Did you LIKE Snape?

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 183134

Mike:
> We've had a recent thread that mourns the passing of Snape. I 
don't, 
> but that led to this query. In the interest of full disclosure, I 
am 
> a Marauder fan and Sirius Black is my favorite character. So I am 
> naturally biased towards despising one Severus Snape. OK, now on to 
> the show. ;-)

Magpie:
It's funny...I'm a Marauder fan too and I love Sirius (though at 
least twice I've been accused of hating the guy--I was even once 
asked if he "killed my puppy" or something, this after I thought I 
was being affectionate towards him!), but I like Snape too. There's 
few people in canon that I really dislike--though there are things I 
dislike about a lot of them.

Now, whether I'd be friends with Snape, like him as a person? That's 
a different story. I think I would find him amusing a lot of the 
time. He is smart and can be snarky in ways that are funny. However, 
he's also really embarassing when he's bad. I mean, attacking Harry 
the way he did? That's just squirmingly bad. It's hard to have 
respect. Granted, the same thing is sometimes true about the 
Marauders and others so it's not just Snape. They were just as bad 
picking on him to be cruel.

In the end I felt DH really diminished him as a character because I 
was expecting something more interesting. A lot of things I thought 
would be resolved turned out not to need resolving because the 
question was simple: How could Snape protect Harry and hate him and 
James? He loved Lily. Meanwhile the guy had been given many chances 
to actually redeem himself--and by that I don't just mean do the 
right thing and make up for his mistake (which he did) but turn 
around and become a better person, and he rejected them in favor of 
staying in the same place he was when he was 12. I think he got a raw 
deal from Dumbledore too, but you can see why he'd be able to be 
played that way. He could have had more.

I don't think you'd get much out of liking him except in a casual way 
because he was determined that nobody else was Lily. That's one of 
the sad things about the story for me. I feel sorry for the way he 
created so much of his own misery, but I don't identify with him, 
exactly. Well, I do in certain instances but not in the way some 
readers do, where Snape is more of a tragic hero. I can empathize 
with him in what are for him the worst moments--I understand why he 
called Lily a Mudblood (though it's still a bigoted comment--I don't 
agree with his just being angry making it not bigotry), I understand 
why he joined the DEs. I liked him a lot when I thought there was 
more of a transformation. I suspect if I knew him in real life I 
might still like him--he's very talented, he can be very funny, he 
was a bad ass spy and very competent and he was no longer a believer 
in Voldemort's policies so there's a lot to like there. But 
unfortunately he has to compete with the guy I thought he was for the 
first six books and he can't.

-m