ever bullied at all (despite the author stating that he suffered “relentless bullying”, and some of it being directly shown in the books), or excuse the posh boys’ bullying of an already-abused child on the grounds that he would eventually grow up to be the difficult, embittered personality that their bullying helped to make him. Some outright say that the fact that they bullied him was a good thing and was what proved that they themselves were good boys – that they were good because they were bullies, not in spite of it. If you diagree thay call you a “Snape apologist”, or a Nazi-lover.
I’m sure many of my readers think I’m being silly to care about this, when it relates to a fictional character (albeit a fictional character who was based on one of my closest friends), but I’m very much afraid that the Snaters carry these attitudes through into their real lives. One of them that I encountered several years ago, and who claimed to be a US attorney, spent all her free time writing poems about torturing Snape to death, and actually argued as follows:
Harry loves James and Sirius, therefore James and Sirius are Good.
James and Sirius are bullies, therefore bullies are Good.
Good people would not bully a good person, so anybody James and Sirius bully must be Bad.
James and Sirius bully Snape, therefore Snape is Bad and deserves to be bullied.
I (this person) am a bully, therefore I am Good.
Good people would not bully a good person, so anybody I bully must be Bad.
The fact that I choose to bully somebody in itself proves that they are Bad and deserve anything I choose to do to them.
By hurting the people I choose to bully, and who must be Bad because I, a bully like James and Sirius and therefore a Good person, choose to hurt them, I am doing God’s work.
If she really is an attorney as she claimed, real people are being sent to prison because of attitudes which are expressed in her hatred of Snape. Either way, she demonstrates that in its most extreme form Snaterism is an expression of the abusive impulse which we see in real-life domestic abusers, and even in serial killers. “I am the arbiter of good and evil, so the fact that I choose to hurt you proves that you deserve to be hurt.”
The way so many people side with the Marauders over their victim also mirrors the way that in real-life abuse situations, many people will side with the abuser over the abused, especially if the victim is somebody they don’t like.
In February/March 2026 I had a run in with a Snater which epitomised the whole phenomenon. It was absolutely typical, and combined two common Snater traits.
Uninvited, and with no great relevance, a Snater joined in a comments thread about Snape to claim that he was incapable of love and never felt anything for Lily except obsession and possessiveness. After a novella’s worth of ranting hatred, he declared that his evidence for this claim, and for his pure distilled hatred of Snape, was that Snape had begged Voldemort to spare Lily “for me” and that that meant that he saw her as a possession to be owned. Now, to begin with, that’s a perverse and wilfully biased interpretation, because normally when you say “I begged him to do X for me” it means “… as a favour to me”, not “… for my ownership”. So it was putting the worst and most extreme possible slant on something very minor for no very good reason.
Much more importantly, I suppose Snape might have said that in the films (I’ve only seen most of them once, about fifteen years ago) but I doubt it, and he certainly didn’t say that in the books. That and the guy claimed that there was no evidence Snape ever repudiated his wizard-supremacist agenda, so he obviously remained a wizard-supremacist to the end. Not only is there very little evidence that Snape was ever a wizard-supremacist, even as a boy (unlike Dumbledore), but as an adult he actively tells people off for saying “Mudblood”, never says a single word against Muggles or Muggle-borns and is the only wizard I’m aware of that we know chooses to live in a purely Muggle town, amongst Muggles: but somehow that’s supposed to show that he is prejudiced against Muggles. The whole of this Snater’s frothing, passionate hatred is based on something he either imagined all by himself or read in a fanfic, and now he is screaming at the rest of us for not basing our moral judgements on his imagination, and that is absolutely bloody typical. I’m sorry now that I didn’t make a copy, but a few years ago a Snater on Quora published a list of “10 reasons to hate Snape”, all in SCREAMING CAPS, and only one of the ten was even compatible with the text, although not actively supported by it. The other nine all flatly contradicted the text, but he will attack anyone who prefers the author’s version over his.
So, the reason I despise and loathe Snaters is that they epitomise nearly everything I despise and loathe in the wider world. They are a symptom and a living embodiment of cruelty and lack of critical thinking skills, and I’m quite sure many, probably most of them carry that through to their offline lives.
Victim-blaming, and abusers claiming that they are the victim: Snaters claim that Snape must have deserved to be bullied, or make up wild stories about him somehow having bullied the Marauders, or somehow having stolen his talents from them. This is not a game, and not fiction: it’s a mirror to reality. It’s no different from Trump claiming that ICE were justified in murdering Alex Pretti as he lay defenceless on the ground, because he was “no angel” (because ten days earlier he had kicked a car), or domestic abusers claiming that the victim somehow “made them do it”. Many of them probably think Epstein’s victims asked for it, too.
Fake news: they make things up out of whole cloth, or build elaborate conspiracy theories out of a combination of pure imagination and exaggeration of the flimsiest evidence, or treat something they read in a fanfic (think Faux News) as if it was authoritative fact, and then instead of just using those things to write an Alternate Universe fanfic like rational people, they try to force other people to believe in their conspiracy theory, and attack and scream abuse at anybody who doesn’t. In the era of Musk and Putin I don’t think I need to explain why such people are dangerous.
For example, they claim that at school Snape was part of a gang who violently attacked Muggle-born students, and maybe even used Sectumsempra to cut them. The only evidence for this in canon is that he used a bad word, “Mudblood”, for Muggle-borns, but Rowling has said that he is also a Mudblood (because he has a Muggle parent), so he’s like a mixed race kid in the US south in the 1970s using the n-word. More accurately, he’s like a mixed-race kid calling somebody an “oreo”, because the problem wizards have with Muggle-borns is that they may be agents of the Muggle majority from whom they are in hiding, who outnumber them at least six thousand to one and who used to burn them at the stake. He also grew up in a region (the English Midlands in the 1960s) which was notorious for the free use of racist language, even by politicians. But Snaters claim it was so much more than that.
