Snape's Psychology: WAS: More thoughts on the Elder Wand subplot - Owner?

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187533

Carol earlier:
> > But I wouldn't call LV's agreeing to spare Lily "altruistic." Generous, maybe, for Voldemort--he's "giving" Lily to Snape as a  reward to the young DE for providing him with what appears to be  extremely valuable information, and LV and the DEs (even quasi-DE  Snape) are always mouthing that phrase about rewarding some loyal DE "above all others." He's probably relieved that Snape asks so little. Why not let the "Mud-Blood" girl live if Snape wants her? It's her son that he wants dead.
> 
Jen responded: 
<snip>
> Another minor point about Voldemort: I doubt he felt relief Snape asked for so little.  That isn't part of his psychological make-up. If a follower dares ask for something, he or she should be grateful to be alive after the asking.  

Carol again:

That idea that he would reward a particular DE or DEs above all others, repeated by Snape and Narcissa in "Spinner's End" and Barty Jr. in GoF, appears to come from Voldemort himself. He says it in the graveyard, a scene at which none of those three is present, which suggests that he's said it before. It seems to be almost a catchphrase, thoroughly familiar to all of them. (IIRC, Bella also says it at her sentencing, indicating that it goes back to VW1.) If LV didn't reward his supporters on occasion (and I'm not talking about double-edged swords like the silver hand), that idea would have died out. (He certainly seems to reward them with positions of leadership and rank (Snape earns the symbolic "privilege" of sitting at his right hand, which I suspect Lucius Malfoy had before the MoM fiasco. It certainly appears that Snape was allowed to choose his own reward after "murdering" Dumbledore--becoming headmaster of Hogwarts. So I suspect--and admittedly I'm only guessing--that he was asked, perhaps belatedly, to name his own reward for revealing the Prophecy. Maybe he deferred for a time, but came back later and asked for Lily (ostensibly as a prize; really, to save her life) when he found that LV interpreted the Prophecy to mean that Harry Potter was "the one with the power." It makes more sense to me that Snape would have asked it as a reward than as a favor. Or perhaps, having delivered the Prophecy brought him into the "inner circle" where he was in a position to belatedly request the favor/reward at some point when LV was in what passed for a generous mood. Obviously, Snape didn't trust him to keep his word or he wouldn't have gone to Dumbledore, but he must have known that he could make the request in the first place without being killed for doing so. It makes more sense, however, that LV would *offer* him a reward. Why else would he have attempted three times to keep his promise, giving Lily three chances to "step aside"? As I said, it was no skin off his nose, and it would have made Snape happy. (It would, in fact, have enabled LV to kill Harry with no cost to himself because  there would have been no self-sacrifice to bring about the ancient love magic, keeping LV in power and keeping Snape as a loyal DE, but, of course, neither of them had any way of knowing that.)

Carol, not sure that JKR actually thought out those details