highly sensual; an expert loverHow Fan Fiction Transformed Professor Snape from a Greasy Git to a Byronic Hero . . . Who’s Really, Really into S/M
MOST POPULAR CULTURE HAS LONG ENGENDERED ITS OWN FLATTERY-BY-IMITATION IN THE FORM OF FAN FICTION, BUT RARELY HAS FAN FICTION DELVED INTO THE DARK AND STORMY DEPTHS OF. . . ALTERNATE LIFESTYLES . . . AS IN THE FEVERED PRODUCTS OF THE AFICIONADOS OF PROFESSOR SNAPE. EVEN ROWLING SEEMS TO REALIZE THAT SHE CREATED A MONSTER. . . AND NOT THE ONE SHE INTENDED.
FOR A SARCASTIC, HOOK-NOSED, greasy-haired git, Professor Severus Snape sure gets a lot of action. Down in his dungeon apartment at Hogwarts, the Potions Master has a big, curtained bed with silk sheets in Slytherin green or black (the same colors as his silk underwear). He is never lacking for sexual partners: schoolgirls, schoolboys, witches, wizards, prostitutes, colleagues, he has had them all. Snape is an expert lover, seductive and inventively sadistic. He has a secret passion for the tango. He is a stickler for old-fashioned formality. He’s also a stickler for old-fashioned discipline, spanking naughty students over his knee (usually before sexually ravaging them on his desk). Severus Snape is living large but, still, he suffers—oh, how he suffers! He is hated, feared, alone. Long ago, he loved a woman. Or a man. Whatever. The point is, it ended badly. But his frozen heart has been thawed by, a) Hermione; b) Harry; c) Draco; d) All of the above. He is heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, omnisexual, a virgin. And, oh yes—he masturbates a lot. In the shower.
Clearly, this is not your child’s Severus Snape (unless your child has a precocious imagination and an Internet account). This is the Severus Snape of adult Harry Potter fan fiction, and for many (usually female) Potter fans, he is the real star of J. K. Rowling’s saga. (There are plenty of PG-rated Potter fics, but for the purposes of this essay, I am concentrating on stories with ratings of R and NC-17.) This sexed-up, communal-fantasy Snape slinks through tens of thousands of fan fictions published on Web sites like Occlumency and AdultFanFiction.net and in age-restricted chat groups. The transformation of Rowling’s sneering antagonist into a hunky hero is almost as fascinating as the Potter series itself, demonstrating the intense relationship between readers and fictional characters in the age of instant Internet gratification. J. K. Rowling can’t publish her books fast enough, so Potterheads have hijacked her characters (all of them, not just Snape) and written their own stories, with varying degrees of skill and flair. And while Rowling has been comparatively tolerant about what other authors, such as Anne Rice, have denounced as copyright infringement, it’s difficult to dispel the sense that Potter fan fiction is a runaway train bearing down on traditional publishing. After you have taken the leap and read fan fiction, is it possible to be a Potter virgin again, to be satisfied with what Rowling gives you? How has Rowling responded to fans taking possession of her characters? Who really owns Severus Snape? And how in the name of Merlin did he become the sexiest wizard alive?
The Man in Black
In an interview collected in the children’s book Conversations with J. K. Rowling, Rowling explains that Professor Snape is loosely based on an elementary school teacher she had whose bullying of students was “the worst, shabbiest thing” an adult could do to children. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Rowling’s first descriptions of Snape set a menacing tone: “His eyes were black . . . they were cold and empty and made you think of dark tunnels”; “He spoke in barely more than a whisper.” In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Rowling adds that the Potions Master is “cruel, sarcastic and disliked by everybody except for students from his own house,” and that he gives Harry “the impression of being able to read minds.” Sweeping through the corridors with “his black robes rippling in a cold breeze,” Snape terrifies and intimidates his students. He looks like the quintessential pantomime villain. But in the Harry Potter series, looks are often deceiving.
