#asenora's opinions on ships
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Thoughts on Ron and Hermione as a ship?
thank you very much for the ask, @thesilverstarling!
i’ll state my position straight away: book ron and hermione are the best of the canon couples.
they will have a long and extremely happy marriage made rich by great and stalwart love, lust, fun, and faithfulness, rather than held together by duty and couples’ therapy like so many readers and authors (including jkr, who seems to have decided to spend the years since the conclusion of the series failing to understand anything about her own characters) tend to think.
i will state another position straight away: lest i seem like i’m just a fan with blinkers on, i think this even though hermione is, by far, my least favourite member of the trio. if she were real i would detest her, and i dislike how she is treated by the narrative as always justified in her negative characteristics. i like fanon hermione - perfect and preternaturally good - even less.
as a result, i think that it’s ridiculous that jkr has said that she thought ron needed to ‘become worthy’ of hermione. they belong together as equals - which is what they’re set up in the narrative as being from the off - and i hate seeing that undermined.
because ronald weasley? he’s an icon. and he doesn’t get anywhere near the respect he deserves in fandom.
there are multiple reasons for this - ron’s narrative purpose is to be the everyman sidekick, and so he is able to be less special than harry or hermione (the helper-figure); the amount of aristocracy wank in this fandom means that the weasleys’ ordinariness is less appealing to writers than making harry have twenty different lordships and call himself hadrian; the narrative interrogates ron’s flaws - especially his capacity for jealousy - much more intensively than it interrogates either hermione’s (cruel, inflexible, meddling) or harry’s (reckless, self-absorbed, judgemental) - but one i feel is particularly significant is that ron is such a british character that many of his traits are not understood as intended by non-british readers.
in particular - as is outlined in this excellent meta by @whinlatter - ron’s sense of humour isn’t indicative of immaturity or a lack of seriousness, but is, in fact, evidence that he’s the most emotionally aware of the trio.
ron is shown throughout the series to understand how both harry and hermione need to have their emotions approached - and i think there is no piece of writing which says this better than crocodile heart by @floreatcastellumposts:
That was what she liked most about Ron, she thought vaguely. He was very good at being suitably outraged on your behalf. For Harry, for her, for Neville. That sort of thing mattered, when you were hurt or embarrassed or wronged in some way. You needed to have someone else on your side, to be as emotional as you felt, maybe even more so, so that you might feel a bit more normal. It was very decent of him, and she was not sure he realised he did it.
ron’s inherent emotional awareness is an enormous source of comfort to other people. he does the work which isn’t flashy or special - he makes tea and tells jokes and is just there - but which is needed in healthy human relationships far more frequently than a willingness to fight to the death for the other person.
[as an aside, this normality - even though i think it is assumed rather than justified by the text - is also what ginny provides for harry. if you believe that hinny are a good couple but romione aren’t… i can’t help you.]
but let’s look at some specific reasons why ron and hermione belong together:
their communication styles mesh perfectly. ron is the only person hermione knows who feeds her love of being challenged and debated, and who is able to engage in this way of communicating without becoming irate when she refuses to back down. ron is good at picking his battles, but he’s also good at recognising that hermione’s tendency to argue isn’t intended to be confrontational a lot of the time - it’s just the way she works through feelings and problems. he’s far more easy-going about her tendency to nag, interrupt, try to provoke arguments, or speak condescendingly than he’s given credit for - and hermione evidently respects this, since when he does tell her not to push a situation (above all, when she’s trying to needle harry into talking about sirius), she listens to him.
that ron and hermione’s tendency to bicker is taken by fans to be a bad thing is because it’s something harry - from whose perspective the narrative is written - doesn’t understand. harry is extremely conflict-avoidant - he tends to take being pushed on views and opinions he has to be insulting; and he has a tendency to assume that he is right which is just as profound as hermione’s. he and ginny communicate not by debating, but by ginny having no time for his rigidity and refusing to indulge it - but ron and hermione bickering about everything is not a negative thing within their specific emotional dynamic.
[as another aside, this glaring chasm in communication styles is why harry and hermione would be a disaster as a couple.]
they each provide validation the other needs. it’s clear - reading between the lines - that hermione is a tremendously lonely person. the friendlessness of her initial few weeks at hogwarts seems to be a continuation of her experience as a child, and - outside of ron and harry - that friendlessness endures through her schooldays. i’m always struck, for example, by the fact that, when she falls out with ron in prisoner of azkaban, she has no-one else to spend time with, and that this is only avoided in half-blood prince because harry decides not to freeze her out. i don’t think her friendship with ginny is anywhere near as close as fanon seems to imply (ginny has no interest in being nagged either), nor do i think that she’s anywhere near as close to neville (not least because she is so condescending to him) as she’s often written to be.
and this loneliness seems to stretch beyond hogwarts. the absence of hermione’s parents’ from the narrative is - in a doylist sense - clearly just a device to maximise time with the trio all together, but the watsonian reading is that she doesn’t have a particularly good relationship with them. hermione’s obviously upper-middle-class background - the name! the skiing! the holidays in the south of france! - can be presumed, i think, to come with a series of expectations from her parents which she feels constantly that she’s not entirely meeting, particularly expectations attached to academic success.
[for example, the grangers - were she a muggle child - would undoubtedly have ambitions for her to attend an elite university and then go into a prestigious career. tertiary education of the type that they’re familiar with doesn’t seem to exist in the wizarding world - most careers seem to be taught by apprenticeship - and this, alongside all the other divides between the magical and muggle worlds which contribute to the distance between them, would be one very obvious area in which she felt the need to prove herself to them.]
ron, too, has quite a difficult relationship with his position in the family - voldemort’s locket is not wrong to point out that he seems to receive considerably less of his mother’s emotional attention than ginny or the rest of his brothers - and he too is constrained by expectations which he doesn’t know how to explain he has no interest in - above all, molly’s desire for her sons to achieve top grades and go into the ministry.
he also suffers while at hogwarts from being ‘harry potter’s best friend’, something which harry never appreciates. but hermione does. she recognises ron’s jealousy and never allows harry to minimise it (and she and ron are very much aligned on having no respect for harry’s saviour and martyr complexes). she appreciates ron’s strengths - above all his kindness and his sense of humour - and makes him feel as though he’s achieved things with them. and ron does the same for her; he is hugely observant when it comes to her, and he challenges and defends her.
the two of them clearly spend a lot of time together one-on-one while harry’s involved in his various shenanigans (including outside of school - hermione has often arrived at the burrow days or even weeks before harry, and they seem to write to each other frequently when apart). they do this within a relationship which is fundamentally equal. one issue with hinny is that, post-war, harry is going to have to get used to seeing ginny as a peer, rather than as someone he has to protect. but ron and hermione never have that issue - equality is baked into their relationship from the off.
because, to be quite frank, fandom overstates the role that jealousy plays in their relationship. it’s true that ron certainly doesn’t acquit himself brilliantly when it comes to hermione’s relationship with viktor krum (it’s because he’s bi and doesn’t know it yet), and a tendency to externalise his insecurity into trying to make others also feel insecure is one of his primary negative traits (hermione does this too, via her patented lofty voice when she’s trying to condescend to people). but this is often taken as the initial red flag for how the relationship would crash and burn, and ron’s toxic jealousy is often used in fan-fiction as the trigger for emotional and physical violence towards hermione which, frequently, seems to drive her into the arms of either draco malfoy or severus snape… who are, of course, the first people we think of when we hear the words ‘not prone to jealousy’...
but i think it’s important to point out several things in defence of ron’s jealousy over krum. firstly, hermione evidently regards his jealousy as ridiculous - she’s upset by it, yes, but her upset must be understood as being caused by the fact that she wanted him to ask her out. she doesn’t think he’s being possessive, she thinks he’s being stupid. secondly, hermione is equally as jealous over ron’s crush on fleur delacour and relationship with lavender brown. she behaves just as cruelly when it comes to lavender as ron does when it comes to krum - and the narrative only treats her actions as more sympathetic or justified both because harry dislikes lavender too, and because, by that point in the series, jkr has dispensed with any inclination to ever criticise her.
but, outside of this teenage pettiness, ron is never jealous of hermione over things which matter. he is never jealous of her intelligence or competence or ambition or success (indeed, he defends her constantly from attacks designed to undermine her in these areas). for someone who struggles with being overshadowed by harry, he is never upset at being overshadowed by her. he is clearly going to be happy to support her in any of the career ambitions she can be written as having post-war.
and, on this point, i think it’s worth interrogating why so many readers still seem to feel uncomfortable with the idea of ron and hermione having a dynamic where she is the more ‘powerful’ one. [it’s always a bit trite to say ‘but what if the genders were reversed?’, but actually that’s not irrelevant here]. if hermione ends up taking the ministry by storm and ron becomes a stay-at-home father or has a job which is just to pay the bills, what, precisely, is wrong with that? why, precisely, should hermione regard ron making that choice for himself as a negative thing? hermione so often seems to leave ron in fan-fiction because of a lack of ambition - something which seems to be particularly common in dramione - but, in canon, she is shown to not particularly care if ron and harry do the bare minimum when it comes to studying etc. she nags them to do their work so they don’t get in trouble. she doesn’t nag them to do it to the same standard that she would.
and, actually, i think that ron being less ambitious than hermione is something which is key to how well they work. because ron provides not only emotional support, but emotional clarity.
hermione is shown throughout canon to - just as harry does - have a tendency to become obsessive to the detriment of her own health. she is also often - as harry is - emotionally or intellectually inflexible, and finds it hard to move on when what she feels or believes is proven to be wrong. both she and harry are micro-thinkers, who lean towards knee-jerk assumptions and stubborn convictions (and, indeed, hermione has a remarkably hagrid-ish tendency towards blind loyalty).
