Harry Potter Essays Livejournal

Popular films are a mechanism for communal bonding, individual identity building, and often contain their own metaphysical discourses.Here, I plan to outline the manner in which these elements resolve within extreme Snape fandom so as to propose a nuanced model for the analysis of fandom-inspired religion without the use of unwarranted veracity claims..He argues that fandom is a self-aware zone of imagination and experimentation, in which players are always aware that they are in a game.

This led to a substantial amount of creativity amongst fans as they attempted to predict future plots, fill in gaps in the canonical texts, and criticise areas in which they felt Rowling was lacking.

The exploration of alternative universes in which canon could be disputed or re-framed was also highly popular.

This paper explores a small community of Snape fans who have gone beyond a narrative retelling of the character as constrained by the work of Joanne Katherine Rowling.

The ‘Snapewives’ or ‘Snapists’ are women who channel Snape, are engaged in romantic relationships with him, and see him as a vital guide for their daily lives.

In this article I will problematise received ideas of religion by showing that the Snapists actually satisfy common There are a variety of problems inherent in approaching a belief system such as Snapeism through a methodological obsession with veracity.

This is a problem found both in fandom and within scholarly projects that seek to find some kind of ‘true’ definition for what religion is and is not.

By policing extreme manifestations of the fandom, other eccentricities can be placed in the more neutral category of ‘ironic’ or ‘playful’, as opposed to ‘insane’.

This boundary policing is a virulent and under-researched manifestation of fandom communities.

Her taxonomy delineates the category of ‘text as reality’, in which “the text is constructed as a reality in itself, not simply within the internal logics of the narrative, but owning some form of extra-textual ontological status” ([1], p. Under this schema, Snape exists as a being with thoughts and feelings independent of Rowling as author.

Of additional consideration will be the veracity of any given religion, including the scriptures of Christianity—used by the Snapists as an example of another possible system of beliefs with equal validity to theirs.