Konichiwa Snape-san

Howdy!

Happy New Year!

I'm still pecking away at chapter 4 of Well Done, My Good and Faithful Servant. However, I still have a bunch of random thoughts rattling around in my brain which I have to express or my head will explode. ...Okay not literally but you get the picture.

Samurai Snape: I've been reading ObsidianEmbrace's excellent fan fic Lily's Charm and Rieve's equally riveting Ghosts and Unfinished Games as well as a whole variety of Severitus fan fic and they've got my brain churning. I've been trying to understand Snape, to figure out his basic psychology. From an astrological standpoint, he's got deeply Scorpionic and Saturnine tendencies. But today it occurs to me: Snape is what you get if you asked William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens to come up with a baby wizard, gave him a loving kiss from Faust and handed him over to a samurai to raise.

His ability to handle the extremes of terror and pain is breathtaking. His ability to handle them with stoicism and haughty disdain is equally so. I am not well educated on Japanese tradition or customs. However, like millions around the world, I am fascinated by the samurai. To me, they were larger than life, bespeaking a nobility that I can hardly conceive of in my comparatively hedonistic Western existence. No, that's not necessarily an objective sentiment, but that's how I feel. To me, the samurai were the type of men who could look the worst possible scenario in the eye and not flinch. When death was the only way out, they didn't fold or beg. They went out as strongly, proudly and unrepentantly they stormed in.

To me, that's Severus Snape.

On another note: Rieve also has an excellent short story called Beltane which is absolutely fantastic. In fact, it's given me an idea on how to handle Snape in my story, Well Done, My Good and Faithful Servant. Chapter 4 remains delayed because I had an amazing brainstorm partially inspired by Beltane the story and the custom. If you've read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, you'll have some idea of where I'm headed. That idea is forcing me to revise Chapter 4. So please hang in there with me. I'm still plugging away.