ron is none of these things. ron is a big-picture thinker (it’s why he’s so good at chess). he’s a pragmatist. he’s the least righteous of the three. he understands that faith and loyalty are choices, and that sometimes these choices will lead to outcomes which are bad or hard. he is the one of the three most willing to own up to having made mistakes. he is the one least likely to act on gut instinct (and, therefore, the hardest to fool - i think it’s worth emphasising that he clocks that tom riddle is tricking harry immediately, the only one of the trio to do so). he understands that things are a marathon, not a sprint. he is the least obsessive.
and these traits contribute to aspects of his character which are underappreciated. ron worries about hermione making herself ill during exams, or when she is using the time-turner, and makes an effort to get her to set healthy boundaries and redirect her anxiety. ron stands on a broken leg in front of sirius or goes into the forest to fight aragog not out of righteousness, but out of choice. ron takes over the burden of preparing buckbeak’s defence when it is clear that hermione is approaching burnout. ron is completely right that harry hasn’t done any long-term planning for the horcrux hunt, and his anger does force harry to tighten up after he leaves the trio. ron has a clear head in the middle of battle. ron makes harry and hermione laugh. ron is unafraid of human emotion. ron arrests harry’s tendency to brood over the little things by looking at the bigger picture. ron will always come back.
ron is bringing his politician wife regular cups of tea and making sure she doesn’t work all night. he is helping his lawyer wife to feel less upset over losing one case by reminding her that she’s won ten others. he is noticing stress creeping in and whirling her off for a dirty weekend, or even just a takeaway on the sofa. he is teaching his daughter to be proud of her ambition and his son to treat women as equals and both of his children that all you can do when you fuck up is apologise and try to do better. he is making hermione smile on the worst days of her life. he is helping her strategise her long-term goals when she gets stuck on the short-term ones. he is telling her straight when she needs to get it together. he is seeing a misogynistic head of department call hermione a ‘silly little girl’ and choosing to tell him exactly what he thinks of that.
ron is the ultimate wife guy. hermione is a very, very lucky lady.
#asks answered#asenora's opinions on ships#romione#ron weasley#hermione granger#ron is a wife guy#also may i be clear#ron is evidently unbelievably hot#the text says he looks like bill#who is so fit that harry can barely see when in his company#hermione you lucky thing
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ew how can you ship tomarry??
because i believe in big dicks, narrative mirroring, and the idea that nobody on earth is unworthy of love.
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Thoughts on remadora?
thank you very much for the asks, anons!
while they are by no means my otp, i really enjoy remadora as pairing - and i think they’re fully up there among the canon couples in terms of being an amazing vehicle through which to explore all sorts of questions about life and love - which i am aware is a sufficiently controversial statement that it involves an immediate engagement with some discourse…
because remadora girlies [gender neutral] get an enormous amount of shit within the fandom, particularly from fans who consider wolfstar to be a more plausible pairing for lupin than tonks. i have seen remadora shippers called homophobes for simply enjoying the couple, justified with the bizarre idea that it disrespects remus' relationship with sirius [so... the non-canon one?] to put them together. i have seen tonks turned into a pathetic shrew who is trying to keep remus from the real love of his life by trapping him with an unwanted baby. i have seen remadora shippers get a lot of the usual stuff that people who prefer the canon-endgame couples do [that to ship a canon pair is boring, that it is indicative of a lack of talent, that it indicates an uncritical support for jkr] magnified to eleven because tonks has the temerity to be a barrier to remus’ relationship with the fandom’s favourite hot and brooding man.
obviously, this is bullshit - primarily because its unreasonable and cruel to invest so much time and energy being mean to people because of their harry potter shipping preferences [fandom should never be that deep].
but it’s also a disappointment to me personally because it means that it can be very hard to find the sort of remadora i like without looking like i’m coming to contribute to the pile-on. because where many remadora fans and i don’t see eye-to-eye is that i have absolutely no interest in thinking about them as a relationship which is actually functional. and, all too often, i find myself sifting through fics which do prefer to interpret them like this - as romantic and passionate and stable - largely, i think it’s fair to say, as a defensive move against the tide of “urgh, imagine shipping that” nonsense - even though all the evidence of canon is that they are… very much not.
i am aware of the pottermore article which smoothes the edges of lupin’s canonical reaction to tonks’ feelings for him in half-blood prince - but, while i read this as something of a retcon to make the relationship more palatable, i also don’t think that assuming that both tonks and lupin’s attraction to each other was sincere precludes them being as dysfunctional as they canonically are. i don’t go in for the common anti-remadora argument that tonks “forces” him into a relationship with her - it’s clear in half-blood prince that it’s not only her who has discussed her feelings with molly and arthur weasley, lupin is definitely flirting with her when they pick harry up in order of the phoenix, lupin is an adult man [no matter other power imbalances between him and tonks - such as the fact that she is an agent of the state which oppresses him] who possesses the capacity to refuse her advances, and - since teddy’s conception is not immaculate - he has no issue with enjoying a sexual relationship with her even if he then wants to run away from the product of that.
instead, what i like with remadora is that they reveal something which goes against the grain of the rest of the series: that love is not always enough. throughout the seven-book canon, we see time and time again the idea that love - and, crucially, love-as-noble-suffering and love-as-sacrifice - is enough to overcome any problem. entire civil service collaborating with a terrorist regime? don’t trouble yourself, love has won. your mother dying in childbirth leaving you to be neglected in a state institution? your own fault you’re not interested in love.
i understand the genre reasons for this, but i also love the way in which lupin especially exists on the margins of these genre conventions [just as he exists on the margins of wizarding society!]. i’m always struck in deathly hallows that he’s the only person who’s actually realistic about the demands of war - particularly when he tells harry that it is breathtakingly naive for him to think he can get through the fighting without having to shoot to kill - and that part of him having to be shuffled out of the way when harry tells him to return to the pregnant tonks is because, were the story focused on realism, the idea that a wanted man who is considered an unhuman by the state fleeing in order to guarantee the safety of his wife and unborn child becomes eminently reasonable and harry's defense of the nuclear family embarrassingly unradical.
and so i like the idea of lupin seeing tonks - and tonks seeing lupin - initially as just a bit of fun, as the two of them being just two chill single people who think the other is hot and interesting and want to bang because of it.
[which is something fandoms in general really struggle with as a concept. we like epic love stories - and you won't find me objecting to that! - but we're less good at thinking about casual sexual attraction or transient friendships, and how these can be transformative and meaningful without having to end up going any sort of distance.]
and i then like the idea of the relationship being forced into a profundity it doesn’t really have the juice to sustain by the sheer avalanche of grief which besets the two of them - sirius, dumbledore, mad-eye, ted - and by the pressure of the war and the fact that the order is scrambling and the hangover of remus' self-destruction in half-blood prince which makes each cling to the other as a life-raft. i like remadora as something codependent and messy and strange and sad, and i don’t think this prevents it being sincere and fun and based in mutual attraction, but instead that these positive qualities can exist in conjunction with the fact that, without the war, it would have been a summer of fucking and that was probably it.
on tonks herself, i don’t think i can say it better than @evesaintyves in this meta on her character. i’ve been really uncomfortable with quite a lot of stuff i’ve seen recently which has taken against the idea that tonks can be meaningfully read as queer on the basis of what we find in the text, above all because it so often comes with the implication that one cannot imagine her in her canon endgame pairing and presume that she’s something other than straight or cisgender. eve sets out an excellent case for tonks as bolshy and liberated and in tune with herself and fun and confused and in flux and still figuring stuff out about who she is and where she’s going - and this translates, may i say, to an astonishingly beautiful way of writing her, lupin, and the dysfunction inherent between them which i highly recommend you read.
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idk if you've talked about it before, but what do you think of snucius?
thank you very much for the ask, anon!
i'm a big fan of it as a ship, above all because of the ways it can be used to subvert the expectations which might accompany it into something oddly beautiful.
by which i mean that the possibility of quite a manipulative snucius is actually implied by canon. sirius is absolutely suggesting something salacious with his comment in order of the phoenix about snape being lucius' "lapdog" - it's a reference to a practise called "fagging" [yes, you've read that right] traditionally understood to take place in elite, all-male british boarding schools, in which younger boys were expected to act as something akin to the servants of older ones. the expectation that fags [yes] would perform sexual favours was a fairly standard part of the whole phenomenon - and so, when sirius suggests that snape runs around being lucius malfoy's personal errand boy, he is evidently also suggesting that he bends over for the privilege.
and the idea that lucius has power over snape is suggested more broadly in canon too. the implication of the prince's tale is that snape was taken under lucius' wing as soon as he was sorted, and that lucius was the conduit through which he was groomed to become a death eater [he is also the conduit through which snape meets his death - voldemort sends him to fetch snape before he kills him]. that he supposedly relies on lucius' patronage is something draco malfoy is well aware of - when he suggests in chamber of secrets that lucius would support snape if he applied to be headmaster, he is doing so with the subtext that snape's appointment would be entirely contingent on lucius' position as chair of the governors and, therefore, that he would only be chosen because lucius would think him likely to run hogwarts how he would like to see it run - which suggests that this power dynamic wasn't just restricted to death eater meetings. and voldemort undoubtedly elevates snape to his right hand within the setting of malfoy manor at the start of deathly hallows - reversing that established power dynamic - as yet another "fuck you" to lucius after his fall from grace following the farrago in the department of mysteries.
but.
i think narcissa is telling the truth when she describes snape as "lucius' old friend". i think that something deeper than not wanting to piss off his main patron lurks behind snape's decision to protect draco. i think that there is a very credible case for lucius being the only person who actually knows the real snape, behind his mask, and his relationship with lucius being the only thing in his life which stands in contrast to the relationships which seem to define his life more profoundly [his relationships with dumbledore, voldemort, lily, and harry, for example].
you can do so much with lucius having to confront his friend having turned spy - whether snape lives or not. you can do so much with lucius - terrified and disillusioned - relying on snape's help to prevent voldemort's wrath descending upon him. and you can also just have so much light and campy fun with someone as posh and peacocking and lucius having a sallow goth boyfriend.
