Quote from Naaga on May 6, 2023, 1:00 pm

Snape is either very saintly or very evil.

There is a tendency in fanwriting to carry the characters to extremes and make them wholly good or wholly bad, instead of the complex, ambiguous souls they are in canon. Snape himself is so resolutely and realistically colourful that Rowling herself says that she loves him, but she'd like to slap him - a sentiment with which many Snape fen would agree. I've described him elsewhere as "brave, brilliant, honourable, dedicated, witty, also petty, vindictive, childish, tactless and sulky" and because of this obvious mixture of characteristics he probably suffers from the canonisation/demonisation fanon less than many other characters, but you do still see it. There are Snape fen who feel they cannot justify their love unless they turn him into some classic romantic hero, and Marauders fen who feel they can't like what was good in James and Sirius, or pity their fate, unless they can justify what was bad in them by blaming their victim.

There is an issue of canon-compatibility here. The characters behave as JK Rowling says they behave, because they are constructs of her imagination (albeit several of them are loosely based on real people at Wyedean School which had, in addition to the very Snapey John Nettleship, a large, hairy, emotionally labile biker Biology teacher; an immensely tall French mistress; a Pottery teacher identical in appearance to Rowling's own drawing of Professor Sprout; a teacher called Mr Mooney and another teacher who liked to weird students out by removing his glass eye, among others). We do not have to agree with her feelings about her characters - we do not have to give the same weight to their actions which she does - but if she likes a character then a canon-compatible version of that character cannot be so wholly, obviously bad that it would not be possible for Rowling to like them (regardless of whether we share her feelings or not), and if she dislikes or is ambiguous about a character then they cannot be so wholly virtuous that she couldn't be ambiguous about them.

No human or part-human characters in the Potterverse are wholly pleasant apart from Arthur, Cedric, Tonks, Neville and Luna (and even Arthur is flawed by his immaturity, which leads him to condone dangerously irresponsible behaviour in his children, and his willingness to bend the rules at work to suit his own preferences, and Cedric has been sabotaged by The Cursed Child, if you accept that as canon, which personally I don't)); none, probably, is wholly bad except Tom Riddle and Umbridge. Some of the other Death Eaters may be, but we don't know that much about most of them. Of the ones we do know a lot about, Bellatrix is driven by her intense love and hero-worship for Tom Riddle, and Lucius and Narcissa by their love for Draco and their sense of family.

Since the publication of DH it is not really possible to write a wholly evil Snape and remain canon-compatible: he has too many established virtues. Rowling herself said at interview that he was "immensely brave" and sacrificed himself for love, so if you accept interviews as canon there's no doubt about his courage, his devotion or his motivation. He hands himself over to Dumbledore at a time when the Aurors are torturing and killing prisoners, in an attempt to save Lily, and goes back to the Death Eaters to serve the Order and protect Lily's son, although he must know he'll probably be tortured and then killed if his deceit is uncovered. [There's no strong evidence that the Death Eaters routinely torture people for fun but they do torture for information, and Snape is a skilled Occlumens who could not reliably be interrogated using Legilimency or Veritaserum.]

He prefers to die by breaking his Vow rather than kill Dumbledore (or maybe rather than risk splitting his own soul, that part isn't clear). He runs through the school in his nightshirt because he thought he heard a scream, charges though a bathroom door without checking what's on the other side because a girl's voice cried "Murder!", and sprints across the lawn and down the tunnel to the Shrieking Shack, to the place where he was once nearly murdered, to confront the two people who had nearly murdered him, one of whom he knows to be a werewolf on the point of changing and the other of whom he wrongly but sincerely believes to be a mass murderer, and does so almost certainly because he fears children are in danger. [The Shack is known to have no exit except through the tunnel, so if all he wanted to do was catch Sirius he could have sat by the Willow and picked him off as he came out.]

He risks blowing his cover - something which would presumably result in his torture and death - in order to save other people from the Death Eaters, even when he has to defy Dumbledore's instructions in order to protect Remus during the Polyjuice chase. He refuses to fire on McGonagall, Flitwick and Sprout when they are trying to harm him, but only deflects their blows - and doesn't even do that much to protect himself from Buckbeak. His capacity for violence is strictly limited: Harry may torture somebody with Cruciatus and throw them through a glass door to punish them for being rude, Remus may throw Harry into a wall, but Snape limits himself to the magical equivalent of a slap. When he has Pettigrew, the man who betrayed Lily, in his power he does nothing worse than boss him around a bit and give him a little sting.

