Thank you to Deannah Robinson for transcribing Snape Chat Podcast’s interview with Lorrie Kim. Inquiries about transcription and subtitling work can be sent to: deannahm03@gmail.com.

Snape Chat Podcast Episode 50, September 6, 2025

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/snapechat/episodes/50–Lorrie-Kim-e37stlg

Snape: I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses. I can tell you how to bottle fame, brew glory and even put a stopper in death.

Snapecentric: Welcome to Snape Chat, the voice of the Snapedom, the podcast where we discuss all things Snape, always. Join us as we dive into the world of the greatest man we ever knew in art, fanfic, meta and more, obviously. This is Snapecentric with Episode 50, and on this special episode, Megs and I will be interviewing author and podcaster Lorrie Kim. She’s the author of Snape: The Definitive Analysis and co-host of the Harry Potter After 2020 Podcast. Enjoy the show. This is Snapecentric and I’m here with Megs.

Megs: Hello!

Snapecentric: And our special guest, Lorrie Kim.

Lorrie: Hello!

Snapecentric: She’s the author of Snape: The Definitive Analysis and also a host of Harry Potter After 2020. So welcome!

Lorrie: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited!

Snapecentric: Oh, we are, too.

Megs: Yeah, it’s going to be so great. So I guess… Do we want to start off with Lorrie? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Lorrie: Okay. I read Harry Potter as an adult, which I find makes a huge difference. I entered HP fandom in 2003 after Order of the Phoenix was published, and then before Half-Blood Prince was published I became a first-time parent, and that changed how I saw the series completely.

Snapecentric: Oh, that’s neat. Okay, so how did you get into literary criticism?

Lorrie: For this, I was just in Snape fandom, and I was writing meta; it was after I read Half-Blood Prince, and I was just overwhelmed by this character. How was he going to get himself out of the horrible corner he was in? How do you get him out with only one book left? Because he was the most hated person and he had no allies, he had absolutely no affirmation of his inner self, he was hunted… I was dying to find out and I went to the internet, especially LiveJournal and Sycophant Hex. I went to see where other people were posting what they thought so that I could at least consider some of the options among the thoughts that were swirling in my head. I started writing meta, I attended some conferences and saw people giving presentations, and I thought I could do that. I want to do that.

Megs: Yeah!

Snapecentric: Neat.

Lorrie: So, that’s how.

Snapecentric: Wow, that’s great. Yeah, I guess we could talk about conventions, maybe, a little later on. I know you’re active with that, as well as your other fandom things.

Megs: So, then, how did it come to actually writing a book entirely about Snape?

Lorrie: Well, I really loved giving presentations about him because I thought there were endless possibilities for interpretation, and it seemed like every ungovernable, irrational primal emotion in fans was unleashed by this character…

Megs: Oh, absolutely.

Lorrie: To the extent that it’s a truism that the fastest way to get a comment thread shut down by a moderator is to introduce the word ‘Snape’, and then within minutes, comments have been turned off.

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: Right? He was important, but it was hard to talk about, and that made it really intriguing to find out: what is it about this character that shows us so much about ourselves, and why do we keep wanting to talk about him, even though we’d all practically kill each other as soon as we start trying?

Megs: Right! Exactly.

Lorrie: So that was just endlessly rich. I had a body of essays and talks that I had given; meanwhile, some friends of mine who were in Snape fandom (they were fanfic writers)… They had trained themselves — some of them from no writing experience at all — into becoming amazingly good writers. You write a couple novel-length fanfics, and you end up knowing a lot more than you did.

Megs: Absolutely!

Lorrie: And some of them were already expert writers. Some of them had thought that they didn’t have any writing in them at all, but because they had all beta’d for each other, they raised each other, and then there came a point when they realized — this was a fairly daring stance in the early 2000s. They realized there are some ways in which we are better than the standard for published fiction. Nobody believed that at the time, but there comes a level of achievement possible when you don’t have any deadlines and you’re not writing to the market; you’re just writing until you’re satisfied, so no one’s going to tell you to stop if you’re going to go for the 90th rewrite, and no one’s going to tell you, “That’s not going to sell, so don’t write that story.” You’re writing to please your friends so they can give you immediate feedback. “This worked. This did not work.” This community of fic writers — and I was friends with them — they started a press, a small independent press, to publish their original fiction because they had gotten to that degree. When they decided to expand to non-fiction, they contacted me.

Megs: That’s amazing.

Lorrie: Yeah.

Snapecentric: Cool. What was the writing process like?

Lorrie: Yeah. At first we thought, ‘Should we do it by themes?’ because there are definitely some themes if you want to write about Snape that would unify all the points of people’s curiosity. But what I came to conclude is that the important thing about Snape is that he is unusual in literature for being an almost perfectly ambiguous character in that every single thing he does or says was deliberately written to support at least two contrary readings — sometimes completely opposite readings. Everything. That was such an achievement, and the game was to raise the stakes with every revelation about him while maintaining that ambiguity, gambling that the big reveal was going to succeed and be worth the payoff, and that was a really big gamble. The fact that I think she pulled it off was so impressive, so then I thought, ‘Okay, that is actually the story. How was this done?’ Because most writers… I don’t know if they can or can’t, but most writers don’t try, so it continually strikes me as a huge achievement in fiction writing. I thought, ‘Okay, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to follow the chronology of the mystery as it goes book through book so that we can see how it was done,’ and like all the best magic when I figured out how a lot of it was done, it only looked more magical.

Megs: Absolutely. I mean, that’s exactly what I describe. I listen to the audiobook and I have the original digital publishing from prior to the update. It’s just so wonderful to have someone take us through the Snape journey outside of this story about a teenage boy and all of his opinions and his point of view, but then let’s really dig into all the things that were trickled throughout the stories, because still at the end of the day, Snape was a very important pivotal character and obviously written to be hated so much that just being able to go back and really look at just him is so much fun, and it just… I love that you made this book and that it’s still doing its rounds and getting updated and doing everything today. It’s just wonderful.

Lorrie: Plus when I was reading this series, I was around the same age as Snape and that generation, and I barely registered at first that there were children in the books. ‘Oh, no, this is obviously a story about Harry’s parents’ generation…’

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: ‘And how what they did affected the generation that’s currently growing up.’ That’s the nature of being a child, right, is that the world is run by people who don’t explain anything to you and you’re just stuck trying to navigate. So yeah, I was puzzled, when I first read Deathly Hallows, that the story was mostly about the children and not…

Megs: Yes!

Lorrie: ‘Where’s the stuff that I want to know? I’ll write it. I’ll write the book.’

Megs: Yeah. You don’t want to read about camping and more camping and camping.

Lorrie: I do. I do now.

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: Every time I reread the series, I find completely new things in it that’s happening, continuing up to this day. Now I appreciate the richness, but that first read, when you’re getting a small fraction of it and you’re skimming really fast…

Megs: Yes. Oh, definitely.

Lorrie: Yeah.

Megs: So then what influenced you to update the book?

Lorrie: Topix Media Lab is a press that has a lot of Harry Potter-related unofficial books — things like covering the different Houses, covering specific characters, covering spells — and they wanted to do a single-author line examining characters. I also, coincidentally, was coming out of my contract with the previous publishers that was expiring, so they said, “Would you be interested in re-releasing it through our line?” I had to really think about it, because that was 2021 when they contacted me; we were all still at home. We were all still in lockdown, and TERFpocalypse had just ruined everything.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: So I thought, ‘Do I want to continue contributing to this fictional universe?’ *groans*

Megs: Right. Yeah.

Lorrie: I did not plan that horrible noise. It just came from my soul.

Megs: It felt relatable.

Snapecentric: Yes, yes.

Lorrie: So I thought about that carefully, and I thought, ‘Well…’ What I was noticing was… I had studied in other eras how there were breaks between an author and their readership, but they were in other times, other centuries — fandoms and books that have long since passed on into history — and I thought, ‘Okay, well, this is fascinating to be living through it in real time. It’s joyless, but it’s fascinating.’

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: And I thought, ‘Okay, you know what? I want to chronicle that,’ because it turns out that all of the feelings around that are richly telling and show how important fiction series and characters are to people, and therefore why it’s so distressing to have a break like this. There were many, many people writing many words about some of the politics around TERFpocalypse, and I thought, ‘Well, I want to write about this aspect from that point of view.’ I especially thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to write a purposefully post-TERFpocalyptic book where I address this ongoing break, and I’ll see where this has changed my reading of the series and include it.’ I especially wanted to revise my section on the Boggart in the Wardrobe chapter from Prisoner of Azkaban; in my 2016 book, I had written that this has transmisogynistic elements to this scene that made me really uncomfortable and I had gone a little bit into why, but I thought, ‘No, this is now a central issue.’

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: I did two different steps of hiring people, because actual reparations to the trans HP community were a part of this whole landscape. First, I hired 10 beta readers — peers in the community — and it turned out that you can get lots and lots of very thoughtful trans Harry Potter fans by going to wizard rock fandom.

Megs: Oh, absolutely!

Lorrie: Because I said, “All right. Hey, friends! Give me some suggestions. Where should I look?” and they all said, “Oh, just go to wizard rock. They’ll take care of you.”

Megs: We both know Geoff.

Lorrie: So yeah, I took part of my advance and I said, “I will pay you if you answer these few questions and email them to me, or if you want some other way, you can do that,” and questions like, “If you’re comfortable identifying your sexual identity and your orientation and your gender, tell me.” “How did that affect how you felt as you read the Boggart in the Wardrobe scene?” “Has Rowling’s stance on trans rights changed your reading, and what does it make you feel about engaging with the series going forward?” I got ten really wide-ranging answers, and that was super helpful for me to see the range; then separately, I hired a professional sensitivity writer, Charles Waltz, who I had known from Harry Potter conventions back when he was a cosplayer and had written a dissertation on trans cosplay in Harry Potter fandom. Charles, now a former Harry Potter fan…

Megs: Right.

Snapecentric: Uh-huh.