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are you still doing ur asks abt the ships? if u are what r ur thoughts on wolfstar? if not have a very good day!
thank you very much for the ask anon - and thank you in particular for leading me into danger...
my answer to this is going to be - and wolfstar shippers keep calm please - similar to my jegulus one, which means the tldr is: write what you want, but i’m unlikely to read it, especially if you don’t acknowledge the difference between canon and fanon.
i have no aversion to wolfstar coming up as a background ship (let them be happy while harry/anyone are having drama, i’m all for it) but i generally don’t search out fics in which wolfstar is (one of) the central pairing(s) and tend only to read wolfstar-centric stuff if it’s written or recommended by someone whose opinion i trust.
this isn’t because i think the pairing is unfeasible (the canonical sirius and remus very much have the vibes of people who have enjoyed each other’s bodies…) but because the community which has built up around wolfstar, both among ‘original wolfstar, y’know, like in canon’ fans and their sworn enemies ‘marauders fandom, canon who?’ fans, largely expects certain tropes and characterisations which divorce the characters from what i personally think is interesting about them.
the most egregious of these tropes, in my opinion, is the fact that wolfstar which purports to be canon-compliant or which follows the canon timeline deals so infrequently with the fact that both remus and sirius have such little trust in each other that they believed utterly sincerely that the other was a death eater.
it’s crucial that we understand the profundity of this suspicion and - therefore - what it says about the fragility of the loyalty between them prior to 1980-81. this is not a brief flash of distrust in a high-pressure couple of days at the end of october. the evidence of canon is that we’re talking about a period of months - if not a full year - in which remus and sirius not only think it justifiable to doubt the other’s loyalties, but also seem to be acting on that doubt to try to get the other in trouble.
harry is born in july 1980, at a point when voldemort has all but won the war. severus snape defects to the order at some point relatively soon after this, when voldemort decides that the potters are the family referred to in the prophecy. peter pettigrew then defects to the death eaters in the autumn of 1980 (sirius says in prisoner of azkaban that he was spying for a full year before voldemort’s fall).
snape then evidently tells dumbledore that there is a spy in the order - although he clearly doesn’t, despite a common accusation levelled against him, know this is pettigrew, since the voldemort of the first war has apparently heard of operational security, unlike his resurrected counterpart - and this leads dumbledore to demand a restriction on james and lily’s movements until - by august 1981 (the plausible date of lily’s letter to sirius) - they are basically under house arrest. the implication of canon is that, by this summer at the very latest, james and lily are aware they’re being spied on, from which i think it’s reasonable to infer three things: that dumbledore has begun to suspect that sirius is the spy over the opening half of 1981; that remus, who canonically always trusts dumbledore’s judgements, uses this to confirm his own suspicions about sirius; and that sirius, whose canonical relationship with dumbledore has an undercurrent of unease, especially in order of the phoenix, picks up on this and assumes remus is briefing dumbledore against him. i think it’s also reasonable to infer that the only person convinced there isn’t a spy among his close friends is james.
peter visits the potters’ safe-house and is aware of its address, so we can assume remus and sirius are the same. by october 1981, however, there are clearly concerns that james and lily’s whereabouts are known to the death eaters - perhaps also accompanied by information from snape that voldemort, who loves a bit of symbolism, has selected halloween as the day he will strike - which trigger dumbledore’s advice that they perform the fidelius charm. dumbledore’s unease when james picks sirius as secret keeper is confirmation that he had identified sirius as the spy. that remus is never suggested as a potential candidate is confirmation that sirius believes him to be the spy - and possibly also that james is beginning to think his best friend might be onto something (i always wonder if remus’ bitterness when accusing james of being too trusting in deathly hallows is a flash of self-loathing about the fact that james didn’t trust him). sirius then persuades james to use peter and, within a week of the charm being performed, james and lily are dead, peter has disappeared, and sirius is in azkaban.
[as an aside here, i don’t love the amount of dumbledore bashing in wolfstar, and i think it’s worth doing some dumbledore defence: sirius’ internment in azkaban without trial - a reference to an actual historical event, if you were thinking it sounded far-fetched - is not dumbledore’s fault. the wizengamot acts on dumbledore’s credible belief that sirius was the secret keeper, while sirius - who is cackling his head off the whole time - refuses to speak in his own defence. similarly, dumbledore does not deny sirius access to harry (via hagrid) when he arrives, distraught, in godric’s hollow because he’s contrived a machiavellian plan to keep harry alone and unloved with the dursleys instead of with his true family, but because all the evidence he has available to him is that harry’s life is in danger at sirius’ hands.]
so sirius spends the next twelve years in azkaban, with remus clearly nowhere near his mind. that he stays in prison, and only escapes when he has an unimpeachable chance to get his revenge and protect harry, is because he - like his narrative mirror, snape - is so haunted by his role (indirect, but he canonically thinks that he essentially cast the killing curse himself) in the death of someone he fiercely loved that he considers azkaban a punishment he deserves.
this links to the next issue i have with a lot of wolfstar: that the defining force in both remus and sirius’ lives is james, not each other. the dynamic of the marauders is frequently reduced to the following: wolfstar, who are best friends and lovers it would take the heat-death of the universe to pull apart; james and whatever romantic partner the story wishes to pair him with, who are the same; and peter, who is either there and completely futile, or is replaced with a fanonised female character (dorcas, marlene, alice etc. - none of whom, may i say, it makes sense to have in the same school year as the marauders, dumbledore is not actually running the order as a gang of child soldiers) or a woobiefied death eater (regulus black, barty crouch jr., evan rosier etc.).
but in canon, a different dynamic is clear. james is the lynchpin of the marauders’ world, the anchoring point to all their sense of self; and the moment he is out of the picture no bonds of loyalty remain among the other three. (it’s tempting to think that remus always harbours a belief that sirius is innocent, but i think that this would be less due to an unconditional affection for his friend and more due to the fact that his own self-loathing needs to believe that he couldn’t have stopped james and lily dying; which he should have done if sirius really was the culprit, since he clearly suspected he was a death eater).
if you asked remus, sirius, and peter, clearly each of them would describe james as their best friend (even though james’ eyes are only for sirius - he only has one best man, and harry only has one godfather), but their relationships with each other outside of james are less clearly defined, at least before sirius and remus are the only two left.
this doesn’t prevent pre-1981 (or james lives au) wolfstar - your boyfriend and your best friend being different people is fine, obviously - but it is going to change the dynamic between them in ways i think are significant and which i would like to see explored more, particularly in ways which acknowledge that - for remus and sirius - this dynamic might not lead to the healthiest relationship…
for example, during their schooldays, wolfstar are likely to talk to each other through james, rather than james being surplus to the flirtatious dynamic between them; remus is likely to feel awkward or insecure about the fact that sirius - whose personality is closer to james’ than his - is so happy and gregarious in james’ company; sirius is likely to resent remus’ tendency to stay out of the action, since the fact that he and james mutually encourage each other in their exploits is key to their relationship; remus is likely to resent the fact that sirius is treated by the potters as a second son, while he isn’t, and so on.
during the first war, even if we remove the fact they suspect each other of spying from the equation, they will clash over how to protect james, and remus will undoubtedly take this to mean that sirius cares more for james than for him. during the second war, the long shadow of james - so painful that remus can still barely talk about him, while sirius wants to do nothing but - will hover over everything.
and this leads on to the third reason i generally don’t enjoy wolfstar: that the complicated threads of their canon personalities are removed or reduced to irrelevance to make them fit fanon which has no basis in the books.
now, i’m not going to get into appearance discourse here, although yes, i prefer a tall sirius who tends to wear wizarding clothing and has never heard a single cool piece of muggle music in his life, and i prefer a hollowed and world-weary remus who doesn’t have visible scars. i think background discourse is slightly more important: a great deal of sirius is lost if he is turned into someone who likes being pureblood, who feels more comfortable around his ‘own kind’, or who aspires to sit on the hereditary wizengamot; a great deal of remus is lost if he is turned into someone who didn’t grow up in a loving home with parents who did their best, but whose inability to give him the childhood he really deserved in the face of the prejudice against werewolves in the wizarding world encouraged his absurd gratitude towards anyone who made even a half-hearted effort to act in his interests.
all of my preferred aspects of characterisation are canon-compliant. but deviating from total canon compliance is not a moral failing. the term is more flexible than some of its defenders acknowledge, and people are at perfect liberty to imagine that characters look, identify, or behave differently than they do in the canon narrative without that automatically bringing accusations of writing them out-of-character (after all, it’s clear in the books that both harry and hermione are white, but art and fics which portray them as a different race can still meaningfully be described as canon-compliant if that's an aim they're written to have).
similarly, rejecting canon compliance entirely is just as fine - i think you should indicate to your readers if you’re doing that, but i’m capable of using the back button and moving on with my life if you don’t.
