Snape/Hermione

These are some general remarks; I don't give any listing or overview or recs or reviews or analysis of fics. These remarks began in comments to elgoose and to spare_change.

Passionate feelings about power relations surround likes and dislikes of Snape/Hermione fic both in general and within the genre, as in the PtQ wars-- so far as I know, by far the longest and bloodiest battle over the content of a fic in the fandom. One thing I'd say about this, in terms of why I think S/Hr has attracted some of the fandom's best and most interesting writers, is that I actually think Snape is one of the few characters whom Hermione, as written, can't dominate. I think Hermione is often the vehicle for female readers' fantasies of omnipotence (yes, we have them), and as such carries the threat of obliterating the other (cf isiscolo' "4 funerals and a wedding"). Thus the ambivalent focus (in both canon and fan text) on her "bossiness" (of course this is also a reflection of internalized sexism, but it interacts with primal fantasies) as the shadow of her intelligence and conviction. Fan writers threaten to obliterate all their character-objects already, by swarming all over the source text appropriating and re-writing them and commanding them to do their bidding.

One of the ironies of S/Hr is that (if we view them as psychologically real), Hermione has one of the strongest, most integrated selves in the books, and Snape (as of OotP especially) one of the weakest (hence his extreme, self-fulfilling terror of humiliation -- not bathing being an expression of the "self-fulfilling" part-- and his acquisition of Occlumency as a way to protect a fragile core). So that his age and position of authority relative to Hermione (which can never be outrun by "aging-up" the characters, since she builds her identity around her intellectual accomplishments and he was her teacher for 7 formative years) actually balance Hermione's intrinsic superiority in terms of psychological strength.

Having said that, though, I notice I'm drawing on OotP, and the golden age of Snape/Hermione fic was pretty clearly between GoF and OotP (we need a nickname for that period!), when the stock narrative function of the tortured, secretly virtuous Romantic hero was so available to Snape, in spite of his behavior in PoA. But if we look at the horror, in Snape/Hermione fandom, of Hermione/Ron, I think we see a sense of a subject without an object. There's a a lot more to be said about the fantasy of unique understanding (no one understands Hermione except Snape and vice versa--you get it in Snape/Harry and Snape/Black as well), and maybe the unhealthy self-psychological implications of that are what canon rebels against--everyone understands Ron except Hermione, and vice versa.
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I think all the Hermione fics I really love are Snape/Hermione, though some of those that are by famous slashers, interestingly enough, don't push my Hermione buttons, even when I admire them and enjoy them as narratives. Hermione often seems very cold to me in fics by slashers, whether in S/Hr or as a supporting character. I prefer the works of Snape/Hermione specialists, as a rule.

I'll admit I have a thing for the Romance template everyone mocks, of Snape being the only one who appreciates Hermione (in canon, it often does seem like no one does, like her 'professional' achievements come at the cost of being recognized as sexual - GoF - or even as a friend -PS; and in OotP, JKR just backs off the character to make her socially acceptable- Kalina called her "Dear Abby with a wand.") There's this wonderful moment toward the end of Kalina's (kalinalea's) The Buried Life, where Harry is watching Hermione in the potions lab, and she's flushed and sweaty with her hair in a messy ponytail cuz she's working, and he realizes she's beautiful and that this total loser (Snape) recognized it when he and Ron and the other young dudes missed it. It sounds very mundane I guess but it's terribly well done and well set-up and it killed me, and why not?

Kaz's Falling Further In is one of the fics I'm working on an essay about for (as soon as I get done with the one on lexin's "Through a Glass Darkly".) For this group, I am trying to write about fics where I want to talk about something other than the representation of characters and what's hot (even though that's what I ended up doing here). I haven't seen much talk about other, specifically literary characteristics of fic, like form, style, structure etc. So the post about FFI will mostly be about the baroque method of narration and the structural relation to canon and fic in general, stuff like that.

Fics mentioned here:
Kaz (or KazVL)'s Falling Further In. Unfinished and likely to remain so, but still about 250,000 words. R.

Kalina's The Buried Life. R. Novel-length. My review of Kalina's fics.


Isis's "Four Funerals and a Wedding".