Why did Snape _really_ hate Harry?

[Frank D]

No: HPFGUIDX 186894

Explanatory note: The inspiration for this post is an article by
J. Odell, to whom I owe much thanks. The original can be found at
http://www.redhen-publications.com/Loyaulte.html
<http://www.redhen-publications.com/Loyaulte.html>  . I have edited it,
below, with oversight by J. Odell, so that it reflects my own
understanding of the Snape/Harry Potter conflict, with an eye toward
the "son seeking the father" and "usurper/supplanter" themes as
presented in James Joyce's 'Ulysses' and other literature.

After I read the original essay, concerning how, when, and why
Severus Snape became "Dumbledore's Man" and why he so thoroughly and
deeply hated and resented Harry Potter, upon seeing the article's
"bottom line," regarding Snape's resentment of Harry's supplanting
him in the favors of his adoptive-father figure, Dumbledore, I mentally
cried "Bingo!" or words to that effect. Everything fell into place.

I'd appreciate it if the HPfGU list members could consider and discuss
the article's ideas as set forth below.

Frank D


Concerning the Trelawney Prophecy: Although we may be reasonably
confident that we now know the full text and correct wording of that
Prophecy, we surely don't have the full story of what actually happened
at the Hog's Head the night it was delivered. We have two conflicting
versions of the latter; one of those was deliberately incorrect,
and the other was unavoidably incomplete.

Keep in mind the following points:

1. It can't have taken more than a minute to actually make that
Prophecy. It's just not that long. Right from the top, this renders
Dumbledore's statement about interruptions made half-way through it
implausible.

2. Since Book 3 we've all known that Sybill Trelawney has no awareness
of what is going on around her while she is "channeling the Prophecy
demons," only of what was going on before and after.

3. We watched Trelawney actually deliver the Prophecy (from
Dumbledore's memory) in Dumbledore's pensieve. She gave us the whole
thing in one pronouncement. She did not stop in the middle. He did not
tamper with the memory, but extracted it, put it directly into the
pensieve and played it for us.

4. We *only* saw Trelawney delivering the Prophecy. We did not see what
else was going on in the room or hear what was going on outside it.
Dumbledore carefully controlled just what information we were given in
that debriefing.

Question: If Sybill—-who is unaware of her surroundings while in the
grip of a Prophecy—-did not actually see or hear an eavesdropper,
how could she even know that there was one, let alone his identity?

Question: If Snape was discovered halfway through the Prophecy
and thrown from the building, as Dumbledore claims, how would Sybill
have
known he was the person listening at the door?

Question: If Snape was still at the door after the Prophecy was
finished, how can Dumbledore say so confidently that he only heard the
first part of it?

5. Given all of the cloak-and-dagger nonsense over the course of Book5
about that Prophecy record in the Ministry, it is obviously true that
Voldemort was told only the first part of the Prophecy.

6. Sybill reports that there was a "commotion" at the door of the room,
which then flew open to reveal Snape and Aberforth, the barman.

7. Neither apparation nor disapparation has been represented as silent
(not counting the DEs in the Little Hangleton graveyard, who seem to
have mastered the art of doing it silently).

8. We have been told on J.K. Rowling's official website, and seen for
ourselves in the books, that members of the Order of the Phoenix send
messages to one another by means of their Patronuses. Dumbledore
himself taught them this technique. It is a very speedy form of
communication.

Under normal circumstances, Sybill is not as credible a witness as
Dumbledore, but since the whole point of giving us her report on the
events of that evening was to give Harry (and the reader) the
information that Severus Snape was the eavesdropper, it stands to
reason that Sybill must actually have seen him there.

Since Sybill is unaware of what is going on during a prophecy, she has
to have seen him either before she made this Prophecy or afterwards.
>From the report she gives us, she caught sight of him right after she
finished giving the Prophecy.

