Have you done Snape/Sirius for the ship asks yet?
thank you very much for the ask, anon!
and what better occasion than sirius' birthday to give @ashesandhackles something she's been waiting for for well over a year...
besides the ship name, the reason this ship slaps is for the absolutely classic reason that it's smashing a narrative mirror pairing together.
snape and sirius are obviously incredibly similar personality wise - they're both arrogant, theatrical, incredibly clever, creative, capable of great cruelty, stubborn, loyal, possessed of dry senses of humour, from difficult family backgrounds, and so on - and their differences - such as their looks, class, or wealth - are polar rather than divergent.
but they also serve identical narrative purposes. each functions as the guide who leads harry through the character arc which begins in prisoner of azkaban and concludes in deathly hallows, in which he sheds his childish, black-and-white view of his parents and comes to regard them as real, flawed, and complex people.
sirius takes him up to the end of order of the phoenix [and is then immediately killed, his narrative role complete], when harry's realisation that james was a bully stops his earlier hero-worship of his father and allows him to approach him as a whole person.
[which is important, since we then see in half-blood prince that voldemort's inability to do this - and his inability, therefore, to cope with the disappointment of discovering the elaborate fictional version of tom riddle sr. he'd created in his head wasn't what the real one was like - is why the text understands harry as superior to him.]
snape - through the proxies of slughorn, the discipline of potions, his textbook, his patronus, and his memories - takes harry through half-blood prince and deathly hallows, as harry starts to think more deeply about lily [who spends the earlier books secondary in importance to james in his mind] and to eventually learn that she and her sacrifice are the keys to the entire mystery.
snape and sirius are the figures who assist in this arc because each of their lives are defined by their relationship with and love for one half of james and lily as a pairing. their mirrored relationships with harry are similarly driven by their mirrored relationships with his parents.
and, most importantly, so is their relationship with each other. they hate each other on sight because snape blames sirius for james noticing lily [thus drawing her attention away from him] and sirius blames snape for the same thing [thus drawing james' attention away from him] and their constant mutual antagonism is the most interesting snape-versus-one-of-the-marauders dynamic because of the equality this lends. snape likes antagonising sirius - even though he thinks sirius tried to murder him! - whereas he is straightforwardly afraid of lupin and feels inferior to and resentful of james, because he must sense - however subconsciously - that sirius is his emotional equal: someone else struggling against the fact that the person he loves doesn't love him with the same intensity.
the mutual spark this creates is hot enough for an enemies-to-lovers conflagration for the ages even while they're at school. but it gets so much better once we're in the canon timeline, since sirius and snape's adult characterisation is entirely driven by their mirrored approaches to guilt and grief.
both of them indirectly trigger the death of the person they love - snape via reporting the prophecy, sirius via insisting on the secret keeper swap - and neither accepts that his actions were, in fact, indirect.
hollowed out by this feeling, both of them decide to punish themselves in an effort - one which they both clearly consider near-futile - to atone. both of them do this by subjecting themselves to the pain and humiliation of imprisonment and being thought a criminal - sirius by refusing to profess his innocence at any point before 1993; snape by staying at hogwarts and insisting that dumbledore keeps his true motivations concealed, allowing him to be thought of as an unreformed death eater - until they have a shot at the only thing they each think will redeem them in james and lily's eyes - murdering wormtail, for sirius, and murdering voldemort, for snape.
[after all, why does dumbledore say to harry at king's cross that his aim was for snape to control the elder wand if he wasn’t hoping he'd use it to give the dark lord his death blow? it's just a shame the dream-team of draco malfoy and nagini got there first...]
and this mirrored grief provides such a good point of narrative tension between them, which can so easily grow into something romantic.
because you have, at first, the fact that each can use the other's grief to wound - snape can scream at sirius about how stupid the secret keeper plan was; sirius can scream at snape about what a cunt he was to report the prophecy to voldemort - and to soothe - if snape blames sirius for lily's death, he can pretend that reporting the prophecy was less integral to it than it was; if sirius blames snape for james', he can pretend that insisting wormtail was the secret keeper was less integral to it than it was.
but this can then grow into a recognition of both their mutual culpability - the secret keeper swap only happened because of the prophecy; the prophecy could only be acted upon because of the secret keeper swap - and their mutual lack of it - neither actually knew that what they were doing would doom james and lily, and voldemort is the person who is actually to blame for their deaths.
and this can grow into each of them offering the other the forgiveness he craves, but can't give to himself.
and so, they're the best of the series' mirror pairings for writing love which is totally, utterly equal.
for example, harry and voldemort - who are the series' main narrative mirrors - don't have the mutual weight of guilt driving their relationship. writing them as a consensual romantic pairing requires dealing with the concept of forgiveness, absolutely - but harry is the only person who actually needs to do the forgiving; he hasn't done anything to voldemort which is an equivalent to voldemort killing his parents. similarly, while the grief of their orphanhood and the way it shapes them is one of their main mirror traits, this grief doesn't have equal causes - voldemort's mother died in childbirth; his father, and both of harry's parents, died because voldemort murdered them.
with snape and sirius - in contrast - there is none of this imbalance. they interact with each other - whether they're holding their wands to each other's throats or cuddling on the sofa [or, let's be real, both] - as equals [even though sirius attempts to introduce an element of inequality into many of their canon interactions by alluding to their divergent social classes].
which is to say, there's a respect behind the loathing which allows the loathing to be transformed with very little work into love.
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