Snape and the DADA Job

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 157778

"zeroirregardless" wrote:
>   Maybe he doesn't want it, but Voldemort ordered him to try to get
> it. Voldemort could presumably lift the curse -- or at least tell
> Snape that he would. Having a DE as DADA teacher would have several
benefits for Voldemort. Snape could leave out crucial spells, making
the students easy prey. (Snape teaches a defense against Dementors
that Harry considers much inferior to the Patronus charm.  Since the
Dementors have gone over to Voldemort, advantage Voldemort. Except
that Dumbledore's Army learned the Patronus charm from "Patronus
Potter" himself....)
>     Snape would be in good position to identify those students with
> strong DADA aptitude. He could keep them from becoming Aurors by
> giving them bad grades and weak recommendations, or try to recruit
> them to the DEs. Those who responded positively to his "I [heart]
the Dark Arts" lecture would be likely candidates.
>     Of course, Snape could want the job, and Voldemort could want
him to take it. Snape doesn't seem like someone who has that kind
> of luck, though.

Carol responds:
I take it you haven't been converted to the DDM!Snape camp?

It's entirely possible that Voldemort still wants Snape to take the
DADA job, but possibly not for the reasons you suggested. Since he
already has someone assigned to the task of killing Dumbledore, that
doesn't seem to be the reason--except for Snape's suspicion that "he
intends for me to do it in the end, I think." Maybe he just wants
Snape to perform his "useful role as spy" a little longer. (With
Dumbledore dead, he'll no longer be needed, at least at Hogwarts,
assuming that Hogwarts is even open, so why not take a cursed post?)
Or maybe Voldemort wants the DADA curse to serve his purposes by
working on its own, as indeed it does, with Snape losing his job under
the worst possible circumstances.

Dumbledore, of course, has his own set of reasons for hiring Snape,
ranging from Snape's deep knowledge of the Dark Arts to his desire to
hire Slughorn as Potions Master. Dumbledore has put off hiring Snape
for as long as possible, almost certainly knowing that the curse would
reveal him as an apparently loyal DE at the very least. Whether or not
Dumbledore suspects that his own time is limited, as his behavior
throughout HBP suggests, he knows that if he hires Snape for the DADA
post, it will be *his* last year, and he's waited until the last
possible moment to do it, when he needs to send Snape into deep cover,
but also needs Snape's expertise at healing Dark Curses, as opposed to
the potion-making skills he's needed in previous years. (There's more
to the DADA position than teaching classes, as Lockhart found out to
his cost, and it wouldn't do to have the Potions Master handling
cursed necklaces and similar incidents. That Dumbledore is worried
about such items being smuggled in, even before the Katie Bell
incident, is shown by the increased security relating to communication
and Hogsmeade outings.)

But all that aside, Dumbledore knows, and Snape himself knows, that
Snape is a DADA expert (unless we count a supposed flub relating to
minor Dark Creatures, not his area of expertise). Far from teaching
the Slytherin students Dark spells or preventing the Gryffindors from
learning effective defenses, Snape starts by showing them exactly what
Dark Curses and major Dark creatures or beings like Inferi and
Dementors can do to you (without actually casting Unforgiveable Curses
on them as his predecessor Crouch!Moody did). He follows up with
making them learn to cast defensive spells nonverbally, which will
give them a split-second advantage over opponents who don't happen to
know Legilimency. And his alternate method for handling Dementors,
which Harry argues against in his essay, may very well prove more than
useful for those students who haven't yet learned to cast a
Patronus--or even those from the DA, who've learned to cast them in
the safe environment of the RoR but have never faced so much as a
Boggart!Dementor and might have great difficulty conjuring up the
happy memory required to cast the spell when faced with a Dementor
determined to suck out not their happiness but possibly their soul as
well. (Harry didn't master the spell against a Dementor Boggart; he
was still casting silver mist when he first tried to fight the
Dementors on the lake. His quick mastery of the spell is movie
contamination.)

Snape undoubtedly knew about the curse on the DADA position, and he
may have routinely applied for it every year to keep up the pretense
of loyalty to LV (who originally sent him to apply for the position,
not knowing that he was already spying for DD "at great personal
risk"), and there's no reason to suppose that he really wanted that
cursed position--not when, as he tells Bellatrix, he a "comfortable
job" at Hogwarts in the uncursed Potions position. Nevertheless, I get
the feeling that he views most if not all the DADA teachers with a
touch of resentment and either contempt or suspicion, depending on the
teacher. I suspect that he thinks (rightly) that he could do a better
job than most of them and he doesn't mind nudging them toward their
inevitable exposure (Lockhart and Lupin) or working actively to expose
them (Quirrell and Crouch!Moody) or subtly undermining them
(Umbridge). So when he gets the position in HBP, he has the
satisfaction of knowing that he's the best-qualified candidate in many
years (even if he weren't the only one left) mixed with the bitter
knowledge that it will be his last year at Hogwarts and the possible
realization that he has doomed himself with that accursed Unbreakable Vow.

Carol, just presenting one DDM!Snaper's perspective without presuming
to speak for anyone else