Consequently, it is obvious that Dumbledore is just not being straight
with us when he claims that the eavesdropper who reported the first
part of the Prophecy to Voldemort was discovered partway through and
was ejected from the building—-and, therefore, had no opportunity to
hear the second half of it. That is the story that Voldemort has
been told; Dumbledore is keeping his stories straight just in case
Voldemort is listening in via Harry. All of which makes Ms. Rowling's
insistence that everything played out exactly as it appears on the
surface without any coordination between the various players, rather
difficult to believe.

And, of course Dumbledore also intended to ever-so-slightly redirect
Harry's attention. There was no purpose to be served by allowing that
particular debriefing session to wander off in pursuit of
the unidentified eavesdropper, after all.

Dumbledore could perhaps have given us a sort-of (but even then not
completely)-plausible story, claiming that the eavesdropper had
heard only the final statement of the Prophecy—-which repeated the
first
part. But he didn't claim that. That wouldn't have matched Snape's
version, which has already been told to Voldemort.

The whole contradiction is there for a reason. It is Ms Rowling's hint
that Dumbledore lies whenever he feels it is justified.

This suggests that "the affair of the interrupted eavesdropper" wasn't
exactly how the incident really happened.

We're stuck with the fact that either it really did happen as Trelawney
tells it, or there is no way that she could have identified the
listener. But, the way that she tells it, if Snape was actually in a
position to hear only one part of the Prophecy, it was probably an
undetermined portion of the last part. However, judging from all of his
subsequent actions, Voldemort clearly only knew about the
information that was presented in the FIRST part.

It now becomes unavoidable that Dumbledore either allowed the first
part of the Prophecy to escape, or he deliberately turned it loose.In
other words, he wanted Voldemort to learn about the first part of the
Prophecy.

Why not the whole thing? The next part of the Prophecy includes a
couple of rather serious cautions, such as marking "The One" as his
equal. Voldemort very likely would not want to take the risk of doing
something like that if he knew about it in advance. Dumbledore couldn't
be sure, so he didn't take the risk of letting Voldemort know about
that part of the pronouncement. He made sure that the second part was
carefully edited out of whatever Voldemort was told.

Which brings us back to Snape, who was at the door of the room at the
end of the Prophecy, and is the Death Eater who told Voldemort only the
first part of it. Snape could only have done that on Dumbledore's
behalf. Otherwise, why did both Dumbledore and Aberforth, who had him
in custody, let him get away without just obliviating those few moments
of the evening's events from his memory, in keeping with established
Ministry policy regarding prophecies? We know that Dumbledore will
permit memory modifications to be performed if it suits him. He allowed
it for Marietta Edgecombe with far less provocation.

Let's take a look at the "Severus Snape, reformed Death Eater" reading.
The official version, which so far as Ms Rowling has ever established,
supposes that Dumbledore, up in his ivory tower, was unaware of the
developing Snape/Lily/James triangle at the time the werewolf caper
("The Prank") took place, and did not follow through on the incident to
the point of being filled in on it until years afterwards. Slughorn,
who was on the front lines in the classroom, and watched it play out
under his own nose, unable to do a thing about it, seems to have
found it painful enough that he never spoke of it to anyone.

So from Dumbledore's vantage point:

1. Severus Snape, to all outside appearances, is a thoroughly nasty
young piece of work.

2. He is, in the main, an intelligent and fundamentally realistic nasty
young piece of work.

3. Ultimately, even thoroughly nasty pieces of work have to answer to
their own consciences.

This young man also has a history. Dumbledore has unfinished business
pertaining to him. The mess concerning the Shrieking Shack ("The
Prank") does not appear to have been resolved to anyone's real
satisfaction, and Snape is now in debt to an enemy (James), which
cannot sit well with him. And he may very well feel that Dumbledore
owes him something over that business, too.

4. When given a choice, a Slytherin will usually choose to save disown
skin. Offering amnesty to one mean-spirited young wizard—so longs he
is willing to give up any current illegal activities—is a very small
price to pay for the possible removal of the former Tom Riddle.

