Heroes and Not - What should Snape Have Done?

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 145236


> bboyminn:
> 
> I've never been one to give much weight to the Unbreakable Vow. 

I dunno, I think you HAVE to give a lot of weight to it-- otherwise
why have it at all?  The situation on the tower was pretty tightly
choreographed by JKR to have a bunch of vectors converging on one
point, and one of the critical vectors pretty much has to be the Vow,
unless she's intending to pay it off in Book 7.  Of course it's not
the tightest legal language ever seen, but that's how magic generally
works in JKR's universe-- it serves to create dramatic situations, not
to adhere to logical guidelines (*cough*moon in PoA*cough*).  IMO the
Vow was engineered (I mean by the author) precisely to give the
characters a certain set of choices.  

The interesting question to me is-- why the heck did Snape take the
Vow?  OFH!Snape would obviously never take a UV unless he was totally
cornered- have to keep one's options open!  and Snape wasn't cornered
at all in that scene.  I don't see why ESE!Snape would take the Vow
either-- he wouldn't need to.  In any event I'm a DDM!Snaper, so the
options would be:

a) Snape was taking a flyer on this being useful to the Cause by
keeping him tight in with the Draco plan-- especially if he didn't
know what it was.  It was an act of impulsive decisiveness with tragic
consequences.  The parallel would be Dumbledore's drinking the potion
at the end of the book-- a what-the-heck, fish-or-cut-line,
bet-all-the-marbles, your-cliche-here thing.  It's sort of in
character, because we do get a lot of scenes where Snape acts very
quickly and with decision, but on the other hand, it's really not-- I
wouldn't call Snape impulsive

b) It has something to do with Snape's relationship with the Malfoys,
including Snape's 'sudden movement' when Harry outs Lucius as a DE in
GoF.  I have no theories about how this would work specifically
though, I can't make head or tail of it

c) My own suicidal!Snape theory, that Snape took the Vow in order to
break it, or with the view that breaking it wouldn't be a tragedy (you
can drag yourself through the whole theory in post #141872).  This
makes sense to me mainly because the set-up on the tower is so very,
very specific to make Snape's fullfilling the Vow a hideous but
necessary choice of the sort JKR loves to torture her characters with,
and that's just so much stronger if Snape had no desire to live at
that point.  It also makes sense of the extremity of Dumbledore's
emotion in "Severus.. please.."

d) Dumbledore was already dying at the start of the book, from the
curse on the ring Horcrux, and Snape and D-dore were already making
contingency plans.  If you want to be really Macchiavellian, it was
Snape who nudged V-mort towards giving the assignment originally to
Draco, so Snape could put the Malfoys in his debt.  This would make
sense of several things:  the Vow, D-dore finally giving Snape the
cursed DADA post, Snape's line that V-mort "intends me to do it in the
end", and Snape's overheard line to Ddore that "he didn't want to do
it ANYMORE."  If Snape and D-dore had concocted an abstract plan that
Snape would kill D-dore (to make lemonade, as it were, from the lemon
of D-dore's dying), then the closer the event came the more Snape
would start recoiling, so he could logically say, "I was okay with
killing you a year ago, but I don't want to do it anymore."

Personally I like c or d because they tie the Vow in with Hagrid's
overheard conversation,  and relate both directly to the events on the
tower.  I like tidy plotting :-).

bboy:
> As a side note: Even I find it extremely odd that I had my doubts
> about Snape until he killed Dumbledore, then against the obvious
> evidence, I immediately concluded that he was indeed Dumbledore's Man.
> Sort of defies logic, I know.

LOL!  When I finished the book, I thought, "even the most diehard
Snape-hater is going to have to think this is pretty fishy"...

-- Sydney