would you still love me if i was a worm?

Song from ab unrelated Victoria that says all the letters really quickly at the beginning

All this arguing about how Marquis should be pronounced, meanwhile I'm forced to constantly hear Parahumans podcasts mispronounce Hebrew letters.

Oh? What's that, tensions are high with Earth CHEAT? What does CHITE want? It's too bad the sealed off Earth UH-LEFF, we could use their help!

So, to tally up.

Worm: one cannibal girlfriend, one cannibal daughter (Noelle and Siberian).

Pact: one cannibal girlfriend (Green Eyes!)

Twig: one cannibal daughter (Helen).

Ward: no cannibal girls.

Pale: Two cannibal girlfriends! (Brie and Chloe). Also a cannibal boyfriend (Nibble).

Claw: TBD.

toe doesnt watch the sun set over the horizon; mostly because he doesnt feel the need to. calabash has been dead for over three years now, and now hes next in line. in line for what, he doesnt know.

didnt know. not until now.

since hes been back and residing in the dorlish woods, his mind has been racing over what could have been. he even thinks back to koark and the bottle woman, when was the last time he thought of them? who cared even? they were long dead- extranji, most importantly, out of the most who had mattered, died first. and then æthirus…

damn. why was he thinking like this?

“toe?” familiar. familiar voice.

“rice boy, yes. how have you been keeping?”

the small being looked around, and came into toe’s vision. he had a knapsack strung across his back carrying œm knew what.

“what are you doing here?”

toe stalled for a moment, his body producing an odd number of clicks. “sitting.”

“oh.” rice boy took a seat next to toe, and pulled two sandwiches and some tea from the knapsack. “lunch?”

“how did you find me?”

the small body seemed to shrug. “something just told me, i guess.” toe chuckled.

“rosemary?”

“ha. yeah.” rice boy pulled out a few small berries and some plants, setting them next to the tea kettle, about to pose the question a second time to toe.

“lunch?”

toe looks at the sunset this time, now, because he feels like he needs to. its been too long since hes had lunch with someone lately.

he grabs a sandwich, and takes a bite.

and yeah, its pretty good.

Hey, can I hear about your shatterbird thoughts? She's always been my favourite member of the nine :]

[@faultlinescrew]

Oh I'm about to type for entirely too long.

Alright so a chunk of this is kinda headcanon, but any of that is fully based on canon. I had a giant fanfic planned that was literally an expanded telling of Shatterbird's life from trigger to death, and some plot points there may bleed into this unconsciously.

Number one favorite thing about Shatterbird is that initially, she did nothing wrong. She was unwillingly dosed with a Cauldron vial, and her scream and subsequent exploding of Dubai wasn't her fault. She had no intention to hurt anyone, it was done entirely out of her control as she gained powers and she should not be blamed for her first time destroying a city. The thing is, that doesn't matter in universe. She's still going to be hunted down by countless capes because she killed an untold number of people with that scream. No one's going to just let her go because it wasn't her fault, because she's the only person who can be blamed. People want revenge for their loved ones, and I'm willing to bet that she had a sizable bounty. It's similar to the situation we see with Rachel, where she can't have a normal life because she killed someone in her trigger and her identity is public, but on a much much larger scale.

I think the guilt ate at her so fucking bad at first. She killed her dad, her friends, her sister, her mother, countless others, and as much as it wasn't her fault she's still the one that did it. There's no way she doesn't blame herself for what happened, but when does she even have time to mourn? She's fled to a desert, she's gotta be struggling with food and water, and she's being hounded at every turn by people who want her dead. What's she supposed to do, let them kill her so she can atone for what she did or something?

I just love what a tragic backstory this is. She's one of the most horrible people we meet in canon, and I don't think it's unreasonable to say she has one of the highest body counts on Earth Bet, but she started as someone innocent and desperately trying to survive. And as much as I love this backstory and will defend to the death that she did nothing wrong at this point, it doesn't excuse who she becomes.

Shatterbird laughed.  “There’s only two ways to recover from something of that magnitude, to deal with the fact that you inadvertently killed thousands and thousands of people, and hospitalized twice that many.  You break, or you become it.”

