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Team “I can hear the near silent hum of electrical appliances and the bubbles fizzing in the can of soda on the coffee table, but can’t watch tv without subtitles and processes conversation at 1/4 speed”

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📚 Hermione Granger Aesthetic 📚

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Wasting time.

Aka. I just wanted to draw kitty cat.

#pascalcampion

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Winter in La Palma

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By Yue Xu

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personally the lattice method of multiplication is the reason i hate math

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A quick question about the Snape/Hermione thing: is this posited as Snape being an adult and attracted to Hermione as his student, or is this an AU thing where Snape and Hermione are the same age or of similar ages?

Hi!

Thanks for asking, because I’ve been dying to write a bit on exactly why and how I love this ship of mine.

Here’s a brief explanation of why SSHG is my OTP

Hermione and Snape complement each other in many ways. They’re both intellectual, but Snape is more of an innovator and will prevent her over-reliance on book learning from hampering her post-Hogwarts career, while her more methodical knowledge-focused approach will probably be a help in his own research.

In terms of personality and past actions, Hermione has done and been through some pretty bad shit in the past, and I think Snape is particularly well-equipped to understand the effect those things may have on her. In canon, it looks like Snape has an overabundance of conscience, while we don’t really see Hermione feeling guilty for the things she does, so he will keep her from falling into the trap of ‘I’m doing it, so it must be right’ while she will keep him from beating himself up about things he had to do and/or couldn’t stop.

They’re both incredibly loyal people. Snape will appreciate that because he hasn’t had much loyal support in his life - Lily abandoned him, Dumbledore used him etc. Hermione, after being (arguably, some people may see it differently) used for her intellect by Ron and Harry for years, and abandoned by Ron during DH, will also appreciate Snape’s steadfastness.

Then there’s the fact that the only person we see her dating in canon (she never ‘dates’ Ron, they kiss during the Battle of Hogwarts and 20 years later they’re married, we don’t get any romantic development between them) is skinny, dark-haired, hook-nosed, grumpy Viktor Krum, so Snape is definitely her type.

The trick in SSHG stories is to get the pair to spend enough time together to realise that they are basically soulmates, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

Okay, and now for the timing

I like a wide variety of SSHG fics, including ones where they start their relationship while Hermione is still a student, albeit an of-age student. Basically any fic that starts their romantic relationship before sixth year is a no for me, while after and during sixth year it’s a go.

What I’m really looking for in an SSHG story is that meeting of the minds that shows that they work really well together as equals or near-equals, and of all my favourite tropes, Secret Sixth Year gives them the most opportunity to realise that, while maintaining the Older Man/Younger Woman thing I like (I blame the massive amounts of Mills&Boon and Regency novels I read as a child for that, as well as my parents’ 11-year age difference) and having Hermione be a virgin (which I blame solidly on Harlequin/Miils&Boon)

Secret Sixth Year is when Hermione and Snape spend a lot of time together during the course of HBP, generally while Snape is teaching her Occlumency.

 Snape (or someone) teaching Hermione Occlumency is kind-of supported by canon, and here’s how. When Snape tries Legilimency on Draco during HBP, he finds that Bellatrix has taught Draco enough Occlumency to be able to block Snape. This means that Bellatrix is at least as strong a Legilimens as Snape. And yet, when she doesn’t get results from Hermione at Malfoy Manor, she doesn’t simply use Legilimency to find out the truth about the Sword. Why can’t she just take the information from Hermione’s brain, if she’s a Legilimens? Because Hermione has learned Occlumency. Who taught her and when?

Snape, that’s who. And when? During HBP when, for large patches of the book Harry neither knows nor cares where Hermione is and what she’s up to.

I like Secret Sixth Year best when they become friends during HBP, communicate secretly during DH, and only start a romantic relationship after Voldemort’s defeat, as happens in Grangerous’s fantastic Phoenix trilogy, where I don’t remember them even kissing before the third book, Hermione Granger and the Elder Wand. However, some authors (like Slytherpouf) have written Secret Sixth Year stories that start the smut much earlier, and they’re pretty damn good as well.

In cases where Hermione is a student, I absolutely despise fics where Snape uses his power as a teacher to punish her when their relationship hits a stumbling block, as he does in The Problem with Purity by Phoenix.Writing, but that Snape also has other issues which make me wish that Hermione would chop him up and use him for Potions ingredients, magical mate bond or no magical mate bond.

The best Secret Sixth Year stories stick close to canon, which is entirely possible, and have Hermione saving Snape during DH.

The key to a Secret Sixth Year story is that the Snape may start out however snarky the author wants, but by the time a romantic relationship starts he must regard Hermione as more or less an equal, a colleague or even a friend.

Two stories that don’t exactly follow the SSS trope are Caeria’s Pet Project and AMR’s The Lioness Prophecies.

In Pet Project, Hermione decides that she needs to make Snape’s life easier, and begins a campaign of being polite, not doing extra work, and trying to figure out why he’s not eating with the help of the house-elves. The story is 338K words long spread over 52 chapters, and was written over eight years, and Snape and Hermione don’t even kiss until something like Chapter 48 - at which point Hermione would have been a seventh year except that Hogwarts is closed. 

In Lioness Prophecies, Snape and Hermione marry during the Christmas holidays of her seventh year, because of a combination of factors - but mostly because Snape’s grandfather Septimius has made conditions in his will that require certain things or the family trust will stop funding the Order. I like this one because the writing is fantastic, but also because Snape has built a friendly relationship with Hermione and Harry prior to the beginning of the story, so he already sees her as something of an equal when the story begins.

Time is an Illusion are stories where, for whatever reason and by whatever method, Hermione goes back in time and becomes friends with Snape while they are the same age.

So far I’ve only read one Time Turner story that managed to preserve canon and not make me hate it is mltefry’s Fate Set Right which has good reason for Hermione to be unable to reveal what she knows of the future. If Hermione didn’t have that ironclad excuse, there could be no excuse for her not to change the future that she will never be able to return to.

I admit that I am not a great fan of time travel stories that have Hermione returning to the future after being in the past, because I feel that once they’ve established themselves as friends or lovers having Hermione in his class as a student would simply be too hard on Snape, who would feel like a horrible creepy pedophile. Plus there’s the aforementioned thing about Hermione not changing the past while she’s there to save Lily and James and possibly even destroy Voldemort before he can rise again.

TL:DR

I like SSHG stories where they treat each other more or less as equals by the time any romantic relationship begins, no matter the circumstances. Age is not really a factor, except that I don’t read stories where they start a romantic relationship while Hermione is underage.

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Witches on a railroad adventure 🚂🚃🚃🚃🚃☕

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the moment you realize you are, actually, a writer

what is a writer, if not a miserable little pile of ideas and half written google docs

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Incredibles 2 (2018) dir. Brad Bird

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Night Shots by @bunlee

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Autumn bliss in the Aosta Valley, Italy.

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I saw THIS and immediately thought of these two. 

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when one character brokenly says “i have nothing to offer you” and the other character looks at them with fond exasperation, because there’s nothing else they could want except the gift of their love. that shit gets me.