5. Severus Snape wants a job? Give him one.

The big question for us is whether Dumbledore gave him that particular
job by mutual agreement or just let him go to make his report to
Voldemort as an unwitting tool. The Dumbledore who was revealed over
the course of DHs would have been perfectly capable of such an action.

At the end of Book 6, we were faced with the following possibilities:
Perhaps Snape was already on his road to Damascus when he followed
Dumbledore into the Hog's Head that evening. Conversely, maybe
Snape didn't "go to Dumbledore" at all. Maybe it was Dumbledore who
recruited Snape.

Maybe that whole tale of Snape's apparent remorse and Dumbledore's
grand forgiveness when Snape went to work at Hogwarts (which is the
tale that they were both telling) is just one that was originally
cooked up between the two of them as a cover to be fed back to the
DEs, or to anyone else who asked questions.

So, with this "official" version as a jumping-off place: at the
presumed date of the Trelawney Prophecy (which can now be pinpointed to
the week following Halloween, 1979), Severus Snape, then 19 years
of age, would have been inside the DE organization for something over a
year. Long enough for him to have begun to be a little disenchanted;
for rivalries to have become a bit bitter; for him to have been handed
a few stinging disappointments; for him to begin noticing things, and
to begin to ask himself a few questions. He is not a trusting soul.He
does not subscribe to the Blacks' and the Malfoys' built-in assurance
that "of course" nobody could possibly renege on a promise to him. And
he's bright enough to recognize the truth when it's pointed out to
him (except from Harry or Sirius Black).

If Snape had joined up in good faith, he might have been all in favor
of overthrowing the Ministry or subverting some of its policies. But it
was the Ministry that was responsible for maintaining wizarding Secrecy,
which every wizarding-raised child—-and Snape was wizarding-raised;
even
if his family home was in a Muggle town, his mother's family were still
wizards—-had been brought up to regard as his only hope of
continuing
personal safety, and Voldemort had no particular interest in doing
anything about that. In fact, given the direction of the activities
that Voldemort was now proposing, it was only a matter of time before
wizarding seclusion would be impossible to maintain!

Young Snape was more than bright enough to realize that without the
protection that their secluded world gave them, wizards haven't much
chance of surviving as a culture, or indeed, as anything but fugitives,
and you don't get a lot of chance to set up a potions lab and study
arcane branches of magic when you are in hiding and may have to run for
your life at any minute. (The irony is that the whole wizarding world
is already effectively cowering in hiding.)

Even assuming that Snape was on nobody's side but his own, he might
have weighed his options and contacted Dumbledore, whose track record
of taking in waifs, strays, and general outsiders who were in a
position to make themselves useful, as well as his status as the
uncrowned king of wizarding Britain, offered the best chance for Snape
to enlist him as middleman for cutting a deal with the Ministry. All at
the very reasonable price of admitting that Dumbledore was right about
the Dark Lord.

Ergo: Snape was one of Dumbledore's White Hats.

Well, duh. We already know that, now. But I am suggesting that he could
very well have been so then. How can we tell? Consider.

1. What was Snape doing at the Hog's Head that night in the first
place? Voldemort would have hardly assigned one random 19-year-old DE
to follow Dumbledore around whenever he left the Castle, just on
speculation. Nor is the information that there was a Divination
instructor candidate (Trelawney) staying at the Hog's Head—-by that
time
a regular Death Eater hangout—-likely to have interested him
overmuch,
even if he did believe in prophecies. Particularly not if he had any
kind of information on who the candidate was. It was believed by just
about everyone that Trelawney was a charlatan. So why was Snape there
at all? Had he just stepped in for a drink? Had he already arranged to
meet someone else? Why was he there? It's a question that Ms. Rowling
has determinedly ignored.

