Snape Reduced LONG(was: Re: Villain!Dumbledore...

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 177876

> Betsy Hp:
> Lily spends a lot of time chastising Snape.  And he spends a lot of 
> time trying to get her attention.

Pippin:
Once she finds out he can tell her about the WW, she spends a lot of 
time pleading for information and reassurance. And at Hogwarts she 
apparently benefitted from his potions genius, studying, like Harry, 
from an advanced text. It's clear that the HPB book was not her
handwriting, which Harry recognized instantly as being like his own,
not the HBP's.

Betsy Hp:
 I was also incredibly unimpressed that 
> Lily blamed Snape for the two of them reading Petunia's letter.  

Pippin:
"Lily gave herself away by half glancing towards where Snape stood,
nearby."  --DH ch 33

She didn't mean to expose Snape. But she hadn't got his aptitude
for sneakery. She was hardly a saint,  being so taken with James.
She also gets along famously with Slughorn and seems to have liked
the old devil, not to mention hitting it off with Sirius once he'd stopped
hexing people for fun.

> Betsy Hp:
> I did find that weird yes.  Though, I'm sure Dumbledore helped Snape 
> into his hair-shirt every morning. <g>

Pippin:
Now this is just plain contradicted by canon. Dumbledore didn't
even know that Snape was still mourning Lily.  He was shocked.
"After all this time?" – DH ch 33

> > >>Pippin:
> > <snip>
> > So what does it have to do with the Slytherin dynamic?
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> To me, everything.  From the age of eleven certain children are told 
> they're bad and disgusting. 

Pippin:
Where in canon does any adult tell  Slytherin children that they're
bad and disgusting? The Hat worries that it does wrong by Sorting 
the children, but look at it this way: if some people really are innately 
bad, then mingling those children with the other Houses won't help. 
They will still find their real friends and form a subculture of their 
own. OTOH, if Slytherin is a culture, and discrimination against 
them is ethnic and not based on anything innate, then abolishing 
Slytherin would be ethnic cleansing. 

It's not as if they're doing something illegal. And it's not as if
the Slytherins and their families aren't fond of dear old Slytherin.
Slughorn isn't the least bit ashamed of his House.
Phineas has himself painted in his House colors. The Blacks have
serpent motifs everywhere, and Regulus had Slytherin banners
proudly  displayed. 

Personally, I don't think Slytherins are innately bad. Their
talent for deception is misunderstood, IMO, like Parseltongue, as
the mark of a bad wizard. But the WW survives on deception,
and as Dumbledore says of the cloak, the important thing is that
you use it to protect others, not just yourself.

Their culture does not offer them much moral guidance, unlike
the Hufflepuffs who are taught to value loyalty, and the Gryffindors
who are taught to value chivalry. So their values will be the ones
they bring with them, and those aren't always good. 

In DH we see that Gryffindors have some hair shirts of their
own. Dumbledore has lived a life of secret shame, having to stand 
for goodness when he wonders if he's really any better than Voldemort. 
His introspection stands for Harry's, (it may *be* Harry's if King's  Cross 
is a hallucination)  and is far more effective since his lifetime was 
much longer and his reputation for goodness much greater.

DH  reminds me of a Heinlein book where some Fred and
George-ish characters nearly get somebody killed through 
their carelessness. Their dad is about to punish them (with a belt,
no less) but then changes his mind.

They'll have to live with their mistake, he tells them.
That's what adults have to do.

There's no one to take responsibility for the adult Trio,
to punish them or grant them forgiveness. They have
to live with what they did. We don't see their  guilt just as we 
didn't see Dumbledore's. But it's still there, IMO.

*My* Harry will bear forever the guilt of not having tried
to save Snape, and is now dedicated, like Dumbledore, to
trying to see the good in people. But he's not going to
publicly flagellate himself just to give people like Rita
Skeeter a thrill. 

 I'm reading that into the text. But it's a fairy tale.
That's what you're supposed to do. It makes more sense
than having to read  the humanity of one quarter of  wizard
kind *out* of the story after JKR went to such lengths to
put it there.

It's a style of story-telling reminiscent of the Book of Genesis, IMO,
where we're seldom told what the characters are thinking, and parallel 
story lines are not made explicit, yet for thousands of years people 
have connected emotionally with the characters and found the
parallels themselves.

> > >>Pippin:
> > The expectation that Draco would morph into a hero can
> > not have been based on canon, IMO... <snip>
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> I agree.  Which is why this wasn't an expectation of mine. <eg>  I 
> just expected a moment of positive action.

Pippin:
He does take action, refusing to recognize Ron and Hermione,  and 
staying behind with Crabbe and Goyle, refusing to let them injure
Harry and helping to rescue Goyle. 
 
> > >>Betsy Hp:
> > > <snip>
> > > And why are we supposed to think Snape is worried about the      
> > > Malfoys?  Is there anything in DH to suggest it?
> Betsy Hp:
> They all *hint* to something that I expected to see expressed in DH.  
> But we got nothing.  Which means I can only conclude that those hints 
> were meaningless.  Spice for the broth, but no meat.

Pippin:
What we got in DH was confirmation that the relationship existed.
Lucius patted Snape on the back to welcome him to Slytherin.
But Snape couldn't help the Malfoys any more than he could help Charity
Burbage. Still, *somebody* made sure Voldemort didn't find out that
Dumbledore had lost his wand to Draco before Snape got there. The
Carrows knew that Dumbledore was defenseless. But somehow 
Voldie never found out. Hmmmm....

> 
> Betsy Hp:
> How is Snape's death scene more fully realized than Sirius's, Dobby's 
> or Dumbledore's?  

Pippin:
Snape's death is the only one that Harry knowingly witnesses 
from beginning to end, and the only one he might  perhaps have
prevented, if he'd intervened before Voldemort had struck. 
He loses Sirius behind the veil before Sirius himself even realizes 
what's happening, he does not see the knife strike Dobby, and 
does not admit to himself that Dumbledore has died until a good  
half an hour after the fall from the tower.

> 
> Betsy Hp:
That an idiot like Voldemort could so easly throw both Snape and 
Dumbledore for a  loop, causing students to be injured or killed 
under their watch,  doesn't impress me much.  I wasn't looking for 
perfection.  I was  looking for effort.

Pippin:
What student was killed under Snape or Dumbledore's watch? 
As far as I know, no student was ever killed while at Hogwarts except
Moaning Myrtle, and Dumbledore was not headmaster then.
Sure Voldemort was a maniac and made some strategic blunders. 
That doesn't mean that it was easy to thwart him.  Complaining 
that some students suffered sounds to me like complaining that 
Oskar Schindler didn't save enough Jews. Compared to who?

Betsy Hp> 
> What can say is that, for me, even the characters I found most 
> interesting in the beginning, became rather pathetic and small in the 
> end.  Which is not how I like to end a reading.  But there you are.
> 

Pippin:
What I see is that they became more realistic in the end. Less 
legendary, less powerful, but more poignant and more relevant 
to real life, where social problems that have lasted for centuries 
do not disappear because they have come to the attention of a 
few idealistic  teenagers who are shocked (shocked!) to discover 
that people are being exploited.

Pippin