Power vs. Trust (was:The Possibilities of Grey Snape...)

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 143021

Lupinlore:

> On the contrary, the whole DDM! argument, as far as I can see, rests 
> primarily on the idea that Dumbledore just CAN'T be wrong to have 
> trusted Snape.  I really don't understand it, myself, but a lot of 
> people seem to have a gut reaction to the idea of the old boy just 
> not being in the right where Severus is concerned.


Magpie:

It's not that Dumbledore can't be wrong--there could be plenty of 
things Dumbledore didn't know or understand about Snape.  I assume 
there are, in fact.  Snape could definitely have changed sides again 
without Dumbledore's knowing.  But should he be so wrong he's just a 
plot device? Throughout the series the fact that Snape *seems* bad 
comes up all the time, and every time it's asked we're told that 
there's some reason Dumbledore trusts him.  So he can certainly have 
been wrong not to trust him in the end, but surely he has to have had 
some reason we can follow and not just because being the "epitome of 
goodness" requires you to be supremely gullible about people.  It 
makes it seem like Dumbledore trusted Snape just so that he could be 
betrayed by him so that Rowling could have Snape at the school.  (And 
as Sydney correctly pointed out, the scene in the Tower is designed so 
that we don't see a moment where Dumbledore realizes he's been 
wrong.)  Yet HBP still has Harry asking why he should trust Snape and 
Dumbledore hesitating and then not giving him the actual information.  
It seems to me that whatever the deal with Snape, the reason *why* 
Dumbledore trusted him has to mean something.


I mean, here's the thing with this idea for me:

Nora:

There's one area where Harry has definitely been the underdog: being
right about things. This is the card currently being played (and
played hard) as to why Snape is actually good and Dumbledore should
be trusted about him: since when has Harry actually been right about
*anything*?

Magpie:

Harry's right a lot.  Each book ends with Harry triumphant in some 
way.  Plots often revolve around nobody believing him: he knew he 
wasn't the Heir of Slytherin, he knew he didn't put his name in the 
Goblet, he knew Voldemort was back in OotP.  In fact, book V seemed to 
make a big case for people needing to believe Voldemort was back 
because Harry said so.  Second hand trust was pretty important in the 
DA. All the people who challenged Harry to prove himself were punished 
in some way--Zacharias Smith, in HBP, turns out to be rememberd 
as "that idiot from the DA" for this.

Harry isn't Sherlock Holmes and he never solves the mystery himself, 
but then, neither does anyone so it's not like Harry's constantly 
frustrated at his wrong guesses and shown up by other people.  All of 
Harry's friends believed Snape was guilty in PS--and Harry was correct 
about thinking Snape had something personal against him.  Nobody knew 
it was Ginny in CoS.  Everyone thought Sirius was guilty in PoA.  
Nobody knew Moody was Crouch in GoF.  Hermione does sometimes figure 
things out--Rita being an animagus, Lupin being a werewolf, she had 
figured out it was a basilisk before she was petrified (but can't tell 
Harry, so it's up to him and Ron to figure it out for themselves) she 
suggested the MoM was a trap in OotP.  But I don't think it's that big 
of a deal in the story that Harry gets surprised at the end of every 
book. I would suspect plenty of fans are used to thinking Harry is 
right.  In HBP Draco was openly the villain-Harry, Hermione, Ron and 
Dumbledore all knew he was up to something.  Draco still did do his 
usual thing in HBP in that he was guilty, but slightly more innocent 
than Harry thought he was.  Harry and Dumbledore are both right about 
Draco in different ways.

With Snape, it's not like Harry has had a thought-out theory about 
Snape being a triple agent throughout the series and nobody believed 
him, he just hates Snape because Snape loathes him and likes to see 
him suffer.  (It's not even Harry who first suspects Snape is 
intentionally opening his mind to Voldemort during his Occlumency 
lessons--it's Ron.) The events of HBP didn't change anything about the 
Harry/Snape relationship at all.  Harry's hated him and it's been 
personal between them before HBP even started. Maybe Harry hates him 
more now, but for all Harry's great power being love, Harry's been 
running on hate for a while now.  Snape being guilty seems like it 
would be more of a relief to Harry, than a victory in line with people 
believing Voldemort had returned.  It's not like Snape turning out to 
be evil changes the fact that he wasn't stealing the PS and wasn't 
hexing Harry's broom, or wasn't the villain in any of the other books.