the only hard and fast rule is don’t seek out people who do things differently to you and insult them directly, although i would also suggest that it’s worthwhile to spend a bit of time in introspection about how lots of popular wolfstar and the fandom around it - like the fandom around all slash ships - portrays queerness in ways which are heteronormative (i.e. exclusively equating bottoming with femininity) and portrays women in ways which are misogynistic (i.e. how tonks is often treated in wolfstar discourse).
however, with this said, i think there is a difference between rejecting canon compliance and yet still writing the characters in ways which feel connected in interesting ways to their complex canon selves, and just writing original characters named sirius black and remus lupin.
because i just cannot get on board with a remus who is written as the cleverest one of the four, as assertive and direct instead of avoidant and passive-aggressive, as anything other than incredibly selfish, as anything other than an extreme people-pleaser, as being soft and sensitive (his mild manner hides the fact that he is incredibly cold and calculating - this is a man who is prepared to execute wormtail in front of three children mere minutes after learning he’s still alive), as majorly regretting the snape-versus-werewolf incident (he loves it! snape is terrified of him! he downplays it constantly!), or as functioning as the moral heart of the marauders (when sirius says in order of the phoenix that remus tried to restrain their bullying of snape, he is doing it to make remus - who is incapable of self-criticism - feel better in the face of harry’s anger) when he is in fact quite morally cowardly.
and i cannot get on board with a sirius who is written as a goofy himbo, as a constant flirt and womaniser (more grey-ace sirius, i would like to see it), as the world’s wokest king (a man who’s upset his slave isn’t sufficiently deferential to him isn’t someone who’s going to speak in queer theory buzzwords - this, of course, doesn’t prevent sirius being written as queer, non-binary, trans, femme, and so on, it just means that authors have to deal with the fact that sirius’ way of existing as any of these things will be human, rather than perfect), as a small bean unable to take care of himself (he escapes from prison and swims across the north sea! he charges into danger at the drop of a hat!), as anything other than incandescently loyal to james and harry, as - after james’ death - anything other than completely wrecked by guilt over the fact he caused it, as best friends with his brother and his gang of slytherins, or as lacking the fundamental arrogance and cruelty which make him so interesting.
and wolfstar can work, absolutely, when these things are taken into account. i find the idea of second war remus and sirius, stuck in grimmauld place together, buying harry a joint christmas present, the last survivors in a generation completely hollowed out by loss, incredibly moving. remus' choice to self-destruct in half-blood prince - having lost sirius so soon after having found him again - does, i think, justifiably indicate a change in their relationship during order of the phoenix which can be seen as romantic. i find the idea of first war remus and sirius, each in love with a man they think is a spy, wonderfully bittersweet. i find the idea of school-aged remus pining desperately for a friend who is head-over-heels in love with james to be, quite frankly, canon.
and i also think that two original characters called sirius black and remus lupin can do whatever they want - i’ll just be closing my eyes, pretending i cannot see, and leaving them to it.
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Wait why are you not a fan of Snape and Hermione?? 2 nerds who care a socially awkward amount about the things they care about nerding out together at levels of romance people who can be chill and normal about things can’t comprehend?? It’s not one of my fav ships but I can definitely see it!
I headcanon that Snape picks on Hermione being a muggle raised know it all thirsty to prove and lacking self awareness because he was one himself when he arrived at school and James and Sirius picked on him for it! It’s like that you’re most repulsed by the things you’re self conscious of in yourself thing to me. Or maybe a him trying to live out being the “cool” one in that dynamic thing
But when she’s a grown woman and more self possessed like he became too I feel like that same energy ness has potential for love!
Hermione is famously respectful and compassionate enough towards all beings to be more understanding than say Lily Evans of his prickly tender ego if he had another m word style outburst and such a people pleaser she’d keep coming back for more snark as long as he peppered it with the odd encouraging compliment
And I feel like a Snape in reciprocated love could absolutely veer into inventing beautiful and helpful spells to impress his lover or sending “made me think of u 😘” notes with verses of elaborate obscure poetry territory that would be frankly the level of literary and academic courtship our Herms deserves 😌
Is it cause they’d both be the highly strung worrier one and they both need someone to ground them? Or maybe too pessimistic together and one of them needs to be the cheerful one?
anon, i genuinely love this for you - i'm always thrilled to get people explaining their love for ships in the ol' inbox, especially when they're ships i don't instinctively vibe with, and i have been won round to stranger premises than this by a passionate defence of why two characters should kiss.
where i still think snamione isn't clicking for me, however, is that the way you describe both snape and hermione here doesn't align in any significant way with what i personally think would be interesting to explore about either character in a relationship and have them still feel meaningfully like their canon selves.
[i will say, though - because i always think it's worth reiterating my fandom commitment towards being neither a cop nor a priest - that i literally don't give a shit about either the age gap or the student-teacher dynamic. i know that's an objection to pairings like snarry and snamione which lots of people do express. but i will never be one of them.]
the primary reason that i don't vibe with many of the more... sapiosexual hermione ships [by which i mean not only snamione but tomione] is that they hang on the idea that hermione's intellect expresses itself in a way we never actually see in canon.
or, the idea that snape and hermione are intellectually compatible [and that they would enjoy hanging out being nerdy about stuff] is just... not true.
throughout the seven-book canon, the way that hermione shows herself to be clever is that she displays an excellent memory and an enormous capacity to rote-learn. her intelligence is overwhelmingly demonstrated - both in the classroom and during the trio's year on the run - by her being able to regurgitate swathes of information, very usually verbatim from the source she got it from.
she is clearly able to use this ability to retain information to understand the theoretical component of magic in a way neither harry nor ron ever manage, and she is able to use this understanding of theory to work out how to perform spells which are ahead of her expected level on the hogwarts curriculum.
and this is intelligence - and i want to be very clear that i'm not trying to suggest that hermione shouldn't be thought of as intellectual, or that her academic achievements should be devalued. but it isn't the way snape's intelligence manifests itself.
because hermione is never shown - at any point in canon - to be a particularly creative or experimental thinker.
she places an enormous intellectual trust in disciplinary authority - teachers and textbooks - and is frequently rattled when these are revealed to be partial or incorrect, as we see in her shock at hogwarts: a history not mentioning house elves or her anger at harry getting better results by following the modified instructions in the prince's textbook [despite knowing nothing about the theory underpinning them] than she does with the "official" ones.
she also regards the gatekeeping of inquiry which disciplinary boundaries enforce to be a positive thing and she never displays any inclination to step beyond them. she dislikes the spells in the prince's textbook because they aren't ministry-approved - and i must say that i think the idea that she'd be won over by a man creating spells for her is wishful thinking...
she is immediately mistrustful of anything she can't find something she regards as an empirical source for - notice, for example, that she only comes round to the idea that prophecies might be real once she encounters them in the ministry of magic.
even when we see her using magic on her own terms - the jinx she uses on marietta edgecombe, for example; or the protean charm on the da coins - the magic she's using is sophisticated, and is being applied in a way which wouldn't be classroom-sanctioned, but it's not magic which is being used in a way which is removed from the spell's original purpose. the protean charm on the da coins is impressive because it's a flawless execution of newt-level magic by a sixteen-year-old. it's not impressive because hermione is using it in a strange, experimental, or radical way.
[in contrast, the dark mark - which harry notes the coins mimic - is clearly a spell voldemort himself invents.]
snape, on the other hand, is an experimenter. he's someone who clearly sees magic as a creative force which he has every right to shape as he sees fit by adaptation and invention. and he's someone who evidently rejects the logic of disciplinary gatekeeping - one tension in his relationship with dumbledore prior to half-blood prince is that snape evidently retains an enormous intellectual interest in the dark arts [which, as he tells us, are an area of magic which is feared precisely because they can't be neatly contained within disciplinary boxes - they are ever-changing, unfixed, mutating...]
and it's these conflicting views of what magic is and how it should be used and thought about which is the cause of the intellectual incompatibility we see between snape and hermione in canon.
he is unequivocally in the wrong for his dismissive classroom manner towards her - because he is an adult and she is a child. but he isn't wrong in principle that hermione just repeating what she's read in the textbook and refusing to synthesise her knowledge [she always goes massively over word limits! she never gives answers in class in her own words!] isn't actually a demonstration that she understands the material. [and therefore something a good teacher would guide her through conquering... snape having no interest in doing this is his own fault.]
and - from a snamione-specific perspective - it's all the evidence snape needs that, actually, they're not going to enjoy hanging out chatting about academic pursuits. hermione values knowledge like a dragon hoards treasure. snape wants to take that treasure, melt it down, and turn it into new and weird things.
once again, i don't think this a flaw in either of their characters - it's just something which is. and i don't think it's an insurmountable obstacle to writing snamione, because i believe any ship is possible if an author has enough nerve. but it's an aspect of both characters' canon personalities [and hermione's above all] which never seems to make it into snamione fics - all of which, as far as i've encountered them, are beholden to an idea of hermione's approach to academia which is considerably more flexible than we actually see in the books.
of your other points, i'm not particularly convinced by the idea that snape sees his younger self in the teenage hermione. this isn't just for the reasons outlined above - hermione isn't trying to prove herself in the same way he was, which was by creating and experimenting in a bid to be noticed and considered impressive - but also because of the massive gulf in their respective class backgrounds.
hermione is really posh - and, while she's obviously subjected to discrimination at hogwarts on account of her blood-status, she also comes from a family with both the financial resources and the cultural language to make her familiar with the vibe of the elite muggle boarding schools hogwarts is a pastiche of.