Snape is actually the most complex character in the books. He is deliciously enigmatic, his every action open to interpretation. Does he taunt Harry and publicly correct his mistakes because he hates him, or is he trying to ensure that Harry never forgets what he needs to know in order to survive? Has he truly renounced his association with Voldemort’s murderous Death Eaters, or is he preparing to serve Harry up on a platter for the Dark Lord? Is he Dumbledore’s spy, Voldemort’s spy or only interested in saving his own neck? So artfully has Rowling built up Snape’s ambiguity that, even though we see him dispatch Dumbledore with the killing curse in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, it’s hard to believe our eyes. After all, Dumbledore’s trust in Snape never wavered. And, in those final moments, Dumbledore almost seemed to ask Snape to kill him. What else is going on here that we can’t see? Time (and the sneaky Rowling) may prove me as dead wrong as Dumbledore, but I’m not ready to join Harry and say with absolute certainty that Snape is evil—are you?
Rowling has modeled Snape on more than just a nasty teacher from her childhood. He fits, amusingly and perfectly, this description of Schedoni, the charismatic villain from Ann Radcliffe’s influential 1797 Gothic novel The Italian: “Among his associates no one loved him, many disliked him and more feared him. His figure was striking . . . and as he stalked along, wrapped in the black garments of his order, there was something terrible in its air; something almost super-human. . . . An habitual gloom and severity prevailed over the deep lines of his countenance; and his eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate, at a single glance, into the hearts of men and to read their most secret thoughts.” In his seminal 1962 study The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes, scholar Peter L. Thorslev Jr. writes of the Gothic villain archetype, “An air of mystery is his dominant trait and characteristic of his acts. Frequently, it is increased by an aura of past secret sins.” Remind you of any Potions Master you know?
A funny thing happened to the Gothic villain—readers loved him. According to Thorslev, when Gothic novels like those of Radcliffe and Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto) were adapted for the stage near the end of the eighteenth century, the Gothic villain “became gradually more sympathetic, until he appeared as half-villain, half-hero in sensibility.” Lord Byron took this half-villain, half-hero as his inspiration for the passionate, flawed, darkly handsome protagonists of The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814) and Manfred (1817). Years after Byron’s death, the Brontë sisters created two of the most thrilling Byronic heroes in literature, Mr. Rochester in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1846) and Heathcliff in Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Rochester and Heathcliff are moody, attractively mysterious and, above all, emotionally and psychically damaged. They are the original bad boys. They bespeak ravagement, domination, forbidden passions. And yet, encountering them on the page, our hearts fill with eternal foolish hope. Surely, these men are not bad, just sad and misunderstood, and in the hands of the right woman (putting our hands up to volunteer), they can be domesticated by love.
This is a notion that Rowling finds reprehensible. “It’s a romantic but unhealthy and, unfortunately, all too common delusion of girls . . . that they are going to change someone,” Rowling told interviewers from the Potter fan Web sites The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet shortly after the release of Half-Blood Prince. She was speaking about fans with crushes on bad boy Draco Malfoy, but she has given similar public warnings to Snape fans in the past. “Who would want Snape to be in love with them? That’s a terrible idea,” she said during a 1999 radio call-in interview show. Rowling describes Snape as “a gift” of a character to write but, apart from that, she gives the impression that she loathes him. Which, perhaps, makes him all the more desirable as fan fiction forbidden fruit.
In the hands of fan fiction writers, the dark-browed and solitary Severus Snape takes his place beside Rochester and Heathcliff as a figure of powerful eroticism. We don’t see Snape’s sexual or romantic side in the Potter series because the story is told, almost exclusively, from Harry’s point of view. But fan fiction authors have eagerly taken up the challenge of sexualizing Rowling’s saga, writing between the lines like graffiti artists tempted by a pristine stretch of wall. The lack of any adult romantic partner for Snape has been particularly fertile ground for fan fiction imaginations to bloom. Some writers have seized upon Hermione as a Jane Eyre to Snape’s Rochester. Others pair him with Harry in slash (homoerotic) fiction. Still others have projected themselves into the story by inventing “Mary Sue” characters1, heroines who are dropped into the Hogwarts universe to charm the glowering serpent of Slytherin.