Bearing in mind that Rowling has stated that all curses and hexes are Dark magic, and that the sainted Marauders used curses and hexes against their victims, we are told in canon that a friend of Snape’s named Mulciber either tried, or pretended to try, to use a Dark spell against somebody called Mary Macdonald, when Snape wasn’t present. Snape said it was “just a laugh” and we don’t know whether that means it was a real Dark spell, but relatively harmless, or whether he means that Mulciber was only pretending: we only know that he wasn’t there and is taking Mulciber’s word for it. We don’t know what the spell was, or what the circumstances were, or who attacked whom first. We don’t know who Mary was, other than that she was presumably a student, Lily knew her or at least knew of her, and she was at the school in the academic year 1975/76, although we don’t know how old she was. She may be the same person as the Mary, surname unknown, who was in Gryffindor that year; but Mary was the second-commonest girl’s name in the UK at the time, so there would have been several Marys at the school at any one time. Twenty-two years later we meet a married Muggle-born woman named Mary Cattermole, age unknown except probably between twenty and seventy (since her husband is working-age), maiden surname unknown, house unknown, and the Snaters assume that there could be only one Mary in the whole of wizarding Britain and see this as proof that she is the same Mary, that Mary Macdonald was Muggle-born, that Mulciber attacked her because she was Muggle-born and that Snape was involved, and was part of a gang who hunted Muggle-borns for sport.
[Yes, Remus has seen Snape use Sectumsempra often enough to associate it with him. They were both spies for the Order of the Phoenix together at the time when Snape was saving people whenever he could, which presumably sometimes involved combat.]
Like MAGA voters, many of them delight in cruelty: they enjoy the fact that an already badly-abused child was bullied and tormented some more, because they don’t like him, so any cruelty heaped on him is good.
They treat the sexual assault of men as less important than that of women: James hung Snape upside down, stripped him (or threatened to, but there’s good reason to think he went through with it) and displayed his naked genitals to a jeering mob, and Snape’s subsequent behaviour suggests he was profoundly traumatised, but they treat this as just boyish good fun. If James had hung a girl upside-down and displayed her naked vagina they would probably be horrified, but they really think it doesn’t matter if the victim is a boy. This attitude has profound real-world consequences: about 40% of abuse survivors, both as children and adults, are male but the provision of shelter and counselling places for male victims is tiny compared with that for female ones.
They show a lack of understanding of and sympathy for abuse survivors, especially adult survivors, and a lack of understanding of what abuse is. Some of them do sympathise with abused children, almost to excess, but have no understanding that traumatised children grow up to be traumatised adults. They call Snape himself an abuser because he is a bit over-critical as a teacher, even though he is no more so than other staff at the school, he only normally interacts with each student for three hours a week and aside from one single witticism about a student’s teeth in seven years (and which was probably a clumsy Dad Joke, because I’ve seen the exact same joke made on a British panel show) he never criticises them for anything not related to their classroom performance. Yet, the Snaters look at scenes of the bullies hounding Snape as a child and publicly humiliating him for being ugly, with no wit involved, just straightforward jeering, and call it good clean fun, even though we are told that this was something which happened “relentlessly”. Somehow it’s seen as acceptable and not abuse when he’s the victim, and they don’t understand why he is tense and snappy when confronted with a student who looks exactly like one of his his tormentors, or why he reacts very badly when that student witnesses a recording of his boyhood humiliation.
It’s semi-canonical (from an essay authorised but probably not authored by Rowling) that Snape was whipped severely and often as a child, and he was certainly badly neglected, but Snaters have no understanding of why such a child might grow up jumpy and snappy like a beaten dog, or fall in with a bad crowd who were willing to love-bomb him and give him a group to belong to. When reminded that Snape was a survivor of extreme physical abuse they reply that emotional abuse is far worse than physical abuse: within extreme limits this is true, but they then ignore the fact that from what we see, the emotional abuse which Snape suffered from the Marauders was enormously worse than anything he himself ever said.
At the same time, they sexualise everything, in a way that often borders on paedophilia. Snape and Lily were friends since they were nine and he clearly already loved her in a sort of quasi-romantic way when he was ten, but they claim that his love for her was always and only ever about sexual possessiveness – meaning they think a nine-year-old is a fully sexual being. They also accuse people who like Snape of only liking him because he was played by a handsome actor in the films – even though book Snape is meant to be fairly ugly, and he was already a very popular character before the first film came out. They evidently can’t conceive of liking a selfless war hero for any reason except wanting to get into their pants.
There’s a very strong suggestion that they judge Snape so harshly because he is ugly. In their world, ugly men are not allowed to have finer feelings, and definitely not to be friends with an attractive woman: and if they are, it must be for venal reasons. So Snaters also epitomise a certain kind of misandry. Some of them are shallow women who despise ugly men and/or think men have no emotions except rage and lust, and who accuse Snape of somehow being an incel for being unselfishly devoted to a woman and going away when she tells him to; and conversely some of them are probably incels who can’t stand the fact that a man described as ugly has so many female fen. This is hinted at by the fact that so many Snaters also describe James as handsome, when James is meant to look exactly like Harry except with a longer nose and less interesting eyes, and Harry is meant to be, aside from his eyes, almost aggressively ordinary-looking. They want the pretty girl to be with a pretty man, and the ugly character must be evil and the character they see as good must be handsome, because anything else upsets their world view.
There may even be an element of anti-Semitism involved, since even though Snape looks the way he looks because he is an uglified caricature of John Nettleship, Rowling’s real-life Chemistry master, to people who didn’t actually know John he could be seen as “Jew coded”. Not for nothing is one of the loudest Snaters at the moment also a Hamas supporter. There is certainly often an element of quasi-fascist authoritarianism, even though they claim to be anti-Nazi, since many of them say that his bullying by the Marauders was Snape’s fault for daring to fight back: he should just have lain down and let the upper-class boys do whatever they wanted with him until they got bored with hurting him. [Passively not reacting to bullies can actually be a form of psychological aggression and of asserting dominance in itself, of course: but that’s a whole other conversation.]