Lorrie: But somebody who had a professional sensitivity reading business… Wow! I said, “Could you just take me through some basics?” and working with him, I could identify, ‘All right, the goal I now know that I have is when I’m writing this passage, I want to center a viewpoint that’s not going to “other” a potential trans reader.’ No matter what you write about this scene, when you talk about trans themes and issues, somebody — some reader — is going to look at it and be completely bewildered and say, “That’s not how I read it at all. That’s not how I feel reading it.” Somebody’s going to say, “Hey, my point of view is actively, possibly offensively omitted from this reading,” and I thought, ‘You have to make a choice. There’s no neutral, so I’m going to do my best to make sure that a trans-inclusive viewpoint is centered here,’ and I got a lot of help from Charles about that. The other thing that made me decide, ‘Oh, God, yes, I want to update this book’: my book, the first edition, was published in early July of 2016, and in late July of 2016, the first script of the Cursed Child play came out.

Snapecentric: Right.

Megs: Ah, yes.

Lorrie: Oh! That was so frustrating, because the play had been staged for a while, but it was like, ‘Oh, keep the secret.’ I didn’t know.

Megs: Right, yeah.

Lorrie: So I’m reading the new script. ‘Oh, I want to put this in!’ Anyway, it was fun to add another chapter.

Snapecentric: Oh, I bet it was. Yeah. How interesting… You just came up with the idea to have so many beta readers?

Lorrie: Yeah. I think, especially if you’ve been tracking Snape fandom for a while, you know that any point about him is going to have at least eight or nine different takes. It was also like, ‘How much can I afford? How many people can I afford today?’

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: ‘All right, ten’s good. I can let myself take a break after ten.’

Snapecentric: Fair enough. Yeah.

Megs: So with the update between the beta-ing and having to work with Charles on the sensitivity stuff, how long did it take you to complete the update?

Lorrie: I don’t recommend this. It took me five months. Yeah, I really don’t recommend that. My husband did solo parenting for five months, and when I turned in my manuscript and I looked at my children, they had both grown out of their school uniforms to the next size; they were showing ankle.

Megs: Oh, my gosh!

Lorrie: “Okay, okay. Thank you, thank you, everyone.”

Megs: Yes!

Lorrie: Yeah.

Snapecentric: Are there any plans to promote with an electronic version of the updated work?

Lorrie: I am told that later this year, there will be an electronic version.

Snapecentric: Oh, yay! Yeah. It’s just easier for me to make the print really big so I can see it.

Lorrie: Yeah.

Megs: So then, getting into the book itself, one of the overarching themes is obviously Snape’s second chance. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Lorrie: Can I tell you a little more about that? Help me out a little. Okay, help me out a little bit. Where should I start? Give me a topic to start on.

Snapecentric: How about when he is told that Lily has been killed?

Lorrie: Mm-hmm. Okay. A lot of times in this series, I find that the theme of second chances has to do with Unforgivables. When you commit an Unforgivable… The meaning of the word ‘unforgivable’ here is that nobody else’s forgiveness can resolve what you’ve just done to your soul. The only thing you can do is try to make your soul whole again through the process of remorse, knowing that this might be so agonizing that it might be easier to just die. It’s going to be super painful, and we see that Snape goes ahead and tries. He really commits to it, and it’s not easy for him. Those are the stakes: if you’ve done something that you know in your soul was unforgivable and you commit to trying to face up to it and really feeling what you’ve done, that’s not going to make for an easy rest of your life. But if you really know that’s what happened and you don’t deal with it, then the rest of your life you’re not going to be completely whole. That came at his midpoint when he was nineteen in a 38-year-long life, so it’s really nicely symmetrical because at that point he is considering suicide. He’s told, “Well, you might not be happy ever again…”

Snapecentric: Uh-huh.

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: “You might not be able to prioritize your own ambitions ever again, but you could devote the rest of your life to trying to do some repair. That is going to be a very unrewarding path, but if it matters to you, it will be worth it.” We see, through the rest of his second half of his life, that sometimes, is it worth it?

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: He’s not sure. It’s very, very painful, because to make it less painful, the only thing you can do is to deny to yourself how bad it was and what it really did. We see him through the series frequently denying to himself, ‘Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad,’ and that doesn’t work because it’s not true. Yeah, we see that… It’s also nicely symmetrical that the issue of second chances comes up in the midpoint of the series — it’s in the middle of Goblet of Fire — where Harry and Hermione and Ron are vanishing chair cushions (sofa cushions?). Harry’s saying, “I wonder what Snape did with his first chance if he’s on his second chance,” and that’s the one time that Harry shocks himself by his cushion getting exactly where he was sending it. ‘Huh! Okay.’ It’s Hermione’s Time-Turner journey from the previous book, from Prisoner of Azkaban, that shows us what Snape’s task is. This is what it’s like to have a second chance: somehow, you’re supposed to go back into your own past and not change anything, because no matter how much you suffer, you don’t get to change anything. Whatever you did, you did, but you’re supposed to have a different perspective on yourself. You’re supposed to look at it from a different perspective, and you have to be anchored by a friend. You can’t go in by yourself. You need somebody to sponsor you, to be your guide; if you can see yourself from a different perspective, then somehow that’s going to somehow save innocent lives. How that’s going to happen… Well, it would be making it too easy to tell you how, but somehow, something will be better. If you manage to do that and you manage to survive feeling genuine remorse (which is going to be agonizing), then that act will reintegrate your soul, but it might kill you. If you manage to do that, then you become one of the few people who can undo Dark Magic, because most people cannot. Someone who has always been good does not know how to undo Dark Magic. Someone who has done Dark Magic, but not gone through remorse, can’t undo it. It has to be somebody who understands every single bit about how good it feels to give in and really make other people suffer, and then understand that it takes more than that power to feel the effects of that and then want to go back and undo it. That’s a power that always-good people don’t have, haven’t had to make themselves acquire…

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: And people who are still enjoying Dark Magic don’t have to challenge themselves this way. It requires the greatest amount of power, so that’s why you need people like Snape around who maybe have the option. After you do something really terrible, shouldn’t you just kill yourself? Shouldn’t you just give up on your life? How can you feel like you deserve to live when, because of you, other people suffered? Well, maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but if you commit to it, then there are ways you can help people that nobody else can do, especially if you see other younger people or more vulnerable people going down the path that you went down and your intervention might be able to help prevent them having the damage, incurring that damage to their soul that you did. That might make it worth it. The theme of his second chance that, to me, is incredibly beautiful is: If you have done real damage, do you have the right to want to be a better person or do better things? Or should you just be so ashamed of yourself that you just give up on your life? I want the answer to be, ‘Anyone has the right to want to be better.’ All right, I’m done talking about his second chances for now. More than that, and I’ll just go on longer.

Megs: I know. Of course, it just resounds in my head, the whole ‘I wish I were dead.’ ‘Well, what good would that be to anybody?’

Lorrie: Yeah. Well, yeah, because the option that he’s given is it’s not going to be any fun for him.

Megs: Right, Yeah.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: Ugh. Well, how hard will it be? It will be unrelenting toil and you’ll get no credit for it.

Megs: Exactly.

Lorrie: You will get a lot of hatred, though.

Hosts: Yeah.

Snapecentric: And of course, Dumbledore is his guide through this process.

Lorrie: Yeah.

Snapecentric: I’m not good at pulling out meaning so much, so for Dumbledore I get kind of stuck at the “You disgust me.” It’s like, is he looking at him with disgust throughout these years?

Lorrie: Well, yeah. My take on that changed over the years, partly from getting older and partly just because I find it’s so enjoyable and rewarding to keep working at these questions from this series until I get an answer that satisfies me. It might in a few years no longer satisfy me; a different reading might satisfy me later, depending on where I am in life. So yeah, that line, of course, really stood out to me. It’s the harshest thing that Dumbledore says to anybody in the entire series.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: There is a category of dialogue in this series where people are super memorably harsh to others when they’re feeling self-conscious about their own flaws that they don’t like about themselves. The way that Dumbledore says, “You disgust me…” I thought, ‘You know what that sounds like? That sounds like how people talk to themselves.’ If you think about people you know who are really insightful, kind people, and if you go to them in a moment of weakness hating yourself, they show you how to let up and see the bigger picture and not be so harsh to yourself, but then you hear how they talk to themselves and you’re shocked.

Snapecentric: Right, yes.

Lorrie: That’s how that felt to me, Dumbledore looking at somebody and saying, “You disgust me,” because he looks at really disgusting people and he doesn’t talk to them that way. Not that what Snape did was okay, but he looks at people who are worse than that.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: So I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good starting point,’ and then as you get some revelations about where Dumbledore came from (and you realize that what he did was worse, and that he underwent the same kind of remorse and conversion that Snape underwent, but it was like a hundred years ago)…

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: Oh, that’s Dumbledore able to tap into a level of disgust and self-disgust that not everybody knows, and it hurt. Oh, it stings so badly when he does that. It really stings, but we do see in the years after that that Snape is able to demonstrate to Dumbledore that Snape did better than Dumbledore expected him to do.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: I think, actually, when you’re in Dumbledore’s position and you see somebody who grosses you out so much that reminds you of yourself, and then you say, “Oh, well, if you want to be less of a worm, you can try this, but I don’t even like looking at –“

Snapecentric: Ugh…

Lorrie: If they show you that they actually accepted the challenge — which is, granted, extremely difficult, possibly not within human power —

Hosts: Right.

Lorrie: And if they show you that they actually stuck with it and that they maybe did better than you’ve ever done or that you expected, that is so humbling. That is more than Dumbledore expected, that he could ask for, from this world, which is the same thing that Dumbledore gets when Draco disarms him instead of attacking him. Dumbledore obviously had been hoping that something good could happen for Draco. All the care that we’re putting into this young Death Eater… Is it even going to work? The temptations to go evil are so strong. Is this even worth it? And then how humbling is it to see, ‘Oh, my goodness, it actually worked? I didn’t know,’ and then you cry. You’re so moved. I think “You disgust me” is a really good starting point to show just how much of a gift Dumbledore got, although he didn’t expect it, later on when he saw that Snape took his words to heart for years and years and years, long past when Dumbledore thought that he might even remember them.

Megs: Yeah.

