My one issue with black Snape. It’s not what you think.

So, I was just in a mall shooting and needed to take my mind off it, so indulge me in a little rant.

See, I don’t normally care about race swapping. I know all the usual arguments. I don’t care. I’ll give anything a shot at least once.

My only issue with race swapping is if I feel it fundamentally changes a story in a way that is detrimental to it. It very rarely does. At least to me.

So, Black Snape. Let’s call him Snape for short. I believe the race swapping changes the story in an unfortunate way because of James.

We all know James. Heroic father who joined the Order, fought Voldemort four times. He survived 3. His best friend was kicked out of his family for not being a racist shithead (just a regular shithead). His other best friend was a werewolf who was discriminated against. His last best friend was a kid who struggled in school. He loved all of them. He helped them all as much as he could. Bigotry was not a thing James stood for.

Snape was the equivalent of the nazi kid in school. He was very open about his desire to join the Death Eaters when he graduated. His group of friends included many people who became Death Eaters later on in life and who tortured a poor girl in a way that was described as “evil” by his closest friend.

Now, Snape and James hated each other. The only difference is that James had loyal friends. Snape didn’t. So, James would often fight Snape and would almost always have Sirius as his back-up. Wormtail was their little cheerleader, and Remus would be in the back pretending not to notice. So, from Snape’s point of view, it was 4 vs. 1. It makes sense. Even if it wasn’t physically 4 vs. 1, the psychological toll of fighting a guy who had 3 friends backing him up couldn’t have been easy.

And James WAS a bully. It was on sight with Snape, but he also picked on others. He grew out of it for the most part. He stopped picking on people, but he was like the chicken and Peter Griffin with Snape.

Now. Making snape black does change this because it introduces the concept of race when it was never there. Even if it’s not intended. Having the popular, rich, and privileged white kid and his little gang of friends go after the lonely, weird black kid can’t be ignored. How many times have we not seen that on the news? How many times have we not seen this scenario play out and end up in awful circumstances. Specially when one of the most unfortunate instances of this involved James hanging Snape? (By the foot, but still.)

Now. This is all completely wrong. Snape was the 4chan kid who wanted to join the magic KKK and would say slurs like the N-word or the F-word. He literally lost his best friend because he called her a slur that he used plenty of times with other people. James was the kind of guy that would be a bully and fight people but would also throw hands if someone misgendered you or said something racist.

Changing Snape’s race would really add an extra layer to this that would only make James and the Marauders look so much worse. Don’t get me wrong. They were dicks. But not that kind of dicks.