2. How likely is it that Dumbledore would have tried to, let alone been
able to, successfully recruit Snape on the spot after being caught
eavesdropping, that very night? We know that he must have recruited
Snape at some point, but could Dumbledore really, plausibly have
recruited him that very night? Recruiting Snape, on the spot, on the
strength of his eavesdropping on the prophecy, is extremely unlikely.
Snape is not a trusting soul and he does not change his views easily.
It would have worked only if Snape had come to speak to Dumbledore
about changing sides in the first place. (We don't know that this was
the case. There is nothing to hang that possibility on. But we cannot
ignore it.)

We know that Snape did report only the first half of the Prophecy,
despite his having apparently been in position to have heard the whole
thing, which makes the following possibility unavoidable:

Snape was already "Dumbledore's man" by the time the Prophecy was made.
The report to Lord Voldemort was made at Dumbledore's direction.
Dumbledore lied about the circumstances under which the thing was
supposedly overheard from that time until the night he died.

So why would Dumbledore lie to keep Voldemort (or Harry) from figuring
out that Snape could have heard the second part of the Prophecy as well
as the first part, unless it really, really, mattered?

Is it possible that Snape wasn't anywhere near the Hog's Head that
night, or not until Dumbledore summoned him? We know that members of
the Order of the Phoenix communicate by means of their individual,
unique Patronuses. Dumbledore devised this form of communication. By
the end of Book 6 we had twice seen Order members send such messengers.
Even just the sight of such a messenger would be enough to convey the
fact that so-and-so wants you—now!

That's how it worked when Dumbledore summoned Hagrid in Book 4. That
was how it was supposed to work when Tonks summoned Hagrid in Book 6.
(On that occasion, however, Snape showed up instead, claiming to have
been deputized to substitute. Hagrid was probably still occupied
escorting the new batch of Firsties across the lake). Neither of them
apparated in response to the summons, but at Hogwarts you can't do that
(and Hagrid cannot do that anyway).

But we get no indication that Dumbledore devised this method of
communication just for the Order. Most likely he had been using it
decades earlier.

So, even though it couldn't have taken more than a minute for Trelawney
to deliver the Prophecy, that was just about enough time for Dumbledore
to have fired off a Patronus—-which he would have done as soon as he
realized that this was the genuine article, and that it concerned Lord
Voldemort (which is in the very first phrase of the thing).

Wherever Snape may have been that night (apparently not in the company
of other DEs), having Dumbledore's Phoenix Patronus flash in his face
would have had him apparating to wherever Dumbledore was on the double.
(It isn't just Lord Voldemort who can call his followers to him on
the instant.) The whole thing might have taken no more than the minute
it took Trelawney to deliver the thing.

Dumbledore would have wanted to summon his trusted operative inside the
DE organization as soon as humanly possible. If he was going to
make any kind of use of this development, there was no time to waste.
The report, if they were going to make such a report, had to be made by
the following morning or even sooner. If it was to be believed, they
had to act immediately, especially if Voldemort, another untrusting
fellow, decides to double-check that report.

Sybill Trelawney is a barfly. Dumbledore recognizes the signs. There
will be witnesses as to when she arrived at the Hog's Head, and since
Dumbledore cannot in good conscience let her wander around loose now
that she's channeling messages from "the Prophecy demons," she is
soon going to be celebrating her new job in the taproom downstairs.

The Hog's Head has been a Death Eater dive since before there
officially were Death Eaters. Dumbledore has no control over who might
be loitering about to tell tales. So he'll give them all one to fix the
incident in their minds.

So, Dumbledore summoned both Snape and Aberforth in response to this
new development. Trelawney came out of her trance just after Snape
apparated outside the room, too late to hear what the noise (of
apparation) actually was and to identify it, but quickly enough to
register that there had been a noise at the door.

Snape after apparating either into the hallway or, just possibly, in
the street below and pounding up the stairs to answer the summons, not
knowing that Trelawney was there, threw open the door. Aberforth, who
had also been summoned, was right behind him.

