Fanon Vs Canon: Snape Edition
Snape delayed warning Sirius about the incident at the Ministry in order to put him in danger.
I've seen people seriously argue this as a canon fact and a reason for believing that Snape is eeeevil. In fact in the books Dumbledore states categorically that Snape contacted Sirius "at once" after leaving Umbridge's office, to make sure he was safely at Grimmauld Place. When Harry failed to return from the Forbidden Forest with Umbridge, Snape contacted Grimmauld Place again, where several Order members had gathered for some kind of meeting and Dumbledore was expected imminently. He warned them that Harry and co. might have gone to the Ministry, and asked Sirius to remain behind to brief Dumbledore, but Sirius declined to do so.
There is actually a gap of two or three hours somewhere during that evening, because Rowling has got the sunset happening two or three hours earlier than would be the case in the Highlands in June. But it's clear from what she has Dumbledore say that she doesn't mean there to be a gap in Snape's behaviour, and absolutely unequivocal that he warned Sirius the first time as soon as he left Umbridge's office.
Snape knowingly endangered a baby when he relayed the prophecy, and other prophecy-related issues.
This is one of the most common Snater argument and I liked this analysis. It completely makes sense that half heard prophecy doesn't explicitly mention a baby.
Snape is unreasonably obsessed with his boyhood quarrel with the Marauders.
This is another one which is so deeply established in fanfic that it tends to be believed even by people who like Snape, although they view his supposed obsession with sympathy. It came about in part because initially many people took Dumbledore at face value, and didn't realise that some of what he said might be intentionally misleading.
In the first book, Dumbledore suggests that Snape is still strongly motivated by his grudge against James, and that this is the reason for his hostility to Harry - but this forms part of a conversation in which Dumbledore is, at the very least, being "economical with the truth". Whilst Dumbledore probably won't tell an outright lie there's no doubt that he lies by omission and distortion, and no doubt that JK Rowling intends this to be the case - because she quotes Dumbledore's little speech about the truth being "a beautiful and terrible thing" which should be "treated with great caution" in Beedle the Bard, with reference to an essay written by a Dumbledore who is using misdirection to give the impression that he isn't one of the people who believes that the Deathly Hallows are real - written while he had one of them in his possession, could lay his hands on the second one at any time and was hot on the trail of the third.
So, dislike of James is probably a factor in Snape's dislike of Harry, but we've no firm evidence that it's a major factor. There are plenty of other reasons for Harry to not be his favourite student.
The fact that Snape is wary of Remus from the moment he is appointed could be a sign that he bears an old grudge against him; but it's not unreasonable, since he knows that at school Remus did little or nothing to stop his friends' rule-breaking, even though he was a prefect. This is bound to lead Snape to think that Remus can't be trusted to put his duty to the school ahead of his own interests - and Snape is right, he can't. Remus deliberately withholds information which could have been vital for Harry's survival, just to save face. Even Sirius, one of his best friends, distrusted Remus so much that he thought he might be Voldemort's spy in the Order - or to put it another way, at twenty-one Sirius trusted Remus less than he trusted Peter Pettigrew, so it's hardly remarkable if Snape doesn't trust him either. And the fact that when Snape brings Remus his Wolfsbane he backs out of the room, not taking his eyes of him, strongly indicates that Snape is still very afraid of Remus, which isn't going to help matters.
At school, as far as Snape knows Remus did absolutely nothing to prevent his friends from bullying Snape (in fact he did occasionally make some effort to make them feel bad about it, but it's unlikely Snape knows that), even when he was a prefect and it was his job to keep order. Now, as an adult, Remus lies to Snape about The Marauder's Map - and Snape, the Legilimens, probably knows he's lying. Worse, Remus is lying to him in the context of whether or not Harry has been wandering around Hogsmeade unsupervised, at a time when they all believe that a mass-murderer is stalking him - which must make Snape wonder whether Remus is setting Harry up to be killed. Snape probably does suspect Harry has an Invisibility Cloak, since Draco saw Harry's head apparently floating in mid air, but he doesn't know it's a special one so good that Harry is in little danger while he wears it.
Whether or not Remus is conspiring with Sirius to murder Harry, Snape can see Remus repeating the pattern where he sides with rule-breaking students even when it's his job to uphold the school rules, so he can see that as far as working with him goes, Remus is not on his side. In his campaign to maintain order and keep the students from taking stupid risks, he will see Remus as an obstacle, not a colleague.