the teen snape - in contrast - stands out from his cohort in that he is visually identifiable as working-class [which does appear to be genuinely unusual at hogwarts]. his class background is something which clearly drove a lot of the marauders' bullying of him [i'm sorry to the girlies who think james and sirius targeted him out of some righteous desire to stamp out his prejudice - it was because he was poor and uncouth] and which he still has a chip on his shoulder about as an adult.
this - again - is not an insurmountable barrier to a snamione relationship [as it's not a barrier to thousands of real-world partnerships and friendships]. but it is something an author needs to grapple with if they want to make the pairing - at least, in my opinion - seem plausible. but the standard vibe seems to be that snape would be comfortable in the grangers' home fairly quickly, and that he'd be delighted to have hermione swanning around offering suggestions for how they could do up spinner's end... instead of him resenting this as the unwelcome meddling of people who've never had to worry for money.
i'm also not particularly convinced by the idea that hermione would get over being called a mudblood - especially by an adult man. while i think it's completely plausible that she'd handle this differently than lily [although lily's reaction is entirely justified - and i don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater of contextualising the teenage snape and the motivating factors behind his decisions by pretending that cutting off your friend because he called you a slur is a petty, ill-thought-out, or unreasonable move], i don't think that her reaction would be automatically forgiving.
hermione is compassionate towards kreacher when he calls her a mudblood because kreacher is a slave, whose prejudicial views are inextricably bound up in the magic used to oppress him [i.e. that if he received an order to use the term, or to refuse to serve a muggleborn food, from his masters, he would have to punish himself violently if he disobeyed it]. she is not - quite rightly! - compassionate towards someone like draco malfoy when he calls her one, since he is a free person with full agency to choose not to do this.
could she forgive him - or snape - for using the term? sure! absolutely! but i don't think it's a given - and i also think she'd expect a demonstration of how sorry snape was which wouldn't necessarily align with how he'd think he'd demonstrated his regret.
i do agree that - as you say - hermione is a people-pleaser, and she definitely has a far greater tolerance for being treated cruelly by people she wants to impress [especially authority figures - including snape himself] than either harry or ron. and i think this has the potential to introduce an extremely thorny dynamic into a snamione fic - in which the power dynamic inherent in the age gap [which, to reiterate, i think is completely fine for an author to enjoy] is compounded by hermione being unwilling to anger or contradict snape [which is a vibe - as i've said in answer to an ask about harmony - we also see in her relationship with harry... it's also obviously exactly how snape's relationship with dumbledore works.]
on a couple of the more minor characterisation notes, i'm afraid that the idea of snape as a great romantic has never hit for me. it seems really bound up in the way alan rickman portrayed him in the films, which i've always found a bit toothless. i also don't like the trope of "actually snape's really hot" which seems to always accompany it - ugly, odd men to get to bone too!
[what he would be - i think - is a magpie. get ready to be handed odd stones and bits of leaves on dates.]
i also think they're highly-strung in ways which differ enough to mean they'd just annoy each other. hermione is highly-strung in that she flusters easily and is very poor under pressure, but she's actually pretty emotionally stable [and i'd dispute that she's a pessimist - this is a girl who thinks that she's successfully eradicating slavery at hogwarts by knitting hats; she's pretty robust, funny, cheerful, and idealistic]. snape is highly-strung in that he has a hair-trigger temper and is very emotionally volatile, but he's obviously an extraordinarily good liar, very quick on his feet, and very good under pressure. he'd think she panicked too much [and over insignificant things he didn't care about], she'd think he tanked the vibe of a date by taking offence at someone breathing too loudly.
where are they similar? well, they have a shared self-serving streak [hermione is appalled by behaviour from harry and ron she considers perfectly moral when she does it]; capacity for cruelty; tendency towards secrecy; tendency towards pettiness and pleasure in the misfortune of others; loathing of flying a broom; cutting sense of humour; stubbornness; resilience; clear dislike of slumming it in nature; love of puzzles; and a weakness for red hair.
i think you could make it work on the grounds that they'd probably have the time of their lives being haters together - especially, i feel, about rita skeeter.
and - y'know - because love is weird.
#asks answered#asenora's opinions on ships#snamione#hermione granger#severus snape#is this an “i'm in danger” one?#only time will tell
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asenora i will listen to anything you have to say about these characters ever. please tell us what the tea is with dron
as i rummage through the backlog of messages in my inbox the thing that i have discovered is that you girlies [gender neutral] are absolutely clamouring for citizenship of dron nation.
[thank you to @spectral-kitty, @thesilverstarling, and two mystery anons!]
to which i say, the borders are open, baby. you just have to read the following manifesto:
why fandom needs to stop sleeping on dron
something i am continually banging on about, as regular readers know, is the harry potter series' fondness for assigning [male] characters to narrative mirror pairings.
exploring these pairings is interesting in and of itself without a romantic dimension being involved - i could talk for hours about the mirrored approach to guilt and grief in snape and sirius' characterisation - but it's also true that several of the most interesting ships which can be drawn [however non-canonically] from the text are between the two halves of each mirror pairing.
tomarrymort is the obvious one, snack [or starprince or snirius or whatever we're calling it] is starting to get the attention it deserves, but people are still sleeping on draco malfoy/ron weasley [and also, may i say, on lucius malfoy/arthur weasley and narcissa malfoy/molly weasley], largely - i fear - due to the sheer popularity of drarry and dramione.
i'll be honest that i really don't like dramione, and i'm generally ambivalent towards drarry, but i do love dron. and the narrative mirror aspect is entirely the reason why.
ron and draco begin the series as mirror archetypes within the genre conventions of a children's boarding school romp. ron is the loyal, humble sidekick of the everyman protagonist, draco is the everyman protagonist's posh, stuck-up rival. both are insiders to the world of the story - whereas harry, the reader surrogate, is not - who introduce harry to the positive and negative aspects of the wizarding world respectively.
as a result, ron and draco are mirrors in terms of personality, and are much more similar to each other than either is to harry or hermione. this doesn't, of course, preclude ronarry [a ship i adore] or romione [which i've defended here] or drarry or dramione [if ya nasty], but it introduces a specific - and very interesting - tension into the pairing which is absent from these other ships.
both ron and draco have shared positive traits - they're both loyal [and their loyalty is very practical and pragmatic - ron is not hagrid, whose faith in e.g. dumbledore is totally unwavering; draco is not bellatrix, whose faith in voldemort is the same], they're both highly observant, they're both quick-witted, they're both capable of doing the right thing - if not always immediately [which is, in fact, more admirable than being preternaturally willing to suffer and sacrifice], and so on.
they also have shared negative traits. they're both attention-seeking [ron fucking loves nearly being knifed by sirius and you just know draco was seething], self-aggrandising, insecure, sulky, and predisposed to jealousy.
and this is a gift for authors, because it means that dron butt heads in a relationship in ways which allow for real character growth... or otherwise.
one issue that i have with drarry is that it often feels like the change either one goes through within a fic is kind of out of character. for example, you have a harry who feels insecure and haunted by his ill-treatment of draco [this is a man whose response to committing attempted murder is to be raging that it reduces the time he has free to hit on ginny], or a harry who is chasing after a cool and sophisticated draco who eventually learns to open up [whereas if there's two things draco isn't, it's someone who keeps his thoughts to himself and someone who isn't a distinctly unsophisticated flop].
dron, however, react to conflict in the same way - which means that the two of them finding themselves in conflict with each other absolutely slaps. they also have similar levels of emotional intelligence, and are likely - if they're inclined to - to be able to communicate with each other and work through issues surprisingly effectively. they can be a mess, or they can be a happy-ever-after, and i like that in a ship.
but, while ron and draco are mirror archetypes, they are specifically children's literature mirror archetypes. ron's role as harry's guide to the world diminishes in the later books, as the series' horizons move beyond hogwarts to think about wizarding society and voldemort's impact upon it more widely [he is replaced by characters such as dumbledore]; while harry becomes considerably less bothered by the pettiness of draco's rivalry with him [concerned as it is with things like being good at quidditch and getting away with misbehaviour at school] as the enemies he's focused on shift to being the resurrected voldemort and his death eaters.
which is to say that dron makes considerably more sense within a hogwarts setting than drarry.
as i've said elsewhere, an issue i have with drarry is that it's frequently written in a way which suggests that harry and draco have a mutual obsession with each other - while the actual evidence of canon is that, while draco is [as his archetype demands] preoccupied with what harry's doing, harry rarely gives the impression of caring what his rival is up to unless directly compelled to by draco's own attention-seeking.
ron, in contrast, spends a lot of time noticing things about draco unprompted - he can, for instance, recall overhearing him boasting offhand about what broom he owns in philosopher's stone - and retaining this information in order to deploy it at the opportune time to get a rise out of him. he delights constantly in his misfortune [him being hyped for days because draco's annoyed harry gets a firebolt is beautiful]. he's ready to throw hands with him at any given opportunity, often giving those of us who thrive on cheap innuendo plenty of material in the process [draco finds himself, for example 'on all fours, banging the ground with his fist' after having ron's wand pointed in his face... same, girl.] and he tends to consider draco much more integral to the various shenanigans which take place in the castle than harry does [ron is the main proponent of the 'draco malfoy is the heir of slytherin' theory in chamber of secrets - and he is shook when draco reveals that he's wrong].
and draco does the same. he comes into the trio's compartment on the train in goblet of fire and immediately starts telling ron how unfashionable his dress robes are. he obsesses over ron's position as gryffindor keeper for months - and, of course, makes up a song about it, which isn't exactly helping him pull off 'i don't think about you at all', is it? - and ron is profoundly affected by the taunts in way that harry, who doesn't really care what draco thinks of him, isn't. and he constantly goes out of his way to provoke ron into trying to punch him [him shoulder-barging ron in half-blood prince just after harry's essentially outed him as a death eater in madam malkins... exquisite pettiness].