Clearly, opinions vary, and are free to vary, on how much comparative weight you give to Snape's virtues and faults, and whether you think e.g. that his spiteful and overbearing manner to Harry outweighs the fact that (according to Quirrelmort) he sacrificed his own friendships in the staffroom in order to protect Harry; or that his willingness to risk being sacked by Umbridge in order to protect Neville from being throttled outweighs his humiliating the boy by making rude remarks about him to other teachers in front of the class; or that his getting Remus sacked outweighs his risking discovery and death to protect Remus from being shot out of the sky during the Polyjuice chase. [Nightfall Rising has suggested that it was an act of Slytherin genius for Snape to present Umbridge, a beaurocrat, with the argument that he didn't want Neville to be strangled because it would generate too much paperwork - a motive she could actually sympathise with.]

Many fen who still deny that Snape is one of the good guys do so because they have confused "good" with "nice" - something Snape seldom is. But niceness is a slippery characteristic, which tends to be a learned social strategy rather than or more than a personality trait. It's a strategy which makes everyone's life more pleasant, and if a person is nice primarily to ease the lives of the people around them, then it's clearly a virtue: but if they do it to smooth their own path it's close to being a vice. Think how very "nice" young Tom Riddle is to Slughorn when he wants to worm information out of him.

Even if a person's pleasant manner is genuine, soft emotions are a poor motivator for doing good. If you are warm to other people mainly because of your soft feelings, the odds are good that when you're in a bad mood, you will turn cold - whereas good done for duty's sake is largely immune to mood, and if you genuinely care about the people you are being good to, rather than or more than your sense of your own virtue, then you should want whatever gives those people the most benefits, whether or not it's what gives you the most emotional satisfaction. Snape fen tend to prefer substance over style and to think that things like courage, dutifulness, loyalty and self-sacrifice are more important and provide more significant benefits to others than "niceness", but there's clearly a grey area where lack of superficial niceness can shade into actual unkindness, and it's a matter of personal taste how much you think that matters.

However, the "Snape-hater" sub-section of fandom, those who don't just feel that his vices outweigh his virtues but deny that he even has any virtues, often in a wildly obsessive and over the top way involving detailed and gloating descriptions of horrible tortures they would like to inflict on him, are really not fen of the Potter books at all - since their take on the story is clearly not remotely book-canon-compatible - but are either film-fen or, like the "Dark Harry" and "Dark Hermione" crowd, meta-fen of a certain class of fan-fiction. They tend to be either children or childish, people who are clearly projecting some unresolved issue with one of their own teachers onto Snape, whereas Snape-fen tend to be either mature adults or prematurely jaundiced, and are therefore better able to sympathise with a teacher's point of view - even a sour, disaffected teacher who dislikes most of his students. You could say that Snape tends to be liked by the same people who liked Victor Meldrew in the 1990s - and who are often old enough to have been Kerr Avon fen in the 1980s and Spock fen in the 1960s/70s.

Indeed, an essay on Pottermore - possibly authored by JK herself, and almost certainly authorized by her - categorizes Snape-hatred as a childish phase. "As children, Harry, Ron and Hermione had looked at the sarcastic and strict Professor Snape as something of a pantomime villain - the bitter Potions master, stewing in the dungeons. As adults, they learn Snape is far more complex." This is from an essay entitled The chapter that made us fall in love with... Severus Snape, so loving Snape is clearly seen as linked to increasing maturity and as the natural outcome of learning his true story. Rowling herself has said that she loves Snape, but she'd like to slap him - a sentiment with which many Snape fen would agree.

It was just about possible, pre-DH, for Snape-haters to present a canon-compatible case but their take on the story has really been thoroughly canon-shafted by DH, by Beedle (with its absolute confirmation that Dumbledore can and will twist the truth into a pretzel when it suits him, so that his statements about Snape's motives cannot be trusted) and by Pottermore. Although the saintly!sex-god!Snape of extreme pro-Snape fandom is nearly as unlikely as reeeally-eeeevil!rapist!Snape, the more serious, analytical Snape fen have repeatedly proven that they had a much better eye for the structure of the story and a much better instinct for where the plot was heading than the Snape-haters did - probably because Snape fen tend to be decades older than Snape-haters, and have had time to have read or watched far more stories.

