Praise be thin ice and speculation, that's exactly what I'm looking for here ;) Better get all the possibilities on the table first, and later we can try and see which are most likely to be true. I studied seme/uke dynamics for my masters thesis about three years ago and am pretty glad to be getting back to the topic -it's fascinating. Where have you been stumbling, exactly?
I'm going to do a more detailed comparison of references to canon scenes in fics and dj, but I did get the impression from this that there's more of that in in fic than in djs. Actually, the event referenced most often in fic was Snape nearly getting killed by the werewolf through the fault of James' friends (which never happens onscreen in canon). James saved Snape's life then, although it didn't change their bitter enmity. Perhaps fic writers, apparently more preoccupied with linking things to canon, like to latch onto that moment because it's the only known interaction between Snape and James that might possibly be construed as non-hostile (and thus a starting point for JP/SS)?
Very interesting point about the bullying scene. I do wonder what makes dojinshika able to portray James as an all-round 'good guy' (at least in the twenty or so JP/SS djs I've looked at), when James' signature scene in canon is indeed one that shows him humiliating a fellow student. It's a pretty hideous scene, not the garden variety I'll-turn-your-hair-blue kind of schoolboy bullying. Maybe it's partly because being depicted as a bully isn't quite so damning for a character in Japan? I'll have to look into whether Japanese fans are more likely to expect Snape not to take too much offense at being bullied. It might explain quite a bit about his apparent lack of serious negative feelings towards James in djs.
Actually, fic writers don't seem to use the bullying scene much either -at least in JP/SS fics, I've seen it in other fics plenty of times. Fic writers might want to ignore the bullying scene when writing JP/SS because it's such a painful incident that any vaguely non-hostile relationship between James and Snape sounds impossible afterwards. The werewolf scene leaves some doors open for a JP/SS relationship, but the bullying scene shuts and bolts them all. Fic writers can be pretty good at ignoring canon too :)
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I'm going to do a more detailed comparison of references to canon scenes in fics and dj, but I did get the impression from this that there's more of that in in fic than in djs. Actually, the event referenced most often in fic was Snape nearly getting killed by the werewolf through the fault of James' friends (which never happens onscreen in canon). James saved Snape's life then, although it didn't change their bitter enmity. Perhaps fic writers, apparently more preoccupied with linking things to canon, like to latch onto that moment because it's the only known interaction between Snape and James that might possibly be construed as non-hostile (and thus a starting point for JP/SS)?
Very interesting point about the bullying scene. I do wonder what makes dojinshika able to portray James as an all-round 'good guy' (at least in the twenty or so JP/SS djs I've looked at), when James' signature scene in canon is indeed one that shows him humiliating a fellow student. It's a pretty hideous scene, not the garden variety I'll-turn-your-hair-blue kind of schoolboy bullying. Maybe it's partly because being depicted as a bully isn't quite so damning for a character in Japan? I'll have to look into whether Japanese fans are more likely to expect Snape not to take too much offense at being bullied. It might explain quite a bit about his apparent lack of serious negative feelings towards James in djs.
Actually, fic writers don't seem to use the bullying scene much either -at least in JP/SS fics, I've seen it in other fics plenty of times. Fic writers might want to ignore the bullying scene when writing JP/SS because it's such a painful incident that any vaguely non-hostile relationship between James and Snape sounds impossible afterwards. The werewolf scene leaves some doors open for a JP/SS relationship, but the bullying scene shuts and bolts them all. Fic writers can be pretty good at ignoring canon too :)