The Fundamental Message.../ Heroes...

[Zara]

No: HPFGUIDX 176306

> Betsy Hp:
> The reason I bring this up is that this is how, pre-DH, I saw the 
> relationship between Dumbledore and Snape.  That Dumbledore got to 
> know Snape well enough (his driving principles, etc.), that he 
> trusted him in the truest sense of the word.  Instead, it seems 
that 
> Dumbledore trusted Snape's demons.  Which is not that same thing, 
IMO.

zgirnius:
Your mileage obviously varies. What I saw in DH was Snape's driving 
principles forming/changing in front of Dumbledore's eyes over the 
course of sixteen years. When he pointed out the exact appearance of 
Lily Evans's eyes and Harry's possession of those same eyes to Snape, 
he was absolutely using on Snape's demons to manipulate him into the 
desired course of action. When he admitted to Snape during HBP that 
he had been deceived for fifteen years, and assigned him the task of 
telling Harry he must die, he was relying on Snape's principles.

> Betsy Hp:
> She has a boy unthinkingly head off to his death because 
> his leader told him to.  

zgirnius:
If you mean Harry, and "The Forest Again", that is not what happens 
in the book. If you mean somewhere/someplace else, Harry in "The 
Forest Again" would have to be my counterargument, as being a far 
more important scene/character/moment in the book than whatever one 
you have in mind.

Harry takes the information he has learned from Snape as a personal 
betrayal. He does not act out of loyalty to Dumbledore - he has no 
more at that point. Albus does not merit resurrection with Harry's 
loved ones. So why does Harry do it? To save lives, and because it 
makes sense, as Harry figures out for himself in the following 
excerpt from that chapter:

> DH, "The Forest Again":
> Now he saw that his life span had been determined by how long it
took to eliminate all the Horcruxes. Dumbledore had passed the job of
destroying them to him, and obediently he had continued to chip away
at the bonds tying not only Voldemort, but himself, to life! How
neat, how elegant, not to waste any more lives, but to give the
dangerous task to the boy who had already been marked for slaughter,
and whose death would not be a calamity, but another blow against
Voldemort.

> And Dumbledore had known that Harry would not duck out, that he
would keep going to the end, because he had taken the trouble to get
to know him, hadn't he? Dumbledore knew, as Voldemort knew, that
Harry wouldn't let anyone else die for him now that he had discovered
it was in his power to stop it.

> Betsy Hp:
> He also failed to pull Draco out from under Voldemort's sway (a 
place 
> we see Draco didn't like being from the 1st chapter of DH) despite 
> the fact that his parents seemed unhappy as well.  Instead, despite 
> all of Dumbledore's pretty words on the Tower, Draco was kept 
frozen 
> in place. 

zgirnius:
Draco was lost to Voldemort on the Tower, if not earlier. Yes, he 
went back to Voldemort, that is, to his home, in which his parents 
were virtual prisoners. Yes, he tortured on Voldemort's orders (since 
his only other option would appear to have been to suffer the fate of 
his victims, or watch his parents suffer it). No, he did not join 
Neville in the DA (but again, unlike Augusta Longbottom, the senior 
Malfoys were firmly in Voldemort's hands). The choices he made when 
not under immediate threat - he did not acquire Crabbe and Goyle's 
reputations at Hogwarts, he did not recognize Ron and Hermione when 
they were captured, he tried to talk Crabbe into less violent 
pursuits and out of killing Harry in the RoR, and he tried to save 
the life of Goyle when his own was at risk.

> BetsyHP:
> Instead Snape remained under Dumbledore's boot, being dictated to 
by 
> a portrait (much as Harry remained a loyal follower than a leader 
in 
> his own right, thoughtlessly dependent on luck and unquestioningly 
> following Dumbledore's orders), filled with a sense of self-
loathing 
> that I think reflected on his own house. 

zgirnius:
We do not have the benefit of having Snape's thought processes 
spelled out for us as we do Harry's, but I think you are no more 
correct about him than you are about Harry. And I think one place 
this shows is at precisely the same sticking point as for Harry. 
Snape objects to the idea of sacrificing Harry in order to achieve 
the defeat of Voldmeort.

While the conversation, unseen at the time by us, occured in late 
March of the school year in which HBP is set, we are shown it in 
DH, "The Prince's Tale". Dumbledore tells Snape the big secret he has 
been keeping all these years - Harry has the soul bit in him and must 
permit himself to be killed by Voldemort before Voldemort can be 
defeated, and Snape is to tell Harry this as the right time. 

Snape expresses his horror at the plan, characterizes it as a 
betrayal of his trust, and makes a principled objection to it. He 
also does not agree to the plan, an omission I think is highlighted 
by the pattern throughout the DD/Snape scenes of Snape agreeing to 
various other, less problematic, proposals of Dumbledore.

We don't even know when, finally, Snape decides to go along with this 
portion of Dumbledore's plans. If his decision not to go back on his 
agreement to kill Dumbledore at the end of HBP means that he decided 
to go ahead with all of it, Dumbledore felt he needed to beg Snape to 
do it at the end of that book. If it happened even later - well, it 
certainly indicates he was not being dictated to by a portrtait or 
its flesh-and-blood predecessor.