[Actually, to do him credit Remus does make some attempt to head Harry off from taking stupid risks, and is more successful at this than either Snape or McGonagall because he knows how to use emotional blackmail - but Snape doesn't know this.]
Remus compounds this impression by encouraging Neville to transform the Snape-Boggart into Snape in ridiculous women's clothes, making him a laughing-stock and bringing up memories of when he was a child so poor and neglected that he was jeered at for wearing his mother's old blouse. Remus could have encouraged Neville to defuse the Boggart in a less damaging way, by making it e.g. Snape picking his nose, but instead he held what was meant to be his colleague, his working partner, up to ridicule in the most extreme way. Again, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation this is a clear indication to Snape that Remus is not a trustworthy colleague, and not on his side, and doesn't have any respect for him, so Snape has every present-day reason to distrust him.
Then, Snape sees Remus talking to Harry in the DADA classroom, and the same night Sirius comes into the school and slashes the Fat Lady. Obviously Snape is going to suspect that Remus is in cahoots with Sirius and is setting Harry up to be killed. But he doesn't know for sure, so he doesn't out Remus - he just makes sure that Harry's class are forewarned on how to spot a werewolf, in case his suspicions are correct and Remus attacks Harry. He doesn't out Remus as a werewolf until after he learns that Remus has suppressed information which as far as he knew at the time could have meant the difference between life and death for Harry, and he knows Remus has failed to take his Wolfsbane, and has then walked out under a full moon along with three children (one of them lame), a bound prisoner and an unconscious colleague, endangering the whole party, despite having been reminded that he hadn't taken his Wolfsbane and shouldn't go outside unless he was bound first. By this point Snape has every reason to think that Remus is a significant danger to the students - and he's right.
Against this, Rowling herself has said that Snape outed Remus because of "resentment". As with her flatly untrue statement that Harry never refuses to help somebody who is in pain, this is probably a case where she has forgotten what she wrote, and secondary canon has to be ignored because it clashes with primary canon. We can see, right there, that Remus has proved himself to be a danger to the students, so it would have been a dereliction of duty for Snape not to out him.
The only way this comment about resentment makes sense is if Snape knew that Remus was leaving at the end of the year anyway, so that outing him wasn't necessary to student safety because he wasn't going to be spending another full moon at the school. Remus resigns after realising that he had come close to biting students, so as far as he knows his leaving is very sudden - but if Dumbledore has any care for him at all, he must have planned to get rid of him anyway, at least from the DADA post, so as not to activate the curse. If Snape acted out of resentnent, knowing Remus was leaving anyway, presumably that means Dumbledore discussed getting rid of Remus with him, and Snape knew Remus would be leaving before Remus did.
In the Shack, Snape has just heard Remus telling Harry that the cause of the enmity between Snape and James was that Snape was jealous of James's popularity and sporting prowess, which we know is a lie because Rowling has said the cause was James's jealousy of Snape's friendship with Lily, and because we see James give Snape every reason to dislike him from the outset, by launching an unprovoked verbal attack on him on the train. Even if he was wrong about Remus being in league with a mass murderer, Snape knows for a certain fact that Remus is a liar who takes the easiest course, shirks his duty and takes extreme risks with student safety, and who seems to have zero respect for him, Snape.
We don't know whether Snape ever finds out exactly what happened in the Shrieking Shack after he was knocked out, but if he does then he knows that Remus left him lying unconscious on the floor, bleeding from a scalp wound and so still and pale that Harry wondered if he was dead. Remus probably knew he wasn't dead, if only because he was still bleeding, but medically any period of unconsciousness caused by head-trauma and lasting longer than ten minutes is considered to be life-threatening and to require hospital treatment, and yet Remus didn't put him into the recovery position and didn't even bother to check his pulse for fifteen or twenty minutes. He then handed him over to the care of Sirius, who hates Snape, has just boasted that he deserved to be fed to a werewolf, and is twelve years out of practice at using a wand, with the result that Sirius allows Snape's head to bang against the ceiling several more times. This was immensely dangerous, as a second blow following soon after being knocked unconscious is very often instantly fatal (called Second Impact Syndrome). If Snape does know this he knows neither man has any care for his safety, yet he will later have to work with them in a situation (the Order) where his life is constantly on the line.
