As long as there are Harry Potter fans on this earth, there will be Snape fangirls who are obsessed with redeeming Snape. One of them is JK Rowling herself, which should surprise absolutely nobody at this point.
Last week, I shared some of my favorite Harry Potter memes featuring everybody's favorite secondary villain: Draco Malfoy. He is one of the characters JK Rowling is super unsympathetic to, and she doesn't understand why fans are so into him. I don't understand why it's so shocking to her that teenage girls liked a bad boy played by an attractive young actor in the movies. As far as villain redemptions go, Rowling is a lot more likely to err on the side of Severus Snape, which a lot of fans, especially the young ones, don't entirely agree with.
I think young fans don't like Snape because they think that his incessant harassment of children makes him kind of irredeemable as a character. Even though he did so many things for the greater good and ultimately helped win the war against Voldemort, his childish cruelty toward his students understandably makes fans resentful toward him. We all have a teacher in our past who was super cruel to us for seemingly no reason. If I found out that teacher had a long-lost love she'd held onto for decades, that wouldn't make me more sympathetic to her!
The Lily situation is another thing that a lot of fans find kind of weird. In days of yore, loving somebody so much that you can never love again was a romantic display of loyalty. In todays day and age, it makes you a weird incel. Snape haters think it is creepy that Snape never got over Lily, instead of admiring how Snape was looking out for Harry's best interest over the entirety of the series, far more than Dumbledore did. I'm not of the opinion that Snape never getting over Lily is because he's a creep. He very well might have gotten over her if she had survived the war, but her passing was extremely traumatic for Snape. She was his childhood best friend, and nobody ever understood him like her. Snape kept making the same mistakes over and over, which cost him his friendship with Lily and made him a feared, unlikable teacher: no matter what he did, he couldn't let go of the cruel name-calling! While his heart changed from childhood to adulthood, his coping mechanisms were all too consistent.
I have no problem with people who are obsessed with Snape. If anything, it suggests you probably started reading Harry Potter as an adult and can better understand deeply flawed, nuanced characters. If you like Snape for whatever reason, than this was the right day for you to click on this meme list. These Harry Potter memes are all Snape memes. Sorry if you came for the Boy Who Lived. This week is all about the Half-Blo*d Prince.