Hello! I love your posts about Snape and I wanted to ask your opinion on something (sorry if it’s something you’ve talked about before). As those with reading comprehension skills know, the whole boggart scene is narratively there to establish that most students have childish fears—spiders, mummies, a mean teacher, while Harry has real fears—a dementor and all the feelings of despair and hopelessness that come with it. We as readers also know that Neville is actually afraid of being bad at magic from the way he’s talked about the expectations and pressures from his family and that Snape very much brings up those feelings for Neville in his class. Neville pretty quickly defeats his Snape boggart before it gets the chance to say or do anything that would frighten him further, which it does appear to be preparing to do. Neville’s Snape Boggart gets so much attention as “proof” that Snape is just the worst most cruel and abusive person to come in contact with children. However, we later find out that Hermione’s boggart is McGonagall telling her she’s failed her classes and that Hermione wasn’t able to defeat the boggart. It can be easily assumed that, like the Snape boggart, the McGonagall boggart stepped out of the container it was in and walked towards her before telling her she’d failed. But this is all off-screen. Do you think that if Hermione had faced the boggart in class and we had seen it at the same time as the Snape boggart that people would treat Neville’s fear of Snape with the same seriousness as they like to do? Because with that logic, Hermione’s greatest fear is McGonagall and that is clearly ridiculous. I’ve never heard anyone bring up the McGonagall boggart as a counter argument to the Snape boggart though.
Hey! I'm glad you like my posts haha! And while I have talked about the boggart scene extensively, this specific question isn't one I think I have ever written about (and if I had it was so long ago, I forgot).
So to answer your question... they wouldn't, because the very reason people over-dramatize the boggart scene in the first place is to find more reasons to hate Snape specifically and prove he's an abused. In that scene, we're shown there's an equal chance of the boggart being Neville's grandmother, but that's constantly overlooked, even though Neville straight up prefers the boggart to be Snape than her (considering he explicitly says he doesn't want it to be her, instead of 'i'd rather the boggart being her please').
Neville's grandmother has been explicitly shown to mistreat him, to the point that McGonagall eventually takes Neville's side against her "tell you grandmother she ought to be proud of the grandson she HAS" (or words to that effect)- and McGonagall herself has either mistreated the children (she's insulted Neville) or allowed the children be mistreated (the Marauders clearly wouldn't have reached the levels of audacity they did if she wasn't failing to discipline them correctly), so for her to stand up for Neville kind of tells you how bad the grandmother was by that point. And yet nobody takes that from the boggart scene as evidence to add to this fact, the focus is entirely on Neville's childish fear of Snape, again to either try make Snape out to be an abuser, or because the audience just lacks basic comprehension or the knowledge of how children actually are (not all of their feelings and fears ARE valid, because they're CHILDREN. They're going to be dumb sometimes. Just because YOU were valid to feel the way you did doesn't mean you project that trauma onto fictional characters when discussing the canon. Headcanons, you can go ahead. But discussing canon can't included that).
Not only that, but like I've said many times in the past, the boggart scene does, actually, paint one person in a very awful light, and that's Remus Lupin. Lupin comes across as misogynistic at best, and transphobic at worst. What's so funny, exactly, about a man in a dress? A line that's been used to mock transwomen, gender non conforming individuals, and the like? Or rather, why is he here teaching these kids that to humiliate a man, you put him in women's clothing? Not to mention, this was all disgustingly unprofessional. Regardless of his and Snape's relationship, teaching kids that already disrespect him (and they do) that it's perfectly acceptable to bully him (and THIS was bullying) doesn't help. There were countless other ways Lupin could have helped with the boggart-Snape becoming less scary. He could have told Neville to imagine him smiling, for example, or even just "imagine him as someone harmless and funny". But the ultra specific instructions? Disgusting.
Also something I've never mentioned but it's come to my head now is that it kind of reminds me of how some freaks will ask cosplayers to do a specific thing or ask for a hyper specific artwork and it's actually just fetish art and okay yes that's most likely a huge reach but still just wanted to throw that in there, Lupin can get slandered for once-
So from that scene, that completely light-hearted scene, there's only one person that has any darkness in it, and that's Lupin. And yet that has not had any effect on his character and how he's been viewed. He is most likely actually the only character to be this openly bigoted (I may have forgotten if there are others though), but nobody acknowledges that.
And because of this, I believe that no matter who else physically appeared on that scene as a boggart, Snape would still be the only one treated as a problem for the simple reason that people just want him to be an abuser incredibly badly for their own bizarre reasons, whether it's because they want to convince themselves the Marauders were morally in the right when bullying him, or whether it's because they project their trauma from their teachers onto the one teacher that has an antagonistic relationship with Harry, or because they're dumb teens who think anyone who makes you feel any negative emotions MUST be abusing you and MUST be capable of all evil (which ironically is the same mistake Harry makes). I hope this answers your question!
