No seriously I can’t stop thinking about Snape being the half blood prince. Him stealing away a little nickname for himself, perhaps to bolster him when life gave him its ass to kiss. A secret little bit of pride he could hold on to when he was constantly reminded of how he lacked. But Snape’s status as Prince wasn’t just a moniker he adopted, a nickname he gave himself, it was something he simply was, something he was born as. His birthright/claim to Prince is validated not by the characters acknowledging him as such but by the text itself, with chapters centring him referring to him as Prince e.g. “The Flight of the Prince” or “The Prince’s Tale.” Of all the characters, the legions of aristocratic, pure blood, upper crust characters crawling around this universe, the Prince is this strange little man who lived a wretched life, a life defined by cruelty and bitterness but also bravery and selflessness, a Prince from humblest origins.
There’s something about the title “The Prince’s Tale” that really gets me. It sounds like the legend of some historical or mythical figure–someone fantastical, larger than life, a knight in shining armor–but then you read it and it’s the story of a broken man. And really just that, a man–not this foreboding, almost inhuman figure we thought Snape was for so long. “The Prince’s Tale” is the chapter that peels back those layers of mystery and legend surrounding him, removes that forbidding exterior and reveals the child who wished for a better life–perhaps wished to be that Prince–and just wanted love–that core aspect of Snape’s being that pulled him out of the darkness in the end. It’s the chapter where we finally see him (almost the culmination of his final “Look at me”)–and the book validates that, in all this sorrow and heartbreak and humanity, he is the Prince.
I will always find it fascinating that young Severus didn’t just call himself The Prince. I mean, we have pretentious allusions to Machiavelli right there. But no, he (or JKR) specifically chose the Half-Blood Prince, despite it being the sort of nickname you’d expect his enemies to throw at him, to mock him with, signifying “not good enough” and “impure.” Not only does it not ignore his status as a half-blood, it emphasizes it - i.e., he’s half-Muggle, something we’re led to assume he rejects as a follower of pureblood ideology. Yet he claims it as part of his secret, daydreaming identity as a teenager. It’s his superhero title. He projects onto both sides of his heritage, unites them in one name, and the implication is that he finds it empowering, romanticized the way adolescent self-creation often is.
Yet we never see it reflected in Snape’s day-to-day behavior. It almost seems out of character for him to recognize his Muggle “half.” So what did it mean to him? How did he imagine himself reconciling - living up to - both sides of the Half-Blood Prince?
You know, it kind of makes me sad how villainized Snape’s love was and that it’s a bad thing he did what he did because of it and not because a certain moral obligation.
As if love hasn’t been the ultimate weapon in story-telling for as long as we can remember, as if love hasn’t been always the answer. It has always been “love conquers all” and “the power of love” and it has always been just about how much people loved each other whether they were lovers or friends or family. It’s literally one of the most innocent tropes out there – that it doesn’t matter what happened to you or what you’ve done, if you can love you are a person capable of changing and doing good because love it the purest most selfless feeling there is. Love changed monsters into humans and broke curses, it showed us who was evil because they never felt it.
“Snape did it only for Lily.” Yes. Yes, like we’ve never seen stories that started because of love. As if there has never been a story in which the hero went out to search for love/a loved one. I grew up with stories where people stayed fighting because of love, where they never gave up because of it, where their stories started and ended with love and it was the main plot point.
Everything is about love, and the whole thing about Snape’s being creepy literally because the whole story about it and the person as a whole is villainized is just spit in the face of one of the most popular and used tropes ever.