(quote is from the missing interlude)

This is the quote that puts her entire character in a nutshell. The biggest question to me is... when did she become it? She implies in that interlude that it was rather quick, and that she went to Britain so she could hit a big target, but the Tattletale clone calls this out as a lie. She was running, the desert that she'd been in for months was unbearably loud with all that sand, and I think she was sick of living on the run. She wanted society, structure, something to make her feel human. I think she's full of shit saying she went there to destroy it, some accident or desperate confrontation occurred (timeline fits well enough for it to be a result of the Simurgh's attack, but that's just one possibility) and she broke London just as bad as she broke Dubai. What do you even do from there? Any slim hope of clearing her name is gone, she just has to keep running and try to ignore the guilt. And she ran to America, where the Slaughterhouse Nine found her.

The recruiting of people by the Slaughterhouse Nine fascinates me, because most are unwilling to join at first. Unfortunately the alternative is to die. No one in Brockton Bay was jumping to be the lucky winner, and the only people we know nominated themselves are Cherish and I think Siberian. Shatterbird (ever notice how she's the only S9 member with no canon first name? drives me nuts) was dragged into the recruitment process with no say in the matter just like most everyone is. Someone in the Nine found her, thought she would be a good fit because of London and Dubai (and how would that feel, to have someone on the S9 see you as just as bad as them?) and even if she explains that was on accident... what does it matter? It never matters that it was an accident. It never will matter. It's just something that she can tell herself to keep her sane.

So she's doing the fun little tests, I'm actually very curious how she altered herself for Mannequin's since he always does the same test, she's a very vain person, but that's off topic. Atrocities, horrors, being hunted by the Siberian, and suddenly she's at the end. Her and someone else.

“That’s not really a test,” Shatterbird spoke, “There hasn’t been a round of testing since I joined the group where we didn’t whittle it down to one candidate.” “We could forego the final test, pitting them against one another.” Shatterbird turned to him, “Ah.  But, again, the last test where we had to go that far was… mine?”

And she kills them. Dubai, London, those were accidents. This was on purpose, maybe even the first time she's done it on purpose. She could either break and decide she couldn't live with herself as a member of the nine, or she could just as horrible as everyone sees her. All her choices were rigged, there was never much of an opportunity to get better since so many paths closed off to her, but she voluntarily chooses to get worse. What's the point in holding on to the fact that it wasn't her fault at the beginning? She's never escaping what she did, so she'll become the monster everyone sees her as. You break, or you become it.

And there's not much of the more sympathetic side of Shatterbird in canon (partly because her backstory chapter was removed). She's fully embraced herself as a mass murderer. She revels in the attention, the fear. She parrots Jack's philosophy as a way to feel better about what she's doing, and eventually she doesn't need to feel better because she enjoys who she is now.

I don't know, I rambled for a while there but it boils down to me being fascinated by the circumstances of her gaining powers, and the shift from innocent but hated/feared to making damn sure that fear is justified.

Ok, so moving on from the backstory analysis, other miscellaneous details. Fuck it, I'm putting every thought I have on Shatterbird in this post.

She's the Nine's primary recruiter! Woo, good for her. Notably, she recruits Burnscar. Mimi is in a similar position to Shatterbird's past self with the whole involuntary mass destruction, although on a lesser scale (it'll always be on a lesser scale, Shatterbird has the worst trigger event out there in terms of consequences and she didn't even trigger). Mimi was on the streets and trying not to use her power, and Shatterbird scooped her up into the Nine.

“I- before I knew it, the Slaughterhouse Nine had found me.  Shatterbird recruited me.  And now I’m stuck.  I’m trapped.  You know there’s a kill order out on me?  If I try to quit, either the Nine or the cops will off me.  So I keep going, I work for them, and it all just gets worse.”

It's a situation Shatterbird can very likely relate to, but she's perpetuating it and making Mimi suffer like she did. No sympathy, no helping someone get through it and avoid the pitfalls she fell into, she's dragging other people down with her like a crab in a pot. Worth noting that I believe she's still bitter about the hand she was dealt even if she's embraced where it led her to, she remembers how horrible it was to be forced into everything and she does not care if she inflicts it on others.

But if someone else willingly joins the Nine, she takes it personally. Cherie says Shatterbird hates her, and that's because Cherie chooses the life Shatterbird was locked into. She's bitter that she never had that choice, and so she makes sure Cherie understands what it's like by chasing her for days for her test, not allowing any rest or sleep. However, this could also simply because Cherie sucks and is an unpleasant person to talk to, and Shatterbird is stuck-up.

