In Defense of Snape (VERY long.)

[eggplant9998]

No: HPFGUIDX 122079


"horridporrid03"  wrote:
 
> "Nice" is a behavior word. It's being polite,
> making sure others are comfortable, writing 
> thank you letters, showing sympathy to 
> another's suffering. Whereas "Good" 
> refers to a core set of beliefs. 

If true then as far as I'm concerned being nice is far more 
important that being good. Believe anything you want, that's your 
business not mine, just don't make me miserable. Snape has the 
ability to make all those around him miserable. 

> When Crouch!Moody takes Neville aside after
> the Unforgivables class to make sure he's 
> okay, and to buck him up a bit, Crouch!Moody
> was being "nice". 

I would maintain that act to Neville was not only nice it was good, 
it was certainly good for Neville even if the reason the fake Moody 
did it was not so nice.

> Okay, I think it *is* a given that 
> Snape is a spy. 

It's a given that Snape WAS a spy, but since those days Dumbledore 
testified in open court in front of hundreds of people that Snape 
spied on Voldemort for the good guys; after that it's a little hard 
to understand how he could still be a spy. 

> What else was Dumbledore sending Snape 
> off to do at the end of GoF? 

I don't know, I thought that would be answered in book 5 but it was 
not. I do have a theory however:

Voldemort can almost always tell if somebody is lying to him, only a 
person skilled in Occlumency could deceive him. Even the most loyal 
Death Eater would very much want to develop this skill because being 
able keep things hidden from a boss that powerful and that bad 
tempered could save your life. I don't think you can learn 
Occlumency from a book, you need a teacher and Snape is one of the 
best at it in the world, at least he is when he really wants his 
student to learn the subject. He wants the Death Eaters to learn it, 
he didn't want Harry to. 

I think Snape's mission at the end of Goblet Of Fire was to secretly 
teach Occlumency to as many Death Eaters as he could without 
Voldemort's knowledge. It would be useful if there were plots among 
the Death Eaters Voldemort could not detect and Snape could get 
valuable intelligence information from flashes of memory from their 
minds during the lessons.

Eggplant