all of which is to say, their interactions feel very teenage and petty and silly all the way through to the end of half-blood prince in a way that draco's interactions with harry and hermione don't, and - therefore - i sincerely think that dron can be made to work much more plausibly as a pairing in fics set while the characters are at school.
my final point in favour of dron is that they mirror each other in their approach to their other relationships, and the tension this causes is really interesting to explore.
both ron and draco have mirrored attitudes towards their place within their own families - something neither harry nor hermione can have with draco for obvious reasons. ron is one of many siblings and feels overlooked in the crowd; draco is an only child and feels overburdened by the visibility, especially once his father is sent to azkaban. they both conform to behaviours expected of them by family [they are both in the same hogwarts house as generations of their family, they share their families' political views etc.]. they are of the same social class and their families both have a reasonably similar level of political influence [despite what we're told about his insignificance, arthur weasley is known to everyone in the ministry and he's able to throw his weight around to influence policy even before the promotion he receives in half-blood prince], but their material circumstances are divergent. they both heavily resemble their fathers - to the extent that they are immediately recognisable as each man's son - and spend their schooldays defending family honour by playing out lucius and arthur's own petty feud [lucius and arthur - and, indeed, narcissa and molly - are also narrative mirrors, and we deserve many more enemies-to-lovers fics featuring them]. and the course their lives take during the war is dictated as much by their role within their families as it is by their relationship with harry - the scrambling post-dumbledore order operating out of the burrow is a mirror image of the ascendant voldemort operating out of malfoy manor.
they are also obviously defined by their mirrored relationship with harry - most interestingly by a major similarity in their attitude towards him: that both struggle with how jealous they are of harry.
this leads to lots of excellent tension which just isn't possible in drarry or dramione. how do both sets of parents react to the news their sons are in love? how do ron and draco's relationships with harry change as they find each other? how does draco cope with the hustle and bustle of life at the burrow? how does ron deal with having to have dinner at the manor [particularly interesting because the world in which draco lives is one that's familiar to him - he's not going to be shocked by any of the weird stuff in that house, he knows how it all works, so he can ruin christmas by deciding to have his dad arrest lucius for fun instead]?
it's messy, and fun, and it sustains me.
and some recs for the lads?
collateral damage by @danpuff-ao3, which starts out with both of the lads working out their... issues with harry and ends with declarations of going to lunch with each other's mothers.
dance the night away (aka it's true love, you bastards) by evandar, which has as its premise ron and draco ending up, largely by accident, going to the yule ball together.
this great stage of fools by @nanneramma, which correctly demonstrates how ron is charming enough that him being supremely annoying is actually loveable.
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Hello! I just had the pleasure of reading your big romione meta. So well argued and articulated! It really made me miss the livejournal era of fandom, when meta was a much bigger part of the discourse. Do you have a favourite romione moment? Which ones?
ahhh thank you so much, anon!
i will ride out to war for romione without the slightest provocation at all, so actually having an excuse to talk about them is delightful.
my top romione moment will - of course - always be...
ron using the sight of her empty chair to convince him to face aragog
But Lockhart’s disgusting cheeriness, his hints that he had always thought Hagrid was no good, his confidence that the whole business was now at an end, irritated Harry so much that he yearned to throw Gadding with Ghouls right in Lockhart’s stupid face. Instead he contented himself with scrawling a note to Ron: Let’s do it tonight.
Ron read the message, swallowed hard, and looked sideways at the empty seat usually filled by Hermione. The sight seemed to stiffen his resolve, and he nodded.
i just love this! he's facing his greatest fear for her!
and it also sets up the fact that hermione is shown to provide ron with the push it takes for him to step out of his comfort zone in more ordinary ways throughout the series, but - even without this - him being willing to go visit an enormous spider in the middle of the night on the off chance that it might help unravel the mystery of how she's been petrified always gets me.
#asks answered#asenora's opinions on ships#romione#hermione granger#ron weasley#it's giving chivalrous
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Call for asks: I’ve noticed you’ve avoided saying anything about Jegulus for the last few asks so…. Jegulus 😈
anon please, i’m not avoiding saying anything about jegulus, i genuinely don’t know her.
but, fine, let’s imagine i do.
i don’t enjoy it as a pairing, not because i think it’s unfeasible [in my view, the joy of fanfiction is taking a completely implausible premise and making it work], but because i don’t like the way that the fandom which has built up around jegulus expects certain tropes and characterisations which turn the characters into just profoundly uninteresting people.
and this is the case for all the marauders and marauders-adjacent characters [i’m looking at you, fanon barty crouch jr.!], undoubtedly because the era has so little actual canon material that fanon becomes canon and authors run from there. and that’s great - anyone writing stories in a world hostile to hobbies and creativity is a triumph - but the standard way of writing jegulus which has coalesced around this fanon doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest.
there are many jegulus tropes i don’t love: how it always becomes a parallel wolfstar [james and peter would be the cultured choice if we have to do that]; how it’s just drarry but in the seventies [when the cultured choice for that is lucius malfoy/arthur weasley]; how james becomes a tediously good person when the evidence of canon is that he’s a bit of a dick; how it relies on an exaggerated portrayal of orion and walburga’s abusive parenting which misses the fact that regulus evidently colluded with them against sirius; how it assumes the marauders aren’t intensely codependent [sirius mentions-lily-once black is definitely going to let his brother hang around with them, sure]; how snape is sometimes there and always a knob. james and regulus are also so similar in terms of background, social position at school etc. that there’s no juicy spark [as in snack, for example]. and, of course, prongsfoot is canon.
and so on…
but the biggest reason i can’t get into it?
regulus is a death eater, and not by mistake.
now, we all love a fluffy no-voldemort au, but unless that is a jegulus author’s stated setting, they are going to have to deal with the fact that regulus fucking loves the dark lord. this is a teenage boy who has press clippings about voldemort’s terrorism taped above his bed. he knows exactly what he’s getting into and he likes it.
indeed, my reading of deathly hallows is that regulus’ decision to go and get the locket has absolutely nothing to do with a damascene conversion that conducting a campaign of sectarian violence against muggles and muggleborns is bad, but that learning of the existence of the horcrux - and also voldemort’s lack of respect towards his property, kreacher [after all, we see an attitude expressed canonically by wizards that other people have no right to interfere in how you treat your slaves] - makes clear to him that the dark lord’s aims are not oligarchy, with those from pureblood families ruling in happy condescension over a ministry which is fundamentally unchanged, but ruling in majesty as an immortal absolute monarch. his death is a repudiation of his beliefs, yes, but it is a repudiation of the fact that he believed voldemort was his champion, rather than that he believed voldemort was wrong.
and, actually, i don’t think this in and of itself makes jegulus insurmountable. james is a pureblood, and while there is absolutely no evidence in his few canon appearances that he harboured blood-supremacist views, the very fact of his background would allow a complacency which might let him overlook some of regulus’ opinions [think, for example, about ron’s attitude towards house elves]. equally, we have no evidence that regulus couldn’t completely disavow his former beliefs.
but, it requires the fact that regulus isn’t just a tiny baby who aspires to join a terror group by mistake to actually be dealt with, and i have never seen a single piece of jegulus which does so.
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Opinions on Tonks/Snape?
thank you very much for the ask, anon!
here's where i confess that i've got quite a soft spot for stonks as a ship - and not just because of that ship name - because it's a great vehicle for one of my favourite post-war questions: how the hell do you put a life together in peacetime if you never expected to have survived the final battle?
that this would apply to snape is obvious - it's pretty clear in canon that [much like harry] his experience of the entire period 1981-1998 is that he's following a script written for him by dumbledore which he believes [and, i suspect, hopes] will end in his own annihilation. while i don't think he imagines dying in the exact way he does [and while a hill i will die on is that dumbledore tried as best as he could to arrange things so that snape would survive], i think the only post-war survival scenario he envisions for himself is a lifetime rotting in azkaban, continuing to punish himself and consider himself unworthy of absolution for his role in lily's death.
but - perhaps more controversially - i also think that this can be said to apply to tonks. while i would absolutely reject the suggestion that she would have imagined herself dying because she was a bad mother, i think that several things she says in deathly hallows - above all her recognition that she's locked into a battle to the death with bellatrix - would lead to her sharing the view lupin's shade expresses to harry when he summons him with the resurrection stone: that the greatest act of love she can show her son is to die for a world in which he can live freely.