Another thing I like is Shatterbird's appearance of knowledge and elegance. She's trying to appear put together, confident, in-control, and to be fair she does a pretty good job, her costume and theming are great. But under that is someone violent and angry, she's keeping up appearances to everyone else but also to herself. The fact that she's always trying to keep up appearances, even when locked in a room and doomed to die with one Witness (haha get it) she's trying to make it look like she was calm and in control when her body is found, is what 100% convinces me exploding Britain was an accident. The Tattletale clone calls her out, and to me it seems like another attempt to seem in control by framing it as deliberate.

Anyway, my attempts to woobify a mass murderer aside, I also like that she was a spoiled rich kid before all this and her prim asshole attitude points to that. She quotes Edgar Allen Poe, she reads because it makes her feel better than others, she's just so pretentious and unpleasant and to be clear I love this as a character trait, it's fun and leads to her speaking in overdramatic ways.

“Then you should know, nearly-Tattletale, that I’ve spent too long in the company of monsters to be scared by words.”

She thinks she was soooo cool saying that.

I also want to look at the last few weeks of her life. She spends so much effort propping herself up as great and in control, only to be locked in a box and puppeted around against her will. Genuinely I cannot think of anything more humiliating and agonizing for her to endure. She has nothing to do but think as she's used as a marionette.

She had a long time to reflect on her life, to look back at how she got here and what she regrets.

But I think she spent it stewing in her rage, itching and planning to get violent revenge and keep hurting others to be respected. She's unwilling and unable to go back, she'll double down on this forever because this is who she is now. And because 99% of characterization for Shatterbird isn't in Worm anyway, I may as well toss in this minor AU summary by Wildbow. If she escaped, she would have started her own version of the Nine with Damsel of Distress and Trickster. There is nothing left to sympathize with or redeem Shatterbird by the time we see her in canon, she's simply past that point. Side note but Shatterbird + Damsel of Distress + Trickster as a team is perhaps the funniest combo ever and I really wish those 3 fuckers got to interact in canon. Weirdo assholes who dress up fancy and have a taste for theatrics as a murder crew, we were robbed.

I could analyze the Hookwolf interlude but I don't want to. I'm very annoyed that Shatterbird (still no first name) is the only member of the Nine to lose the fight against her recruit instead of appearing terrifying and unstoppable. How come Burnscar can solo Faultline's crew but 3 nazis can take out Shatterbird, who has way more experience? It's pretty uncomfortable to have the only member of the Nine who isn't white be the one that loses to nazis, while one calls her a slur in his internal monologue, in the interludes where everyone else on her team is introduced as a force of nature. I think we should just collectively agree to make this interlude not canon and un-retcon the Witness interlude. While I'm on the topic it's also a bit questionable to have Sophia and Shatterbird (no first name. I am annoyed by this) as the only named capes puppeted by Regent?

But that's not the topic I wanna explore. The topic is that Shatterbird is a great character and I wish that she had depth in the story itself rather than scattered through 20 different sources, because she's legitimately my favorite non-undersider in the story. There is a lot of potential to explore her, one could interpret her backstory in a less charitable way than I did just for an example, and I really think she's neat! She takes hurting someone in an accident and then becoming the monster people see her as, something we see a few times throughout worm, to its ultimate conclusion in terms of scale. That alongside her outer layer of intellectualism and pretentiousness, which I'm a massive sucker for as a trait, and she's just perfect. Did nothing wrong (citation needed). I love her and I do hope that at least some of the stuff written her makes someone appreciate her character more.

Ok! That was... 2.2k words about Shatterbird (no first name). Woo! If some stuff seems inconsistent between paragraphs here, it's probably because I wrote this in chunks over the course of a few weeks and my feelings at the time can influence my interpretation of things and my writing to feel different when read all at once and compared. If you think I'm woobifying her too much, cool. I think it makes her more compelling to examine how much we know was her fault and how much she shouldn't be blamed for, and making her have less agency makes her more tragic which I always like. If you actually read this to the end, thank you! Have a nice day!

I love Encanto so much. I love Worm so much. I’m not a great writer but I have thought about this a lot. The ironic nature of the “gifts” playing into the miseries of the characters is so baked in.

Bruno’s tragically horrible at being tactful and totally neurotic, but people listen to every single word he says and interpret it for the worst since he can see the future. Feedback loop, least popular Madrigal in the Encanto serving as a harbinger of ill.