Dumbledore's being wrong about Snape just doesn't seem to have 
anything to do with Harry for me.  Dumbledore's not the main 
character, I'm not privvy to the Dumbledore/Snape relationship.  I 
don't know just how much of a blow it would be to Dumbledore to find 
out Snape betrayed him (and I didn't see it be a blow to him in the 
Tower scene).  I never knew why he trusted him or how much. Harry 
never trusted Snape on Dumbledore's word, so if that was the danger, 
he dodged a bullet there.  Good thing Harry never did that thing it 
would have been bad of him to do.  Ironically, it makes it a good 
thing that Dumbledore finally kicked it since Harry is finally rid of 
his interference.  Here for six books Harry's been all, "Snape hates 
me, I tell you!" and Dumbledore's said, "Yes, he does hate you. But 
he's not a Death Eater, which I know for reasons I won't tell you."  A 
totally artificial obstacle has been removed and we can get smiting.

Now, of course the book's told us flat-out that Snape is a traitor and 
a bad guy who played Dumbledore for a fool all these years.  It tells 
us in chapter 2, then shows us in the Tower.  So it's not like that's 
not a possibility that Snape is just a bad guy.  The real story about 
Snape turns out to have happened offstage between him and Dumbledore.  
In chapter two of the sixth book of a seven book series we're just 
told okay, here's the real deal with Snape, so think of him this way 
from now on.  It won't be a surprise for you when he kills Dumbledore, 
because here he is swearing to do so.  It seems to come down to 
whether the tension about trusting Snape was an important part of the 
story or just a distraction to keep Harry busy until he got out of 
school.  And maybe that's what he is, and he's just Pettigrew or 
Voldemort Jr., but my instincts at the end of Book VI were that that 
wasn't the solution.  Not because I think Snape's the big hero or I 
don't think he killed Dumbledore, it just seemed like the book was 
signalling me that way.


Jen Reese:

So HBP broke with tradition. Harry should have learned about part of
the UV as he did, misintepreted it, and Snape should have been
proven right once again by the end of the book. "Of course he didn't
take a UV, it just looked like it! He did take the UV but only to
help Draco!" But nooooooo, JKR wanted to torture us by putting a
chapter in that we the readers are aware of and the characters in
the room, but not establishing whether anyone else is aware of the
events.

Magpie:

Broke with tradition...or just played a variation on it?  Book VI 
seemed to me like it was, as JKR has described it, a set up for Book 
VII.  This is the first half of the final story, and in the middle of 
the story Harry usually is mistaken as to what is going on.  HBP 
resolved the Draco story, but possibly not the Snape story.  And the 
Draco story (although it left him, too, at a place where he's poised 
to tip in one of many potential directions--we have to see which way 
he'll fall), for all the ways HBP's plot was different, it still 
followed the pattern set out for Draco earlier, and seemed to me to 
support the wisdom of Dumbledore's pov. 

Also, and this may be a big flaw of HBP, but I don't really get what 
the other characters know and what they don't.  Some people think 
Snape didn't know what he was vowing to do in chapter two, others 
think Dumbledore didn't know what Snape had vowed to do either.  The 
way I read it, Snape intentionally vowed to do Draco's task, which was 
kill Dumbledore, and Dumbledore knew that he had made this vow.  Harry 
overheard something about this vow and told Dumbledore and Dumbledore 
already knew about it.  Though Dumbledore *could* have not known about 
that third provision.  We don't know.  I assumed he did, others 
didn't.  So it's not like tension comes from us knowing something the 
characters don't, because they all seem to quite possibly know as much 
as we do. Perhaps an editor should have made sure in the end we all 
knew what everyone knew when.

-m