Why we'll get no further revelations that Snape is Really Evil (even if he i

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 169777

wynnleaf wrote:
<snip> JKR doesn't need to convince Harry, or any other character,
that Snape is a Bad Man, hates Harry, is disloyal to Dumbledore, and EVIL.
> 
> Neri:
> But it appears that she still needs to convince certain readers <g>.

Carol responds:
Very true!
 
Neir: 
> Clarifications of the Snape plot that are directed to the *readers*
rather than to Harry were already included in HBP. For example, Snape
explains in Spinner's End that he was sent by Voldemort himself as a
spy to Dumbledore, thus solving the mystery of why would Voldemort
accept Snape back. Note that Harry wasn't present in Spinner's End,
has never heard this explanation in any other way, and doesn't need to
since he has never wondered why would Voldemort accept Snape back. But
the *readers* obviously wanted and needed to know this, as well as
many other things, so Bella was sent to Snape by the Author with a
detailed laundry list. Since we're still missing a few key items it's
a good bet that we will get a revised laundry list in DH. It may be in
another chapter that isn't from Harry's point-of-view, but this time
featuring Snape with Voldemort himself (I find it telling that Snape
is the only major DE we haven't yet seen together with Voldemort). <snip>

Carol responds:

I agree that "Spinner's End" was for the reader's benefit, but far
from clarifying Snape's motives and answering all out questions, the
chapter merely added to Snape's ambiguity. We see him as he is with
the Death Eaters and we hear the version of events that he prepared
for Voldemort (with one or two additions for Bella's benefit), but all
we really learn is what he wants the DEs and Voldemort to think his
motivations are (the cover story he had prepared before going to
Voldemort at the end of GoF; "If you are ready; if you are
prepared...." "I am," said Snape), not the real or whole truth truth
by any means. We see certain gaps in his story, for example, the
details of Dumbledore's "serious injury" and Snape's own role in
stopping the curse from killing DD and his sending the Order to save
Harry and friends). But there would be no point in a chapter with
Snape telling Voldemort these same half-truths. That happened at the
end of GoF. Anyway, that chapter raised more questions in most
readers' minds than it answered, most notably how much he knew about
Draco's mission and why he took the Unbreakable Vow. the only question
it really answered is how he managed to stay alive--a combination of
being able to "hoodwink" the Dark Lord with his superb Occlumency and
the particular half-truths he tells Bella, which, as he notes, are the
same answers he gave to Voldemort. But Rita Skeeter isn't the only one
who knows how to put a particular slant on the truth or make the facts
appear in a certain light or select the part of the truth that will
persuade or appeal to a particular reader/listener or achieve a
particular goal of the speaker or writer. Snape also uses this tactic
with Draco, telling him about one provision of the Unbreakable Vow but
not the crucial one, or giving the DEs a reason to stop Crucioing
Harry ("He's for the Dark Lord!") which probably isn't his real
reason. (DD, of course, uses the same tactic, for example, the reason
he gives Voldemort for not trying to kill him in the MoM.)

wynnleaf:
> > JKR, in her interview with Emerson and Melissa back in 2005,
commented that Harry's hatred of Snape is now "personal" and that his
greater hatred would be important for when they meet again.  
> 
> Neri:
> I can't remember JKR mentioning Harry's "hatred" in this context.
The theory that Harry's hatred to Snape is going to play the central
role in their next meeting is only a theory. 

Carol:
And yet, what can she mean besides hatred or the desire for revenge?
As Harry puts it, "And if I meet Severus Snape along the way, so much
the better for me, so much the worse for him" (HBP, quoted from
memory). Harry and Snape are clearly going to meet again, and as it
stands now, they'll meet as enemies, at least on Harry's part.
DDM!Snape (or even an OFH!Snape who wants Voldie dead) will have a
hard time aiding Harry (or the Order) under the current circumstances
(unless someone else in the Order knows what Snape promised Dumbledore
and didn't want to do). And Harry has to use some form of Love magic
to defeat LV, which is why he and no one else can kill or destroy
Voldemort, but if he's motivated by hatred and the desire for revenge,
as he clearly is at the end of HBP, that isn't going to work. So, for
his own sake, Harry has to get past his personal grudge against Snape,
not for Snape's sake but for Harry's development as a character and
for the sake of the plot. Or that's how I read "Harry-Snape is now as
personal, if not more so, than Harry-Voldemort." And we know how Harry
feels about Voldemort, from "He killed my parents!" in SS/PS to the
torture scene in the graveyard and the possession in the MoM. Harry's
"personal" feeling toward Voldemort is hatred and a desire for
revenge. As Harry says in HBP, "I'd want him dead, and I'd want to do
it." (I *wish* I knew what DD was up to stirring that desire for
revenge when elsewhere he talks about the power of Love. Snape isn't
the only character I have questions about!) And now "Harry/Snape" is
even more personal. *Of course*, it's about hatred and a desire for
vengeance, at least on Harry's side. Harry isn't saying, "I can hardly
wait to see Snape so I can forgive him."