As for Sirius, Snape initially believes - just like everybody else including Sirius's dear friends Remus and Hagrid - that Sirius is a fanatical Death Eater who betrayed the Potters to their deaths, murdered his friend Peter and twelve Muggles in a single terrorist attack, and has come to Hogwarts to finish the job by killing Harry. There is no reason to think that he knew that it was really Peter who was the Death Eater spy until Dumbledore told him. He does not hear the details which show that Peter was the guilty party - he arrives in the Shack too late to hear the bit of conversation about Peter being a rat Animagus and being Scabbers, and is knocked out before Peter transforms and confesses. Nothing he has heard, therefore, provides him with any reason why Sirius would have broken into Harry's dormitory with a big knife, other than to kill Harry, so of course he remains convinced of Sirius's guilt.
What he does hear is Sirius, whom he hasn't seen for at least twelve years, still boasting about his attempt on his, Snape's life and saying that he had deserved it. This is before there has been any present-day interaction between them, at all. It is Sirius, not Snape, who is carrying a deranged and pointless grudge left over from their schooldays: Snape's grudge against Sirius at this point is the true fact that Sirius is still gloating over an ancient historic grudge against him, and the mistaken belief that Sirius is a mass murderer who betrayed Lily and is planning to kill Harry.
His lack of sympathy for Sirius's starved and traumatized condition, his eagerness to send him and Remus back to the Dementors, seems horrible to us because we know Sirius was innocent. But Snape is only expressing the same hatred Harry himself had felt half an hour earlier, before he heard the full story Snape has not heard. As far as Snape knows, Sirius and Remus are there to kill Harry, and the fact that Sirius has broken Ron's leg only reinforces his belief. As far as he knows, the fact that Sirius has chosen to starve in the Forbidden Forest instead of making a new, comfortable life somewhere else is proof of his fanatical desire to get at Harry in order to serve the Dark Lord.
Nor is this unrealistic: he's just wrong about who Voldemort's agent is. The following year Barty Crouch Jnr comes to Hogwarts precisely to do what Snape fears Sirius is doing. Snape's wanting to bind Remus with ropes and then "drag the werewolf" was also perfectly sensible, and if Remus had been thinking straight and behaving responsibly he would have asked to be bound: unbound, he was a danger to everyone else in the party, including a child with a broken leg, who couldn't run. And Snape has every reason at this point to think Remus doesn't have the children's best interests at heart, because he has heard enough of the conversation to know that Sirius is an Animagus, and he knows Remus knew this but didn't warn the school, potentially endangering Harry. Of course he will assume Remus is in cahoots with Sirius to harm Harry.
I've seen somebody argue that Snape should have known Sirius wasn't there to kill Harry, because if he was, why hadn't he already done so? But the Shack must be warded against Apparition, otherwise it could be used as a back door into Hogwarts, and we see from the fact that false!Moody wasn't able to whisk Harry away except by corrupting the destination of the Tri-Wizard Cup (which was evidently always meant to be a Portkey, since it eventually transported Harry to a point in front of the judges' table) that unauthorized Portkeys are blocked at Hogwarts as well. So if Sirius was there to take Harry to Voldemort - as false!Moody would be less than three months later - he would have to win Harry over and get him to return to the Hogwarts grounds with him, and then walk past the Dementors and out of the gate with the big doggie to a point from which Sirius could Apparate or Portkey him away.
A couple of hours later Snape - who by this point is severely concussed (ranting and spitting) - refuses to believe in Sirius's innocence and reminds Dumbledore of Sirius's attack on himself. He is mistaken, but his belief is perfectly reasonable - he's saying "This man was imprisoned for mass murder, and now you think he might be innocent but is that likely, given that he already had one atttempted murder under his belt at sixteen?" It's also reasonable for him to think Sirius has deceived and maybe Confunded the Trio with malign intent, and to want to gag him so he can't do it again: after all, Sirius once did something of the sort to him, in order to lure him into a potentially fatal encounter with a werewolf, and he still hasn't heard a rational explanation of what Sirius was doing waving a knife around in Harry's dorm, if he wasn't there to kill or kidnap Harry.
Of course, Snape continues to dislike Sirius after he knows Sirius is innocent. But again, he has plenty of current reasons to dislike Sirius, without invoking the past. Sirius is constantly rude to and about Snape, and Snape is risking his life as a spy whilst knowing that one of his fellow Order members is still bragging about how he tried to kill him - a mentally unstable man with a drink problem, whose brother Regulus and cousin Bellatrix were/are Death Eaters, even if there are already some suspicions that Reggie was a defector. Snape is going to have to wonder all the time whether Sirius will betray him to Voldemort out of spite.
