Eeevil!Snape was Snape in Shrieking Shack

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 142277

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "phoenixgod2000" <jmrazo at h...> wrote:
=
> Harry is pretty darn sure that Snape is Eeeevvvillll too. We are all 
> pretty sure about out interpretation of the greasy git. That's part of 
> reason I haven't been posting anything lately. I just don't have that 
> much to say anymore. The story keeps narrowing and all the fun stuff I 
> like to argue about (Snape being a good/bad teacher, the lack of merits 
> to Ginny W., Dumbledore doing right by Harry) just don't matter 
> anymore. 

Pippin:
That's the best argument I've heard against Eeevil!Snape. It takes all the mystery JKR has 
built up around this 'gift of a character' and  collapses it like a house of cards. If Snape is 
evil then it really doesn't matter why he hates Harry so much, why Dumbledore thought his 
remorse was genuine, why he joined the DE's in the first place.  Eeevil!Snape could still be 
redeemed of course, but how and why he went wrong isn't important for that. Harry 
doesn't need to know, because evil in these kinds of stories isn't individual. It takes 
advantage of individual weaknesses but it's like a virus -- once it gets  through your 
defenses, it shuts down what you were and makes you into a copy of itself.


But if Snape isn't a murderer, then he's something much more interesting -- an anti-hero 
whose personal behavior is somewhere between reprehensible and atrocious, depending 
on how sentimental you are about the kiddies, but who has done more than any other 
adult with the exception of Dumbledore to stand between those children and a destroyer 
who would doom them to a world of slavery, torture and premature death, not so that he 
can be a hero, but  so that they can grow up and can take on Voldemort themselves.

Pippin