Pepa can control the weather, but only insomuch as she can control herself. Every time she’s upset she makes it everyone else’s problem, so she can’t be upset.

Julieta can heal all ills, but she can’t come even close to healing what is wrong with every member of her family.

Luisa is strong, but her strength erodes her boundaries as people need her abilities.

Isabela has conditionally beautiful plant powers that are a visual reminder that she must constrain herself to be loved.

Dolores hears everything, which makes it more painful as people overlook her.

I think the main thing that is essentially different about the two power systems is the fact that the Encanto powers were born of unconditional love and the Jesus-coded sacrifice of Pedro. The way they become miserable is Abuela’s trauma, and when that can be addressed the gifts can serve as healthy expressions of self for the family again. If I could write better, I’d do a crossover with the worm from worm, but I think it’d be 100k words and it would have 2 readers.

...isn't. isn't encanto similar to worm in how it uses superpowers as representations of the character's problems

Every time I think about the Travelers I black out a little. Every angle you can approach them from reveals new fucked up Situations. The inherent dynamic of your 'team leader' being the actual team leader's probationary boyfriend who would sell every other member of the team to One Direction for a corn chip and a vague promise of Maybe Helping His Girlfriend and who has gotten increasingly less concerned about pretending that's not true to anyone's faces. Once he fucked up and called someone by the numerical rank of 'Value To Operation Saving Noelle' he's assigned them all in his head and then refused to tell anyone else what their number was and they all just had to live with that one. They have to let him keep making the worst decisions imaginable because none of them can bear the consequences of shouldering the responsibility themselves. He put a thirteen year old in a Wire Strangling-Slicing Murder Art Piece as a distraction. He makes everyone put on colour coordinated black and red outfits because it's 'intimidating'. He's the worst and bravest person they know. He's going to get everybody killed and he's the reason they're all still alive. He is wearing a top hat. They are all in hell.

@simurghed ok here are some miscellaneous nothing thoughts ive had about undersiders team vacation for you. this is my purest form of autism theres literally nothing interesting under this post just a lot of words of me sticking undersiders into situations. thats not intended as self deprecation just fair warning

if they went in a cave where the tour guide is like "DO NOT TOUCH ANY CAVE FORMATIONS or they will BE DESTROYED, FOREVER, after THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF BEAUTIFUL EXISTENCE" brian would immediately proceed to spend the entire tour staring at aisha and alec instead of looking at the rocks and shit and preparing to grab them if either of them attempts to touch a cave formation. alec would accidentally set his hand on one w/o realizing while huffing and puffing his way up stairs or a steep incline but he would be walking behind the rest of the team so no one would notice and he would pretend it didn't happen

brian accidentally slams his forehead into top of low tunnel everyone is walking through and swears for like 20 continuous seconds and then has to go sit somewhere with an ice pack and the entire time hes like I bet aisha and alec are touching so many fucking cave formations right now.

if the undersiders went on a hike or something where there were like. Ledges. over Long Drops. aisha would without doubt go stand on them and dick around in a spry 13yo manner and it would freak brian out so much he would yell Aisha Middle Name Laborn Get Your Ass The FUCK Down From There!!!!! and then she would pretend to be startled like she was about to fall off for a moment and he would almost have a heart attack and he would be so mad for the entire rest of the day and not let her off the trail at all and keep glaring at her

if they went to a beach they could all wear cute little swimsuits...taylor would have a full bodysuit (dark gray) but mostly just spend time sitting in a chair reading. rachie wouldnt wear a swimsuit but she would just take her dogs up and down the beach on walks in normal clothes and maybe get a bit damp anyway. brian would wear swim trunks and a long-sleeved top because he also feels uncomfortable having too much skin exposed but, like, more quietly. aisha is wearing a purple tankini with one of brians giant t-shirts over top. voluntarily, to be clear, ifeel like someone might misinterpret this as "brian made her" but shes doing that on purpose. i also think she has at least one "nightgown" that is fully a massive shirt stolen from brian but thats besides the point. lisa is wearing a purple bikini with one of those like. flowy half-skirts tied around the bottom. and alec is wearing girls swim shorts and one of those sheer white swim cover tops youre supposed to take off before you get in the water except he's not taking it off

aisha keeps pestering alec to go swimming with her and he's like sure ok and lets her drag him in. and then almost drowns because he doesn't know how to swim and figured he could just "wing it." brian has to dredge him out and he spends several minutes coughing up seawater sopping wet style while brian takes the opportunity to lecture about how he's stupid. and then he spends the next half hour after that complaining about how there is Sand up his Buttcrack.