Snapecentric: Wow. Wonderful.

Lorrie: Yeah. I had a whole journey about liking Dumbledore and then raging against him, and then discovering, ‘Oh, no, actually, no. Actually, I get it.’

Snapecentric: Uh-huh.

Lorrie: And realizing, ‘No, no, this was good. I actually have peace about it,’ to the point now where I actively like him.

Snapecentric: Uh-huh. Oh, that’s neat. Yeah, there’s so much to think about different characters, and seeing the interaction between Snape and Dumbledore is always so interesting.

Lorrie: I love the way they talk to each other.

Megs: Oh, yeah.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: It’s nice to see them not masking their power. Both of them, when they deal with everybody in life, they have to hold back so much. Their full power is too much. With each other, oh, they’ve got shoes and socks off, they’re insulting each other…

Megs: Oh, absolutely.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: Yeah, and I love it.

Snapecentric: Bear with me. This is a long question. As you go through the seven books, you have certain recurring sections for each one: Snape’s personal dislike of Harry, Snape’s hostility to the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Snape’s reputation, and the mystery of Snape’s true motives. How did you identify these common threads that give such a great structure to your book?

Lorrie: Yeah. That one… that was laborious. I had to think about the constant themes that come up in each volume so that we can test the progress of what we have learned about this character and figure him out. There are a few places where we just sort of get a recap — “Harry looked at Snape and thought, ‘He did this, but then he did that'” — just because that’s the challenge of this super complicated character, so I just kind of made up categories of themes that I thought were the ones that get checked off each time we assimilate a new truckload of contradictory clues.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: And I thought one of the major ones is, ‘How can he be on Harry’s side when he clearly really loathes the kid?’ That is not an act. At first, it’s like, ‘Is he just doing an act?’ No, he’s not doing an act. He really hates him.

Megs: Yes.

Lorrie: ‘So can he really be on Harry’s side? Okay.’ That turns out to be the key to how they fool Voldemort: Voldemort cannot imagine helping somebody you don’t love. He doesn’t understand loving somebody, but he knows that’s a thing that he can exploit.

Snapecentric: Right.

Megs: Yes, exactly. Yep. He knows it’s manipulation that he can — Yeah.

Lorrie: Yeah. That’s how Voldemort gains power: by going for that trait that humans have and exploiting it — but he and his followers do not have this trait of risking just as much for someone that you really hate. That’s the thing that Dumbledore identifies about Voldemort and says, “If we strategize in this one spot that he can’t understand, then we ought to be okay. Let’s gamble on that.” So yeah, Snape totally can’t stand Harry, but then you have to look at Snape the character, thinking, ‘This guy? You’re telling me this guy is big enough of a person to risk it all for someone he hates? He’s not even being nice to people he likes.’

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: ‘This guy? This guy?! Really?!?!’ That’s a brilliant mystery, and then his hostility to each Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher is just funny. It’s just funny. There’s so many things to hate about so many people. Thank you, Snape. His reputation… I love that one. That is the big trial for any double agent. It’s against human nature to voluntarily forgo being recognized for your true self. It hurts. Humans want to be seen, humans want to protest, “That’s not me. This is me.”

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: And then when you do something good, you want credit for it; when you pull off something that’s so difficult that you’re the only person in the entire world who could do this, and you get the opposite of credit for it, can you withstand that? That nearly kills him, right?

Snapecentric: Oh, yeah.

Lorrie: Especially being a Slytherin, everybody wants credit for their abilities. Slytherins have it the worst; it really, really, really hurts him.

Snapecentric: Oh…

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: But if you’re going to be a double agent, that’s your life.

Snapecentric: True.

Lorrie: Yeah. I think that might be the thing that almost killed him: doing all of this hard stuff and then having people on every side think lowly of him. Ugh.

Snapecentric: So true. Yeah. At first, he’s like, “No one can know” of his taking care of Harry while he loathes him. He loathes him even before he has met him, but I think over time that gets to be something that’s such an important element of his way through life. I’m not very good at this. It’s like he can’t change his mind about it, because that would… Sorry, guys.

Megs: It’s okay.

Snapecentric: Yeah, but he… Part of his persona is such that he can’t say, “Oh, yeah, by the way, I am doing this for… See these good things I’m doing.” That’s not very good. Okay.

Lorrie: This character does that, where you’re facing the emotion. He’s looking into the abyss all the time, right?

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: And here we are right with him, going, ‘Wow!’

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Megs: So then, going back to the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. Do you think that the general perception of him coveting that role was real or manufactured by him and Dumbledore?

Lorrie: This is something where, at this point, my opinion is so firmly part of my understanding that I have a hard time remembering ever thinking otherwise, but at this point, it’s like, ‘Oh, no, clearly he and Dumbledore made that up.’

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: Which clearly — well, no, there was a time when I was reading the series and it was not clear to me, but I can see that it’s carefully written so that it’s always presented as common knowledge and never attributed to anybody.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: And then you see Dumbledore doing that in other instances with other things in the series, so you know that’s one of his common tactics. And then, probably the biggest clue is — Oh, poor Snape — that horrible moment when Umbridge is taunting him, saying, “Oh, so you’ve applied every year? Can you explain why Dumbledore doesn’t think you’re very good?” He grits his teeth and he just spits out, “I suggest you ask him,” and that’s his limit. He has done his job so much, just playing along, like, “Yes, yes, I apply every year, and no.” Then you look at the teachers that are considered… He was turned down, but they hired Lockhart, so however good a teacher Snape is, he’s not as good as Lockhart.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: Or when Dumbledore says, “Oh, yeah, the Ministry had to appoint one because I was unable to find a suitable candidate,” but it’s on the record that Snape applied. Snape is not as good as Umbridge, right? He can’t bring himself to say it. Whatever cover story Dumbledore told him to tell, he can’t do it. Meanwhile, Harry’s there with his eyes huge, drinking this in, like, ‘Oh, oh…’ and Snape is like, “Could you not do this in front of the kids?”

Hosts: Right.

Lorrie: Umbridge is having a great time asking him.

Megs: Oh, absolutely.

Lorrie: That is so galling. Anybody would find it galling; Snape in particular, his personality… He finds it the most galling, and you see him — he gets a tiny, tiny bit of revenge on the universe when he tells Harry, “Oh, you have to tell everyone you’re taking Remedial Potions.” It’s like, “If I have to do this, you have to do it,” and it’s clear that although he has some talents in teaching, he hates it. That’s obvious as anything: he hates teaching, he hates children. It’s not his calling. His calling is espionage.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: Teaching is his espionage post. That’s why he does it. First one boss, and then the other, said, “Great, you’re my spy. Here’s your post. Go make like you’re a teacher,” and so he does it. His true position in life is that he is the right-hand man to the two opposing generals in a war. That’s who he really is; that’s his true job. He has to pretend that he’s a teacher. And this is the most galling thing of all: he has to pretend that he is such a petty human being that his greatest ambition in life is to teach a different subject to the same miserable children that he already hates, and that’s it. That’s what he wants in life more than anything. This grand, magnificent genius of a man… That’s what he wants most in life? Okay. “Yeah, that’s all I want. That’s what I want.”

Snapecentric: Yeah. Sometimes I try to imagine: how did people find out that he was supposedly wanting this so badly or at all? Did they have to manufacture conversations to be overheard by students?

Lorrie: Well, how do they know that the Shrieking Shack is haunted?

Snapecentric: Oh.

Lorrie: That is a deliberate example of Dumbledore doing this. Lupin says that Dumbledore “put out the rumor that it was haunted, even though it was me.”

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: That’s something that he uses as something he knows about human nature. You put that out there. There’s a really cute example — this is not Dumbledore’s doing — where I think it’s Fudge. After Dumbledore escapes from his office when Fudge and Umbridge are trying to get him arrested, and then there’s a second-year Harry overhears saying, “Oh, Fudge has a pumpkin for a head now.” I don’t know where that came from, but humans like to do that, right? Especially if this teacher is so unpleasant and students are going to complain about him anyway, they will love to grab on to some sort of story that lets them take pleasure in his suffering.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Megs: Yeah.

Snapecentric: So true. One recurring element, which I find absolutely delicious, is the mystery of Snape’s true motives. Was it difficult to tease out the often subtle hints that the author left in the books?

Lorrie: Yeah. A lot of them I found really difficult, and I puzzled pretty hard, and that was so rewarding. Really endlessly rewarding. There are things that I’m still puzzling over, and I don’t know that my answers are more or less true than anyone else’s, but I know what it feels to me. ‘Oh, that was worth thinking about. I really like, for myself, that answer to that question.’ It’s not often that books can just reward you, that they’re sturdy enough to stand up to that kind of repeated questioning; but with this series, I have found that if you puzzle over it long enough, it’ll be worth it. Whatever you come up with in the end is going to be worth it for you.

Snapecentric: Right. The percentage… Going into Deathly Hallows, how sure were you that Snape was actually good?

Lorrie: I didn’t think that there was any way that he could turn out to be really evil. That would make a satisfying conclusion that was in accord with the values of this universe.

Snapecentric: Okay.

Lorrie: I also think that up to that point, the evidence for and against was 51-49. There were a couple of things that could really only be explained by there being more to the story than him just being Dumbledore’s murderer.

Snapecentric: Right. I was at 95 percent. I don’t know. It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s some chance you could make a fool out of all of us,’ but yeah, it was a hope.

Lorrie: Yeah. Part of the problem for me was separating out what I speculated from what I felt like I needed personally (the personal emotions that made me attached to this story and want to find out how it ended). I know what I wanted, and that doesn’t necessarily predict what a series is going to do, but if you look at a writer’s ways and their values and what they’ve done so far, then that can get you a long way toward thinking, ‘You know what? This feels like her. This does not feel like her.’

Snapecentric: Okay.

Megs: So in Prisoner of Azkaban, there’s obviously a lot of trauma for Snape and other characters. How did this behavior appear to you in the first reading of the series versus subsequent readings?