Nevertheless he doesn't take an obvious opportunity to rid himself of Sirius, but slips Umbridge fake Veritaserum so she won't be able to make Harry betray Sirius's location. And like Harry, who saves his bully Dudley from the Dementors, Snape tries to warn and protect Sirius when he realises Voldemort is trying to lure Harry to the Ministry. The difference is that Dudley isn't a gung-ho idiot who would stand up in clear sight and deliberately provoke a trigger-happy psychotic into taking a shot at him, so he's a lot easier to protect.
Snape has absolute proof that Remus still sides with rule-breaking students against his colleagues when it is his job to uphold the school rules, just as he did when he was a prefect, and that he still takes reckless risks with children's lives for selfish and venal reasons; and if he is aware of what happened in the Shack after he was knocked out then he knows that Remus literally doesn't care very much whether he, Snape, lives or dies and couldn't even be bothered to check his pulse for about twenty minutes after he'd been potentially fatally injured and was lying on the floor unconscious and bleeding from a head-wound. He has reason to think that Sirius has an active preference for his death, or claims to have. Of course he doesn't like them.
That doesn't mean that he doesn't still feel bitter and angry about their childhood treatment of him as well. Again, he has every reason to be bitter, since Sirius and Remus not only never apologize to him, that we see, but openly jeer at him in the Shack for still being upset about it, even though he has just heard Sirius bragging about the murder attempt and saying that he had deserved it. Sirius then actively continues his campaign of baiting Snape, so from Snape's point of view he's not being bitter about events in his childhood, but about a campaign of petty persecution which is still ongoing.
This must be reinforced by the way the other houses isolate Slytherin, supporting whichever other house is playing against them - although that might have something to do with the fact that they won the House Cup seven years in a row, making the other houses feel that whoever was playing Slytherin was automatically the underdog. Despite Slytherin's considerable run of success with the House Cup, Snape probably feels that he is still part of an isolated, beleaguered group, being picked on by bullies from the other houses - and to some extent that's actually true.
Sirius is shown to be a lesser man than Dudley, who at seventeen is beginning to appreciate the fact that Harry saved him from the Dementors: just imagine if Dudley, in his mid thirties, was still relentlessly needling Harry and gloating about the way he used to bully him, the way Sirius does to Snape. Snape is better able to defend himself as an adult, since it's now one on one instead of four on one, but for him, the bullying isn't finally over until Sirius dies. Yet he still tries to save him. The key to Snape's relationship with the Marauders, in my opinion - and with anybody with whom he has a rivalry - is that he's very competitive, but he doesn't actually want to hurt anybody (except when he believes that Sirius and Remus are there to kill Harry). He just wants to prove that he's won.
And to the extent to which he may still be bearing boyhood grudges, there's a lot of it about. According to Pottermore, McGonagall at sixty is still bearing a grudge against Slytherin because a Slytherin player fouled her during a Quidditch match when she was a schoolgirl. He didn't bully and abuse her for years, he didn't strip and humiliate her in public, he didn't try to murder her, he just cheated her out of victory in a ball-game - but she's still steaming about it and resenting his whole house for it nearly half a century later. Sirius in his thirties is still bragging about how he tried to kill Snape when they were sixteen, and the Dumbledore brothers are still locked in rivalry and resentment nearly a century after they first fell out.
Snape is unreasonably obsessed with his boyhood quarrel with the Marauders.
Severus' grudge was totally justified and reasonable. People who say Severus should've moved on lack empathy and understanding for his character. I mean, Sirius gets free pass by his stans for his behaviour yet Severus is hated despite Severus' abuse comparatively worse than Sirius.
Sometimes, I think marauder fens hate Severus and demonize him because sympathizing with him means their favourite character can't take higher moral ground in their worst behaviour.
Snape gave the Marauders as good as he got.
Many fanwriters portray the ongoing war at school between Snape and the Marauders as fairly even-handed. However, since it seems to be true that the Marauders generally went after Snape many on one, this could only be the case if Snape was a brilliant duellist or the Marauders were hopeless, neither of which seems to be the case.