Once Snape and Aberforth threw the door open and saw Trelawney they
backpedaled; Snape with his "likely tale" of coming up the wrong
staircase and Aberforth, improvising, taking Snape by the scruff of the
neck and hauling him away. Anyone who chose to investigate Snape's
report would have learned that Snape had indeed been publicly ejected
from the building "the evening Dumbledore had come to interview the new
Divination instructor up at the school."

After tossing Snape out the front door Aberforth went around and let
him in the back, and once Dumbledore extracted himself from
Trelawney and joined them in the kitchen or Aberforth's private
quarters, they burned the midnight oil discussing what they were going
to do about this opportunity.

If Dumbledore had already made his decision of what to do about it,he
gave Snape his instructions, and after Snape left to make his report
to Voldemort, discussed what he was going to do to limit the damage
with Aberforth.

At this point, of course, none of them had any clue or concern as to
who was going to be put at risk. They were all still dealing with
hypothetical people in mind. Indeed, Dumbledore may have already
been convinced he knew who the Prophecy referred to and that it was not
a child. Until, that is, it finally sank in to him that Voldemort would
believe it concerned a child. And it was Voldemort's interpretation of
the thing that mattered.

If the Prophecy was made, as suggested, within a few days after
Halloween, 1979, right around the time of the foretold child's
conception, even the Longbottoms and Potters were as yet unaware of the
existence of their children.

Turning loose that Prophecy was one of the "hugest" mistakes that
Dumbledore ever made. It locked him into a course of action that was
totally out of character, and put him at cross-purposes with
himself. Believing that most Prophecies are rubbish anyway, he may have
been attempting to goad Voldemort (who he knows believes in them) into
an unwise action and that the matter could be handled before any child
it foretold was actually born. He should have known better.

But then, Dumbledore also acknowledges that he never studied
Divination. He claims that prophecies are virtually always a snare and
a delusion. But he seems to have overlooked the fact that if you mess
with them, they tend to play out as stated. It is clear that on this
matter he was not dealing in one of his many areas of expertise.

The gamble seems (in the end) to have paid off, but the price was much
too high. And Dumbledore trapped himself every bit as surely as he
trapped Voldemort.

Still, that Prophecy must have looked like the most promising
breakthrough in the whole ongoing, ever-escalating 20-plus-year battle
against Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Particularly since by '79
Dumbledore may have had an extremely uncomfortable idea of the kind of
thing he was up against. There are likely to be few magical processes
which could account for the alteration in Tom Riddle's physical
appearance, and if Dumbledore knows enough about Horcruxes to see the
whole subject banned from the school more than a dozen years before he
became Headmaster—-as Slughorn tells us—-then he knows as much
about them
as Tom Riddle does, and he'd had plenty of time to figure it out by
then. But there were other dividends to be paid by setting loose that
Prophecy, and he took the risk.

In the first place, this development offered some hope for the
wizarding world that there really might be an end in sight. Second,it
could be used as bait to tempt Voldemort into the kind of reckless or
ill-considered action that would bring him down. And, third, it could
be used to get Dumbledore's agent higher up the DE hierarchy and into
Voldemort's favor. It's not that surprising that he did choose to
deploy it, despite the fact that he must have known that tangling with
a Prophecy almost invariably brings the meddler to ruin.

Dumbledore (or at any rate, the Dumbledore we thought we knew), now
being thoroughly at cross-purposes with himself, also immediately
started working against the Prophecy, by trying to limit the damage
to innocent bystanders and to keep Voldemort away from the foretold
child for as long as possible. He did this first by attempting to
discover the targeted family's identity and to offer them at least
some degree of protection. It was probably to this end that he founded
the Order of the Phoenix, most likely over the following month or two.
But in its original iteration, the Order did not concern Snape, and he
had no contact with it during the course of VoldWar I.

(Ms Rowling insists that the Order of the Phoenix was up and running by
the time James Potter and his cohort started their final year at
Hogwarts, despite the fact that she can point to no function that it
served which was not already covered by the Ministry. Indeed it appears
to have existed only for the sake of symmetry with the DEs, and to
provide Dumbledore with information, personnel, services and
resources that the Ministry might have balked at turning over to him.)