Lorrie: I think maybe Prisoner of Azkaban was the one where my readings changed the most as I went along, because on first reading… Oh, I could not stand him. I didn’t know why he was so ugly to everybody — I really, really didn’t like him — and definitely there were things he did where I just was indignant. ‘He did what?!’ I think one of the first moments that a subsequent reading really changed my mind was I didn’t realize at first what he’d thought Lupin and Sirius were planning to do to Harry. It took me a really long time. Why does he say, “Was this map given to him by the manufacturers?” What does he think they’re trying to do? Oh! I had such a duh moment. ‘Oh, he thinks that they’re still in cahoots and that Lupin is trying to lure Harry out to the castle, and then Sirius the murderer is going to kill him and Lupin’s going to transform. Oh!’ Snape is there, going, “When this happened to me, absolutely nobody cared. Now, I’m trying to help some kid avoid the same fate. Is he grateful? No. No! He’s not grateful at all, and Dumbledore’s trying to get me to — Oh, my God, why can’t anybody see what I see? It’s so obvious!” That was a big duh moment for me, and that was not on my first reading, not on my second, probably not even on my third, because there’s so many viewpoints going on in Prisoner of Azkaban. You have to really go through the whole thing in your head from a different character’s viewpoint to kind of make sense of it all, because it’s a very well-done book with everyone’s agendas setting their behavior, and nobody — no single character — sees the same things that any of the other characters sees. It’s beautifully done, and he wasn’t the most important character for me to follow at first. Then the second subsequent reading that changed my view of Prisoner of Azkaban a lot was when I realized that he wasn’t in trouble with Dumbledore for telling people at the end that Lupin is a werewolf, that actually it’s Lupin who’s in trouble, and that actually not only was it okay with Dumbledore that Snape told people; oh, it was actually probably Dumbledore’s idea, and actually Snape was doing it to take the fall for Dumbledore to distract people from the very true point that Dumbledore knew all along that this guy was a werewolf, hired him, and didn’t tell anyone because he was sure nothing bad would happen. For Snape to take on the public role of being a malicious person who would out somebody like this and have everybody up in arms about him… Dumbledore should not have gotten off the hook for that, but he did. ‘Oh, so Snape did that, and yet afterward, it’s Lupin who’s not looking at Dumbledore and hurrying out. Okay. Oh.’ Then I asked myself, ‘Okay, so if I were Dumbledore and I had a staff meeting, how would I be handling this? Would I be annoyed at Lupin? Yeah, I would, actually.’

Snapecentric: All that he didn’t tell in the first place.

Lorrie: “Yeah, and whose fault was this?” “Actually, it was my own fault.” Dumbledore made a mistake.

Snapecentric: Can you talk a little bit about how Snape threads the needle during the Occlumency lessons in Order of the Phoenix?

Lorrie: Oh, that’s such tough stuff. It’s not clear that he did thread the needle, right? In fact, I think we can safely say that he was not successful.

Megs: Right.

Snapecentric: He did it with rather ill grace, I think.

Lorrie: Oh, considering the constraints he was under, there was no way he could — ugh, okay. He was working under super extreme limitations. First of all, the risks are so high. Why is he being asked to do this? Because there are only two people, for sure, that have successfully Occluded Voldemort and lived to tell the tale, and it’s him and Dumbledore. We know what happens when you don’t successfully Occlude Voldemort, so the stakes are really high. He’s already scared, and then he knows that Voldemort is monitoring him. Voldemort is in Harry’s scar throughout these lessons, starting from partway through the first lesson, and Snape knows this two ways: he knows it because he’s in Harry’s head — he’s Legilimizing Harry — and he can also feel when Voldemort has agitation through his Dark Mark, so he has double confirmation. Whatever he does during these lessons has to pass Voldemort checking in on him to make sure that he’s behaving as he should. Plus, he has Dumbledore’s rules to follow; Dumbledore’s rule alone would have made this super difficult, which is “Don’t tell Harry more than he needs to know.” That’s everybody’s rule from Dumbledore. Well, what does that leave?

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: Here’s Snape looking at this little snot-nose kid that he hates, thinking, ‘Okay, I have to teach you this thing, but not in any way that could reveal to Voldemort how I, Severus Snape, have successfully Occluded him all this time,’ because that’s what the whole Order depends on: Snape’s ability to Occlude Voldemort and continue to be a double agent. So how does Snape do it? Well, he doesn’t want to tell Harry anything that Voldemort could put together and go, ‘Ah.’ So what can he do? That leaves him almost no options for teaching. What he can do is put Harry through repetitions, and he follows the exact same lesson plan that Lupin followed for the Patronus lessons. First, you set a baseline: you tell the kid, “This is the thing. This is how it’s supposed to be. Now you try it cold.” Then you assess the kid to see, ‘Okay, that’s what we’re working with,’ and he is impressed with Harry, and he says to Harry, “You will find that the same skills for throwing off Imperius is similar to Occluding somebody.” That is safe for him to do because he’s not teaching; he’s not imparting anything new that would betray Voldemort. Everybody already knows that Harry can do this. Voldemort knows that Snape has to act like he’s teaching, so that is a thing he can safely say to Harry, but he can’t say specifically; this is as much as he can do. Then he has Harry try, and he cannot tell Harry how you do it. The best he can do is if Harry stumbles onto something that works, he can praise Harry for that, and he does. He praises Harry two or three times during the Occlumency lessons. Total record-scratch moment, right? ‘Wait, what?’ And he never punishes Harry. Harry physically hurts Snape during these lessons, and then he waits to be killed, right? He’s thinking, ‘Oh, God, what’s Snape going to do to me?’ Nothing. He does nothing. He was totally sincere, saying, “Harry, you can do anything to me you want, anything that comes to you,” and when Harry does it successfully, he praises him. That’s the most he can do: hopefully get enough repetitions so that Harry can get some sort of pattern going, and that, of course, doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen because while they are trying under extremely limited conditions to do something with these Occlumency lessons — right before the lessons from when Harry saw Nagini biting Arthur Weasley — Voldemort has realized that he can now waltz right into Harry’s scar whenever he wants, and he’s getting better at it so fast. Of course, he is.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: During the Occlumency lessons, you see Voldemort getting better at this, because when Voldemort plants the thought of the door in the Department of Mysteries in Harry’s head — and Voldemort’s doing it for the first time — he’s so excited that he rushes Harry; Harry’s practically tripping over his own feet. He’s almost slamming into the door. That’s Voldemort like, ‘Ooh, this works! Whoa, look at that!’ Then, as Voldemort gets more comfortable and more expert with it, he gets Harry further along and it’s not so awkward, and Snape is freaking out. Between the Legilimency and his Dark Mark, he sees that Voldemort is doing this, so it’s constantly shifting the risk to him and the limitations he’s under. He already had an impossible task, but watching how quickly Voldemort is getting better at this, you can also imagine how excited Voldemort must be. “Hey, Snape, look at this!” From Voldemort’s point of view, this is brilliant because Snape, his guy, is right there. “You got Harry Potter right in front of you, delivered straight into your room. I’m going to put this thought in his head. You just open up his mind to it, okay?” Right? Voldemort’s having the time of his life; Snape is not.

Megs: Right.

Snapecentric: No.

Lorrie: Harry is miserable, and his head hurts like crazy. All of this drama is happening inside the scar of this poor little 15-year-old’s skull, and where is Dumbledore?

Megs: Yeah.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: He can’t even go talk about this to anybody, and everything he tries, Harry’s glaring at him with hatred and Snape is like, ‘Kid, I don’t even have time to hate you right now.” He manages not to give anything away during the lesson; he manages to keep his promise to Dumbledore. As soon as he sees that Harry’s in danger, he shuts down the lessons. He shuts down the first one as soon as he realizes that Voldemort’s in Harry’s scar. He’s like, “Okay, well, that’s… Go. Go home.” Then, when through a different vulnerability he realizes that Harry has seen one of the memories that would give away the whole game, then he really shuts down the lessons. There’s nothing else he can do.

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: He was lucky he got away with all their lives. If Harry had gone one more inch toward understanding Snape’s true feelings — if Harry had looked at Snape through his mother’s eyes and understood what really goes on inside those emotions and Legilimizes him — then Voldemort’s spy would have been cooked, and the whole Order would have been in a really, really bad position. So no, he threw out Harry just in time, and then had to reinforce all of the petty ways that they hate each other so that there would be no more progress on that front.

Snapecentric: Yeah. I think it’s so interesting to reread that and look at all the different layers.

Lorrie: Such a good job.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: I am so impressed with the writing that went into the Occlumency chapters.

Snapecentric: Yeah. Do you reference classic literature, like Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Machiavelli’s The Prince? Did you immediately pick up these hints to the works, or did it become clear on rereading?

Lorrie: Those two I saw right away, but there are a lot that I don’t even know about and a lot that other people have pointed out, and then I’ve looked it up and, ‘Oh, yeah.’ I think it just depends on which ones you’re personally familiar with.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: To Kill A Mockingbird stood out to me right away, because the portrait she draws of the Gaunt shack is such a deliberate tribute to a family in To Kill A Mockingbird.

Snapecentric: Oh, wow.

Lorrie: The thing that made me see, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s what she’s doing,’ is the attractive young men in the story; one of them is named Tom Riddle and the other is Tom Robinson. Then the young woman who sets a trap for him is named Merope in Harry Potter, and in To Kill A Mockingbird her name is Mayella, so that’s set up. There are a number of ways in which you realize, ‘Okay, this is a direct tribute,’ and what that does here is… To Kill A Mockingbird is an adult novel, and you know what Mayella’s father is doing to her; it’s part of it that he molests her. For the Gaunt shack, you don’t exactly know what’s happening, but that’s definitely one of your worries for Merope; it’s not ruled out, but this is a children’s series. What’s going on? We don’t know. All we know is that she’s supposed to marry a pureblood wizard and make pureblood children, but she’s not apparently in any sort of contact with anybody.

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: How is she supposed to do this? Oh, oh, gosh… Then there’s this terrifying detail. I was on my million reread when I saw this, and it just shook me. The Gaunt shack has three rooms. It has the kitchen/living room, and it has two bedrooms. Where does Merope sleep?

Snapecentric: Oh…

Lorrie: There is no good answer to that question. There are a few different answers, and all of them are horrible. How does she get that across in a children’s book? She says there are three rooms.

