Snape's Redemption WAS Re: Deathly Hallows: My Review (SPOILERS!)

[bluesqueak]

No: HPFGUIDX 172329


> Magpie:
> No flames from me. If you want support, that's what I got out of it 
> too. A very small redemption, one that leaves me looking back on 
> Snape's behavior throughout the books and finding him a lot less of 
> a character than I thought he was. And I thought Snape *was* good. 
I 
> never doubted for a second he was DDM. I had argued with Dana that 
> being a double agent doesn't mean you can't also have had a true 
> epiphany and become a different person. I still believe that's 
> possible, but her description of Snape was the correct one.
> 

Pip!Squeak:
The Prince's Tale Chapter does show Snape's moral redemption; it 
shows it happening slowly, year by year. At the beginning of Snape's 
going over to Dumbledore he's doing it to save Lily. He doesn't care 
if James and Harry get killed.

It's certainly not an instant epiphany on Lily's death. He agrees to 
protect Harry reluctantly, because Lily would have wanted it. When 
the kid turns up he doesn't even like him. And Harry certainly 
doesn't like Snape! And Lily is dead. He can get nothing, *nothing* 
out of this except the satisfaction of doing something that the girl 
he loved would have wanted. He won't get praise from Dumbledore, he 
won't find himself Harry's loved godfather with Harry as a surrogate 
son, he is going to get offed by Voldemort if LV ever finds out.

So for reasons that are originally obsessive love (there are also 
hints in the chapter that he is bitterly remorseful that he got Lily 
killed), he starts to do something where (unlike when asking LV or DD 
to save Lily) he can't expect the slightest reward in this life.

By the end of the Chapter, sixteen? years later, he's described as 
looking horrified at Dumbledore's plan to use Harry as sacrificial 
victim. He says he no longer allows people to die if he *can* save 
them. And later on we find that his cutting off George's ear was 
accidental, he was trying to save Lupin. 

Oh, and when he kills Dumbledore, his expression is 'revulsion and 
hatred' - for what he's got to do?

So the redemption is there. His attitude at Lily's death is one 
thing, by the time of his own death, his attitude has changed, grown, 
developed. He's no longer someone who doesn't care about collateral 
damage, for a start.

Pip!Squeak