In the scenario above, Snape was already Dumbledore's man before the
Order of the Phoenix was founded. His first known action on
Dumbledore's behalf was to report the first part, and ONLY the first
part, of the Trelawney Prophecy to Voldemort, at some point around
Halloween, 1979, when he was just 19 years old.

Some additional support for this reading is provided in the Spinner's
End chapter of Book 6. Despite the web of truths, half-truths,
innuendos and outright lies that Snape weaves for the edification of
the Black sisters, Snape was just a tad indiscreet in his rush to score
off Bellatrix when he points out that in contrast to her useless
gesture of putting herself into Azkaban for over a dozen years, he had
kept to his assigned post, as ordered, and that by delaying a mere two
hours in responding to the summons was able to give Voldemort sixteen
years worth of information on Dumbledore's actions. In Book 4, Voldemort
had just returned from an absence of almost fourteen years. Even in the
summer of `96 when this statement was actually made, at Spinner's End,
Voldemort's first defeat had only been fifteen years earlier.

So what event took place sixteen years—-or thereabouts—-before
Voldemort's return at the end of Book 4? Trelawney had made her first
Prophecy. And apparently Snape either had some Voldemort-approved
reason for observing Dumbledore for two years before he started
teaching (in which case, why hadn't he reported these findings at the
time?), or—more likely—Snape claimed to have discovered
retroactive
information concerning Dumbledore's activities that had taken place
before he took up his post at Hogwarts in September of 1981. In
either case we have Snape in association with Dumbledore for nearly two
years before he replaced Horace Slughorn as Potions master of Hogwarts.

It is also hard to believe that Snape could have won Dumbledore's
iron-clad trust on the strength of no more than the eight weeks he is
known to have taught after he first took up that post, in the last
days before Voldemort's first defeat. But throughout Book 6, both he
and Snape are holding to the same cover story; that upon taking up his
post at Hogwarts, Snape confessed reporting the partial Prophecy to the
Dark Lord, expressing his deepest remorse at putting the Potters at
such risk, thereby earning Dumbledore's magnanimous forgiveness and
undying trust. Hmm? In two words: Not likely!

Now, Snape certainly does appear to have had Dumbledore's undying
trust, and there is the strong likelihood that he did indeed feel
regret and remorse, perhaps very deeply, over discovering that he
had endangered the Potters, remorse that was probably only matched, and
perhaps surpassed, by Dumbledore's own. Putting faces on hypothetical
people is apt to be a very painful business, regardless of how noble
your intentions are, or however great the "greater good" over which you
have endangered them may turn out to be. In addition, just because
Snape loathed James Potter, it doesn't necessarily follow that he
wanted him dead. (And until Book 7 we still hadn't been given any real
hint as to what he thought of Lily.)

The likelihood is that Snape was already on "our side" before the
Potters were endangered and before he discovered that it was even about
the Potters. Or the Longbottoms — who, at that point may have
mattered to Dumbledore a good deal more than the Potters did.

It is not hard to see that Dumbledore just didn't quite think that
Harry had the maturity to be trusted with the whole story. Harry
already had enough on his plate and, had events not overtaken them
all, Harry might have been filled in eventually. The fact that it
wasn't just Snape, but Dumbledore too who endangered Harry's parents
was likely to come as a nasty shock. And of the two, Dumbledore
bears the greater responsibility. He could have certainly
obliviated those few moments from Snape's memory before having
Aberforth throw him out.

When did Severus Snape became "Dumbledore's man"? An alliance between
Snape and Dumbledore had been forged by Halloween, 1979. That much is
plain. Snape had finished school in June of 1978. It isn't difficult to
come up with a variety of plausible reasons for him to turn his coat
during that interval. It originally didn't seem out of reason
to suppose that something about the Regulus/Kreacher affair may have
supplied the final straw to prompt Snape into reconsidering his
options. But, no. Voldemort most likely didn't hide the Locket Horcrux
until after hearing there was a Prophecy about his downfall. Indeed, he
was probably hiding it because there was a Prophecy about his downfall.