They epitomise shallow values, superficiality and gullibility. Snape is verbally harsh with Harry, but risks his life over and over to protect him and devotes his entire adult life to keeping him safe. Remus has a pleasant, charming manner but he takes no interest in Harry until he starts teaching when Harry is thirteen, then never tells Harry he knew his parents until fate forces his hand at the end of the year. He is willing to put Harry’s life in danger to save himself from an emotionally stressful conversation, and between the end of his year as a teacher and his death nearly four years later he only sees or even speaks to Harry, that we know of, four or five times. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Remus is good. They really believe that socially nice is the same as genuinely good and promote that view, even though niceness is very easy to fake, and even within the books we see a murderer being oh-so-nice to the old lady he is about to kill.
They also put impressionable or socially naive people in danger by presenting James and Lily as an ideal couple, unlike the horrible geeky poor-and-common Snape. Snape, whatever his faults, goes away when Lily tells him to, and later he tries to save her, promising to do anything to protect her and apparently asking nothing in return, even though she had treated him harshly and had married his tormentor. Rich posh James persecutes Snape in part because he doesn’t like the possibility that another boy might fancy Lily (Rowling has said so), even though he and Lily are not dating yet – so he is staking her out as property in advance. He takes Snape as a kind of hostage and tries to use him to force Lily to date him against her will, and then when she tries to protect her friend he threatens her with violence and says that if he hurts her it will be because she “made him do it”. We see from the way in which he bullies Snape that he enjoys humiliating a victim, rendering them powerless and then rubbing their face in their own helplessness, and trampling on their sexual boundaries. We’re told that later, off-stage, he grew out of it but on the page his behaviour has more red flags than a Soviet parade, and presenting someone who acts like that as a good romantic partner is going to get some impressionable people abused or even killed in real life. It’s a similar problem to the Fifty Shades of Gray series – it romanticises behaviour which, if the perpetrator were not posh and rich, would land them in prison.
They epitomise double standards and unfairness (ironically, something they accuse Snape himself of), which offends my sense of justice.
Snape at ten, with no magical training except what little he may have gleaned from his magical but neglectful mother, has a flare-up of accidental magic and drops a branch on an older girl who is bullying him and jeering at him for being poor. Harry at thirteen, after two full years of formal magical training, has a flare-up of accidental magic and inflates a woman like a balloon because she was rude about his parents. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry is good.
Snape at eleven, having grown up in or close to the hunting grounds of four notorious serial killers two of whom specialised in children, starts school knowing a small number of combat spells. Harry at eleven has to be forcibly peeled away from a book on combat spells. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but Harry is good.
Snape as a child answers back when people are rude to or about him, and fights back when attacked. Harry as a child answers back when people are rude to or about him, and fights back when attacked. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry is good.
Snape is hot-tempered, excitable, suspicious, nosy, a rule-breaker and very sarcastic. Harry is hot-tempered, excitable, suspicious, nosy, a rule-breaker and very sarcastic. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry is good.
Sirius tried to murder Snape as a boy, just for being annoying and a geek (yes, we’re told repeatedly that it was attempted murder and the author has never said it wasn’t, but even if the Snaters are right and he didn’t intend him to die he certainly didn’t care if he died), and is still claiming he had deserved it as an adult. Snape wants Sirius executed when he believes (wrongly but with very good evidence) that Sirius is a mass murderer who is there to kill Harry. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Sirius is good. Meanwhile they blame Snape for having allowed himself to be tricked by Sirius, because apparently he ought to have known in advance that Sirius would try to murder him.
Schoolboy Snape, suspecting the Marauders of a crime (correctly, since they are unregistered Animagi and are letting a werewolf out to endanger the neighbourhood), follows and spies on them after they have persecuted him for years, and is nearly bitten as a result. Harry, suspecting Draco’s gang of a crime (also correctly), follows and spies on them after they have had a fairly equal rivalry for years, and gets his nose broken as a result. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry is good.
Schoolboy Snape, a neglected and severely abused child, makes allowances for the bad behaviour of the people who are willing to accept him, and is later led astray by them politically. Schoolboy Remus, isolated by being a werewolf, makes allowances for the bad behaviour of the people who are willing to accept him, and turns a blind eye to their misbehaviour even when he is a prefect and it is his duty to stop them. Harry, a neglected and at least somewhat abused child, is grateful for the Twins’ support and so turns a blind eye when they carry out dangerous experiments on children, and market date-rape drugs. When the Twins injure Montague so badly that he is still in hospital, being spoon-fed, six weeks later, Harry talks Hermione out of telling the school nurse how Montague was injured, even though they both know this would help with his treatment,so he actually covers up a near-murder. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Remus, Harry and Hermione are good.
Schoolboy Snape is friends with boys who grow up to be Death Eaters, and according to the Snaters that just goes to show how evil he is. One of the Marauders grew up to be a senior Death Eater who personally murdered at least thirteen people and single-handedly resurrected the Dark Lord, but according to the Snaters this doesn’t reflect on the other three at all, no sirree!
Schoolboy Snape supposedly has a reputation for interest in the Dark Arts, but internal evidence suggests that this came after fifth year, so not till he was at least sixteen. We have no evidence that he ever cast an Unforgivable spell until he joined the Death Eaters at nineteen, and quite possibly not till he was thirty-seven and mercy-killed Dumbledore on Dumbledore’s own orders. Harry first starts trying to cast Unforgivables at fifteen, and by seventeen he is tossing them around casually and effectively without a moment’s hesitation. The Marauders routinely expose innocent bystanders to the risk of being killed or infected by a Dark Creature, and sometimes use curses and hexes (intrinsically Dark according to Rowling) on their victims, on at least one occasion involving a dangerous illegal spell. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but Harry and the Marauders are good.