They it was who spotted from the outset that Dumbledore's little speech about the nature of truth in the first book meant that he was, and was intended to be, a rather dodgy character, and that his statements about Snape's motives should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt - and, by extension, that this was going to be a series in which characters didn't necessarily tell the truth, and statements which sounded like The Voice of the Author might turn out to be misdirection. They spotted that McGonagall was biased against Slytherin and that the Marauders' treatment of young Severus was "relentless bullying", not just a bit of harmless rivalry - both since clearly stated on Pottermore. They spotted that Remus was shifty and weak, long before Harry called him out on it in DH. Above all they nearly all knew at once that Dumbledore had ordered Snape to kill him and that Snape was still on the Order's side, not just because they understood the characters but because they understood the author, and the plot.

Conversely, although Snape, like Harry, is arguably saint-like in his heroic self-sacrifice, a canon-compatible Snape cannot be all sweetness or all pleasant, by a fairly wide margin, unless you're going to assume that most of his apparent personality is an act or that, like Harry and the Horcrux, his intrinsic nature has been warped by the Dark Mark; and the faction who portray Snape as a suave and charming romantic hero also tend to be film- or fanfic-fen rather than book-fen. Rowling herself says of Snape that "Snape is all grey. You can't make him a saint: he was vindictive & bullying. You can't make him a devil: he died to save the wizarding world." I would place him higher than that because I value social niceness less and duty and honour more than she does, but the principle is sound.

The situation is complicated by the fact that Snape is fairly closely based on Rowling's Chemistry master John Nettleship, who genuinely was a sweet guy but who could be spectacularly tactless, and had difficulty hiding it if he didn't like a student, because he had Asperger's Syndrome and didn't know how to dissemble and who was, when JKR knew him, in the midst of a messy divorce and half out of his mind with chronic insomnia. It's unlikely Snape has Asperger's, since he must have to be a champion dissembler to survive as a spy, so his surly, abrasive and sometimes odd behaviour requires other explanations.

That he is sarcastic is neither here nor there, really, since sarcasm is a form of humour highly regarded in Britain, and his criticism of his students always seems to be aimed at making them better students. His verbal attacks never really go very far, except for the "I see no difference" comment which in context is actually wholly ambiguous: there's nothing to say whether he means "I see no difference between Granger's teeth now and before" or "I see no difference in severity between what Malfoy has done to Granger and what Potter has done to Goyle". If he does mean it as a crack about Hermione's buck teeth it's a rather cruel joke, but not necessarily intended to hurt: John Nettleship once quite innocently told his very tall, willowy wife, whom he adored beyond measure and wouldn't have hurt for the world, that when he first met her he thought she was something for growing beans up, just because it struck him as a funny idea - and then couldn't understand why we, his friends, went "Oh, John...."

There's an episode of the comedy panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats do Countdown in which, for reasons which are obscure, a photo' of one of the panellists is photoshopped to give him what looks like a Burberry slipper instead of a face, and one of the other guests says something like "I literally can't see any difference." Quite clearly this was not intended to wound but merely to tease, and probably Snape's remark was also meant to be understood as a joke, not as a genuine comment on Hermione's appearance.

OK, it would be a bit of a spiteful joke - but Snape almost certainly knows that Hermione helped to throw him into a wall and knock him out a few months previously (because he knows who was armed in the Shack), and then left him without medical treatment for about an hour, to the endangerment of his life; and he probably doesn't know (because a severe blow to the head wipes out what immediately preceded it) that knocking him out was an accident and that the Trio were only trying to disarm him. Also, as terri_testing has pointed out, Snape probably knows Hermione was in some way involved in the unprovoked spraying of Slytherin students, including Draco and his friends, with Swelling Solution in second year. This caused similar injuries to the one Hermione has now suffered at the same students' hands, so Snape may feel it's tit-for-tat. He knows at any rate that the ingredients for Polyjuice were stolen from him and that Hermione subsequently had an accident with Polyjuice, and he probably knows or suspects that those ingredients were taken at the same time as the accident with the Swelling Solution, which was therefore probably deliberately engineered by Hermione and her friends. From his point of view he has very good reason to feel a bit spiteful towards Hermione at this point, and that aside, Snape never seems to try to cause really serious distress, in the way that, say, Harry's auntie Marge does.