If Snape and Harry are on the same side, whether because of the life
debt or form some other reason, and if Snape killed Dumbledore because
he had to, because not to do so would have matters even worse, Harry
has to know that. And even if they're not, JKR isn't going to have
Harry committing murder for revenge. What kind of hero would he be,
what kind of example for young readers, if the boy who stopped Lupin
and Black from becoming murderers and acting on their desire for
vengeance against Wormtail became a murderer himself. And did DD stop
Draco from becoming a murderer )or show him that he wasn't one) only
so that Harry, the hero of the story, would become a murderer himself?
I really don't think so. JKR has brought Harry's hatred of Snape to
peak intensity for a reason, and I don't think that reason is to show
us that Snape deserves that hatred and is just a bad guy who should be
AK'd on the spot.

If "Harry/Snape is now as personal, if not more so, than
Harry-Voldemort" doesn't mean that Harry now hates Snape as much or
more than he hates Voldemort because Snape has personally injured him
(Snape's killing DD as opposed to Voldemort's killing the parents
Harry never knew), then what does it mean? What personal feelings does
Harry have for either of them than hatred and the desire for revenge?

Neri:
 
> The way I read the above, when JKR says "it has such a huge impact
on what will happen when they meet again", by "it" she means the
original question "is Snape evil", *not* Harry's feelings about Snape.
You will also notice that JKR is quite aware that HBP launches 10,000
Snape theories, implying she's also aware that DH needs to include the
definitive Snape answers for the *theorists*, not necessarily for Harry. 

Carol:
She's talking about two things here, what will happen when Harry and
Snape meet again and the question of whether Snape is evil, which is
clearly central to the plot and possibly the most important question
that the book will answer. And while that question is important to
readers, and she's carefully concealing it from us in interviews and
building up Snape's ambiguity throughout the whole series, it's also
central to the plot, which centers on Harry, who now thinks that snape
is evil. And what Harry finds out about Snape, before or after their
confrontation, will somehow shape the plot. (Unlike Horcruxes, which
were touched on without elucidation in CoS and only came into the plot
as important elements in HBP, Snape has been important since Book 1,
becoming more mysterious and ambiguous with each book. And in almost
every book, Harry has asked questions about him and received only
partial answers. JKR has Harry ask those questions because she wants
the reader to ask the same questions. We aren't wholly trapped in his
pov ("Spinner's End," for one) and we can, if we're careful readers,
set aside his personal responses and interpretations and look only at
Snape's words and actions, but we're still, even then, seeing him from
the outside, and even when we try to be objective, we still arrive at
different conclusions based in part on our feelings for the characters
and our preconceptions about them. That's what JKR wants from the
reader--10,000 snape theories while we wait in limbo for the last
book. But it's not what she wants for *Harry.* Harry, the protagonist,
must have his questions about Snape answered, probably in ways he
doesn't anticipate (but we readers, being outside the book, may come
closer to guessing). JKR wouldn't have him raise those questions if
she weren't planning to provide the answers. As she told Salman
Rushdie, *everything* depends on whether Snape is good or evil. And
there's no OFH! option that I can see. It comes down to whether he's
good (DDM) or evil (ESE/VDM). (Rushdie: ... So, is Snape good or bad?
(crowd laughs, applauds and screams and Jo chuckles). In our opinion,
everything follows from it. JK Rowling: Well, Salman, your opinion, I
would say is ... right....) But they're talking about the plot of DH
(and the series as a whole) and the relationship between Harry and
snape, not just the readers' expectations.

> Neri:
> The "hatred" to Snape is a secondary issue here, certainly for the
readers if not for Harry. The main issue is that JKR has spent the
entire series building the mystery of Snape's background, motives and
loyalties, and it's now pay time. The readers demand definitive
answers and JKR knows that well. 

Carol:

I can't agree. Harry's hatred for Snape is the protagonist's view of
and reaction to another important character, and since this is Harry's
story, not snape's, it's Harry's view that has to change (or, less
interestingly, be validated). And as the protagonist in a
Bildungsroman, Harry has to mature, to learn valuable lessons about
himself--not that he's a wizard or the chosen One but who he is as a
person, what his strengths and weaknesses are, and, if the themes of
the book are what I think they are, how to show true mercy (different
from sparing Wormtail just to turn him over to the Dementors), how to
forgive those who have trespassed against him. (JKR is a Christian,
after all, and Harry needs to learn and apply the lesson that DD
taught him on the tower.) I don't mean the inhuman multiple-murderer,
sociopath and megalomaniac Voldemort, who has only one-seventh of a
human soul. I mean the very human Snape, who for all his faults has
been protecting Harry in various ways for seven books.