Schoolboy Snape invented some prank spells which were regarded as perfectly acceptable, as one of them (Levicorpus) became a school fad and everybody was using it. He also either invented or learned (that’s never 100% established either way) a combat spell which slices like a knife but evidently either cuts shallowly or doesn’t cut bone, since even if you really hack at somebody with it it only causes flesh wounds. This was probably after his tormentors had tried to murder him, but in any case he grew up in or close to the hunting grounds of four serial killers, two of whom specialised in children, and his father seems to have been violent to both him and his mother, so something which caused non-lethal defensive wounds which would look normal to the police could be a life-saver.
The Twins meanwhile carry out dangerous experiments on children, some of which cause uncontrollable bleeding, They invent a prank spell which could choke somebody, then try it on a Muggle. They sell date-rape drugs. They push a boy into a broken Vanishing Cabinet, to punish him for taking house-points, without caring how long he will be stranded or whether he will die of thirst, and he ends up spending six weeks in hospital as a result. They threaten to rape somebody with an implement. They knock down Draco’s gang, warp them and cover them with boils (which in itself was justified since Draco attacked first), then walk on their bodies as they lie helpless, and leave them trapped and in pain without food or water of a lavatory break for eight hours. As small children they beat their sister’s pet to death for fun, torment their elder brother, burn a hole through their younger brother’s tongue, turn his teddy into a giant spider and then try to get him to take an oath they know would kill him. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but the Twins are good – possibly because they have cute freckles. [Note: it’s probably not coincidence that the most famous twins in UK history were a pair of murderous gangsters. Rowling will have her little joke.]
Because Snape invented Levicorpus and the Marauders used it on him, Snaters say they are equivalent. But Levicorpus in itself just hoicks somebody up for a few seconds and probably makes them drop their wand. The Marauders bound him, insulted him, choked him with soap for daring to swear when attacked, then hung him upside down, stripped him and displayed him naked to the mob – but to the Snaters, those things are identical.
Snape, at sixteen, gives the bully who is choking him for kicks, and trying to force Lily to date him against her will, a controlled flesh-wound with a flick-knife spell. Harry, at seventeen, uses a torture-curse on somebody and then throws them into a plate-glass door because they were rude to somebody he likes (the door of a bookcase, so they couldn’t just blow through it but ended up collapsed onto the broken glass). According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry is good.
Schoolboy Snape is nosy. Harry is nosy. The Marauders design a magical device which tells them where everybody in the castle is at any time – essentially a surveillance device which spies on children. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry and the Marauders are good.
As an adult, once they are all on the same side Snape tries unsuccessfully to protect both Sirius and Remus, who were part of the gang who had bullied him at secondary school, and who had once nearly killed him. Harry succeeds in protecting the cousin who bullied him at primary school. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry is good.
As a teacher, Snape is harshly critical of his students’ poor performance, and once in seven years he makes a witty but rude remark about a student’s teeth which was probably meant as a Dad Joke (because I’ve seen the exact same joke on a UK panel show). McGonagall calls a student “abysmally stupid” and warns him not to let the foreign exchange students see how bad at magic he is, Flitwick calls a student “a baboon brandishing a stick”, Hagrid mocks Draco in front of the class over the humiliating ferret incident and Remus orders students to reveal their deepest fears in public. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but McGonagall, Flitwick, Hagrid and Remus are good.
Snape’s teaching style may be a bit harsh and overbearing but it is intended for the students’ own benefit, to keep them alive (especially Harry) and get them through their exams. He sees no reason to change it, because his style is similar to that of McGonagall, his line manager, and it works: we’re told his students are advanced for their age and have a high pass rate. Meanwhile James and Sirius persecute people for kicks, or out of possessiveness over Lily. They mean their victims harm and from what we see they enjoy humiliating them, rubbing their noses in their own helplessness and trampling their sexual boundaries (stripping Snape, and trying to force Lily to date James against her will). Sirius tries to kill Snape to cover up his own crimes. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and James and Sirius are good.
Snape devotes his entire adult life to keeping Harry physically safe, but doesn’t much care about his emotional state or whether he is happy, stressed etc. Dumbledore leaves Harry with the Dursleys because of the Blood Protection, even after he knows that Harry is neglected and somewhat abused, because keeping the boy physically safe matters more to him than his emotional state. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Dumbledore is good.
Snape very rarely gives out detentions (and he also gives nearly as many to Slytherins as to Gryffindors), although some of those he does give are messy. McGonagall gives out far more detentions, some of which are life-threateningly dangerous; gives punishments which are deliberately humiliating; drags a student around by his ear; and allows a student to be hauled away by somebody she has just seen savagely beating him, without even checking him for broken bones or internal bleeding first. Meanwhile Molly beats a sevenish Fred with a broom handle. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but McGonagall and Molly are good.
Snape threatens to poison a student’s toad after the student allows it to roam loose in a room full of open fires and boiling liquids. Flitwick and Harry both practise spells on the same toad; Remus teaches his class to repeatedly break an experimental animal’s fingers; McGonagall teaches her class to kill kittens, and to turn hedgehogs into pincushions and then stick pins into them even though some are still alive and suffering; Sprout chops up mandrake teenagers who appear to be sapient and quasi-human in intelligence; Hagrid feeds a hippogriff on slaughtered pets and gloats over the idea of setting his boarhound on an elderly cat; the Weasleys treat sapient gnomes as garden pests, and tie a gnome man to their Christmas tree for days without (as far as we know) food or water or a lavatory break; Harry kills a sapient serpent, to whom he had the option of speaking but didn’t bother to try, by wedging a sword into the roof of her mouth and blinding her; and the Twins and their friend Lee torture animals – implied to be to death in one case. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is an evil animal-abuser, but all the rest are just fine.
