Severus and the Dark Lord (Snapedom March Challenge)

My official response to the March Challenge at Snapedom. Verbatim repost.

All right, since it’s the end of March and I apparently have time to write insanely long responses to other people’s challenge entries, I might as well go ahead and attempt to put my thoughts on Sev and Voldie into some kind of order. Be warned that this is not a proper essay arguing a point, but merely a long (very long!) ramble about my thoughts on different aspects of Sev and Voldemort’s relationship. Tangents, long detours, etc. may be ahead.

Great Minds Think Alike – Or Do They? Sev as an Armchair

In her response to the March Challenge, mary_j_59 brings up the idea that one possible reason for Severus’ favor with Voldemort lies in the similarities between them that Voldemort could have picked up on – that is, he could have seen himself in Severus to some degree, perhaps even feeling some sort of sentimental connection to him. I do not find this entirely implausible, but nor do I wholeheartedly agree with it. As other commentators elsewhere on the web have already pointed out, there are indeed some striking similarities between Severus and Voldemort, two of the so-called “abandoned boys” of Hogwarts. Both men are literal (rather than technical) half-bloods, having a pureblood witch mother and a Muggle father; both start off in rather unpleasant and lonely circumstances due to the unhappy marriages of their parents; both suffer from neglect and a lack of loving attention. Voldemort seems to have received little or no affection whatsoever from the orphanage’s staff and had no friends; likewise it seems clear that Snape’s only real friend and source of affection during his childhood was Lily Evans (the true closeness of this relationship is another subject for another post). Both are also brilliant, powerful and talented wizards who apparently share some degree of interest in magic itself, as something worthy of study and mastery. Both are skilled in the mental arts (Legilimency, Occlumency), and in the Dark Arts (whatever they may be – we’re not given the details). And finally, Sev and Voldemort are the only two wizards we are ever told in canon who, as adults, have mastered the art of unsupported flight.

However, when it comes to Hogwarts Sev, even more than Voldemort, is an outsider. Voldemort (as Tom Riddle) was able to be charming and to impress his professors and peers; Sev is ridiculed and attacked for his intellectual prowess by his peers, and while he may have impressed Slughorn with his abilities in Potions, the other faculty don’t seem to have doted on him to any degree – quite the opposite. Voldemort may have had an unhappy home life, but his experiences at school were on the whole positive, and so I don’t read them as contributing in any significant way to his later fall into darkness and evil. His murderous rise after leaving school seems far more the agenda of a true, clinical psychopath than anything else. Sev’s descent into darkness, OTOH, seems to me to be far more emotional and human in origin, particularly in light of his experiences at Hogwarts – decisions made out of resentment, anger, hatred, pain, and desire for acceptance found only (if at all) among his Slytherin friends, rather than the cold logic of someone who truly doesn’t connect up with human emotion and cares only for expediency in achieving their personal aims. In short: Voldemort is a user, Sev is not (if anything, he is all too willing to be used).

Voldemort may indeed see similarities between himself and Sev. And the desire to understand Sev’s problematic position as a DE as being related to this degree of similarity is very tempting – particularly in combination with a desire to humanize Voldemort to some degree by attributing some shred of human feeling to him. And perhaps he does feel some superficial attachment to Sev in this regard – a sense that this servant in particular ‘fits’ him well, and is even perhaps a little amusing, because he is so like Voldemort except in key respects (power-hungry, utterly ruthless and lacking in empathy). Someone once commented that Sev was dear to Voldemort the way a favorite armchair is to its owner, and this makes sense to me; Voldemort would feel particularly attached to Snape because he’s a good ‘fit.’ But nothing more. I can’t quite attribute real sentimentality to Voldemort, other than in this superficial (and ultimately ‘user’-friendly) sense. He simply doesn’t have the capacity to empathize, something which Sev DOES possess.