[and i also think - indeed i am convinced of it - that she also thinks it's her duty to die trying to off bellatrix because her decision to join the order means that andromeda and ted's safety in the first war - something voldemort can be plausibly said to grant at bellatrix's request on the proviso that they keep their heads down and their mouths shut - is forfeit in the second.]
the post-war tonks - a widow at twenty-five, navigating life as a single mother to a tiny baby, dealing with her own cavernous grief over the loss of her father and her mother's grief over the loss of her husband - can be written about really interestingly as someone who's unmoored within her new life and looking for something - anything - to anchor herself.
and a snape who survives nagini is a really interesting tool in all sorts of post-war ships [snarry and snack chief among them] in how he serves as a connection to a lost generation. and, in this case, he is the only person tonks will know who - no matter how negative his assessment of him - actually knew lupin well.
and it's so clear that tonks' relationship with lupin in canon was shaped by her searching for answers about him which he kept hidden behind the mask of his own self-loathing. i can absolutely see her being devastated at the knowledge that his death means that she finds herself with no chance of ever actually uncovering the reality of him, and i can see this leading her to snape's hospital bedside out of a desire to grasp at someone - anyone - who might help her fill in those gaps.
but tonks is also clearly very bolshy and very brave - two traits you need to help you survive grieving the loss of one love and still have room to chase after another.
she's also clearly very curious and very kind. and so i think she's the order member - other than harry - who would be most able to accept the fact that snape was on their side all along and to believe that he should be pardoned. i think snape would find that show of trust in him terrifying - obviously - and i think he'd go out of his way to push her away as a result. but she's got plenty of prior experience at dealing with emotionally constipated men...
and i think you can make a very credible case for the idea that snape must genuinely quite like tonks. i think it's often overlooked just how clever she must be to be admitted as an auror, and how one of the areas in which she would have been required to be clever was potions. she's also clearly one of the youngest people in the role, and her position as a junior auror who ends up doing far more for the war effort than many of her seniors mirrors snape's experience as the youngest teacher at hogwarts. i also think her shock at just how horrible to her snape is in half-blood prince when he mocks her new patronus can be read as evidence that, during the order of the phoenix timeline, she and snape had a cordial relationship. and cordial for snape is transcendentally fond for anyone else...
[plus, his disappointment in her being interested in lupin is clearly because she's someone he respects - if he didn't think she was far too good for lupin, he wouldn't have bothered saying anything.]
i genuinely think you can do something lovely with the two of them initially coming together because they view the other as a life raft in a world they don't think really belongs to them, but then something which looks a lot like dry - and stable - land coming into view as they realise they have more than that in common.
snape's terrified, obviously, but tonks is a woman who understands how to go with the flow. she'll follow love where it takes her - no matter the obstacles she finds in the way - and he's going to have no choice but to come along for the ride.
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if you are still doing ship game, thoughts on jily?
thank you very much, anon - i am always taking questions both on romantic ships and on characters' platonic vibes, the more unhinged the better.
although jily can't really be described in those terms, not least because their narrative purpose in canon is to be little more than blank canvases onto which harry can project as he goes through his series-long character arc, shedding his initial hero worship of james when confronted with the reality of his father's behaviour in order of the phoenix and starting both to fully appreciate lily's centrality to the course his life is taking and to see his dad with nuance as a real and fully-rounded person, flaws and all.
this narrative role means that the glimpses we get of them in canon feel kind of superficial - their bantering during snape's worst memory is basically high-school-teen-movie level, the snapshots of their life under lockdown in deathly hallows lovely and bittersweet but also just colour to a storyline which is already all of those things.
and this is not to say that i find jily uninteresting as a ship - i completely reject the common anti-jily position that they didn't really like each other, that they had nothing in common, or that their backgrounds made them incompatible [i'll expand on this below, but while i do think that their respective blood statuses and the impact of these on their relationship are worth thinking about, i loathe fics which portray james as chafing against his marriage because, as a pureblood, he'd be more comfortable with someone 'of his own kind'. this is bullshit, and there's far, far too much of it in this fandom]. my views on one of james' most frequent non-lily partnerships are well known, and i share the outrage many jily fans have for the way lily in particular is treated in a subfandom increasingly dominated by rigid fanon which prioritises giving depth to male characters [even if those characters are, in essence, oc's] and slash relationships over exploring the canon female characters, partnered or not.
but i do also find that a lot of jily falls into the same trap as much of the hinny i dislike - that is, a tendency to present as a sunshine-and-roses fairytale a relationship which is much more interesting if the things which canon implies [and which can be reasonably inferred outside of canon scenes from a canon coherent engagement with the text] might have introduced an element of dysfunction into james and lily's partnership are taken into account.
the shadow of the war is obviously one of these things. what role lily actually plays in the resistance is something which preoccupies me [she is never mentioned in canon to have taken a combat role - and i find it considerably more plausible that any attempt voldemort made to recruit her was at snape's request and connected to her potions prowess] particularly because, as we see in the way her death is memorialised in deathly hallows, the series regards the defence of the integrity of the nuclear family as a key aim for the good guys. how does she interact with james and his wartime role when she's pregnant, nursing, or in hiding for the vast majority of her time in the order? how does she feel about her husband being a soldier if she's behind the scenes?
indeed, what role james [and sirius] plays in the order is also something i'm obsessed with thinking about - not least because so much of the inherent tragedy of the marauders' storyline is caused by the fact that james and sirius think they're fucking invincible and that their plans to keep the potters safe are foolproof. it's entirely reasonable to read james and sirius as being pretty gung-ho about being paramilitaries - and my headcanon is absolutely that more battled-hardened order members didn't like them very much [moody does not, after all, seem massively fond of sirius] - and lily seems affected by this too [she's not holding her wand either!], and what they thought they were doing as 1981 rolls around is compelling to me.
james and lily's divergent backgrounds is also something i'd like to see explored more in fandom - not, as i've said, in the dull 'james should have married a pureblood' way, but in a way which deals with the fact that their relationship follows wizarding norms. molly weasley can blame the war all she likes, but [although i doubt this was jkr's intention] the evidence of canon is that witches and wizards marry and have children extremely young as a social standard, that couples generally don't live together before marriage, that divorce doesn't seem to be common, and that married women tend not to work. lily - a mother at twenty and, therefore, presumably married at nineteen - is coming of age, then, in a magical world which thinks about gender very differently from the muggle world of the 1970s, and i think that tension is worth exploring.
[similarly, the way in which her marriage is self-protective - lily gains a pureblood name and the social cachet which comes with it at a time when she's in rising danger on account of her birth - is something i think it's worth looking at when considering the pairing.]
there are other flashes of dysfuntion which i adore thinking about in relation to jily - lily's relationship with the other marauders [you can pry the reading that sirius resents her for stealing the love of his life - and i certainly don't mean lupin - away from him from my cold, dead hands]; how much of his misbehaviour at school james conceals from her; the fact that lily becoming more overtly interested in james from her sixth year onward must have a little bit of attempting to make snape jealous mixed into it - and whenever i stumble upon them in fics i say oh ho like horace slughorn and kick my little feet in the air.
i care rather less about 'we're so hot and flawless and not doomed' as a trope.
but i do stan james for beefing with vernon dursley even though lily told him to behave. the man really is just that annoying.
#asks answered#asenora's opinions on ships#jily#james potter#lily evans#is this an 'i'm in danger' one?#only time will tell
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Oooo thoughts on remus/james? :0
thank you very much for the ask, anon!
my preferred version of the marauders' dynamic is that james is the central figure in each of their lives [and that, without him, peter, remus, and sirius don't... automatically gel] and absolutely integral to each of their senses of self.
which means that, when it comes to shipping them, i am very much of the opinion that james potter and his three boyfriends is canon.
but i also think that there's a subtle difference in each of the marauders' platonic relationship with james, which would impact how any romantic relationship with him functioned.
and with wolfbucks i think you have - in comparison to prongsfoot, which is so rampantly codependent, and to wormbucks, which will be influenced by the resentment and jealousy of james which must lurk under peter's outward affection for him - a relationship in which a constructed, flawless version of james is worshipped by remus and the james who actually exists is never approached by his friend as a real person.
we see this in canon - that, while sirius' grief for james feels more visceral and raw than remus', sirius is also able to acknowledge the reality of james much more openly, while remus chafes against the idea that he might have had any negative characteristics at all. remus is the person who dismisses the tension between snape and james as snape's jealousy of james being talented and sexy in prisoner of azkaban; when harry confesses having seen his father being a bully in snape's worst memory, sirius who cops to their behaviour, while remus attempts to protect james from harry's anger.
i think there's something really interesting which can be done with the idea of remus' adoration of a perfect james who doesn't really exist having to careen headfirst into the reality of james as a human boyfriend, with all of the accompanying faults and flaws, that could either be really toxic or genuinely moving if an author wanted to take it in either direction.
but i think there's also something really interesting in the idea that james would want to maintain the flattering image of himself which remus had invented, and that he would, therefore, go out of his way to indulge remus' more straightforwardly negative characteristics in order to maintain his status in his lover's eyes.
[i do, in fact, think that this characteristic - in terms of wolfbucks' platonic relationship, at least - is canon. remus' shock in deathly hallows when harry is furious at the suggestion that he might just walk out on his pregnant wife and unborn child heavily implies to me that james would have just said "yep. do what you want, king" in the same situation...]
and so, while i would certainly say that wolfbucks would be much more deeply rooted in artifice in prongsfoot... i can't say the potential for total mess it contains doesn't compel me...
and it certainly compels me more than wolfstar.
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I know you responded with a meme, but if you're able I'd love to hear your thoughts on harry/hermione 👀
fine. i'll scream into a pillow periodically and get through this...
obviously, i don't actually find the concept of harmony sincerely upsetting - people shipping things is never that deep, and because, as i've said before, i subscribe to the principle that any pairing is possible if you just have enough nerve. i've been recommended some harmony fics by people who are fonder of the ship, and while i've not found them immediately compelling, i do appreciate that there are plenty of people who disagree.
but my feelings are basically the same for harmony as they are for dramione: that it's never done interestingly.
harmony is - like all hermione pairings except [broadly] romione - a breeding ground for fanon!hermione, who is perfect and flawless and so clever she can solve millennia-old mysteries in afternoon. i hate this version of the character because i find her boring - it's just standard self-insert stuff, which is fine but not something i have any interest in reading. i similarly dislike the version of harry who appears in these stories, who ends up - like all men in hermione pairings except [broadly] ron - being either this impossibly sophisticated and suave intellectual with the body of a greek god or a doormat who's happy to shut the fuck up forever and do whatever she says.
[i also hate - obviously, since he's my king - the way harmony stories are often even more egregious than dramione ones in writing ron as a cruel and violent misogynist who is ontologically indistinct from your average death eater. and i think it somewhat proves my point that neither of these ships work particularly well that this character assassination has to take place in order to make them plausible...]
and i think the flattening of harry and hermione's personalities within most harmony is the main thing which keeps the ship from being interesting. because - while i certainly don't go in for the common anti-harmony argument that harry actively dislikes hermione - it's undeniable that there is a lot about the two of them which wouldn't be conducive to a harmonious [lol] relationship.
their communication styles - hermione works through problems by debating them, harry prefers not to be challenged - are the obvious one. their ways of expressing affection - hermione shows people she cares about them by nagging them and meddling in their lives, harry very much does not - are another. they have extremely different views about authority, they decompress in different ways [harry is someone who clearly needs to keep physically active to clear his head, hermione is much more of a homebody], and harry's impulsiveness is a poor match for hermione's fondness for planning.
they are also similar in ways which would cause them to butt heads. both have a tendency towards obsessiveness, which they rely in canon on ron pulling them out of. both have a significant capacity for cruelty and extremely black-and-white moral codes - harry has a tendency towards forming judgements on people and situations based on whether they are people he likes or things he benefits from [i.e. how he's appalled by dobby's treatment because his masters are the malfoys, but doesn't give a shit about kreacher's because his abusive master is sirius], while hermione tends to regard any rule-breaking she does as justified even if she'd regard it as outrageous from anyone else [i.e. her fury over harry appearing to use felix felicis to improve's ron's performance at quidditch when she herself confunded cormac mclaggen to get him onto the team...]. both have a tendency towards giving people the silent treatment when they're angry. both are incredibly stubborn...
and so on.
obviously, they also have positive qualities in common too - a shared loyalty, for one - but it always seems to me that the standard move in harmony is for authors to completely ignore these conflicting traits, either really over-egging what makes harry and hermione compatible platonically in the books or just inventing similarities [especially intellectual ones] to justify the pairing. whereas i would much prefer to see just how difficult it would be for harry and hermione to fall and sustain being in love with each other, and i've never seen that done compellingly.
but the conflict i'd love to see explored in harmony fics most of all, but which never seems to be acknowledged by fans of the pairing, is that [despite the fanon slander that ron is the person who behaves poorly towards her] harry is often horrible to hermione and hermione is often scared of harry.
this is at its most profound after ron leaves the horcrux hunt in deathly hallows, but we see several times throughout canon that - if ron isn't there to mediate between them - harry often treats hermione in a way which can be considered downright cruel. if she criticises him in a way he considers unjustifiable, he tends to side with other people against her [ron in prisoner of azkaban over the firebolt; ginny in half-blood prince over snape's textbook]. if she tries to reason with him he often beats her down with the force of his emotions [i.e. when she tries to get him to think about whether his vision of sirius in the department of mysteries might be a trick] or his convictions [i.e. when he lures her into near-death by being certain that nagini is really bathilda bagshot], and she often ends up having to soothe or appease him when he's the one who's screamed at her.
hermione is also scared more generally of harry's experiences - she's by far the least amenable of the trio to talking about voldemort [even though she says his name earlier than ron does] - and mission, which puts up a barrier between them which will be difficult to bring down post-war. i think there's something which could be really interesting there - the most interesting dynamic in hinny, after all, is when harry and ginny's tendency to not actually be honest with each other is explored - but unfortunately at the minute that sort of character work is drowning in a sea of "ron is so stupid and harry and i just love talking about classic literature, come darling, put on your leather trousers and let us solve world hunger; i look like emma watson" nonsense.
dull!
#asks answered#asenora's opinions on ships#harry potter#hermione granger#i'm not tagging the ship for obvious reasons...
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Snape/Ron?
thank you very much for the asks, anon and @midnight1404! you are cultured kindred spirits!
i really like snarry - and i really dislike snamione - as pairings, but i'd never devoted any time to thinking about snon as a ship before.
and yet now i'm pretty intrigued...
because i think you're going to have with this the same thing that you have with pairing ron with voldemort [which i have become a pretty ardent champion of this year] - that, while ron's canonical relationship to either man completely lacks the overt narrative connections which help make snarry and tomarrymort plausible, his character traits, above all his tendency to occupy a caring role within the trio, gives him a way to establish a connection which could feasibly be made to work as romantic.
because ron doesn't like snape - obviously - but his enmity with him is much less profound than harry's - he just dislikes a mean, unfair teacher, rather than having to bear the burden of snape's hatred of james and love for lily - and therefore something easier for him to put aside. while he holds grudges with far more commitment than harry does, ron is also canonically pragmatic and a strategist - and he is usually the member of the trio who grasps big-picture plot arcs [including the purpose of dumbledore's beyond-the-grave machinations in deathly hallows] the quickest for this reason. i actually think it's extremely likely that he accepts that snape's loyalties were to the anti-voldemort cause the moment harry tells him about the memories, and that - in a scenario in which snape lives - he would regard it as entirely reasonable for snape to be pardoned post-war and spared azkaban.
[i also think ron would think without hesitation that snape saved george's life. and that this would matter to him.]
ron was also raised correctly, which means that when harry insists on visiting spinner's end the day snape's let out of st mungo's he's going to accompany his best mate to make sure snape doesn't try to hex him. and he will, therefore, find himself turning into his mother the second he realises that snape's cupboards are bare and that he doesn't have a clue how to look after himself.
snape would obviously loathe being fussed over. but what's he going to do about it? he's lost most of his blood.
and it's clear in canon that snape is disastrously susceptible to anyone who takes an interest in him - and ron turning up to chatter and make cups of tea is a much healthier way for this tendency to manifest than snape becoming a terrorist because voldemort was nice to him a couple of times.
#asks answered#asenora's opinions on ships#unhinged and deranged ships#snon#severus snape#ron weasley#i'll back it i fear
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thoughts on ron weasley/tom riddle?
thank you very much for the ask, anon!
guess it's time to out myself as a ronmort girly...
obviously, as far as fandom stats go, this is the niche crack pairing when it comes to lord voldemort getting into the funky way with a member of the golden trio. both tomarrymort and tomione/volmione have thousands upon thousands of works and stans prepared to fight to the death over insignificant things.
ronmort has... three fans in a trench coat and immaculate vibes.
i am genuinely shocked that it isn't bigger as a pairing - surely we're all agreed that "i have seen your heart, and it is mine" is an outrageously romantic thing for the locket-horcrux to say to ron? surely we've all deeped that the locket makes its bid to save itself by showing ron softcore pornography? - but not, i think it's worth saying, because i think there's any merit in the tedious fanon [particularly prevalent in ships which pair hermione with other men] that ron is a closet blood-supremacist who'd make an amazing death eater. he's not - he's principled and loyal and, even in a world where voldemort wins and he's the only member of the trio left alive, he's not going over to the dark side. it sounds too much like hard work.
instead, i back ronmort as a pairing because ron is... kind of mother. and we all know lord v's very much in want of one of those.
he likes to look after people and he channels his negative emotions into doing so [he wouldn’t have left the tent if harry and hermione had learned how to shoplift properly and he could be settled in front of a nice pot, and i’ll die on that hill]. just imagine little captive ron - maybe the snatchers recognised him, maybe voldemort’s won and everyone else is dead - bustling around his gilded prison in malfoy manor making the dark lord a cup of tea when he turns up to psychologically torture him. voldemort would - as i am - be intrigued.
i have two recs for the pairing - wind tunnels by @mrmxlemons and ghouls in the attic by speechwriter - and i also have a statement of fact which I know many of the girlies [gender neutral] won't like to hear...
ronmort is less of a crack ship than tomione, sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
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Hi for ships, if you don’t mine what do you think of Snape/Narcissa/Lucius and also Snape with each of them individually?
thank you very much for the ask, anon!
lucius malfoy/severus snape
i've answered this one here.
narcissa malfoy/severus snape
i sincerely, sincerely believe that this is implied by canon - not only because the unbreakable vow scene is so intimate but because it's so sensual, but also because narcissa is the only plausible candidate for voldemort to be speaking about in his final confrontation with harry, in response to harry bringing up that snape loved his mother:
He desired her, that was all, but when she had gone, he agreed that there were other women, and of purer blood, worthier than him.
there is, i think, no universe in which snape and voldemort are sitting down for a little casual chat about girls, and there's also no universe in which voldemort would care about snape having a crush on any random woman, pureblood or not. but, if voldemort suspected that snape had a thing - whether or not that thing was requited and/or consummated - with narcissa, then he finds himself able to humiliate snape, narcissa, lucius, draco, bellatrix, and the memory of lily in one fell swoop, and it would - therefore - be information he would go out of his way to uncover.
[that voldemort is lying is, of course, the other potential here. but something that's very striking across the seven-book canon is that - since the narrative usually needs him to provide information to harry that either snape or dumbledore couldn't reveal without blowing their series-long arcs, he usually speaks the truth whenever he appears in person in the text.]
and i think, as with snucius, you have very interesting potential for narcissa to be one of the few people who sees and knows the "real" snape - there is the heavy implication in spinner's end that she recognises that snape is not blindly loyal to voldemort [in the way, for example, that bellatrix is], even if she doesn't doubt his commitment to the death eaters' cause. she evidently trusts and respects him. and she clearly values his wider relationship with her family.
i think you can do a lot with that, especially during the period in which lucius is in prison and narcissa probably needs a little hurt/comfort...
lucius malfoy/narcissa malfoy/severus snape
yes. they saw him across the slytherin table and they liked his vibe.
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