McGonagall and Lupin's reaction to Harry's story (and Snape's DE past)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 138518

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Cathy Drolet" <cldrolet at s...> 
wrote:

>> Carol:
>> Can they really suddenly think that he's always been evil after
>> all the risks he's taken for the Order? Is there more to this 
>> scene, which strikes me as a false note in the narrative, than 
>> just a shared mistrust of Snape by both sides and a very bad 
>> position for Snape if he wants to continue working with the Order? 

Here's a line of questioning to take: do they KNOW for sure what he's 
been doing for the Order?  We know that Snape reports and brings 
things in, but given what we now know of Dumbledore's working style, 
I doubt other Order members were deeply in on what Snape is doing.

And thus it comes back down to the issue I was flogging before the 
book--second-hand trust.
 
> CathyD:
>
> I would think that in fifteen years a person could gain some kind 
> of insight into the man apart from trusting him for Dumbledore's 
> sake?!  Just reading it again...in McG's defense she did 
> say "...*Snape*....I can't believe it."  Really, all the 
> information he has given to the Order about DEs, Voldemort.  How 
> can everyone shrug it off so easily?

Because it's only been on Dumbledore's guarantee that they knew Snape 
was also not giving information to the DEs and Voldemort about the 
Order, I suspect.  I think I've illustrated (or at least *tried* to) 
how easily everything Snape does can be read as for his own 
advancement, at the least--I suspect that's in play here, too.

And there's another thing both of y'all are probably forgetting 
about.  I doubt that most members of the Order, or people who you're 
talking about having known Snape for some time, knew that Snape was a 
DE (ex or not, let's leave it open) who left the fold.

Wouldn't it be a pretty grave shock to discover that your next-door 
neighbor had been in a violent terrorist organization responsible for 
murdering some of your best friends--even *if* someone tells you that 
he left them, and helped out your side?  [I think this does a lot to 
explain the intensity of animosity between Snape and Black in book 5, 
but that's a tangent unlikely to be resolved in the primary text.]

So McGonagall and many others discovered two years ago (from the end 
of HBP) that someone they thought was a fairly known quantity (biased 
and nasty, but not evil, and looking out for the right things), who 
they thought they knew...well, he had a very, very large skeleton in 
the closet.  And I will bet you fake money that Dumbledore, as with 
Harry, *categorically refused* to explain why he trusted Snape--
leaving them in a similar position to Harry, hanging on Dumbledore's 
trust alone.  And given that people like McG and Lupin saw the DE's 
actions up close and personal, they may be quite a bit less likely to 
forgive and forget without the solid proof they never got.

-Nora does the dance of having finished her written qualifiers