Redemption of Anakin and other redemption stories (moved from Main)

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> Well, no. That's not what JKR's version of the afterlife apparently involves. What we see is Dumbledore with his injured hand cured and Lupin looking young and healthy and Black healed of the poison of Azkaban. If we were to see Snape, I'm pretty sure that his Dark Mark would be gone and he'd be "cured" of spite and bitterness, looking younger as Lupin does because the burdens of his existence have been lifted from him.
> <SNIP>
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Alla responde:
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> And my point is that we do not see Snape and thus we can imagine one way or another what his afterlife will be like and I think if JKR wanted to establish it for sure, she could have shown him as well, I am sure she would have found the way to be true to the story.
> 
> She could have for example show him meeting Harry briefly after his chat with Dumbledore ended or something like that.
> 
> She did not and thus she left me a room for imagining him getting what I think he deserved for abusing Harry (IMO), even if he saved his life on Dumbledore's directions and then send him to death on Dumbledore's directions as well.

Carol:
I agree that JKR left room for us to imagine the afterlife as we want to imagine it, which is what you and I are both doing now. After all, she didn't show the afterlife itself, only four people summoned by the Resurrection Stone (rather like the echoes we saw in GoF) and Dumbledore at King's Cross. What's beyond, we don't know because she chose not to show it. (Possibly, she doesn't know herself.)

It's also true, as you say, that she chose not to depict Snape in the afterlife. However, as I've said, there's no reason for him to appear in either scene. He's not one of Harry's loved ones and he's not the old mentor who will answer Harry's questions. (Snape probably has questions of his own at this point, having just died, that only Dumbledore can answer. But Harry's need is greater as he isn't really dead and has to return. Snape's questions can wait.)

What we do see is that the dead, except for Voldemort (whose future we glimpse), are healed of the griefs and burdens that plagued them in life. Dumbledore, for all his manipulativeness and the sins of his youth and his failure to check into Black's guilt after Godric's Hollow and all the many other things that he did wrong, is healed of his blackened hand. He *could* have been punished in some way, but he isn't. Apparently, his remorse is sufficient--that and five decades of opposing Voldemort. Snape's situation is similar--remorse and seventeen years (nearly half his short life) of fighting Voldemort or preparing to fight him and seven years of protecting Harry.

Voldemort, in contrast, will spend eternity in what we can call his own private hell for two reasons: He's split his soul into seven pieces (actually eight, counting the scar) so he barely has any soul left, and he's unrepentant (in contrast to Snape and Dumbledore).

So while of course you're free to imagine whatever punishment you feel is appropriate for Snape's minor sins, what evidence we have seems to indicate that it doesn't work that way. If we saw, say, Pettigrew, suffering some sort of punishment for his many sins, we might have some basis for supposing that Snape is punished, too (though only for the minor sins he didn't repent), but there's no evidence one way or the other. We only have two extremes, flawed but "good" people, at least one of whom (Dumbledore) repented, and Voldemort, who has lost most of his soul and almost all of his humanity. Surely, Snape, for all his failings, comes closer to Dumbledore than to Voldemort in this regard.

Carol, who thinks that the whole point of abandoning revenge for forgiveness (the change we see in Harry) would be lost if repentant sinners are punished in the afterlife