The first Snape-centric fan fiction, “The Love That Shattered a Man,” appeared on FanFiction.net in 1999. It was written by one Gypsy Silverleaf, who was then in the eighth grade. An explosion of fan fiction featuring Snape as a romantic hero occurred between 2002 and 2004, roughly the period between the second and third movies and the fourth and fifth books. This newfound Snapemania was sparked in part by the casting of actor Alan Rickman—well-established as “the thinking woman’s sex symbol”—in the role. Rickman’s feline movements and mellifluous voice give the Potions Master a sensuality absent from the page. And beyond the shoulder-length black wig and black contact lenses Rickman wears, no attempt is made to ugly him up. Indeed, the wig and the black Victorian costume are major causes of Snape-lust; many younger fans who had never seen Rickman before glommed onto his uncanny resemblance to Goth-rock pin-up Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails.
Because the Harry Potter movies are coming out while the books are ongoing, it is all but impossible to separate the actors from the characters (Rowling increasingly seems to be writing Snape’s dialogue to accommodate Rickman’s silken snarl). And for his longtime fans, Rickman carries many past associations into the role of Snape. His bad guys, like Hans Gruber in Die Hard and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, are cruel yet irresistibly alluring. His lovers, like Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility and Jamie in Truly, Madly, Deeply, are vulnerable yet frustratingly remote—Brandon is painfully reserved and Jamie is, literally, a ghost. Put that cruelty, remoteness and vulnerability together and you have the fan fiction rendering of Snape. And it’s not far from the Snape of the books and movies, either. During Rowling’s 2004 Edinburgh Book Festival talk, a woman in the audience exclaimed that she loved Snape, and Rowling laughed and asked, “Are you thinking about Alan Rickman or about Snape?” An excellent question. And when we figure out the answer, we’ll move on to the one about the chicken or the egg.
Besides the Rickman Factor, the feverish outpouring of Snape fan fiction also had much to do with the mantle of heroic possibility Rowling drapes around Snape’s shoulders at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, when Dumbledore turns to him and says, “[Y]ou know what I must ask you to do. If you are ready . . . if you are prepared. . . .” As Snape leaves for this unspecified mission, Rowling tells us that he looks “slightly paler than usual” and “his cold, black eyes glittered strangely.” (Does this scene have something to do with what eventually transpires between Dumbledore and Snape in Half-Blood Prince?) Eager for any official evidence to justify their romanticization of the Potions Master, fan fiction writers seized that nearly wordless exchange as a confirmation that Dumbledore was sending Snape off to spy on Voldemort. Countless post-Goblet fics place Snape unequivocally on the side of good and have him flirting with danger as Dumbledore’s mole within the Death Eaters.
Fan fiction writers found further justification for making Snape a sympathetic anti-hero in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Harry penetrates Snape’s mind during Occlumency lessons and later sneaks a look at his worst memory, which has been left in Dumbledore’s Pensieve. In these scenes, we (and Harry) glimpse Snape’s secret shame as an apparently abused child and an outcast, bullied teenager. Fan fiction writers believed they finally had the canonical keys to explain, if not excuse, Snape’s actions as a damaged adult. (As of this writing, it’s too early to gauge the effect the bombshells dropped in Half-Blood Prince will have on Snape fan fiction.)
There are two prevailing fan fiction interpretations of Snape, which I’ll call Bastard Snape and Softie Snape. The dry-witted, elegantly sardonic Bastard Snape, best exemplified in Veresna Ussep’s astringent, beautifully written stories (especially “Love’s Labours, Paradise Lost”), tilts more to the Gothic villain (he won’t say “I love you” after a shag). Softie Snape, who appears most memorably in white raven’s compulsively readable “Tea with the Black Dragon” and Rickfan37’s florid “Snape in Love,” is more Byronic (he’s stormy, but he’ll snuggle). The various Bastard Snapes and Softie Snapes in adult fan fiction, though, all share the following characteristics (in addition to the secretiveness, sarcasm, strictness, pettiness, arrogance, intelligence and hyper-sensitivity displayed by Rowling’s Snape):
highly sensual; an expert lover
sexually and emotionally sadistic; spanks students/lovers and engages in other scenarios of dominance and submission
formal and decorous
reflective, sometimes even guilty, about past sins
unambiguously on the side of good
mentally and physically tough under torture (by Voldemort and/or Lucius Malfoy)
prefers his paramours young, and is often paired with Hermione
capable of deep emotion, even love, but not always willing to express or admit it
redeemable
incredibly well-endowed
It isn’t hard to see from where some of these fan fiction characterizations and themes originate. The recurring images of Snape manfully enduring torture, for example, spring from the graveyard scene in Goblet of Fire, in which a resurrected Voldemort metes out the terrible Cruciatus Curse to disloyal followers. Although Snape is not present in this scene, it follows that he would be tortured if Voldemort suspected that he was a spy (his role as a spy becomes explicit in Order of the Phoenix).
