High Noon for OFH!Snape

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 149498

Alla wrote:
<snip>
> What I never understood is why the message that Dumbledore's trust 
> COULD be mistaken (and if I may we saw it so many times in the 
> books already IMO), somehow is SO terrible and so much worse for the 
> kids than sending a message that killing is Okay, as long as it is 
> you know for the good cause. <snip>

Carol responds:
But isn't that exactly the message she *seems* to be sending by having
Dumbledore tell Harry that he'll have to kill Voldemort or be killed
by him (OoP) and agreeing that Harry has "got to try and kill
[Voldemort] not because of the Prophecy but because of what Voldemort
did to his parents (HBP Am. ed. 511)? "He will continue to hunt you,"
adds Dumbledore, which makes it really certain that--" "That one of us
is going to end up killing the other," responds Harry (512). So JKR
*does* seem to be sending a message that "killing is okay as long as
it's for a good cause." 

I'm not thrilled that DD seems to be appealing here to Harry's desire
for vengeance, which doesn't fit well with the idea that Harry's
weapon is Love, and I would find it very disturbing if Harry used an
Unforgiveable Curse to kill Voldemort since we've seen what using the
weapons of the enemy did to Barty Crouch Sr. Even if Harry could
summon up the "will and nerve" (Snape's phrase) to cast an
Unforgiveable, and even if the killing didn't qualify as murder and
didn't split his soul, it would still, IMO, cause him great
psychological trauma. Killing, says DD, is much more difficult than
the innocent suppose, and we know that in RL, soldiers return from war
with scarred psyches. So I hope that Harry finds a way, perhaps
through the power of possession, to destroy Voldemort totally and
permanently without killing him.

But nevertheless, regardless of what I want to happen, it looks as if
Dumbledore is asking Harry to take upon himself the burden of killing
for the common good. That being the case, it's not impossible that he
would have placed a similar burden on Severus Snape, whom Dumbledore
canonically states that he trusts completely.

Carol, who does want DD's trust in Snape to be justified but is not
arguing that at the moment