On the whole, Snape seems to be uke in djs very, very often. Speculation time!
One guess for the continued casting of Snape as uke (the Snape/Harry djs are more recent, with all except one being published after HBP, while half of the Snape/James djs were published before HBP) is that Snape started getting coded as 'uke' beginning somewhere around 2001, when there was lots of Snape/James, and when Snape/Harry gained traction later, Snape had already been uke-ified to such a degree that people just continued writing him as uke even with Harry.
Why make him uke to begin with? Snape is in a position of power over many characters as an adult, but he wasn't when at school with James, the period during which most of the early djs took place. He was certainly a more 'natural' uke back then.
There's also an interesting naming detail we could consider. Snape is 'Suneipu' in Japanese katakana. This is the purest of pure speculation, but the verb 'suneru' means 'be peevish or sulky' and is often associated with non-dominant characters in anime/manga. Perhaps the sound of the name alone made people's uke-alarms go off right from the start? (Also, there's a 'ne' in there, which might suggest the word 'neko', meaning 'cat' (and also slang for 'femme', as opposed to 'butch'). Snape does get given cat ears quite often, and I think this might be characteristic of a non-dominant character in anime/manga, too. Examining this cat-ification now for a different paper, so I don't want to speculate as to the reasons for it just yet.)
There's also the question of why he was paired with James almost right from the start. Snape/James is a real rarepair in English-language fic. Not so in djs; it's very popular there. I've had it suggested to me that James' bullying of Snape and Snape's insistence in canon that he hates James to pieces might get interpreted like this: the harder the uke professes to hate the seme, or the more the seme pulls the uke's pigtails, the more hints there are as to a possible relationship.
But did Snape get made uke because people wanted to pair him with James and James just seemed a more natural seme, or did they pair him with James because they wanted to cast him as uke but couldn't do that very fluidly with other characters? Chicken or egg? :)
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momijizukamori
Part 2
Date: 2010-02-21 11:12 am (UTC)One guess for the continued casting of Snape as uke (the Snape/Harry djs are more recent, with all except one being published after HBP, while half of the Snape/James djs were published before HBP) is that Snape started getting coded as 'uke' beginning somewhere around 2001, when there was lots of Snape/James, and when Snape/Harry gained traction later, Snape had already been uke-ified to such a degree that people just continued writing him as uke even with Harry.
Why make him uke to begin with? Snape is in a position of power over many characters as an adult, but he wasn't when at school with James, the period during which most of the early djs took place. He was certainly a more 'natural' uke back then.
There's also an interesting naming detail we could consider. Snape is 'Suneipu' in Japanese katakana. This is the purest of pure speculation, but the verb 'suneru' means 'be peevish or sulky' and is often associated with non-dominant characters in anime/manga. Perhaps the sound of the name alone made people's uke-alarms go off right from the start? (Also, there's a 'ne' in there, which might suggest the word 'neko', meaning 'cat' (and also slang for 'femme', as opposed to 'butch'). Snape does get given cat ears quite often, and I think this might be characteristic of a non-dominant character in anime/manga, too. Examining this cat-ification now for a different paper, so I don't want to speculate as to the reasons for it just yet.)
There's also the question of why he was paired with James almost right from the start. Snape/James is a real rarepair in English-language fic. Not so in djs; it's very popular there. I've had it suggested to me that James' bullying of Snape and Snape's insistence in canon that he hates James to pieces might get interpreted like this: the harder the uke professes to hate the seme, or the more the seme pulls the uke's pigtails, the more hints there are as to a possible relationship.
But did Snape get made uke because people wanted to pair him with James and James just seemed a more natural seme, or did they pair him with James because they wanted to cast him as uke but couldn't do that very fluidly with other characters? Chicken or egg? :)