We know of no point during the stretch of time between the date at
which Snape finished Hogwarts and the evening that Trelawney spouted
her Prophecy, that Snape and Dumbledore were known to have even met.
But we do know that at least one conversation/confrontation must
have taken place between them before that blank stretch. Regarding the
werewolf caper; ("The Prank"), all Sirius Black was able to say about
the aftermath of that incident was that Snape had been forbidden to
speak of what he had seen. Sirius couldn't have been present at that
interview. Dumbledore would have made sure to speak to each of the
involved parties separately. And an offer of amnesty and/or escape
(a la Draco on the Tower) to a surly 16-year-old who is on the wrong
path would at one time have seemed absolutely in character
for Dumbledore.

Dumbledore is not excessively squeamish about entrusting the young to
dangerous paths in dangerous times, particularly the young whose paths
have already been chosen for them, such as Harry and Draco. Or those
who seem likely to be put in a position where to refuse an offered
path could be even more dangerous than to accept it. This was probably
the case with Severus Snape. The boy was very much at risk of being put
to use by the enemy, willing or not.

Dumbledore wasn't completely isolated in his ivory tower office. He
could hardly have missed the fact that there had been an ongoing war
between this one Slytherin boy and that little gaggle of Gryffindors in
the same year since they all arrived at the school together. And yet
the Slytherin, however awkward, and unpopular, and clearly a fledgling
Dark wizard to boot, was not a gratuitous troublemaker.

Indeed most of the boy's problems seem to have stemmed from having
allowed himself to be taken up by a dangerous crowd in his first year.
Even though most of that particular crowd appeared to have dropped him
by the end of it. Dumbledore was probably well aware of this because he
had his own reasons to keep an eye on that particular crowd. This boy
didn't appear to have made any attempt to keep up the association with
the leaders of that circle since that time. Although he did form
an association with another, not significantly better clique by the
following Autumn. Most of this second group had also now passed out of
the school, although this boy was still tagging along after the last of
them. But he is clever, he was once willing to be useful to his
housemates, and in another couple of years he will be out of Hogwarts,
and his former housemates may not have forgotten him. And Dumbledore
has grave suspicions of where their loyalties will lie.

While Draco's opportunity to make his own choices got derailed by the
unwanted intrusion of a trio of enemies and a werewolf, it is doubtful
that the opportunity for Snape's decision was similarly aborted. Young
Snape was almost certainly on a crash course to soon receive an offer
that he may not be able to refuse, even if—-after having been taken
up
and then summarily dropped by those particular ex-housemates—-such
an
offer wasn't what he now wanted. What did he want? Dumbledore intended
to find out. The possibility that the werewolf caper was Snape's
"turning point" ratchets up considerably when factoring in Phineas
Nigellus's snide little endorsement of Dumbledore's trust in Snape,
which he injected into one of the private lessons with Harry in
Book 6.

And if this is so, we can now finally conclude that the biggest
reason that Snape so hated Harry—-and he did sincerely hate
Harry—-had
very little to do with James, much as Snape honestly loathed James.
Harry had taken his place. James never really mattered to anyone,
not the way Harry did, certainly not to anyone in charge. But,by his
very existence, Harry Potter, "The Boy Who Lived," had effortlessly
supplanted Severus Snape as Dumbledore's most valued young
protégé.
Sibling rivalry appears to have been the factor that warped Sirius
Black's life out of shape. It seems that something very much in the
same style may have been riding Severus Snape as well. Dumbledore
probably never realized it. Snape was a superb occlumens, after all.
He would have gladly let Dumbledore continue to believe that it was
all about James. Or at a last resort, that it was about Lily. But it
wasn't. It really was all about Harry, especially by the end.




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