aisha and alec spend literally like over half an hour just standing next to taylors chair pestering her to make a crab rave happen. she tries to ask lisa for back-up but lisa says she also wants to see the crab rave. so it happens. very clandestinely with only a few crabs.

aisha demands a ride on brian's shoulders into the ocean. he obliges. alec demands to get to go next. he is denied, because brian thinks it would be kind of gay. he doesn't say that, but it's what he's thinking.

i think they should get to have the most miserable time on the planet all waiting for their turns to shower off in the hotel room after going swimming. reasonably they would have multiple rooms but i like to envision theres only one and everyone is shivering and holding malicious intent towards whoever is actively in the shower. they make alec go last because they know how he is with long showers and he just kind of sits tragically on the entry tile in a slowly collecting puddle of sandy water and stares into space looking haunted and intermittently shivering

undersiders trip to history museum. undersiders trip to preserved historical building. undersiders trip to preserved fancy mansion. ive posted about this one before but both alec and brian are enjoying it (for different reasons) while aisha HATES it and it's freaking all three of them out a little. alec is performatively trying to pretend he also thinks it's lame because he's (largely platonically) whipped but then he turns around and asks the tour guide an actual question and he and aisha both know that in this moment he has betrayed and abandoned her. they reconcile via shared advocacy for ice cream afterwards

alec vasil hot and tired of walking frow up incident, no deaths, intense injury to one boy's pride and also his shoes

brian laborns intense and immense joy over getting to organize and use the contents of his cargo shorts

the incredible drama of brian laborn trying to parallel park the van in a really tight spot while lisa and taylor both play unwanted spotter for him and he's like Please. just Let me Concentr-. Just let me do what i need to do just be quiet for a minute . they do stop talking for a minute, during which aisha takes the opportunity to start making fart noises

rachel lindt is fitting so many ouppie dogs in the van and theyre just kind of ferreting between everyones legs and climbing onto laps to stick their heads out the windows and shit. this starts off as something everyone but rachel is mad about but settles into a more amenable cuddle pile situation

undersiders go to aquarium or zoo....zoo would be more fun to witness because alec would complain about it being hot + smelling bad the whole time. lisa has the intelligent idea to quiet him with a blue raspberry slushie

speaking of lisa you know shes going into this entire thing like Taylor Specifically has to have the most funnest specialest time ever. shes always like "ok ill read some dinner options off the phone :)" and then all 5 of them are things taylor specifically would love. and so on and so forth.

alec vasil spotted wandering lost and ghostlike in the modern art gallery

i could go on

Sundancer is such a heartbreaking character. She's a genuinely nice person working to improve her life and escape her controlling mother and then she's plunged into hell with her friends and is forced to watch as her best friend is changed into a crude mockery of her former self. And then she's finally got a way out, the terrifying bug girl and her team secured her a way home, and her realization when given the opportunity to go home fucking wrecks me honestly.

She's just so fundamentally changed by her time on Bet, and she knows this. She'll never be the Marissa she was again because now she has blood on her hands, and before she goes home she needs to kill one last person. So she burns her best friend, her lifeline, maybe even her crush, even as Echidna begs and screams and promises wrath upon the world and calls her by the nickname Noelle always did. She takes a life on purpose this time, because even leaving Earth Bet demands she falls a bit more and compromises her morals one final time.

This is the part of the scene that really fucks with me though. She's fucking tearing into her costume, removing every part of the cape persona she hates so much and throwing it to the ground to melt, because she so desperately wants to detach herself from Earth Bet and cape society and her powers that aren't good for anything except destruction and hurting others. But it's not enough. She can remove every single part of her costume, try to pretend her time on Bet never happened, never use her power again, but she'll never actually be able to escape. This passage brings attention to the subtler part of her power, the self-protection that makes everything in about a 6 foot radius around herself a normal temperature (probably room temperature). The pavement cools and hardens in her wake, because even if she's not using her power she's stuck with it and it'll always have that normal temperature field active. Every single time she tries to take a bath and the water cools to be lukewarm instantly, or she goes out in the winter time and someone asks why it's warm around her, or her ice cream melts, or her meal is the same temperature as everything she'll eat for the rest of her life, she'll be reminded of her powers and what she did. The cold will never bite at her skin, she'll never feel the warmth of someone else's touch, she'll just find so many little things in her life from then on refusing to let her pretend she's normal and fine and that she didn't kill her best friend and that she's over Earth Bet. Her powers will never go away, and they'll never let her forget that even if she vows to never use her sun. I love Mars, she's forced to do horrible things for reasons entirely out of her control, and she'll never escape that. Whether she wants to be or not, she's a cape now and forever.

