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

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 143050

> > Julie:
> > *Yawn* As you feel about Joseph Campbell constructs, I feel about 
> > idiot adults in children's stories. 

Lupinlore:
> You must have been yawning quite a lot through the last six books, 
> then.  A bigger bunch of incompetents, idiots, blind fools, and 
> magical morons has never been assembled than the adults in the Potter 
> books.

Pippin:
Trouble is, Harry is going to be one of those adults for most of the next
book, unless it all takes place in the few weeks before Harry's next birthday.
The stage is set for Harry to have a sped-up version of an experience like 
the one related by Mark Twain, about the youngster who left home at eighteen 
and returned at twenty-one. It was amazing how much his old man had 
learned in three years. <g>

In other words,  when Harry himself has to make adult choices, he may find 
that the vision, freedom and power he thought he would
enjoy as an adult are more limited than he ever imagined, and that much 
of what he thought was incompetence and even malice will turn out to have 
been people doing the best they could in some pretty ugly circumstances.  

We had some foreshadowing of this when Harry tried to write that letter
to Sirius in OOP and discovered  he'd been expecting rather a lot 
of Ron and Hermione.

This is a series in which childhood, but especially perpetual childhood, is
not seen as an admirable state. We see over and over again that childish
judgement is by definition poor.   I would not expect Harry's childish 
judgement of Snape to be validated.

Lupinlore:
   In order to accomplish this, I think it means that pretty 
much all of the clues to Snape have to mean something.  Unlike a 
murder mystery, I don't think you can afford red herrings that lead 
nowhere.

Pippin:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. In a "fair" murder mystery, red
herrings *must* lead somewhere, ie, they must be explained. JKR
has gone out of her way to establish that she is abiding by this
convention, even going so far as to correct her readers offpage when
their speculations go haring off spurred by something she
didn't mean to suggest; that Mark Evans is an important character,
for example.

If each action of Snape is sincerely meant, and marks a twist in his path,
then there is no blanket explanation for them and  JKR  will either have to 
revisit each one to tell us what Snape was doing and why, or leave us in 
the dark. While some readers might enjoy a Snape debate that went on
for ever, that would leave Snape as the books' most intriguing character.
It is Harry who is supposed to be interesting.

 Evil!Snape or DDM!Snape is a lot simpler and covered by the explanation
we've already been given: Snape is a good actor and whenever he needs
to, he can pretend. 

Pippin