Snapecentric: Gosh.

Lorrie: So yeah. To Kill A Mockingbird just happened to be a book that I was familiar with so that the parallels came to me.

Snapecentric: Okay.

Lorrie: And then… Oh, gosh, it was so exciting to me when I realized that the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird is the same as the end of Deathly Hallows: that there’s a scar. There are three children who survived an attempted murder, there’s a scar, and after time passes and things heal over, the scar doesn’t even hurt anymore. That’s the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Snapecentric: Oh, wow.

Lorrie: Right? Right? Yeah. Oh, wow… The Prince, that was one of the things — this author does this, and I think many authors do — where sometimes there’s a heavily symbolic point and they really want you to get it.

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: They really want you to know that they intend something with this, so they put giant, giant arrows. ‘Prince’? What kind of surname is ‘Prince’, right? So you’re like, ‘Okay, fine, fine, fine. All right. Obviously, Snape is a big plotter, so okay, Machiavelli, all right, all right, all right. I get it, I get it.’ Then starting from that (when she really doesn’t want anyone to miss that parallel), then she ends up doing some really fascinating things with that that I really enjoyed. An example of something that I didn’t get for a long time, and then when I finally got it, I was like, ‘That? Oh, I see, that explains it’ — and perhaps it was too subtle: the fandom misery over the name ‘Albus Severus Potter’…

Snapecentric: Oh.

Lorrie: Which many people deplore for many reasons, including the Snape-hating one…

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: But not only.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: When I finally realized, ‘Oh, she’s doing A Tale of Two Cities. Oh, that’s what she was getting after…’ There is a character in A Tale of Two Cities who is parallel to Snape in that he’s not a very good man, but there are people he respects who he thinks of (and the reader thinks of) as good people, and he gives his life so that they can live; then they know this about him, and they name their first-born son after him. ‘Oh!’ That’s… but I don’t — I think if she had made that a little bit more explicit… I don’t — No! On the other hand, I think the fandom debates would have gone exactly the same as ever.

Snapecentric: True.

Lorrie: I’m sure there are lots and lots of allusions that I just don’t pick up on.

Megs: Now I need to go back and read all of those.

Snapecentric: Right.

Megs: I’m like, ‘I know I’ve read them all when I was younger, but now I’ve got to go back.’

Lorrie: Well, these three (and generally the books that she refers to)… some of them are fairy tales from your younger ages, but a lot of them are things that you would be reading in school at the ages of the characters at the time. To Kill A Mockingbird, The Prince, and A Tale of Two Cities are all books that were high school required reading for me, and I got through them. I even managed to get some good out of them, and then when I went back now to reread them… I was flipping through the pages… they were so gripping. It was a little bit like, ‘Wow, why is this wasted on high schoolers? They made us read this. I didn’t have what it took to understand them.’

Megs: Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. I’m like, ‘I don’t know the order in which I actually had to read those books and where I was at in the Harry Potter series, and if I could’ve even been able to make any sort of connection like that.’

Lorrie: Right?

Megs: Because I definitely grew up… I do think it’s really interesting how you said you were reading them from the point of view of being the age of the Marauders…

Lorrie: Yeah.

Megs: Whereas I grew up with the books.

Lorrie: Very different.

Megs: So up until, obviously, the last few — because it took years between to publish — ultimately, I was the same age as them through fourth year, so I definitely was very much the point of view of the kids. ‘Oh, my gosh, Snape is so mean. He’s just such a terrible teacher!’

Lorrie: Well, he is.

Megs: Yeah, exactly. My first read through, I definitely remember feeling, even when we find out his true backstory, I almost had resented him so much that I was just like, ‘That’s not enough for me,’ falling in the Snater category. I love that over time, exploration in the fandom really helped me fall in love with the complexity of him as a character, because yeah. My first time reading through definitely was very much like, ‘Hated him.’ He was my husband’s favorite character, and I was like, ‘Why? Why is that?’ And now I get it. Now I get it.

Lorrie: “What evil thing about you does it mean that you like this character?”

Megs: Now, I don’t know if he likes him that much, because I like him too much. I don’t know. Okay, so you write that Snape uses magic that parallels the Deathly Hallows. How is that?

Lorrie: The Deathly Hallows amplify or help things that you want to do anyway, and Snape does not covet magical objects. This is one thing about him that’s consistent: he is so not materialistic. You can leave the Deathly Hallows with him, and he’s not going to take them for himself because his whole emphasis is on doing everything within yourself, in your own mind. He’s really into wandless magic and non-verbal magic and doing things that don’t leave you vulnerable to being disarmed. If you take the Cloak because you’re trying to protect a lot of other people, he’s taken that as his life mission. If the Elder Wand belongs to the person who believes in disarming rather than attacking, well, that’s what he’s been teaching, and if you do things for people you love — whether they’re with you or not — and you draw strength from that, that’s his only source of strength, so he’s internalized them. That makes him a good guardian; you can entrust any of these artifacts to him because he’s not going to impede them. He’s going to pass them on.

Snapecentric: I love your theory that Snape learned to fly from Lily. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lorrie: That’s another one where it’s so much a part of my reading that I have a hard time understanding other readings.

Snapecentric: Uh-huh.

Lorrie: Well, I love remembering the very first time I read Deathly Hallows and seeing that Lily was flying, because I thought, ‘Oh, this means metaphorically.’ No. It says, ‘quite literally flying.’ Okay, if I’m going to have reading comprehension, I have to understand that she’s actually flying. How? And then we see very deliberately that McGonagall is set up to look at the Snape-shaped hole and say, “Oh, you learned how to do that from your master,” and she says that at the same time that everything about Snape is going to later be proven false. For her, that’s total red herring category. Then, if we look at what flying means — because in the chapter of Half-Blood Prince called Flight of the Prince, where Snape’s just killed Dumbledore and he’s grabbed Draco and they’re running away. If you think about the author’s biography, which a major part of a lot of Harry Potter fandom is knowing that she was a mother who had at one point escaped an abusive spouse with an infant, then flight can mean you’re fleeing (you’re running away from something), but it also can be bravery because you’re rescuing (you’re saving), especially if you’re doing it for or with somebody else, and then that can be like taking flight. I thought that goes with the Snape motivation for not hurting his colleagues, but removing himself from the situation so that he could continue to try to help save Harry and work with Harry, and that he could get the inspiration for doing this by calling to himself the most powerful thing he has in his mind, which is the shared connection from childhood that he had with a friend. There’s nothing more fun, if you are a kid and you’d have a friend, than discovering some magical ability, some fun thing that’s so awesome that you have to show it to your friend, and then the two of you say, “Look at me, look at what I’m doing,” and then you show each other this is how you do it. That’s the kind of connection that powers everything good in this series; through Snape’s memory, Harry gets the immense gift of seeing with his own eyes what it looks like to see his amazing mother, a beautiful little child just doing this mind-blowing thing. Wouldn’t you want to say, ‘Who are you? How do you do that? Can you show me how to do that? That’s amazing!’ Just the wonder of seeing this, and then knowing that they bonded over it… that’s the greatest power he has. That’s an experience that transforms you on the inside, and it’s powerful enough to help you do some really difficult things in order to protect somebody else. I thought that is the nature of this universe, I think, that goes along with the values that this series is promoting. Also, Voldemort does not share.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: Voldemort’s whole thing is, “Ooh, look what I can do and nobody else can do!” He’s not going to teach other people.

Megs: Right, absolutely. No, yep.

Snapecentric: I thought it was the other way around, that Snape had learned some wild magic and taught it to Voldemort.

Lorrie: Well, what we see is that Voldemort never listens to anybody. Dumbledore says this more than once: “Oh, he never thought that house-elves could have magic,” or “he never thought to ask anybody about the Room of Requirement, because he just always assumed that no one knows anything except for himself.”

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: Any boss who’s boss-like is not going to want to go to their underling and say, “That genius thing you did… Could you show me how you do that?”

Megs: Right. Yeah.

Snapecentric: Yeah. Yeah, I can see that’s not really a…

Lorrie: It’s out of character.

Snapecentric: Right. Exactly.

Megs: Yeah, and of course, I picture… We see little Snape watching this happen, and he’s completely enamored by it. You can already tell that he’s just amazed at what she has done, and I feel like that helps inform him to go beyond the… It’s like, “Oh, is there anything wrong with me being Muggle-born?” And he’s like, “Well, no,” because I think he also sees her power in her and respects it, and that sort of thing.

Lorrie: Yeah, which is his shame. Having seen that, how did you not continue to respect that?

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: But it’s also a very funny gotcha, because this whole time James and Harry have been like, “Ooh, look at me. I can fly. I’m so good.”

Megs: Right? Yeah, he was always… What was it? Is it Remus who talks about how Snape probably was jealous of James because he was always the great Quidditch player and blah, blah, blah? Earlier, you had mentioned, obviously, you think that everyone should have had the opportunity to become better, I guess is the way you described it. Do you think that Snape’s redemption arc shows that he became a good man in the end? How would you define him as a character?

Lorrie: I wouldn’t say good or bad, because I think it’s very important for many readers to have their own reading of whether he’s good or bad for really valid reasons important to them. Settling it one way would cut off the other possibilities, and I think they’re all intended. What I would say is that he became whole; I think he was a damaged soul, and he made his soul whole again before he died. Does that make him good or bad? Well, suppose you’re a reader who was hurt by somebody the way Snape hurts people. Then for somebody to say, “Well, he became good at the end,” can be so invalidating. You don’t want to say he became good because there’s a risk of erasure, but it’s also important if you’re somebody who has really hurt people the way Snape did to emphasize, “Well, maybe people do do things that are so bad that you never can become good. Even those people can make themselves whole again.” There are people who gain strength from acknowledging, ‘No, there’s some really bad ways you can be as a person,’ but also there are people where it’s really healing to say, “Yes, he became good. Sometimes, maybe there’s hope for people that I love, but who hurt me; maybe there’s hope for myself.” I like that he’s equidistant from good and bad. What I like is that no matter whether he became good or bad in the end, his meter — his metric — was, ‘Can I meet Lily’s eyes, or am I ashamed of myself?’ He spends Harry’s whole school time not really seeing Harry for who Harry really is because he really gave this child a miserable life, and whose fault is that? Nobody but his own. Then at the end, he can say, “Look at me,” because Harry… his eyes look just like Lily’s. Snape is about to die; supposing in the universe of this series there is an afterlife and they will meet, can he go meet Lily, knowing what he did to her child?