Snape's claim at the end of HBP that James never attacked him unless it was four to one seems to be a bit of an over-simplification. We see James and Sirius first start to pick on Severus and Lily two on two, although completely unprovoked (in fact, gratuitously picking on Sev and Lily seems to be how James and Sirius bonded). During the werewolf "prank" Sirius was in a sense attacking Severus, Peter may or may not have been involved, Remus was a potential attacker but he was a weapon in Sirius's hand, not an aggressor of his own free will, and James was actually backing Severus, at least as far as being unwilling to kill him went. During the underpants incident Remus was an abstainer, and James and Sirius attacked Severus two on one with cheerleading and potential backup from Peter - and the fact that Severus seemed not to be on the alert for an attack suggests that they'd probably left him alone for a while prior to that point. Remus and Sirius claim that during seventh year Severus and Head Boy James repeatedly duelled one on one and that it was mainly Severus who was trying to hex James at that point, although the fact that they were able to conceal this both from the staff and from Lily suggests that it was actually James who picked the time and place, using The Marauder's Map to choose spots where there were no staff around.
This could be taken as support for the idea that the feud was more even-handed than Snape would later claim, or at least that it was generally two to one rather than four to one. However, we do have evidence that the bullying was ongoing, and that prior to Remus becoming a prefect it probably really was generally four on one.
For example, James and Sirius give Snape the insulting nickname "Snivellus" on their first day at Hogwarts and are still using it at the end of fifth year, implying continuity. It seems unlikely that young Snape would want to get them expelled (assuming he really did) if they weren't a threat to him, and the way in which James launches a totally unprovoked attack on Severus after OWLs because he expects that this will alleviate Sirius's boredom suggests that this is a very well-worn groove. Sirius appears to be obsessed with Snape's physical appearance - so much so that he is still obsessing about him and gloating about his attacks on him nearly twenty years later. The voices of all four of the gang - starting with Remus, who must therefore at some point have taken an active part in the bullying - appear on The Marauder's Map, sneering at Snape's physical appearance in vicious terms.
[I'm not sure incidentally whether that makes Snape's "I see no difference" remark about Hermione - which may mean either "I see no difference between her teeth now and her teeth before" or "I see no difference in severity between what Malfoy has done to Granger and what Potter has done to Goyle" - better or worse, even if he does intend it as a snide reference to her buck teeth. You could say that having been subjected to verbal abuse about his own appearance he should know better than to do it to someone else, or you could say he grew up in a milieu in which making rude personal comments was the norm, so that even if he means it rudely he won't expect Hermione to be very upset.]
Sirius admits that Peter habitually attaches himself to the biggest bully in the playground, showing that he knows what James's gang were. Lily accuses them of "hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can", and the fact that James offers to leave Snape alone in the future if Lily will go out with him is a strong indication that attacking Snape is a fairly regular occurrence. Remus also says that James hexed people for fun, and that he himself should have done more to tell James and Sirius to "lay off" Snape and that their treatment of him was out of order, and Sirius says that Remus did sometimes make them feel ashamed. And the assault on Snape after the OWL was of an extreme kind - James and Sirius launched an unprovoked attack on him, then punished him for daring to complain, told him that he deserved to be hurt for the crime of existing, and finished by carrying out a minor sexual assault on him (or at least threatening to). Unless they were actively insane, this doesn't seem like something they would do to somebody they weren't already so accustomed to bullying that any ill-treatment of him seemed normal to them. All of this, combined with the fact that it evidently still burns Snape miserably more than twenty years after the event, strongly suggests that although there may have been a period of respite between the werewolf and underpants incidents, many-on-one attacks on Snape by the Marauders were a fairly frequent occurrence, at least through years one to five, even if they weren't all four on one.
Indeed, if you accept Pottermore as canon, an article about Remus (published prior to the point where Pottermore merged the books with the films) refers to "relentless bullying" of Severus by James and Sirius, and Remus disapproving of this. The definition of "relentless" according to the Oxford Dictionary is "oppressively constant; incessant" and according to Merriam-Webster "showing or promising no abatement of severity, intensity, strength, or pace". There is no doubt, therefore, that Rowling does see the gang's treatment of Severus as bullying, not just duelling, and as bullying which evidently occurred frequently over an extended period of time, whether or not it occurred throughout their schooldays.
As to how loaded the odds were, Snape seems to be a reasonably good duellist, but not brilliant. He easily defeats Lockhart - but Lockhart is an idiot. He fends off a three-pronged attack by McGonagall, Flitwick and Sprout fairly efficiently but is able to be knocked out by three third years. When he tries to cut the Death Eater who is aiming at Remus during the Polyjuice chase, he misses and hits George instead. As a boy we see he makes a valiant attempt to fight back against James and Sirius but is clearly heavily outgunned - more outgunned than Harry was against Dudley's gang, since Harry at least had wandless magic to help him escape and his persecutors did not.