Snape says “I won’t let you…” to Lily under circumstances in which the rest of the sentence was probably going to be “be eaten by a werewolf”, but even if the Snaters are right and he was being possessive and controlling, Harry experiences such extreme jealousy over a girl he fancies that he feels to himself as if he has a ravening monster inside him, and Rowling says James persecuted Snape because he didn’t like the idea Snape might possibly have feelings for Lily, even though James and Lily were not yet dating and wouldn’t be for years. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but Harry and James are good.
At nine years old, Snape said that he didn’t want to talk to a Muggle (non-magical person), when the subject being discussed was magic and discussing it with a Muggle would have been illegal; his tone was rather rude, but that was after she had sneered at him for coming from a poor address. At eleven he said that the same Muggle girl was “only a…” and we don’t know what the rest of the sentence might have been going to be, but since she was quite abusive to him it was probably going to be “silly bitch”. At sixteen he used, of Muggle-born students, a bad word (Mudblood) which Rowling has stated also applied to himself (a half-blood with a Muggle parent) in a moment of temper when very stressed and humiliated. As an adult he is verbally sharp with a kid who looks like the bully who tortured and sexually assaulted him, while devoting his adult life to protecting the boy, and strongly objecting if anyone else says “Mudblood”. Meanwhile the half-giant Hagrid, in his sixties, uses “Muggle” and “Squib” as terms of abuse, treats Muggles like semi-sapient cattle, and carries out a vicious, painful and potentially fatal magical attack on a terrified, cowering eleven-year-old Muggle child because he doesn’t like the kid’s father. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Hagrid is good.
Snape feels immense guilt because as a Death Eater he accidentally caused Lily’s death by relaying an overheard prophecy to his commander (even though he had no way of knowing it would be associated with any baby, let alone hers). and devotes the rest of his life to trying to make up for it by protecting Harry. Sirius feels immense guilt because he accidentally caused James’s death by persuading him to make the (as it turned out) treacherous Peter his Secret Keeper, so he makes no statement in his own defence, allows himself to be wrongly imprisoned for murder to punish himself, and abandons Harry, his godson, to his fate. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Sirius is good.
When Snape and Lily quarrelled at sixteen he made one attempt to apologise, and when she told him to go he respected her wishes and left, and never went near her again. The only evidence that he still thought about her much or had any lingering romantic feelings is that the author has said that one of his reasons for joining the Death Eaters (probably at nineteen although how we know that is an essay in itself) was that he hoped it might impress Lily – not unreasonably, since both Lily and her sister married bullies, suggesting that that was what they liked. We do not know whether that means he still carried a torch for her, or wanted to show her what she had missed, or wanted to protect her: we do know both that the Death Eaters were somewhat more prejudiced against Muggle-borns than the wizarding world in general (no, not genocidally so: that was Umbridge’s thing, eighteen years later, and she worked for the Ministry) and that Voldemort wanted to recruit Lily in some capacity, so Snape might have thought it would be useful for her to have a friend on the inside of what at the time looked like being the new government. Two years after he last saw her and four years after they ceased to be friends, Snape is shocked to learn that he has accidentally put Lily in danger, and defects in an attempt to save her, expecting that he will be killed as a result. Fifteen years after her death he still feels bad about it, and is upset to see an old letter in which she was talking about a friendly visit from the friend who was about to betray her to her death.
Meanwhile, McGonagall dated a Muggle boy for two months when she was eighteen, jilted him at the altar, then Could Love No Other (despite the fact that he was now happily married to somebody else whom he had known for more than nine weeks) for twenty-seven years, until she learned that he was dead, when she immediately married a much older former boss who had been Saving Himself For Her Alone for twenty-five years. When he died two years later, she resigned herself to perpetual celibacy, even though she was still only forty-seven. Dumbledore had a six-week fling with the sixteen-year-old Grindelwald around his own eighteenth birthday, then Never Loved Again, nor ever again allowed himself to become emotionally close to anybody. After he accidentally caused the death of his own sister (there’s a definite theme here) he was still so cut up about it ninety-seven years after her death that he put on a cursed ring in an attempt to summon her ghost, and died as a result. According to the Snaters that’s all perfectly normal, nothing to see here, but the fact that Snape still felt bad about Lily’s death after fifteen years proves that he is abnormal, unwholesome, obsessed and incapable of love.
Snape was so shy he never told Lily he fancied her – if he did, which isn’t entirely clear. He may have felt more brotherly towards her, like Harry and Hermione. He could be a bit insensitive to her feelings about her sister, since he had no experience of normal family dynamics. He remained friends with her for as long as she continued to tell him he was her best friend, and when they quarrelled he made one attempt to apologise, and when she told him to go he accepted her decision and left, and never so far as we know went near her again, although he was willing to die to keep her safe. James apparently regarded Lily as his property long before they were dating, since Rowling said he persecuted Snape partly because he didn’t like the possibility that Snape might fancy Lily. He tried to force her to date him against her will, by holding Snape hostage, and when she fought back he told her not to make him hurt her. Once they began dating he continued to do things she wouldn’t approve of, and lied to her about it. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and James is good.
Snape seems never to have been a very enthusiastic Death Eater: Rowling has strongly indicated that he never killed anybody (prior to the mercy-killing of Dumbledore), although he did witness deaths, and we know that despite his distinctive appearance there was never even a rumour that he was a Death Eater, when he really was one. We are given no evidence that he even had the Dark Mark until after he defected and Dumbledore began having him drip-feed scraps of genuine information to Voldemort to improve his status. He probably wouldn’t have quit without the threat to Lily, no, because everyone believed (wrongly, as it turned out) that Sirius’s brother Regulus had been executed by Voldemort for trying to leave, and later on Karkaroff really would be executed. Leaving meant death, and Snape was willing to die to save Lily, but not just to get out of the mess he had landed himself in. Having become the Order’s spy, however, he saved any people he could save, whether they were connected to Lily or not, including risking blowing his own cover to protect Remus; and in the end he reluctantly allowed Dumbledore to persuade him that defeating Voldemort was more important than saving Lily’s son.