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: And say, “Yes, I did that, and then I did everything in my power to do some repair. I can never repair what I did, but I did as much as I could. I could not have given any more than I did,” and by the time he’s ready to go, he says, “Look at me.” He can meet Lily’s eyes. He has reintegrated his soul through remorse. Does it undo what he did? No, that’s not the point because no, that cannot be undone. But could he have given more? Well, that’s as much as he’s got. I like, also, the wholeness. My reading of wholeness comes from what Dumbledore wants. That’s what Dumbledore’s goal is for everybody. He has that goal for Grindelwald, where he says, “Oh, I heard that near the end, he felt remorse.” That’s what he wanted. He has that goal for Harry: he wants Harry to live a life without anybody else’s soul stuck in his scar; and he wants Voldemort to be whole. He wants Voldemort to be able to go to his rest with all of his soul in one place, even if it means that it’s now this tiny, tiny fraction; at least it’s whole. It’s in one place. He keeps checking in with Snape. “Have you done the remorse thing yet?” And Snape’s like, “Go away. I hate you.”

Snapecentric: This is a really broad question. I’m sorry about that. How does Snape figure in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? I guess, how is he presented?

Lorrie: If you think of who Snape was to Harry Potter, then that’s who he is generally to the fandom: this nasty teacher… Blegh, whatever. If you think about him from the Malfoy point of view, he’s somebody else entirely. He’s somebody who was often on the opposite side from the Malfoy family, but no matter what, he always, always, always tried to protect them, even when he was working against their political causes. Scorpius Malfoy… To him, he’s the guy that made Scorpius’s life possible, that saved Draco, that did all of this, that saved Narcissa’s sanity. That’s a beautiful tribute to the complexity of what it’s like to be human. The difference between seven-book Snape and Cursed Child Snape is that Cursed Child Snape is not ambiguous. All of his ambiguity is gone. He has a single story now. He’s the guy who died to protect people, that drew his strength from remembering somebody he loved. That’s who he means to this universe. There’s no ambiguity, and that’s why he can give Scorpius the plain, spelled-out Occlumency lesson that he couldn’t give Harry. He’s not trying to hide from anybody. He’s free now, he’s a single person now. He has a single story; he has a single motivation, and it’s all explained.

Megs: Probably one of my favorite things about Snape in Cursed Child is that we get to see his dry wit…

Lorrie: Yeah.

Megs: And it’s a chance to, like you said, see the character without all the mess of everything else and the questions going on that we can finally see him as a person with a personality, with motivations, with that sort of thing. I love that they had him be part of a timeline there.

Lorrie: Yeah.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Megs: So moving into some heavier stuff… In fandom, there seems to be two different definitions for ‘death of the author’. What are your thoughts?

Lorrie: Well, what would you say those two definitions are?

Megs: I think, Katt, were you thinking sort of how some people… I guess — Yeah, you go into what you were thinking that was.

Snapecentric: Okay. Well, I think ‘death of the author’ was first brought about as meaning you cannot know what the author intends, and I may be mistaken in that. Then there’s also the one where we can say, “Oh, they’re dead. We can do whatever we want with this.” Given our author’s unfortunate stance, I think maybe people use that as a way to separate themselves, separate the work, from her to make it a little easier to deal with.

Lorrie: Yeah. It doesn’t work, does it?

Megs: No, because then there’s the whole… I think that even I was able to kind of use that for a little while, and now it’s like, ‘Well, she’s not dead, and she’s definitely…’ It’s hard. It’s definitely a hard thing to navigate in general.

Lorrie: Well, even if it were possible to get used to her evil and put up a temporary wall in your own mind, she keeps getting worse.

Hosts: Yeah.

Lorrie: You have to keep re-doing that wall, and it’s clearly never, ever going to work. Also, just as clearly, she’s never going to wake up one day and realize what she did and take it all back.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: There were a few months at the very beginning where that was a mass fantasy.

Snapecentric: Yes.

Lorrie: Just because it’s our fantasy doesn’t mean it’s true.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: No. There’s that, and then there’s the reality of her, which we have no control. No, I do not in any way believe in ‘death of the author’. I understand (in context) originally, it was pushing back against an overwhelming tendency to say that whatever an author says about their work is the absolute truth and they can never be wrong, and how you might respond to it differently as a reader and what you might bring to it can’t be important, not compared to what the author says. They are totally as gods regarding their own work. No, of course, that’s not true, and that was a really necessary corrective within that context.

Snapecentric: Okay.

Lorrie: What I like… There’s a critic named Claire Dederer who wrote a book called Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, and J.K. Rowling has an entire chapter all to herself in this book…

Snapecentric: Yes.

Lorrie: Just in case you want — Yeah, right? You know you’re in trouble when…

Megs: Yeah!

Snapecentric: Yeah, exactly.

Lorrie: Right? What Claire Dederer says, which I find a great relief, is that every experience of art is two biographies meeting: it is the author’s biography that forms the art, and it’s the reader’s biography that forms how the reader understands it. It’s always two biographies meeting, and I thought, ‘Oh, thank you!’

Snapecentric: Uh-huh.

Lorrie: Because it is entirely bullshit to say that you can ever separate an author from the books or anything that they wrote. It’s almost too obvious to say, but writing is done one word at a time. The author chooses every single word, and it’s different from what anyone else in the entire world would have written because we are not the same. That’s why we have such things as favorite authors, because something from that person came out in their choice of words in a way that you want. That’s useful to you because of something in yourself that says, ‘Oh, that story, I want more.’ Otherwise, why does it even matter whether it’s canon or fanon? Why can’t we just say, “Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter what she said. I’ll just read fanfiction”? For some people, that is enough, but for some people, it’s not because there was a person and you wanted their story and how they told it, and you want to find out how it is in their mind, even when they haven’t finished it yet. That author’s individuality is in every single word.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: What you do with that, they don’t control. How you receive it is just as much its own entire world, which means that the same person can read the same series at different times and it becomes a different story, right? But you only read stories because a human being created them, and the human being who wrote Harry Potter is similar to 16-year-old Tom Riddle in his diary, frozen in that time and not the same consciousness as the person who is alive and reacting and developing 20 years later, although they have similarities. What you know of the author in current times, as you read the book that they wrote way in the past: your knowledge of the current human being informs how you read the artifact from the past. Harry gets the diary of a 16-year-old, reads it, and tells 16-year-old Tom Riddle, “I’ve seen what you become,” and that Tom Riddle says, “Oh, yeah, I’ve read that you could defeat me. What is that all about?” This dialogue between the author of the past and what the reader knows of the author in the present creates a reading that wasn’t possible at the time of the writing, because every single thing we are conscious of all at once creates our reading. You can try to put up barriers; it’s not going to work. People try — and I understand the value of that, too — but it makes me think about the kinds of spells that they do in this series, where you have to keep renewing it because they wear off, right? If you put up a Protego… ‘I’m going to go back to how much I loved this one character in 2007 and not think about TERFpocalypse.’ You’re going along, and then that character is like, “Ooh, but boys can’t go into the girls’ bathroom,” and then you’re like, “God damn it!”

Megs: I know!

Lorrie: “Protego! Protego! What’s wrong with my wand?!”

Megs: Yeah. Yup.

Lorrie: These are all strategies that we have to use to understand what it means that we love humans, but humans are terrible.

Hosts: Yes.

Lorrie: How do we exist in the world? What makes us different from other life forms? We love stories. Why do we love stories? They help us live; they help us make sense of things. Oh, boy, do we need help making sense of things in the current day… And wow, is the fallenness of this particular fictional universe emblematic of some of the things that we have to think about all the time now.

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: So, no. Someday, as with us all (including Voldemort), this author will be literally dead; right now, she’s still talking. Maybe you don’t know what she’s saying because you got off of Twitter when it became X, but she is still talking.

Snapecentric: Alas…

Lorrie: And there’s nothing we can do about that, and there’s only so much you can lie about how much that affects your understanding of the culture we live in and the pop culture that formed us and still forms us. Anyway, no, she’s not dead.

Hosts: No.

Lorrie: No.

Snapecentric: I wonder if we should elucidate what the issue is. I imagine most people know, but yes, J.K. Rowling has come out and been increasingly against the trans population. She feels that they should not exist in public spaces, and she’s dedicated her fortune to making that happen. It’s so hateful. So yeah, that’s something that everyone kind of needs to think about how they interact with her material.

Megs: Yeah, but the hardest thing for me is how much her hate has kind of poisoned aspects of fandom, even making other people hateful.

Snapecentric: Yes.

Megs: Which is really sad, because it’s just hypocritical. You want to fight hate, but then you’re using hate. There’s just so much harm happening, which hurts, and I feel like it just continues to grow. It’s not anything that we can contain. Even I feel like I’ve had to pull back into safe spaces, be with safe people, because I can’t interact in the way that I used to because people are willing to just make their own judgments of you.

Lorrie: This is where we live now.

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: Yes.

Megs: Yep. Yep.

Snapecentric: In a post-TERFpocalypse world.

Megs: Yup. It’s tough.

Snapecentric: Sad.

Megs: So I guess, then, moving on to your next project that you’ve been doing of late. What prompted you to create Harry Potter After 2020 podcast?

Lorrie: Well, I wanted to go through the series chapter by chapter, looking to see how TERFpocalypse has affected my reading, and also just to do a chapter review podcast, which is its own whole subgenre in podcasting, right?

Megs: Yes, absolutely.

Lorrie: At first, I thought, ‘Well, the world doesn’t need another Harry Potter chapter reread podcast,’ and then I realized there are so many. Why the heck not?

Megs: Right. Clearly, there’s a market for that.