Meanwhile, James is a big Quidditch star (so must have superb agility and reflexes), and the prequel-ette shows James and Sirius already successfully fighting adult Death Eaters when they are seventeen. And Peter may seem like just a cheerleader, but in fact he was probably the most dangerous person there - five years later he would stage his own disappearance, condemn Sirius to Azkaban and murder twelve Muggles, all at a stroke, and fourteen years after that he would single-handedly resurrect the Dark Lord. Even though Snape probably fought back with everything he had and scored some convincing hits, he was still heavily outnumbered in most of their interactions, and for much of his schooldays he must have been constantly stressed, always wondering where the next attack was coming from. His tendency to stay in the dungeons may have come about because as a boy leaving Slytherin territory meant danger.
Some people claim that Snape is an unreliable source because he says that the Marauders attacked him four on one, and in the scene we are shown Remus and Peter did not actively attack him. But Peter was probably the most dangerous individual in the group, by a wide margin, and the fact that a prefect allowed the attack to continue and did nothing to help is not neutral, any more than it would be neutral if someone was being mugged and a policeman just stood by and did nothing.
Maidofkent has also pointed out the scene in HBP where Snape is talking to Draco about Draco's covert activities, and says "You were certainly alone tonight, which was foolish in the extreme, wandering the corridors without lookouts or back-up. These are elementary mistakes –" which does sound as if he's speaking from experience about precautions he himself had taken as a boy. But no amount of backup from his Slytherin friends would have been all that much use against a gang he didn't know had Death's own Cloak, and a flawless surveillance device which enabled them to see where everyone in the castle was at any time.
That may well have been the cruellest thing the Marauders did to young Snape - that they destroyed his credibility. The staff probably thought that young Sev was melodramatic and spiteful and kept making false accusations against the Marauders out of jealousy, because none of the staff knew that the Marauders possessed both a literally-supernaturally effective Invisibility Cloak the likes of which had never been seen before or since, and a covert surveillance device which enabled them to always get Sev on his own when he had no friends or staff members nearby. They would have to suspect the boy of making it up, because he couldn't explain how come his bullies kept catching him where there were no witnesses. This may be why even Lily doubted his word about James's behaviour, in the courtyard scene. And being pursued by people who could go invisible at will, who always knew where you were and where you'd been however hard you tried to hide, would be very like being cyberstalked - and we know that that can damage people's nerves for life.
Snape is very tall.
Snape's height is never actually specified. John Nettleship, the main model for Snape, was 5'8". What we are told in the books is that Narcissa Malfoy is tall for a woman, and Sirius is tall for a man, but Sirius's height isn't heavily stressed so he's probably not as outrageously tall as Dumbledore. When Narcissa collapses against Snape in the Spinner's End scene he looks down into her upturned face (although she may have her knees bent), and when Harry sees Snape and Sirius face to face he sees that Snape is visibly the shorter but he appears not to have been aware of this before, so the difference isn't huge. So Snape is significantly taller than a tall woman and an inch or two shorter than a tall man - say between 5'10" and 6'1". Because Rowling has admitted that Snape is based on John Nettleship, who was 5'8", a 5'10" Snape is arguably more canonical than a 6'1" one, but a tallish 6'1" Snape is just about canon compatible if you assume Sirius was 6'2" or 6'3" (and Dumbledore is about 6'8" ).
Nice. Personally, I've always imagined him being 5'10"-5'11".
Yeah, me too, above average in tallness but not too tall. There are many fics which make him very tall so that's why I posted this one.
Snape was motivated mainly by revenge.
It is widely assumed in the fandom that Snape spied on Voldemort because he wanted to bring down Lily's killer, and that he saw Harry just as a means to an end. But this is what Snape himself says about it, at a point in the story where Rowling is writing explanation rather than obfuscation: "I have spied for you, and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter's son safe." This is a strong indication that he wanted to bring Voldemort down in order to protect Harry, rather than vice versa.
Snape is middle-aged.
The casting of Alan Rickman - who was a superb and very emotionally affecting actor and by all accounts a thoroughly nice person, but more than twenty years older than Snape and a couple of stone heavier - has created the impression of Snape as this masterful middle-aged figure. But canon Snape is only thirty-one when Harry first meets him, skinny and intense. We know he's meant to be quite skinny because he's described as having a thin face, and Rowling's own drawings show that by this she means he has a bony, hollow-cheeked face, rather than a narrow one.
