Snape's Betrayal and the Themes of Book Seven (and genre)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 132944

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "inkling108" <inkling108 at y...> 
wrote:
> Adding my trickle to what is bound to be a mighty river of posts on 
> Snape --

We've got at least two years, folks. :)

> For a long time now, Harry has had a strong intuition that Snape 
> was untrustworthy, that he hadn't really gone to the good side.  
> Dumbledore and Hermione, his two most reliable advisors up til now, 
> kept telling him he was wrong. Dumbledore was essentially saying: 
> trust Snape because I trust him, and Hermione was echoing the 
> theme: if Dumbledore trusts him, he must be trustworthy.  Listening 
> to them, Harry even overrode the testimony of his own experience -- 
> that his mind felt more, not less, open after Snape's occlumency 
> lessons.

Yes, the problem of second-hand trust.  Dumbledore has his reasons 
for trusting Snape, but he won't share them with anyone else because 
it's between him and Snape.  The problem with that is that DD's trust 
in Snape does not just affect him, but also has a direct impact on 
the lives of many other people, especially Harry.  Is it not 
significant that DD's refusal to tell Harry why he trusts comes in 
his giant 'my bad'/mea culpa speech at the end of OotP?

And that theme is hammered over and over again in HBP (cheese 
cauldrons, anyone?).  Dumbledore could be wrong, Dumbledore could be 
mistaken, but he wants to think the best of people.

> Now Harry has learned the hard way that even the wisest can be 
> wrong, that he must never ignore a strong intuition again, no 
> matter what other people say, no matter how much he may love and 
> respect those others.  This realization will be crucial for 
> whatever it is he must do and face in Book Seven.  Trust your 
> feelings, Luke.

We've clearly shifted genres for book 7.  The mentor is dead, the 
ambiguous assistant has done something heinous and fled, there are 
mystical items to be found.

Welcome to Epic Fantasy Quest Mode, everyone!

There are any number of holes for ESE!Snape, which will be argued 
over endlessly.  But I like it, for a number of reasons:

It's BANG-y.  Very BANG-y.  And it's appropriately ironic.  We keep 
getting hammered into us "Harry is wrong, Harry's POV is limited".

This makes it much more 'woah' if and when Harry is really, really 
right for once.  Harry's intuitions, not this reliance on other 
people or trust in dry analysis, are going to carry him through.

ESE!Snape also opens up some interesting possibilities for other 
characters.  Especially Peter, who Snape is now treating as poorly or 
more than his friends ever did.  Peter's listening at doors.  Peter 
isn't happy.  And he owes Harry a big one.

It's also very BANG-y in an amusing way to have things hidden in 
plain sight in front of us.  This makes a very clear read of some 
past events.  We have a Snape motivated by duty in book 1, fighting 
the good fight.  But we have a Snape who looks at Dumbledore with 
resentment and tries to pull something off behind his back in book 3, 
for what seem to be overwhelmingly personal reasons.  [And that 'came 
in knowing more curses' is pretty solidly canonical now, nu?  Hard 
also to feel sympathy for someone getting a curse they invented used 
against them--James et al. must have learned the curse itself 
somehow.  Could this tie into the 'gang of Slytherins' and past 
history?  It's the most obvious explanation, that they saw Snape or 
someone else using it and learned it.]

Sometimes, a hedgehog is just a cute but prickly little animal, after 
all.

-Nora notes this is a preliminary rambling mess, and sees all the 
holes in both sides of is he/isn't he, although there are three nice 
options