Meanwhile, Dumbledore only broke his links to the wizard-supremacist Grindelwald after their connection led to the death of his sister. Regulus only quit the Death Eaters because Voldemort had put his house-elf in danger (even though Kreacher had survived it unscathed, so he wasn’t even saving Kreacher, just avenging a threat to him). Hagrid joined the Order out of love of Dumbledore, even though he despises and abuses Muggles. Sirius probably joined to spite his family, and James because he was in love with Lily. Harry joined the Order because he was being targeted, and to avenge his parents. But according to the Snaters, Snape and only Snape is evil for joining the Order for personal rather than abstract reasons.
When he defected, twenty-year-old Snape was more concerned about the threat to Lily, who had been his childhood friend, than to the man who had tortured and sexually assaulted him and to a baby he didn’t know. By warning the Order he had already protected James and Harry, but he just wasn’t emotionally upset about them. Thirty-three-year-old Remus cared so little about Harry’s safety that he was willing to put him in danger to save himself from an unpleasant interview with Dumbledore. Seventeen-year-old Harry was delighted to learn that Ginny was safe but was not emotionally engaged with the fact that Molly and Arthur were, although they had loved him like a son for five years. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but Remus and Harry are good.
In the scene in the Shack at the end of PoA, Sirius is still justifying the fact that he had tried to kill Snape at school nineteen years earlier, and he can’t resist still jeering at Snape and saying “The joke’s on you again” even when his life depends on convincing Snape of his own innocence. Snape, who has every reason to think that Sirius is a mass murderer who is there to kill Harry, reacts badly to this, and Remus then sneers at him for reacting badly; but once Snape knows they are all on the same side he tries to protect Sirius and Remus just like any other Order members, even though Sirius never shows even minimal politeness towards him, and Remus sets him up to be mocked by students. According to the Snaters this proves that Snape is carrying a schoolboy grudge and Sirius and Remus aren’t.
Snape’s methods of protecting Harry involve his being an overbearing nag, as well as risking his life almost daily to protect him, and trying to capture Sirius when he believes that Sirius is there to kill Harry. Sirius’s methods of protecting Harry include slashing the Fat Lady, standing over Ron with a knife, and snapping Ron’s leg and then dragging him down a two-thirds-of-a-mile-long, bumpy tunnel without splinting the leg first, then planning to execute Peter in cold blood in front of three children. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but Sirius is good.
Snape, believing – wrongly but with very good evidence – that Sirius betrayed James and Lily to their deaths and killed Peter and twelve Muggles, and knowing that Sirius had set him up to die nearly nineteen years earlier, is extremely keen on the idea of getting Sirius arrested and executed by Dementor. Sirius, knowing that Peter betrayed James and Lily to their deaths and killed twelve Muggles, and knowing that Peter had set him to be condemned to Azkaban nearly thirteen years earlier, is extremely keen on the idea of killing Peter with his own hands, in front of three children, and is described as gazing at him with “a horrible sort of hunger”. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but Sirius is good.
When Harry believes that Sirius is a mass-murdering Death Eater who killed thirteen people, betrayed his parents to their deaths and has come to Hogwarts to kill him, he is very keen on the idea of feeding Sirius to the Dementors. When Snape believes that Sirius is a mass-murdering Death Eater who killed thirteen people, betrayed Harry’s parents to their deaths and has come to Hogwarts to kill Harry, he is very keen on the idea of feeding Sirius to the Dementors. Snape doesn’t find out that they were both wrong about Sirius until a few hours after Harry does, and according to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry is good.
When Snape captured an unconscious Sirius, whom he believed to be a mass murder there to kill Harry, he summoned a stretcher for him. When Sirius captured an unconscious Snape, who he knew had attacked him because he believed that he was a mass murderer there to kill Harry, he handled him very roughly and allowed his already injured head to bang repeatedly against the wall, which could easily have killed him and did leave him with obvious concussion. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but Sirius is good.
Neville’s Boggart is Snape drawing his wand on him, a thing which Snape would not in fact do. Hermione’s Boggart is McGonagall telling her she’s failed, a thing which McGonagall would not in fact do. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil, but McGonagall is good.
Snape is a bit spiteful and enjoys needling and provoking people: as a friend of mine would say, he “likes toys that don’t need batteries: wind ’em up and watch ’em go”. Harry gets an almost sexual thrill out of torturing somebody and hurling them through a sheet of glass, gloats about it and feels the blood pounding in his veins from having done it. According to the Snaters that proves that Snape is evil and Harry is good.
Snape’s care for Harry (and he cares intensely for Harry’s safety, even if he doesn’t like him) is driven by guilt over his contribution to Lily’s death (by having relayed the prophecy). Sirius’s care for Harry is driven partly by guilt over his contribution to James’s death (by persuading him to make Peter his Secret Keeper). According to the Snaters that makes Snape obsessive and dirty and Sirius pure and good.
Film!Snape (only) dies comparing Harry’s eyes to Lily’s. Film!Sirius (only) dies calling Harry “James”. According to the Snaters that makes Snape obsessive and dirty and Sirius pure and good.
During the year in which Snape was Headmaster under Voldemort, he protected the staff and students as best he could, but could only do so much without blowing his cover and losing the ability to protect them at all. The Carrows were still able to punish students by getting them to cast torture curses on each other. So far, so grim. But according to Filch, it’s not long ago that it was normal for students to be punished with days-long sessions of extreme physical torture. OK, Filch is a creepy old perv and may be exaggerating, but we know that Arthur was punished for canoodling with Molly in some way which left him physically scarred for life. We know Umbridge, a Ministry official, feels secure using a Blood Quill on students, and the Ministry authorises her or Filch to whip students. So Filch probably wasn’t exaggerating by much, and given that Arthur’s scarring punishment would have been in the 1960s, these extreme punishments probably only came to an end when Dumbledore became Headmaster in the late sixties. That means that the older staff – Dumbledore, McGonagall, Flitwick, Sprout, Slughorn – all taught under a regime where students were punished with torture to the point of permanent injury and it was seen as perfectly acceptable. But only Snape is blamed, for trying to stop the torture of students but not being able to do so completely.
