The impact of SWM (very long)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 189924

 
> Bart:

>      Let's take a look at SWM. Consider his use of the term, "Mudblood" 
> for Lily. Now, as half-Muggle himself, one can be reasonably certain 
> that "Mudblood" is NOT a term he grew up with.

Pippin:
I wouldn't be sure of that at all. Young Snape  was part of the magical world and like it or not "mudblood" is a part of it. Eileen Prince Snape may have used it just as casually as Phineas Nigellus did. As June has pointed out, it didn't apply to her son. He was a halfblood and would be seen as owing his magical powers to his pureblood ancestry, not like one of those muggleborn "freaks".

Bart:
" If the attacks were two-way,  that would explain the other students' relative lack of concern over  Snape's predicament."

Pippin:
Is that how we are going to explain everyone's lack of concern over Harry's predicament at his Muggle school? No, I am afraid they just did not want to see a scruffy, sarcastic, unpopular weirdo as someone  like themselves, thank you very much.

Bart: 
>      In order for Snape to draw upon it in anger, he must have been 
> using it on a sufficiently regular basis that, when his angry brain 
> searched for an appropriate response, that was the word that came up.

Pippin:
Now here I can disagree from personal experience. A boy I knew as a child had a little sister who was retarded (that's what we called it then). We were not supposed to use that word in her hearing under any circumstances and we didn't.  We didn't use it much at all in any case. Only once,  I was so mad at my supposed friend (who was my friend only when the neighborhood bully wasn't around) that I screamed, in the little girl's presence, "YOUR SISTER'S RETARDED!" I knew it was wrong when I did it, I knew I would get in trouble, I knew it was unfair and I was so angry that I didn't care. I just wanted to say the worst thing I could think of, and it had been specially impressed on me not to use that word. 

 Bart: 
>As  we find out in the final book, the problem wasn't his humiliation by 
> James; it was that, when it came down to it, he reflexively chose the 
> DE's and rejected Lily. 

Pippin:
IIRC, Snape was trying to apologize and Lily slammed the door on him.  Snape wasn't the only one who was being reflexive. She may have been right that there was something seriously wrong with Snape if he couldn't see that Avery was a bad person to be hanging around with. But it's a design flaw in the whole human race -- Harry didn't want to hear a word against his friends, even when one of them was abusing a House Elf on a daily basis. 

Bart:
>      JKR does not write in "omniscient reader mode". We have to deal 
> with the limited information we have. But I find it hard to believe 
> that, especially considering DD's attitude towards Snape as revealed in 
> Snape's final account, Snape was the simple victim of bullying; DD would 
> have had a lot more sympathy towards him if he had.
> 
Pippin:
I did not say that DE Snape was the simple victim of bullying. But I think that's what he was in SWM. Lupin and Sirius can't find anything worse to say about him than that he was this weird kid who knew a lot about the Dark Arts. If he'd been a nasty child, they would have said so.

 A manipulative genius like Voldemort can take  disaffected aggressive people like Snape and weld them into Death Eaters. They fall apart at once without him. That isn't to say that there's nothing they could have done to avoid being manipulated by him. But if you think of the Slytherins as bad through and through and solely responsible for Voldemort's rise, you're missing JKR's point, IMO.

Pippin