Lorrie: And I thought this is a transition time, not only because of TERFpocalypse, but also because the millennials that were Harry’s age are now of an age to make decisions about passing on this story, or not, to their children. Any book that goes through this generational shift — Well, there’s also the thing where your parents’ things are uncool, but your grandparents’ things are cool, right? That would have happened anyway. Harry Potter would be in this fallow stage, but I thought that the transition from being a bestseller to a classic is: do you pass it on to your children?

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: And at this point, because of popular culture and the incredible saturation that these novels have, it’s being passed on to your children. That’s happened. So what’s involved here, and what are the politics involved? Because people who are now young, first-time readers of Harry Potter will not be angry at Rowling in the same way as millennials, because they already pick up the books knowing that she has changed and become this reactionary person, whereas the millennials went through the betrayal. What you have now is 10-year-olds saying, “Mom, I know you believe in freedom of speech and you can’t censor what I’m reading, and I’m going to read Harry Potter,” and the mom going, “I won’t have that filth in my house. She’s transphobic.” “I know. I’m trans, Mom.” Where you come from affects that, and I wanted to track the changes in our society at this extremely volatile, stressful moment because we have a gift in that somebody wrote a series of novels that became an international bestseller. This is a collectively held story that means wildly different things to different people according to what continent they’re on, whether their country was in a war or not when they read these books, whether they are English native speakers or whether they read this in translation… If this is a series that you read so that you could understand Anglophone culture (if you’re coming from a different culture), then it’s great; it’s a great reference. If you’re, for example, a person of color in Britain or the U.S., you can say, “This representation of people with color is ridiculous,” but for a person of color from a different continent? “No, no. That’s useful, because I want to see what the mainstream image is. I wouldn’t want her to try to be other than what she is. This is a great representation.” It means different things to different people, and with changes in the U.S. government, there are elements of this series that, in the early 2000s, felt more distant or felt more allegorical, and then there came a point when they became like documentary, like news.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: We are currently at a point where the authoritarianism in the series is at a softer point than what we’re living through at the moment, and when my co-host JC and I reach those points, we have a little laugh-cry, right? “Oh, look at that. They told Umbridge that this meeting took place before the decree making student clubs illegal, and that just took all the wind out of our sails. Aw, darn. Oh, isn’t that adorable!” Right? The rage is immense, but it also shows that there’s no mystery to the trajectory of authoritarian rule. It’s the same story and the same playbook every time. It requires no ingenuity. It is entirely predictable; in fact, you can see this because you see Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore and Dolores Umbridge going through these exact motions, and you see that short-sighted self-interest (as in Fudge) can enable an entire world of evil. You see that if you have vulnerable, not too bright children and you’re trying desperately to guide them on the right path, but somebody else appeals to their pettiness and violence and desire to punish others, that’s a really difficult call to resist; if you have children really vulnerable (because, for example, their fathers are incarcerated), they will respond to anything that gives direction. If you want to manipulate people, all you have to do is make them suffer in a way that introduces confusion into their lives, and then they are yours to manipulate. All of these things are things that read differently, depending on who you are and where you live and what your surroundings are like at the time, so that the same person who read this series twenty years ago has this very reliable guide of a set of books where the words do not change to measure how much you have changed, because you can remember what you thought the first time you read it and you can compare it to what you think now, and that can help you measure yourself. Especially because JC and I are both parents… If you read this and you don’t have children, then, ‘Oh, 15-month-old baby goes to a household where nobody ever looks at him and picks him up. Oh, that’s terrible.’ Then you have a 15-month-old… ‘Oh, my God, I can’t read this. This is horrible. Cannot read this.’

Snapecentric: Sure.

Lorrie: If you are a teacher or a parent who ever made a mistake that super endangered your loved ones, and then you see Lupin leaving the map unwiped, you’re like, ‘Nooooo!’

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: Right? And then Lupin going, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so ashamed.’ You’re like, ‘I know, I know, don’t talk to me.’ The other amazing thing is that JC is a teacher. She is a professor of education at a university, so her perspective as a teacher on Hogwarts and pedagogy is endlessly entertaining and rich. All of these things… I thought, ‘The series can be a really good home, a starting point and a home, for a reckoning about things that matter to us,’ because humans talking to each other through a shared story that was meaningful is how we learn our feelings and how other people feel about what started out as the same story. But very quickly, when you talk to somebody else, “Wait, you and I didn’t read the same story.” We can’t find that out as easily if we’re just talking at cross purposes, but if we are referring to the same text, we have a deeper way to understand how other people’s feelings and experiences are different from our own. So I thought, ‘2020…’ I think I consider TERFpocalypse to be a COVID casualty. I think it happened because it was in response to a story that she was publishing during lockdown, because we had to find new ways of getting free entertainment out to people who were going crazy locked up. That pressure cooker and the response she got, plus the global political tension from the Black Lives Matter movement that was holding people accountable for racism at the time… This is hideous to say, but a lot of people were relieved to have a scapegoat other than themselves and say, “Let’s stop talking about racial accountability,” and the timing of TERFpocalypse coincided with the Black Lives Matter movement. All of it had to do with the day-to-day shock of 2020 and how we didn’t know if the world was ending or not. What does this one reference guide that is a series of stories tell us about the index of how we’ve changed and in what areas? Anyway, it’s a chapter reread podcast, just like every other one. We do an episode per chapter.

Megs: How far along are you guys?

Lorrie: We just had Career Advice.

Megs: Ah.

Lorrie: We just had Harry running for his life while McGonagall and Umbridge shout at each other.

Snapecentric: Wow.

Megs: Oh, gosh.

Lorrie: “Run faster, Harry, or they might notice you again.”

Snapecentric: Uh-huh. Now, I’m not sure if we’ve touched on this, but in the introduction to the show, you mention that you and your co-host JC first read the book as adults. How do you think your experience differs from those who read the stories as children?

Lorrie: Well, there’s a contract between a children’s author and a child reader. That contract is that you’re going to let this adult’s words into the child’s mind and trust that it’s safe, especially a series like Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a heavily moralistic story, and both the child reading it and the child’s guardian checking it over to see if you can let your kid read this agree to the contract, thinking, ‘Okay, I see the values of this universe and we’re okay with it. Child, let this story into you. Let it shape you. Bond with it. Learn things from it. Adopt some of the things you learn from the story as your own for life.’ That’s a contract that you have as a child reader that you do not have as an adult, fully formed reader picking it up. The person who first encountered Harry Potter as a child reader now has that invasive, betrayed feeling. ‘I let you in. I let you in. Did that metastasize while I wasn’t looking? What did you become? Is there something wrong with me that I thought you were okay at the time to let in? Should I have seen something in you that warned me? Well, how could I? I was eight!’

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: It comes down to the difference between whether or not you have that contract, and people older than millennial readers didn’t have that. I read this series, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I see, this author is doing tokenism for race. She knows very little about race, but she knows that this is good, and if I want to know about people of color, I will go elsewhere.’

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: But an eight-year-old will say, “What was I supposed to do? I was just reading the books,” whereas an eight-year-old now… Whoever gives them the book will say, “Well, this is the author. She’s known to have these pitfalls. The part where she says, ‘If you’re fat, you’re bad…’ just kind of skip over them because she’s full of shit…”

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: “And then just go — She was wrong about this, this, and this,” and the kid’s like, “Yeah, Mom, I know, I know. You think I don’t know?”

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: That’s specific according to what contract you enter into as a reader in your time and place. That answers your question, right?

Snapecentric: It does, yeah.

Megs: Yes, yes.

Snapecentric: Sorry.

Megs: I got lost. The big question from two podcasters: how do you manage doing a show on a weekly basis?

Lorrie: We have one rule: we do what’s easiest. If something even feels remotely like it’s work, or like, ‘Oh, God, we have to do that,’ all right, then we don’t do it. Having a designated day of release makes things easy. We have an editor.

Megs: I need an editor!

Lorrie: She’s amazing, and what’s amazing about her is that we throw the files in her lap and she has one instruction: make us sound not stupid. That’s the only instruction we give her, and she’s amazing. Then we go to bed, and she does some magic.

Megs: That’s amazing. Well, send me her contact info and her rates, and I will get in touch.

Lorrie: She’s on our website.

Megs: Oh, perfect!

Lorrie: She drew little headshots of each of us.

Megs: Oh, That’s so great!

Lorrie: Her name is Caroline, and there’s nothing she can’t do. She’s amazing.

Megs: That’s awesome.

Lorrie: But what it really is is that there’s a group of us who like working together, and we just find excuses to work together. I like doing the show with JC because she and I just like talking to each other. Even despite TERFpocalypse, talking to each other about a book can relieve some of the dread that current events have caused. Here’s something that we did not plan; it just happened: the day that we recorded the episode where Voldemort reconstitutes himself in his cauldron and returns more terrible than ever was January 20th of this year, so it happened.

Megs: Woof!

Lorrie: We started recording at 11 A.M, and at some point during our recording, there was a presidential turnover.

Megs: Woof.

Snapecentric: Wow.

Lorrie: So yeah. And then at the end, he has arisen again. Okay.

Snapecentric: Oh, the parallels…

Lorrie: So yeah.

Snapecentric: Do you pretty much just record weekly then? Or do you do extras if you need to be away or things like that?

Lorrie: JC is a professor, so we record more during breaks and during finals, whatever we don’t…

Snapecentric: Okay.

Lorrie: But like I said, it’s our chance to sit down and talk to each other, so if we go too long without, then we have to find some other excuse to talk to each other.

Megs: Oh, yes. That is… yep. It’s very relatable to me and my co-host, Nathan. I just love hanging out with him. That’s ultimately what makes it the most fun.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: Yeah. I couldn’t believe my luck when I asked her, “Would you do this with me?” and she said yes. “You will?!”

Megs: “You will? Really?!” Yeah.

Lorrie: “But — but TERFpocalypse!”

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: “Really? It’s a big commitment.” Yeah. Lucky me.

Snapecentric: Lucky us. In addition to covering the Harry Potter books chapter by chapter, you’ve had some shows where guests talk about their fandom experiences and the damage that Rowling has caused with her anti-trans stance. Will there be more guests?