For this reason, among others, I much prefer the view that Sev taught Voldemort to fly, rather than vice-versa. As I wrote in my response to Janus’ entry:

“He [Sev] is creative and we know he writes his own spells, but we have no such direct evidence of Voldemort’s creativity. He seems rather…uncreative to me, in fact [....] Sev could have gotten the idea from Lily, and shown Voldemort how to do it as a way of currying favor, or even as a sincere gift to his lord if he was still a young, completely loyal DE at the time. Voldemort, paranoid and control-hungry as he is, honestly does not strike me as the kind of person who would give away knowledge that 1) could so easily be used against him (as a strategic maneuver – Sev could teach others, and then any advantage it might have in a battle would be lost) and that 2) makes him special, set him yet further above the ordinary witch/wizard, unique. Voldemort is a narcissist – he would want to be the only one with this power, as yet further proof of his superiority. He might say all sorts of nice things to Sev, and let him sit at his right hand, but that’s all symbolic. Sharing real knowledge and power is something else entirely.”

I mean, how many people teach their favorite armchair anything but how to be a better armchair, a better servant to them? Voldemort teaching Sev to fly is IMHO far too much an expression of Voldemort seeing Sev as worthy of affection and time by virtue of his being human, too much concern for Severus as a separate being with his own desires, for me to buy it.

However, I can see Voldemort according Sev some small measure of respect (after a time) by virtue of his courage, his intelligence and ability to get stuff done (as opposed to Bella or Lucius), and his lack of servile Pettigrew-style groveling (which often gets rewarded with Cruciatus). Over at LJ melannen has an essay on this that I find interesting and in part rather compelling:

http://melannen.livejournal.com/55273.html (Four Virtues of the Dark Lord)

Severus and the Dark Lord: Thoughts on Love

I’ve also wondered about Sev and Voldemort’s relationship in connection with what SEEMED to be one of the series’ major themes, love. We’re told that Voldemort was never loved by anyone (apparently Bellatrix’s fanatical adoration doesn’t count as love), while Sev seems to be able to act out of love for people he finds personally distasteful. Not necessarily out of affection, mind you, but out of at the very least a fundamental regard for the worth of other human beings as such and a willingness to sacrifice for them – an attitude I can only characterize as a basic form of unconditional love, expressed through action rather than sentiment/feeling. Sev is also the only ‘white hat’ who spends enough time around Voldemort to have any idea of what the man in person is like. In my fic (I don’t do this on purpose, it just happens), again and again Sev ends up realizing that he’s found some shred of compassion for Voldemort, often to his own surprise. He also of course still hates the fact that Voldemort killed Lily, has turned his back on Voldemort’s ideology and so on, and he doesn’t feel ‘sorry’ for him as if he weren’t to some degree responsible for being a psychopathic mass-murderer. (He uses an analogy: pity is for teacups, which have no choice and so no responsibility for getting smashed. Compassion is for human beings, who do.) But he recognizes that there’s something tragic in the fact that Voldemort doesn’t understand love because he has NO experience of it, and – having had an only slightly better experience than Voldemort growing up – can empathize with him.

Considering the question of the relationship between Sev and Voldemort regarding love also brings into sharp relief the real lack of appreciation, of respect, of even simple human love, that Sev faces in canon. It’s always struck me as tragically ironic that the highest praise we ever witness Sev receiving in canon is Voldemort’s throwaway line in DH about him being a good and faithful servant – something that 1) is said to him by the man he despises, who murdered Lily and who has just murdered him, and 2) is not even factually true – and that almost the only person who openly expresses even a false sense of regret for what happens to Sev is, in fact, the unloving mass-murdering user who has just made him his latest victim. What a slap in the face for Sev. Perhaps Voldemort was in some ways (though not all, I don’t think) a “better” master than Dumbledore – at least with Voldemort Sev always knew where he stood. Voldemort was no hypocrite of Dumbledore’s ilk, and did indeed reward him for doing well. He also (in all probability) Cruciated him when he failed…but at least this was no different than what his other followers faced. In the DE’s Sev was one of the group, not universally loved but at least accepted and respected, and/or feared. In the Order Sev was always the odd man out, untrusted by almost everyone to some degree, blamed for not being good enough, but unrecognized for his real achievements and sacrifices while he was alive. Which was better, really? What kind of choice is that?

All right, enough rambling for now. I could go on and on, but this is already way too long. Another time!

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