The idea that Snape can be redeemed is a Byronic (or, perhaps, Brontëan) touch, but it is neither sappy (well, okay, maybe a little) nor pulled out of thin air. During the previously mentioned 1999 radio interview, one reader asked a question about Snape’s “redemptive pattern” (this, after only the first three Potter books had been published). “I’m slightly stunned that you said that,” answered Rowling cryptically, “and you’ll find out why I’m so stunned if you read book seven.” Call me delusional, but I agree with the fan fiction writers who explore Snape’s “redemptive pattern”; it’s there in the books, if you want to see it. Snape does keep saving Harry’s neck (albeit never in overt or decisive ways). And in Half-Blood Prince, we finally learn the reason he left the Death Eaters and a possible explanation for why Dumbledore trusts him—Snape felt remorse over playing a part (inadvertently, he claims) in the murder of Harry’s parents, James and Lily.
Before you echo Professor Lupin’s, “Dumbledore believed Snape was sorry James was dead? Snape hated James . . .,” from book six, notice where Rowling cuts off that remark. Snape did not hate Lily. He never utters a word about her throughout the series, though he freely disses James. Even before that subtle clue in Half-Blood Prince, there was a subset of Snape fan fiction that made Lily the love of his life and her death the crux of his conversion to the side of good. Rowling may dismiss this Snape-can-be-changed stuff as more “unhealthy” girly dreaming, but fans recognize in Snape’s arc all the ingredients for a classic journey of redemption. Fan fiction depicts Snape undergoing all manner of hell, some self-inflicted, to atone for his past. It remains to be seen whether Rowling (and Harry) will deem Snape as worthy of redemption and forgiveness as fan fiction writers have.
As for the Snape/Hermione pairing . . . well, okay, here’s one of those points on which fan fiction writers might be a little bit, er, out there. But let us not judge. The Snape/Hermione romance is based in part on schoolyard lore: If a boy picks on a girl (and vice versa), it means he likes her. In the Harry Potter books, Hermione is the only female student whom Snape singles out for verbal abuse and humiliation (“That is the second time you have spoken out of turn, Miss Granger . . . five more points from Gryffindor for being an insufferable know-it-all,” Snape tells Hermione in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). And if Snape verbally disciplines and humiliates students, maybe he would physically discipline and humiliate them as well. There are so many fan fiction scenes of Snape spanking a nubile (and increasingly excited) student, they start to blur. But they pretty much all have a stirring moment like the one in “The Tenth Rule” by Pelagian, where Snape says, “Prepare yourself for your punishment, Miss Pearson! Remove the lab-coat, remove your underwear, lift your skirt and then bend over one of the desks!”
The fan fiction obsession with Snape as a disciplinarian seems to be knotted up with the desire to see him holding sway over lovers at least half his age. (According to calculations made on the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site, based on what is known about the ages of characters who were his classmates at Hogwarts, Snape was thirty or thirty-one years old at the beginning of the series.) There are now whole fan fiction groups, like Ashwinder and When I Kissed the Teacher, devoted to Snape/Hermione stories, despite the fact that one of the early Snape/Hermione fics, “Pawn to Queen” by Riley, was criticized by some readers for its sex scenes between Snape and the under-age student. The author later edited the story to raise Hermione’s age from sixteen to eighteen; the majority of Snape/Hermione fics now portray the insufferable know-it-all as being of legal age.
