John Wellington Snape

Severus Snape as John Wellington Wells from "The Sorcerer" by Gilbert and Sullivan. My pen name on fanfiction.net, Very Small Prophet, comes from the same source.

Based on a drawing by W.S. Gilbert. To see Gilbert's original drawing (and hear the Sorcerer's patter song) go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMtx9G…

Severus is a truly operatic character. With his magnificent extremes of love, hate, and suffering he belongs, not to Gilbert and Sullivan, but to Richard Wagner. On the outside he’s Hagen, the villain of Götterdämerung: harsh, bitter, and cold-blooded; a scorned and utterly miserable half-blood prince; servant of two masters but full of his own secret ambitions; ten times as smart as those snooty pureblood Gibichungs and that heroic dunderhead Siegfried; and a good hand with potions, besides.

But inside— inside he’s Tristan, the ever-faithful lover. Never mind that his Isolde throws him over heartlessly (”Don’t waste your breath!”) and runs off to play happy hausfrau with Escamillo, the toreador from Carmen. (James Potter is sooo Escamillo.) Tristan remains faithful, dedicating his entire life to the memory of his Isolde, and dying at last while gazing at a vision of his beloved’s beautiful eyes. Can't you just hear the yearning, unresolved, unresolvable chord?

From various interviews it appears that JKR sees Snape mainly in his Hagan persona, and doesn't entirely understand why the fangirls love him. Yes, it's partly Alan Rickman, and it's partly the Henry Kissinger effect ("Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."), but it's also because she's given him the soul of Tristan. No fangirl could possibly resist that sort of devotion. Eternal, unswerving love doesn’t grow on trees. It grows only in operas and in fan fiction.