Art: A Little Princess (G)

[sigune]

This was drawn on a whim, prompted by mary_j_59 in a comment to one of my DH-despair entries :-). By all means skip if you don't like the idea of Snape having a daughter, or of him smiling at a child...







The girl in Snape's arms is his daughter Alba, the eldest of the two children (commonly known as "Snapelings") he has with my OFC, Brynhild, in a pre-DH saga I wrote for the RPG Phoenix Rising (pr_rpg). In that story, Snape has to run for it after having killed Dumbledore, and he seeks refuge in Germany. The saga was great fun to write, because it allowed me to build an alternative magical community in which the Dark Arts are not banned, the Ministry is not corrupt, and the people are definitely not English, all of which opened up possibilities. Another great experiment for me was to write Snape in a family setting, wondering what he would be like as a husband and especially as a father, and whether I could make it all plausible. My take on it was that the fact that he can't stand other people's children doesn't mean that he couldn't stand his own, and I think I ended up writing him as a pretty strict father who is nevertheless extremely fond and proud of his children. The chief interaction is between Snape and his daughter, because his son, Xander, is too young to have much conversation *g*.

I thought of this story as very risky to write, because I absolutely wanted to avoid too much fluff and cliché; whether I succeeded I don't know, but I certainly had a great time. Before DH came out I actually had hopes of editing the text and posting it at an archive, but it is too completely canon-jossed now and I don't feel much inclined to post something AU. Ah well.

In any case, I was pleasantly surprised when mary_j_59 brought Alba up again and said she'd love to see a picture of the eldest Snapeling and her doting father :-). It wasn't actually easy for me to draw Alba - children are difficult as it is, and this one... It took a lot of doodling before she looked more or less acceptable. I'm not yet entirely happy with her as it is, but she comes close enough to the Snapeling in my head *g*.



(Severus and Brynhild's intersecting journals can be found at pr_snape and pr_brynhild.)