But even making Hermione (or Mary Sue characters) eighteen years old doesn’t change the balance of power in Snape fan fiction; story after story places a sexually curious student, apprentice or ward under Snape’s tutelage and—at least until the clever child turns the tables—under his command. Detention, punishment, deflowering and, sometimes, true (and monogamous) love ensue. Here’s a representative scene from “Tea with the Black Dragon,” depicting the romantic tension between Snape and a beautiful, feisty seventh-year student who has just finished scrubbing a pile of cauldrons during one of her frequent detentions: “‘You may go, Miss Draven. We are finished here. . . .’ When she finally looked up at him, the grey eyes were turbulent. He stiffened with shock when she placed her hands on his arms, stood on tiptoe and leaned into him. . . . He could do nothing to hide the painful erection that was his immediate response as she pressed her cheek against his and breathed into his ear, ‘Thank you, Professor! Thank you so much!’“
Without the constraints of “family-friendly” entertainment to which the Potter books and movies must adhere, adult fan fiction is free to state the obvious: That Snape is the very model of that enduring sexual fantasy object, the stern, older, male authority figure. This is all made even kinkier by the fact that, using the Lexicon’s calculation of Snape’s age, Alan Rickman is twenty-five years older than the character he plays. But the little girls understand. “Give us a detention, Mr. Rickman,” read a sign held by young female fans at the London premiere of the movie Prisoner of Azkaban.
While we’re on the subject of discipline and domination, let’s talk about the sex in Snape fan fiction. It’s never vanilla. And it always features one or more of the following scenes: Snape initiating the woman into S/M play; the woman kneeling before Snape to perform oral sex; the fetishization of the many buttons on Snape’s frock coat, vest and trousers (this outfit, by the way, is an invention of the movies’ costume designer; the books only describe his professorial robes); Snape intimately bathing the woman or otherwise insisting that she be clean; magical sex involving spells and potions; anal sex. One can only assume that fan fiction Snape’s dom preferences (and cleanliness fetish) were extrapolated from the Potions Master’s sadistic, exacting classroom manner in the books—Rowling’s Snape truly is one of the most note-perfect S/M figures in literature, even if we’re not supposed to notice. Finally, as to why the Snape of fan fiction always has such an absurdly large penis, well, you know what they say: Big nose, big . . . wand.
In general, Rowling has taken a “live and let live” attitude toward fan fiction—as long as it’s G-rated. In 2002, solicitors acting on behalf of Rowling, her literary agency and Warner Bros. began sending cease and desist letters to several adult fan fiction sites demanding that they remove “pornographic or sexually explicit” Harry Potter stories (FanFiction.net removed all of its NC-17 content in response to the letters). However, in 2004, Rowling issued a friendlier statement through her literary agency saying that she was “flattered” by Potter fan fiction, as long as it was not written for profit and as long as adult-oriented stories were not accessible to children.
Rowling has been remarkably patient, considering how difficult it must be to create in a fishbowl, with every tiny detail of her series scrutinized and debated. And it must be particularly difficult knowing that thousands and thousands of amateur writers are out there playing around inside her characters’ heads. While Rowling nailed down the plot of her series several years ago, she is hampered by the creaky wheels of the traditional publishing machinery. Isn’t there a chance that a fan fiction writer will get to where Rowling is going before she does?
There have already been a couple of close calls. In Order of the Phoenix, the vibe between the insolent Harry and the dominating Snape during their private Occlumency lessons—they knock each other around from the force of their mind-meld—echoes Snape and Harry’s S/M pas de deux from the legendary 2001 slash fic “Happy Pothead and the Fornicating Phoenix” by Rune Scriptor (long deleted from AdultFanFiction.net). Snape’s harsh mastery of Harry in Order of the Phoenix also mirrors Bastard Snape’s treatment of his concubine Rosalind in Veresna Ussep’s “Love’s Labours, Paradise Lost.” In Ussep’s story, Snape tells Rosalind, “The only time that you are allowed to address me by my first name is when we are in bed. . . . At all other times you are to address me as ‘Professor’ or ‘Sir.’” In the “Occlumency” chapter of Order of the Phoenix (published five months after Ussep’s story was posted), Snape tells Harry, “This may not be an ordinary class, Potter . . . but I am still your teacher and you will therefore call me ‘Sir’ or ‘Professor’ at all times.”