They are unable to see outside a single viewpoint. Because Harry’s resemblance to his father stresses Snape out he is very snappy and hostile around Harry, and since Harry doesn’t know that his father tortured and sexually assaulted Snape, he just sees that as Snape being unfair and probably a villain. Initially, so do readers – at least if they aren’t familiar with the tropes of the Golden Age detective fiction of which Rowling is a fan. But Snaters are never able to get beyond that or to accept that a first impression could ever be wrong. Harry comes to understand that he had misjudged Snape, but Snaters reject that and insist that Harry was wrong or that Rowling wrote him wrong – even though Harry learning Snape’s true story is the backbone of the series. It’s exactly the same as insisting she was wrong, that Sirius really did betray the Potters and really came to the school to kill Harry – but nobody does that because they only spent one book being mislead into thinking Sirius was a villain, instead of six and three quarters, and he’s posh and handsome and comes from a family who used to be rich, even if they no longer are. Again, in the real world it’s like the MAGA cult refusing to accept they were wrong about Trump, but going the other way (they can’t accept that their hero turned out to be a villain): they can never accept that their initial judgement was wrong, and think that if somebody is rich then they should be allowed to get away with any crime, and that’s truly dangerous.
In the scene in the Shack at the end of PoA, in particular, Snaters are completely unable to understand that Snape was acting on the evidence available to him, and the evidence available to him was that Sirius was a mass murderer who was there to kill Harry, and meanwhile Sirius was so wrapped up in baiting his former victim that he didn’t bother to explain. There were at least four hundred Death Eaters in Vold War One (depending on whether or not you count Snape and Peter, there were either twenty or twenty-two Order members, and Remus says the Death Eaters outnumbered them twenty to one) and they were divided into cells so that each only knew the identities of a handful of the others. Snape had no way to know that Sirius wasn’t a Death Eater, or that Peter was, and his arrival at the Shack is timed so that although he does hear that the Marauders were Animagi, he doesn’t hear anybody say that Sirius is innocent, that Peter is guilty, that Peter is alive or that Peter is specifically a rat Animagus. He wanted Sirius Kissed because he was absolutely sure, on the basis of the evidence available to him, that Sirius was a mass murderer who had killed twelve Muggles and Peter, betrayed James and Lily to their deaths and was there to kill Harry, and that Peter had died a hero nearly thirteen years ago. And Sirius, instead of telling him otherwise, just jeered at him, justified the murder attempt and said “The joke’s on you again”, and then “The rat, look at the rat” without any explanation. Yet the Snaters are all certain that Snape knew Sirius was innocent, and/or that he should have been able to work out the entire story just from “Look at the rat”, whilst trapped in a small room with somebody he believes to be a mass murderer and who is still justifying having tried to kill him personally, and a werewolf on the point of transformation. They seem to have no Theory of Mind – they literally cannot understand that characters have to act on the information available to them, not what the reader knows.
They also show the same narcissistic, binary thinking as Trump, except projected outwards onto Harry. Within the fictional universe they really think that the division between good and evil is [likes Harry/doesn’t like Harry], just as to Trump it’s [likes Trump/doesn’t like Trump]. Harry himself doesn’t think like that, at least by the end. He learns that good is not defined by what is good for him personally, and also that people who don’t like him may nevertheless have his best interests at heart (Snape), and people who do like him may be willing to sacrifice him, in some cases for very serious reasons (Dumbledore) and in some cases for shallow ones (Remus was willing to put him in danger to save himself from an emotionally stressful conversation). He also learns that the fact that he likes somebody doesn’t mean they are good at their job (Hagrid) or can be relied on (Remus). But the Snaters refuse to learn this, and insist that Rowling somehow wrote it wrong.
Even the best of the Snaters, the ones who accept that bullying is wrong, think like Trump supporters. They love what was good in the Marauders, and/or find the idea of a band of true brothers, wandering the forest in beast form having adventures together, primally attractive, but they can’t accept that their heroes also had a dark side so they insist that anyone who says that the Marauders were bullies is Fake News, a liar – especially the author. They insist that either Snape was an equal and willing rival, somehow so powerful that he could fight four at once with ease, or he must have been so obviously evil that attacking him was righteous, because anything else means admitting their heroes weren’t perfect. [And no, most Snape supporters aren’t doing that with Snape – we just require actual canon evidence of this or that fault before we ascribe it to him.]
They tend to be cultural imperialists and/or unaware that there is more than one country and culture in the world, and/or that “the past is another country”. Many judge Snape (but usually only Snape) as a teacher by purely modern standards and seem quite unaware that teaching styles would have been a bit different thirty years ago, even in the real world – let alone in a culture which is clearly meant to be very old-fashioned relative to the Muggle world. They also tend to assume that if Snape gives a low mark that’s a disaster and he is damaging a student’s future, even though it’s made clear in the books that Hogwarts follows the UK system of the time, and only marks gained in exams at the end of fifth and seventh year (and independently invigilated) actually count long-term.
They are absolutely unaware that in UK schools a bright student such as Hermione is meant to be able to say what they think, with supporting arguments, so that Snape criticising her for just quoting the textbook is completely normal. They interpret Snape’s sarcasm as much nastier than it’s probably intended to be (either by Snape or by the author), not knowing, or maybe not accepting, that in the UK sarcasm is a highly-regarded form of humour which is rarely meant, or received, as particularly hostile. I’ve even seen one abusing Snape for calling himself “master of this school”, claiming that that showed how arrogant he was – totally unaware that “master” is a British term for “male schoolteacher” and that he was calling himself “male member of the teaching faculty of this school”.
