Merry’s Thoughts: Sev
Hooooo boy here we go.
I remember back in the day, when I was a wee little babby who was blooming into the HP fandom, I started out on roleplay forums playing Snape. Back then, I often had to deal with some level of metagaming based on any given person’s interpretation of canon, which I always found fascinating to watch.
I’ve always played Snape as a little bastard, but back in the day I loved Marauder Era RP and I tended to play him more as a sensitive-but-sarcastic emo boy (my 14 yr old self liked the tortured artist aesthetic-- nah who am I kidding, I still do). It was always bizarre to see that the people who hated Snape in canon would just like genuinely bully my version of the character, even if he did literally nothing to them (maybe that’s a story for another time, haha). But then there was the flip side: people who liked Snape in canon, who therefore made their characters overly doting and familiar with him even when he outright insulted them to their faces.
Most of these situations I found more amusing than annoying, but one thing in particular became a huge pet peeve of mine: Whenever anyone would refer to Snape as “Sev”.
Now, I’m not against the idea of nicknames as a whole, but Severus Snape is a bit of an exception, in my view. I can see why people gravitate to it; to call someone as supposedly imposing as he is “Sev” is adorable; it lends him an aura of cuteness that he doesn’t otherwise possess. “Severus Snape” is austere where “Sev” is more approachable, not to be taken so seriously.
But in a lot of ways, that was exactly my problem with it. In canon, nobody liked him. He was mean, nasty, unapproachable. Severus Snape was a man so thoroughly unpleasant and strict that at no point did it enter anyone’s mind to call him something fondly, or to think of him as a friend.
But-- at one point, a long, long time ago, someone did. The only person to ever use the name “Sev” was Lily-- and that gave the name weight. It meant something, that she felt at liberty to call him something so incongruous to how other people perceived him. There is something special but strange about it, when Harry hears it for the first time in Snape’s memories... Like an ancient relic from ages past, it could no longer function in the same way it used to. For a time, Severus Snape was “Sev”, but... that person he used to be is dead. He could never again be who he was before. Time and experience had changed him irrevocably.
I was never quite able to articulate it until now, but there was a certain tragedy to the name which I always held dear. This abandoned moniker represented so many interesting things to me: Innocence lost. A forgotten past. A childish love.
And how could I not want to preserve that?