Of course, Rowling’s manuscript had been delivered long before “Love’s Labours, Paradise Lost” was published. But the similarity, though small, illustrates how deeply some fan fiction writers understand Snape and how intuitively they have grasped the mechanics of writing him. The official Snape and the fan fiction Snape move even closer together in Half-Blood Prince. In chapter two (“Spinner’s End”), Rowling breaks with her use of Harry’s point of view to allow us to finally see the Potions Master through our own eyes. He is away from Hogwarts, in his own home, which, as in numerous fan fiction, is lined floor to ceiling with books. Snape is sophisticated, dry-witted and elegantly mannered as he entertains a distraught Narcissa Malfoy (who is seeking his protection for her son Draco) and her sister Bellatrix Lestrange (who suspects Snape of being Dumbledore’s spy). Snape smoothly dominates the women in conversation, even subduing the aggressively insinuating Bellatrix with flawlessly logical, subtly sardonic explanations (shades of Bastard Snape). Erotic currents pass between Snape and Narcissa; at one point she even kneels at his feet (no doubt causing many fan fiction readers to stroke out), as she begs for his help.
There is Gothic romance heat in the way Rowling writes the exchanges between Snape and Narcissa: “When Snape said nothing, Narcissa seemed to lose what little self-restraint she still possessed. Standing up, she staggered to Snape and seized the front of his robes. Her face close to his, her tears falling on his chest, she gasped, ‘You could do it.’” Later, when Snape makes an Unbreakable Vow with Narcissa, Rowling heaps kindling on the bonfire: With “his black eyes . . . fixed upon Narcissa’s tear-filled blue ones,” Snape kneels opposite her, their hands clasped together and bound by “a thin tongue of brilliant flame.” In this chapter, we suddenly see a suave, confident, darkly attractive Snape who may even be showing a glimmer of feeling for a damsel in distress. And at the climax of the book, when Snape keeps his Unbreakable Vow (or Vows, perhaps?), kills Dumbledore and spirits Draco away to (presumed) safety, he appears more Byronic, more tragically caught in a web of intrigue, more strangely heroic than ever. In short, he has become very much like the Snape of fan fiction.
This is not to suggest that Rowling has been influenced by those she has influenced, or has made a conscious decision to give (some) fans what they want. Rather, Rowling’s more mature depiction of Snape in Half-Blood Prince (as well as the book’s emphasis on relationships and snogging among the kids) may simply mark the series’ inevitable coming of age; as Harry approaches adulthood, the world suddenly opens up and he becomes aware of new facets of himself and the people around him. For years, the subversive daydreams of Potter fan fiction have enhanced and deepened adult enjoyment of what are, nominally, children’s books. But the more adult tone and themes of Half-Blood Prince nearly bridge the gap between Rowling’s series and fan fiction.
However, Rowling cannot erase what the fan fiction versions of her characters have come to mean to so many readers. At the Edinburgh Book Festival, Rowling seemed rattled when that woman proclaimed her love for Snape. “Why do you love him? Why do people love Snape?” Rowling asked the audience. “I do not understand this. Again, it’s bad boy syndrome, isn’t it? . . . Girls, stop going for the bad guy. Go for a nice man in the first place.” Rowling’s frustration at having her characters misinterpreted by fans is understandable. On the page, authors have godlike control over their characters, but they can’t presume to have the same control over the way readers feel about them. And that’s what fan fiction is all about—the release of feelings. Readers have always fallen in love with fictional characters, many of whom are not “nice” (Dracula, anyone?). The Internet has merely made these literary crushes and fantasies public, made the idea of ownership too messy and passionate for any strict legal interpretation to convey. Like it or not, authors and fans make up two points of a romantic triangle. And down in his dungeon, Severus Snape’s black eyes glitter avidly as he draws back the curtains of his four-poster bed and settles in for the ménage à trois. You will call him “Sir” at all times.
JOYCE MILLMAN has been writing about television and pop culture for twenty-five years. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1989 and 1991 for columns written while she was the television critic for the San Francisco Examiner. Her essays have also appeared in the New York Times, Variety, Salon.com and the Boston Phoenix. She is a contributor to the Smart Pop anthologies Alias Assumed and Flirting with Pride and Prejudice. In preparation for this essay, she spent many months reading Snape fan fiction. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.