Chapter 4: Hogwarts' Darkness
Severus is not the best storyteller. Let me rephrase it in a more poetic way.
It started out as a simple political issues. Purebloods upset that there weren't laws protecting witches and wizards from crimes committed by muggles and that when they retaliated against muggles for crimes, they were the ones punished. It was even more upsetting that muggleborns were wildly accepted as novel and exciting even though it opened up the wizarding community to even more problems by letting the muggles in.
A conflict that had taken two sides without understanding the root of the problem. There were those who saw muggleborns as the best thing since channeling magic through wands and those who saw them as a threat. It didn't help that the statute of secrecy was considered immutable. Crimes of muggles against purebloods went unpunished or the witches and wizards retaliated themselves only to land a life-sentence in Azkaban. The witches and wizards who saw that they were going to end up in Azkaban anyway started moving from changing the laws about muggles to changing the laws about muggleborns and half-bloods, who they considered as the ones responsible for opening the door for more muggles in the wizarding community.
Conflict spread. Laws targeting of muggleborns were considered wrong and laws favoring muggleborns were put in place. The ministry retaliated strongly against those who tried to change the law. Eventually, conflict bred violence. Violence was met with more violence and the pureblood-led movement had to move underground, gaining supporters in an environment hostile to anyone who didn't hold the ministry approved opinion. The pureblood movement was starting to rear its ugly head once more in public, organized under the leadership of one Lord Voldemort, more commonly known as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Hogwarts had once been an open place where anyone of either opinion could come to learn magic. Muggleborns were present and lineage wasn't talked about as much as it had during the witch-burnings of the middle ages. There were several still of the strong bias that they were lesser, but every high school has its bullies and as muggleborns were more isolated from the magical world in Britain, it was easy to target the ones clueless about the magical world.
When Headmaster Dumbledore took office, he publicly stood against such prejudices and made the halls a place where such intolerances would not be permitted. Those with his political beliefs are favored and get off more easily than the ones who do not. Oddly enough, these political viewpoints are distinguished more by houses than actual political beliefs.
The bullies who had dangled the both of us upside down were Dumbledore's favorites. Severus was marked as their opponent from day one on the Hogwarts Express when he was in his second-hand robes and voiced the desire to be in Slytherin. They only got punished when they disrupted class or harmed students that are associated with the proper political opinion at Hogwarts.
Our roommates in Slytherin are those of the so-called 'pureblood' ideology that has drifted from being opposed to muggles and laws favoring them to being opposed to muggleborns and laws favoring them. Because of the political environment at Hogwarts, where using the word Mudblood will get you a detention if it is spoken in front of an authority figure, they have plans of taking action after Hogwarts. The one eloquent phrase Severus said was, "The only threats from Mulciber to be worried about are the ones where he threatens to ask someone out. All the other ones are to be determined by what bothers him when he graduates and joins the Dark Lord."
Severus is the guy in the middle. He knows what it is like to suffer at the hands of muggles and have no power to fight against it. However, he understands that the problem is not about muggleborns and blood traitors. It is the blind eye they turn to the real problems people face and calling it intolerance. In fact, without the political push against the 'pureblood' ideology and portraying it as an anti-muggleborn movement, Severus feels that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named would not be gaining as much of a following.
Here I am, the scapegoat amongst the enemy and fast friends with the pariah of those who would support me. And I had thought that Riverdale was dark and dangerous.