Lorrie: If we have the energy.

Snapecentric: Uh-huh.

Lorrie: I’m sure there are suggestions. I’m open to suggestions. I make zero promises.

Snapecentric: That makes sense. Is it pretty emotional?

Lorrie: It’s fucking awful. More than when we started the podcast, there are also risks involved in people being public.

Snapecentric: Oh, true.

Lorrie: And there is some lag time between when we record and when we release, and life is going to hell so quickly that during that lag time, there will be new, more disgusting laws.

Megs: Right.

Snapecentric: Yeah. So true. They are very powerful shows. I just listened to the one with Lily this past week. Yeah.

Lorrie: Yeah. I was Lily’s makeup grown-up. When she went to Sephora for the first time…

Snapecentric: Oh, how cool.

Lorrie: I was the grown-up that took them along. Yeah.

Snapecentric: Nice. Yeah. So then, that probably made it even harder to interview her.

Lorrie: No, it made it easier in that I understood. I had been with Lily as a fan of Harry Potter so that she wouldn’t have to explain just how disgusting this betrayal is.

Snapecentric: Yeah. Gosh. We’ve touched on this, but how do you navigate the choice to continue interacting with the Harry Potter universe with — I call her JRK; that’s my little revenge on her — JRK’s escalation of her hate campaign?

Lorrie: Claire Dederer’s argument, which I believe in, is that there’s no logic to this at all. It’s only about love. Do you love the material? Do you love the fandom? If you feel love, then no amount of virtue signaling can change that you feel love. If one day you wake up and you’re like, “I’m just over it, this is too awful, I don’t feel the love,” then it’s gone. You can’t decide; it’s not logical. “I’m doing this as long as I want to; the moment it starts feeling joyless, I will stop.”

Megs: Right.

Lorrie: Is there logic? No.

Megs: Yeah.

Snapecentric: Uh-huh.

Lorrie: Is there an argument for any single — every single possible response to this has strong arguments for it. Which ones are you going to choose? Do what works right now. It might not work tomorrow.

Snapecentric: Right. Yeah.

Megs: Absolutely.

Snapecentric: Absolutely. Yeah. Are you exposed to Snape hate?

Lorrie: Hehehe… No! No, just kidding. Of course. If it is important for somebody to hate this character, that’s what literature is for. That’s the point of having a common text that’s familiar to everybody in pop culture, because we can refer to that context to understand fellow humans better.

Snapecentric: Right.

Lorrie: Something that blows a lot of people’s minds: Snape I love, because he reminds me of the qualities in myself that I’m proudest of. There are a lot of people who hear that and they don’t even know what to do with that, because in their minds, Snape is just Neville’s boggart. I’m like, “Yeah, he is, but that’s not the thing that drew me, and it’s a really complicated character.” This just shows how we don’t all see the same thing in stories. We don’t all have the same need when we read a story.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: That’s how different we all are on the inside. And what a gift of a character! You don’t get a lot of characters that come along where people can have such almost violent, completely opposite responses. Yeah. He’s quite an achievement.

Megs: Yeah. Sometimes I sit and think. I’m like, ‘What other character feels that complex or emotionally visceral?’ I can’t imagine not having… the touch on how long you feel the love. That’s where I find, being in the fandom aspect and the fanfiction aspect and just the people that I spend my time with, I still feel that, even though there’s things that are creeping in that make it a little bit harder, as far as my proactivity in the fandom is reduced, but I still have the things that I get out of it that I feel help me not feel helpless in it, in that loss. You talk about the betrayal that’s… The millennial here? Yes, it’s just so big. It’s so heavy. It’s like, ‘How do we navigate that?’ I guess in the past or even presently, you talked about how obviously you wrote meta, you had friends that were really into fanfiction. Do you read or write fanfiction for yourself?

Lorrie: I go through phases when I really love reading a lot of fanfic, and then other times where I don’t need it, so it comes and goes in waves.

Megs: Yeah.

Lorrie: Right now, I feel like I’m at peace with my understanding of Severus Snape, so I don’t find myself seeking out fanfic about him. If something changes, then it’s wonderful to have that resource. I had friends who swore that once I start writing fanfic, I will discover that I love it and I can’t stop, and I’m like, “I don’t believe you,” so I tried once. It was horrible. It was so difficult.

Snapecentric: Uh-huh.

Lorrie: I don’t know how people do it. Oh, my God, never again!

Snapecentric: Wow, yeah.

Lorrie: So hard.

Megs: Yeah. I’m one of those that I discovered… I actually discovered fandom in lockdown. That was me finding social engagement and stuff like that and common ground. I’d always been a huge Harry Potter fan, but I hadn’t really touched fanfic until that point. I always was happy listening to my Jim Dale audiobooks at least once a year and all that stuff, but once I finally fell into it I couldn’t stop reading. I’m definitely the example of once I started writing, I couldn’t stop. I’ve definitely been not writing, probably, for about two years now because of, like I said, the emotional complexity of fandom in general, but I’m so thankful for my time with fandom during that time, because I feel like it did so much for me to keep me sane and feel connection and depth and understanding one another. The walks of life that we come across online all over the world is just… I can’t take that for granted by any means, so I just am so thankful for that time.

Lorrie: Here’s a thing that’s aggravating. In my experience, it does not work that well to try to maintain the same network and people that you value while ignoring the media that brought you together in the first place.

Megs: Oh, absolutely.

Lorrie: If you say, “Let’s all get together, but let’s not talk about Harry Potter,” it doesn’t actually really work, because not all of these are your best friends. They’re not all people that you would invite over to your house, but you want to see them twice a year.

Megs: Right.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Lorrie: Right? It doesn’t really work, so that has to stay there somehow in some way. Fortunately, fanfic is beyond counting. You have the lovely phenomenon of being able to follow fanfic writers from one fandom to another.

Megs: Yes. Oh, absolutely.

Snapecentric: I stay in my lane. It’s like, ‘Oh…’ Not about Snape, but I feel like I’m under constant pressure to be reading Snape fanfic for this show.

Lorrie: If it’s fun, do it. If it’s not fun, do something else.

Snapecentric: It is fun, but there’s times when I’d like to read a novel that just came out, so I need to make more time for that.

Megs: Absolutely.

Snapecentric: Yeah. And I’m not a writer at all. I’m barely a podcaster, so…

Megs: Oh, stop.

Lorrie: Well, if people have complaints about how I’m doing this, I tell them I’ll give them their money back.

Snapecentric: Yep. So true.

Lorrie: Or the real… This is such a nasty, horrible thing in reality to tell someone: “You could always do your own.” But I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. That’s a terrible thing to say.

Snapecentric: I’m sure it’s good for people to find their voices through writing, and it just enriches those of us who only read.

Lorrie: I’m a great beta. I love beta-ing. Just don’t make me come up with all that stuff on my own. Oh, my God, it’s so much work.

Snapecentric: Yeah. Do you have certain wishes in the upcoming official television production of Harry Potter?

Lorrie: The answer comes down to no, because all of my wishes are I wish people would just stop with the racism. That’s all. Other than that, no. I’ll just see — What I’m interested in is what they do with the character and how people react to it. I don’t have any feelings about wishing that they would consult me.

Megs: Right.

Snapecentric: Yeah, especially since… I can’t remember who it was they cast, but there is a lot of, “Well, he’s supposed to be white. That’s what he is in the…”

Lorrie: I don’t even want to know. What I can say is that not a single word said on that subject will have been original. I don’t… No.

Snapecentric: True.

Lorrie: Nobody’s saying anything in that debate that hasn’t been said a million times before for just as terrible reasons.

Snapecentric: And If anybody… Well, I plan on using my VPN to steal the show. I’m not going to give money to HBO or J.K. Rowling or Warner Brothers.

Lorrie: In 20 minutes, I have to run a workshop for five 17-year-olds about college applications, and it’s going to be a four-hour workshop.

Hosts: Oh, my goodness!

Lorrie: I better go print out my thing.

Megs: Luckily, we only have one final question for you. Ultimately, thank you so much for doing this with us. It’s something Katt and I have been talking about for…

Snapecentric: Over a year.

Megs: Yes. A really, really long time that finally… When she was like, “Okay, we’ve got to do this.” “Yes, we’ve got to do this. Let’s do this!”

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Megs: So thank you! Big fans, admire how much that you give to fandom, and just so happy to share a space with you, for sure.

Lorrie: Thank you for having me. It takes no work to have me on. Just give me a time and date and then press go, and then make me shut up.

Megs: Perfect.

Snapecentric: Yeah.

Megs: Where can everyone find you online?

Lorrie: The Harry Potter After 2020 podcast is at HPAfter2020.com, and it’s available wherever you get your podcasts; there are transcripts with every episode, which I’m very proud of. My personal website is LorrieKim.com, L-O-R-R-I-E-K-I-M. That’s where you can get me.

Snapecentric: All right.

Megs: Wonderful!

Snapecentric: Thank you for sharing your time with us and your great insights.

Lorrie: I’m going to go wash some fruit and set out some cookies now.

Snapecentric: Okay.

Megs: Fabulous!

Snapecentric: Enjoy your rest of your day.

Lorrie: Thank you!

Hosts: Thank you, Lorrie! Bye.

Snapecentric: We could easily have talked another hour because Lorrie is so fascinating and perceptive. Thanks to Lorrie for her time and insights. Thanks also to Megs for her able help with the interview. You can find Snape: The Definitive Analysis at Lorrie’s website, LorrieKim.com. That’s L-O-R-R-I-E-K-I-M.com. The Harry Potter After 2020 podcast can be found at HPAfter2020.com. That’s HPAfter2020.com. They can also be found on your favorite sources for books and podcasts. See also our additional reading page at SnapeChatPodcast.com for links. And here, we say goodbye. We wish we didn’t have to, but it hasn’t escaped our notice that life isn’t fair. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Tumblr and Bluesky, or leave a comment on our website at SnapeChatPodcast.com or on Spotify. We’d love to hear from you! Many thanks to Nyx for her continued work on our website. Be sure to check out Care Of Magical Shippers Podcast and AlwaysSnape.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time, stay snarky.