“Krouse made his play because he'd lost all hope, and decided the only thing he could do was self-destruct spectacularly alongside the person he loved.” krouse analysis by ewingstan (my favorite one so much)

r there any travellersposters left in this cruel cold world

King of the Jinjle

the thing that always confuses me about worm fanfiction is that fanon does like. Pretty universally flanderize characters--oftentimes with traits they're Assumed to have but do not even have in reality--until they're no longer even remotely recognizable as the original. that's a known phenomenon. but worm fanfiction does not do that. worm fanfiction does some new, never-before-heard fucked up shit with its characterization. worm fanfiction will literally just give taylor completely new traits with literally zero relevance to anything about her characterization until she is an entirely different character and then act like it's Still Taylor. people will say shit like "does anyone have any fanfictions about a taylor who's a serial killer elder goddess from [insert random media]" and think they're still talking about taylor. like people are obsessed with the Concept of taylor. but no trace of Actual Taylor remains in that concept. it's bizarre. i get that there being 1.7 million words of her can make her characterization hard to capture in entirety but like. What are you guys doing to her. For why.

philosophical ask game? Francis Krouse

SEND ME A WILDBOW CHARACTER YOU LOVE. I WILL TELL YOU WHICH PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT YOU SHOULD GET REALLY OPINIONATED ABOUT (SLASH DEVELOP A PSYCHOSEXUAL FIXATION ON)

Gonna make a potentially bold claim and say that theological stories should count as philosophical thought experiments when they're specifically dealing with theodicy. Krouse stans want to fuck Job from the Book of.

I don't think I could call myself a good man. But surely I don't deserve punishment like this. Not when I had finally found someone who saw something in me, not when the people close to me were getting punished alongside me. For what had they done to deserve the vengeful angel's scorn?

Whatever else you could say about me, surely you can't deny that I was loyal. Surely you can't deny that I was faithful. So why had I been condemned to Perdition, oh you who sees all? Why should I not curse your name for damning me and mine? A toast, to my demise and your capriciousness, you who for all your might are unworthy of my worship.

Team Fortress Two: Parahumans Edition

Like eight different people asked about the specific powers I had in mind for the wormverse iteration of Team Fortress. Here’s the reddit write-up, updated and expanded, now with additional Ms. Pauling and Administrator.

(Read more under the cut; this absolutely got the hell away from me. This is so so long)

Keep reading

There's this one thing about the whole argument of "Severus Snape isn't redeemed just because he wants to fuck Harry's mom" that grinds my gears. Like that's implying Snape left his memories for Harry because he wanted to be redeemable in the eyes of those who survive. Snape doesn't give a shit if people think he's a good person or not. He spent 7 whole books proving he gives 0 fucks about his reputation by being an asshole (and I love him for it, honestly).

There's a whole myriad of other reasons why Snape gave Harry his childhood memories, first and foremost probably being because Harry's a little dumb but he's not that dumb and if a Death Eater, one of Voldemort's closest followers, the murderer of Albus Dumbledore himself wrote Harry a note saying "kill urself lmao trust me it's the only way to get rid Voldie" do you think Harry would go "capital idea, let me throw myself off the Astronomy Tower just like you punted Dumbledore off it" No. One single memory of Dumbledore saying "I raised Harry as a pig for slaughter" isn't going to make Harry do shit; he needs to know that Snape was and still is working for the Light side by showing him why he's doing all of this.

And, also, I like to think that this is Snape's weird way of trying to comfort Harry, by showing him he's not alone, that Snape understands his feelings of being trapped, of being powerless, stripped of choices, of surviving a terrible childhood and instead of getting a reward, of building that found family, he's instead sentenced to die and it's not fair.