What do you think of Movie!Snape and Book!Snape? Do you have a favourite? Was your Snape inspired by both of them or something else? I'm just curious.
(I love your art, it's beautiful, as are your texts!)
I'm sending you heart-shaped cookies anon, thank you very much! 💚🍪🍪🍪
Well when I got sucked again into the HP vortex last summer I did focus on movie!Snape for quite a while. With time, as wanted to get deeper into the character I dived back into the books.
I do like both because they kind of complement each other imo. They're like two sides of the same coin - one being more important than the other but the second adding an interesting layer to the character.
At the end of the day, book!Snape is my man. I think his traumas, short-temper and feralness are so important to understand him fully and you just loose so much of it in the movies with Rickman's performance. I like how mean and twitchy and petty book!Snape is. I like his sarcasms, his humor, how expressive he is in the way he talks and moves his body and face. He's very emotional, which makes him very entertaining and fuels the aura he carries.
Of course he's also seen through Harry's narration, which is heavily unreliable since they don't like each other.
On the other hand, we have Movie!Snape who is way calmer and not al all seen through anyone's eyes except ours. He's frowning a lot, he's stern and not very patient either but he has a big aura. He commands a room. He's intense but in a more controlled way. He's impressive - unlike book!Snape who feels like an angry wet cat.
And I like to mix the two.
I like the wet cat, it colors him and gives him a lot of depth which you can then use to explore his character, be it with angst or comedy. But I also like to infuse him with a bit of that movie aura, because I believe that even though canon!Snape won't ever be posh and able to fully escape his sooty childhood, he tried his absolute best. He learned (with Lucius, the DE, while being a teacher) to speak and move and act in a way that commands respect. Nothing came naturally but he worked for it and if he was just looking like a sputtering clown in the books, Harry would have told us.
But Harry wouldn't tell us he found him impressive because he's biased, so I'm absolutely using that blind spot/trait of Harry in the books to justify my hc which is that Snape™ has also quite an aura, an intensity to his presence that is not depicted in the books. And that he can be calm and commanding when he's in control of himself.
I think Rickman's gave us an interesting and charismatic performance (that jkr really liked, I mean she wanted *him* for the role so she also might have felt like that there was something right with how he portrayed him) that I like to take into account. BUT he's a bit too smooth imo. I wish we had seen more of Snape's temper and overall expressiveness on the screen.
As for the facecard - which you haven't directly asked about but since you mentioned my art - I started drawing him with movie!Snape as a reference but with time I've been distancing myself more and more (as you've maybe seen). I love movie!Snape outfit and hair (in the first two movies) and I still kept some facial details in my current drawings (thin lips, the crease between the brows) but I have found lately some facecards that aligned way better with the idea I have of him.
Alan Rickman was quite tall and -I won't say 'buff' but he certainly wasn't a stick (I mean in HBP he has such a padded chest people made horny memes about it)(which was fair, it looked pretty comfy) and I do like to imagine Snape as... not being that tall... not muscular either and quite bony. It goes well with how twitchy he was in his youth and his overall dry mood and dry humor. I don't see him as short per say, but he's not tall nor broad. There's an energy radiating off of him, but it's pure aura, not classic masculine presence.
So in conclusion:
