On the attractions of cross-gen, with particular reference to Snape/Harry
No, no. Your children are safe with us. Really.

This is for meri_oddities, whose birthday has arrived. I felt that the topic was appropriate, for a meta written for her, since her stories were chief among the crack that pulled me into this pairing. Happy Birthday, dear. I hope you enjoy this.



One of my advisees came to my office hours for advice on next year’s schedule. Once we’d settled the schedule, the conversation drifted a bit. We talked about her family and she mentioned that she’d become quite interested in HP fanfiction, and I made encouraging noises. From what I gathered, she is strictly a lurker. Emboldened, she shyly admitted that she particularly liked stories about Snape and Lupin.

Heh. A Snupin shipper. Right there in my own classes. I smiled warmly, and murmured something about feeling that Snape was so often misunderstood by many readers. Yeah.

“Really, I like a lot of Snape stories,” she expanded. “I just like reading about him in all sorts of stories,” she concluded. “Except, you know . . . with Harry. That’s just yucky. I just don’t get why so many people like that.”

I’ve kept a straight face under much worse provocation, so it was no challenge to shake my head sadly, and say something about how there was just so much porn on the Internet, etc. I did add that I knew a few other fans who liked Snape/Lupin, and what a lovely bunch of women they were, too.

After I closed the door behind her, I smiled. But she did make me wonder, again, about the attractions of cross-gen. Because I know that her response is the more common reaction to Snape/Harry.

I’m not sure I get it, and I’ve never really talked about it with my fellow Snarristas. Indeed, the dearth of conversation about this at my end of fandom is interesting in itself. I mean: discussion of the cross-gen aspects of Snape/Harry, which are almost always intrinsic to the story and their relationship.

Tell me again: why doesn’t it bother me a bit that my OTP is cross-gen? Because the pairing is hot, and that’s all I cared about when I first started shipping it? Maybe.

In the gateway drug stories that hooked me hard, like meri_oddities’ Sanguis Vinculum and Mairead Triste’s and Aristide’s A Choriambic Progression, this pairing is simply . . . well, meltingly hot. The sexual tension that any good set of characterizations between these two can generate was a gut punch, pure and simple. And I have always valued desire, particularly when it’s that strong. I dove head first into this pairing, and never looked back.

Odd. You’d think that the cross-gen would have given me pause, because my previous hard-core OTP had been Kirk/Spock. And it’s not like I’d ever look twice at someone that much younger in real life.

In real life? The only younger person who’d pose a serious temptation would be Rachel Maddow. She’s smart, tough, dynamic, and sophisticated enough to make me look twice (although I’d still keep my hands in my pockets). But she’s really only young enough to be my (much) younger sister, and not my daughter. And I guess the definition of cross-gen is that one character is old enough to be the other’s mother or father, no?

Snape, however, is definitely old enough to be Harry’s father. Indeed, if things had broken somewhat differently with Lily back when he was a teenager, Snape would have been Harry’s father. And he loved Harry’s mother. This information, which we only got in the last book, can lend an odd AU incestuous touch to the pairing, in some stories that have appeared since Deathly Hallows.

Yes, I guess there’s no getting around it: Snarry is serious cross-gen.

Sometimes the story turns on that, and sometimes it doesn’t. Less and less, now that Book 7 is out and Harry’s all grown up, in our heads.

But in the beginning, a huge part of almost every Snarry plot was the substantial age difference. A 20 year age gap looms larger when one party is 15 than it will later on. Layered on top of that was the conflict of interest because Snape was Harry’s teacher. In any remotely realistic approach, that had to be important, because Snape’s job (and possibly his life, if he needed the Hogwarts position to appease Voldemort) would be on the line if he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Many of the early classic Snarry stories put that problem---the threat of what might happen to Snape if he was caught sleeping with a student---at the center of the story’s tension, and drama. Such stories were more about a conflict of interest than they were about an age gap: the relationships in Telanu’s Tea Series, Cybele’s If You Are Prepared, or Aucta Sinistra’s Scratch were all shaped by Snape’s realization that he had a lot at stake, professionally, if he gave into temptation. And since canon Snape is usually cautious, shrewd, and wary, the story often got past the difficulty of making such reckless behavior IC by having Harry make all or most of the advances. In Harry, recklessness is always plausible.

So, one way to resolve some of the conflicts of interest and other obstacles to a cross-gen relationship (in terms of keeping it plausible) is to have the younger character make all the moves. In this, I see the difference between reality and fantasy: older people are rarely so easily manipulated or outmaneuvered by the young, as often happened in early Snarries. Certainly not Snape, who is so aware of how to manipulate others. This was one reason I loved Sanguis Vinculum: Snape is very aware of the conflict of interest and is determined not to go there; and he’s not so easily manipulated, either.

But another category of early Snarry said, in effect: conflict of interest be damned. The whole charge of the story lay in the thrill that came from their relationship being wrong, wrong, wrong. Snape isn’t struggling against temptation in such stories, or (more pragmatically) being careful because he doesn’t want to lose his job. On the contrary, he enjoys the transgressive aspects of it all, ruthlessly exploiting the advantages that age and experience give him. And in this sort of Snarry, Harry can be a more innocent “victim,” seduced or exploited with only dubious consent. Thamiris’ Dragon-Blind is a classic in this category, as is Hijja’s But Not Forgotten. Amy’s Intricacies of Expectation features a Snape who also clearly enjoys being in control of a dubious situation, although in this story Harry has finished Hogwarts and so the conflict of interest is dissolved.

These sorts of Snape/Harry stories used to be more common than they are now. The older Harry got, in canon, the easier it became to imagine him as an adult, and to project forward to an adult relationship where conflicts of interest, or Snape’s abuse of the trust placed in him, became moot.

Some authors got to this place very early, long before canon closed. Many of Minx’s stories---written before Book 5, I think---start with Harry as an adult, who meets Snape on fairly equal terms. One reason I liked Meri’s own work was that she also explored this sort of Snarry quite early on, for example in The Same Coin, with its carefully structured timeline, which resists any happy ending until they can meet each other in a place of equality.

When Harry is an adult . . . I’m not sure it’s accurate to call it “cross-gen” anymore. The sense of transgression, of danger, of struggling with temptation against something Snape knew was a poor idea, of unequal power relationships---all key components of cross-gen---slowly evaporate, the older Harry becomes. And when they meet as adults, it becomes an exploration of the clash of personalities and the working through of a complicated personal history. Miriam Heddy’s What Dire Offence is a strong example of this sort of Snarry, as is pir8fancier’s Snape: the Home Fries Nazi. Most of the good Snape/Harry stories that aim at light humor or quirkiness fall into this category, too (since it’s hard to imagine light humor in tandem with transgression and danger): Scheming Reader’s Pornopticon, Jay Tryfanstone’s Fly Fishing for Beginners, and a number of stories by Beth H (who is the doyenne of deft and amusing Snarry).

Snape/Harry is such a rich pairing that it produces reams of great fiction even when you remove the automatic sources of dramatic tension (listed above) that a cross-gen pairing gives rise to. Even when they meet as adults, the chemistry can be explosive. And their edges can be so sharp, that it’s easy to make something droll out of that.

Snape always seemed to me to be a character who had escaped his author’s control: he clearly took up a much larger piece of the stage and of fen’s imagination than Rowling seems to have expected. Even when we weren’t given much to work with in terms of his personal history or what he does off-stage, out of Harry’s presence, Snape was always a vivid character. And Harry is of course the star of the show. Put them together, and add in the complicated personal histories, loyalties, and parallel experiences of these two “lost boys” of Hogwarts, and you can in fact dispense with drama generators such as conflict of interest, violation of trust, etc.

Snape/Harry doesn’t need that to work. Indeed, the staggeringly large body of good Snarry made it very hard to complete this piece: I kept scrolling through the lists of good stories at the snarry_reader, trying and failing to include at least one good example from each sub-genre. The list of terrific links almost took over this meta, in other words.

Because with Snape/Harry, even after the first blush of youth is gone . . . it just gets better and better. Age cannot not wither, nor custom stale its infinite variety.

Which is how I know it’s true love.