> Neri:
> You seem to assume that the only readers that are really interested
in Snape's motives are DDM!Snapers, and the rest of us don't care
about them and will just be happy to find out that he's generally
Evil. Not so. We too have spent a lot of time analyzing Snape, we too
have contributed our humble share towards of the above 10,000
theories, and we too need our questions answered. Why did he make the
Unbreakable Vow? Why did he save Dumbledore in the beginning of the
year and killed him in its end? Why does it appear that he didn't plan
on killing Dumbledore at that time and was forced to it by Draco's
unexpected action? What exactly was his game as a 
double-triple-quadruple agent during all these years? What was he
trying to achieve during the Occlumency lessons? During the MoM
battle? What are exactly his connections with the Malfoys? Why did he
care about what happen to the Potters so much that he warned Dumbledore?

Carol:

Exactly. She's set up the character and the series in such a way that
those questions will occur to the reader, so that we will wonder about
his loyalties and motives and some of us (not necessarily adult
readers who analyze everything but many child readers, especially the
younger ones who can't recognize subtlety, irony, and inference) will
see him as "evil" for docking points unfairly and subjecting
eleven-year-olds to sarcasm and therefore assume that he must be evil
in other respects as well. But although she cares about her readers
and wants to keep us in suspense as long as possible (I mean, she
doesn't want to spoil the plot for us by giving away any surprises,
particularly about Snape, whose Boggart and Patronus she won't even
reveal), she's writing primarily for herself, and for her as for many
readers, this is Harry's story. And it's Harry's questions, Harry's
relation to Snape, Harry's develop as a character  that matter.
> 
Neri:
> The answer "Snape was just generally Evil" is far from being
sufficient here and JKR knows it.

Carol:
No disagreement there. Both the reader and Harry need to know Snape's
motives and whether or not he's evil, and the details are necessary to
establish his motives and enable both Harry and the reader to
understand him. I know that some readers just want to sweep him under
the rug (and then stomp him into a bloody pulp), but that's not going
to happen. Snape is central to the plot and therefore to Harry; JKR
has made that crystal clear.

Neri:
 It certainly wasn't sufficient that
> Peter or Crouch!Moody were "just generally evil" – JKR still
supplied us with detailed explanations of their characters, motives
and schemes. Naturally this involved some interesting revelations,
like Peter spying for Voldemort for a whole year before GH or Crouch
murdering his own father. Note that at the points when these
revelations were given they didn't move the plot anymore, nor did they
change our opinion that these characters were evil, but JKR still
spent the time on them. <snip>

Carol:
Well, yes and no. Till PoA and even well into that book, Scabbers was
just Ron's pet rat (eaten by the evil Crookshanks in Ron's view, a
nice dark comic parallel to Sirius Black being out to murder Harry)
and Peter Pettigrew was just MPP's inept friend, a little fat boy who
died a hero. JKR has to establish his true character to solve the
mysteries in PoA and set up Wormtail's role in GoF. Barty Jr. is, of
course, disguised as Mad-Eye Moody and for many readers comes across
as a good guy for much of the book (I hated him for his treatment of
Draco and Neville and wondered how he knew so much about the means
used to put Harry's name in the GoF, but I never dreamed that he was
Barty Crouch Jr., whose story has also been introduced and needs to be
explained). The details about Barty Jr. are like the wrap-up of murder
mystery, necessary to resolve the plot of that book but not necessary
to move the series in general forward. (I expect, though, that we'll
find out a bit more about Barty Jr. in connection with the
Longbottoms.) But Snape is another matter. He's been a mystery for six
books now, and he'll have to be "wrapped up" in DH regardless of
whether he's evil or not. But, just as Harry (and many or most
readers) thought that Peter and "Moody" but they turned out to be very
bad guys, I expect that Harry and the readers who agree with him that
Snape is evil will be equally surprised.

There's really no point in concealing information about Snape and his
motives if he's already evil. Harry "knows" that. (And anyone who
wants a red flag to alert them to the presence of the unreliable
narrator, meaning Harry's perception of anyone or anything, not just
of Snape, being wrong, can just watch for the phrase "Harry knew." Or
Harry's promise to himself never to do something again, like his
promise never to interfere in other people's business or spy on anyone
again back in SS/PS. "He would never forgive Snape. Never!" is a
bright red flag of the same sort waved in the reader's face.)

Carol, crossing her fingers that Harry's growth to maturity (and it's
no coincidence that he comes of age in DH) will involve developing the
capacity to understand and forgive an ally who is not a friend