They judge his joining the Death Eaters as if it were happening in the twenty-first century, absolutely unaware that in the 1970s many Muggles themselves believed that Muggles were about to destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust (and had come within a hair’s-breadth of actually doing so in the 1960s), and Europe was in a panic about acid raid, such that the idea of wizards taking over and giving the world nuclear disarmament and limitless free energy might seem attractive to anybody raised in the Muggle world. I often feel as if I’m the only person in the entire fandom who actually remembers the seventies.
Many of the American Snaters seem totally unaware of, or even offended by, the idea that a story written in the UK by a British author for a British audience will reference British tropes and British history, so they try to force the Death Eaters into an American mould – aided and abetted by Warner’s putting them in those stupid pointed hoods, which may say “KKK” to Americans but say “Dunce’s cap” to Britons. In the books, the Death Eaters are pretty clearly mainly inspired by the IRA (although their level of prejudice is more like the other side’s paramilitary terrorists, the UDA). They are active from 1970 to 1998: the Irish Troubles ran from 1969 to 1998. They wear something like black Balaclava helmets: in the books, mask and hood are the same thing, with slits for the eyes and mouth. At the World Cup, they aren’t the terrifying, disciplined army marching in uniform, trampling down the camp with their iron tread as shown in the films, but a drunken, whooping rabble who set fire to a few tents by accident by blundering through people’s cooking fires. The Death Eater prisoners starving in Azkaban mirror the real IRA prisoners on hunger strike in the real prison called The Maze. The mass escape of Death Eater prisoners from Azkaban mirrors the real mass escape of IRA prisoners from The Maze. The Death Eater attack on the Brockdale Bridge happens six months after the IRA blew up the bridges carrying the Docklands Light Railway, and a month after they blew up central Manchester. But if the Snaters have heard of the IRA at all, they probably still buy into the American myth that they were gallant freedom fighters (which was fairly true in 1920, but by 1970 they were trying to force a united Communist Ireland on an Irish people who wanted neither unity nor Communism) – not realising that they’ve just encapsulated why a boy like Snape would join them. Snape is a fantasy version of the youth who joined the IRA because they seemed romantic and exciting, decided that their methods were unacceptable and became a mole instead. There were hundreds like him.
But the Snaters either claim that the Death Eaters are the KKK, or they claim that Snape joined “wizard Hitler”. The KKK and the Nazis are/were majorities persecuting minorities, whilst the Death Eaters are an extremist group spawned by a tiny minority, in hiding from the Muggles who outnumber them at least six thousand to one and used to burn them at the stake. If you must make them correspond with a US paramilitary group they’re more like the Nation of Islam. In the books, the closest thing to wizard Hitler is Grindelwald, and Voldemort wanted to recruit talented Muggle-borns, even if only as second-class citizens, so his intention was apartheid, not genocide. Killing or imprisoning Muggle-borns was Umbridge’s thing, and she was working for the Ministry. It’s possible Voldemort approved of her murderous campaign by that point, since he was now both half-mad and heavily dependent on the support of the blood-purists Lucius and Bellatrix: but in Vold War One when Snape was a genuine Death Eater Hagrid, an Order member, was not aware of any reason why Voldemort might not want to recruit Muggle-born Lily, and according to Rowling he tried to do so. But the Snaters want to paint Snape to be as evil as possible and they only know about the Nazis, the KKK and at a stretch al Qaeda, so any extremist group in the whole world must be one or the other.
They also act as if he is some abnormal monster because he is an almost stereotypical northern Englishman, and they don’t even understand how profoundly he was praising Harry when he said “that was not as poor as it might have been”. They badly need to read some books of Yorkshire humour. . OK, he’s from the north Midlands, not Yorkshire – but that just makes him even more dour, snappy and sarcastic. Round there, being bad-tempered and rude – known as “being blunt” – is seen as a regional virtue and a proof of honesty, and the highest possible praise is “not bad”.
Finally, it’s an odd thing for me as a pagan to say, but like the Prosperity Gospel lot in the US the Snaters are absolutely, categorically unChristian, because they do not believe that forgiveness or redemption are possible but that instead a person must be hated and punished all their life for a mistake they made as a teenager, even if they devote the rest of their life to trying to put it right. Having decided for themselves that Voldemort was “wizard Hitler” and that Snape was therefore a teenage Nazi (even though the wizard Hitler was Grindelwald, and teen Dumbledore was literally shagging him), they feel that they are signalling their own virtue to the world by declaring that anybody who ever flirted with Nazism can never, ever be forgiven, even though they may devote the rest of their lives to making up for it. This is an expression in fiction-fandom of the same incredibly toxic lust for punishment and for “cancel culture” which divides societies and makes it impossible for prisoners to find work or become productive citizens.
Yet, the same people would not dream of applying the same rules to Oskar Schindler: an adult career Nazi who helped to set up the invasion of Poland; without whom WWII might not have happened; and who, like Snape, only changed sides when people he knew personally were threatened, but who then expanded his protective circle to include anybody he could save, even if they were strangers. They are, all told, a deeply morally destructive group, like the MAGATs they in many ways resemble.
A lot of people don’t understand why I think any of this matters, when it’s about a “kids’ story”. But it’s a demonstration in miniature, in a kind of Petri dish, of the same kind of mindless acceptance of a toxic narrative that led to Qanon, to racial persecution and anti-vaxxing and people sincerely believing that Hilary Clinton sacrificed babies in the basement of a pizzeria which doesn’t have a basement, because they heard a dramatic story about it which fitted with their world view. And that kind of thinking has killed many millions, and will kill millions more if we don’t teach children how to spot it. In the UK we are now teaching metacognition (how to think about how you think) at primary school, but worldwide many regimes actively discourage critical thinking, because the lack of it makes their citizens easier to control. Propaganda keeps them docile and hating the people their governments want them to hate – and propaganda is a form of fanon.