He does call Hermione an insufferable know-it-all - but a) this is both true and relevant to her class performance and b) we're told that this is only what all her classmates call her, including her close friends. When Ron says "You asked us a question and she knows the answer! Why ask if you don't want to be told?" he has fundamentally misunderstood the reason why teachers ask questions of a class, which is to find out whether a particular student or the class, generally, have reached a stage where they know the answer. Snape already knows the answer himself and knows that Hermione probably knows - although it was petty or thoughtless of him to ask for "anyone" and then ignore Hermione, instead of saying "anyone other than Miss Granger". [Petty or thoughtless or maybe quite deliberate and a cunning way of making sure that the identification of werewolves will stick in Hermione's mind.]

Ron is being somewhat hypocritical to complain of Snape calling Hermione something which he himself, we are told, calls her "at least twice a week". Snape has no reason to expect in advance that it will particularly upset her, and indeed it's not clear why it does. I don't think she's given him any reason to think that his opinion is that important to her, and teachers are not generally very respected in British culture, so one can't say he ought to know his words would matter because he's a teacher: almost the reverse, since teachers are expected to be critical and he especially is. He must at least strongly suspect that Hermione was involved in stealing the ingredients for Polyjuice from him the previous year, since she ended up furry, so he has no reason to think she has much respect for him: and indeed, only a few months later she would be part of a group who threw him into a wall and knocked him unconscious, and she would be more concerned about whether she was going to get into trouble for it than whether he was seriously hurt.

Indeed, despite the Shrieking Shack incident, the fact that Hermione was so upset because Snape made a not all that insulting comment she was used to hearing from her friends could be seen as evidence for the HGSS scenario. We've seen how Hermione hung on Lockhart's every word in second year, and the fact that she minds Snape's opinion so much could be evidence that she's transferred her crush to the man who defeated Lockhart in a duel.

He is certainly never remotely as vicious and abusive as Dumbledore, his own teacher, was to him when he was twenty and trying to defect. But he does seem actively to enjoy causing mild to moderate stress and frustration, and scoring off people - even people who are in his power and so can't really defend themselves - in a very childish way, and he cheats by behaving like a name-calling student to the students, and then pulling rank if they respond in kind. He likes to annoy people, to wind them up and then watch them do a slow burn so he is, at least in this fairly limited way, a spiteful gloater, and the crack about Hermione's teeth and the childish accusation of "know-it-all" suggest that the problem may be that Snape doesn't know from one minute to the next whether he's staff or student. He is, after all, the youngest teacher in the school (except, briefly, for Remus, who is just a few months younger), teaching in the place where he himself was taught, with colleagues who have known him since he was eleven and sometimes treat him as if he still was.

[Whether Remus is more or less mature than Snape - or Sirius - is an interesting question. He seems less bound by resentment, shows greater fairness and detachment (when he isn't trying to placate Sirius), his dislike of the use of Dementors even on the guilty speaks well for his emotional and ethical maturity, and his willingness to accept that it's right that he should resign his post because his behaviour has endangered students shows admirable disinterest and self-awareness. On the other hand he is vastly, even criminally irresponsible in his willingness to risk Harry's life rather than own up to his own childhood misbehaviour, he is on the side of rule-breaking even when part of his job is to uphold school rules, he's an emotional coward who tries to wimp out of his relationship with his pregnant girlfriend and reacts very violently when Harry tells him off for it, and his encouraging children to reveal their deepest fears in front of the whole class suggests a worrying lack of imagination.]

According to what Ron has heard before starting at Hogwarts, presumably from his brothers, Snape has the reputation of being biased in favour of his Slytherins. We don't really see this much, except in a Quidditch context, but he does let Draco get away with some overtly annoying behaviour. Draco is the son of his friends, perhaps even his godson, so he must have known the boy since he was a baby, and there is a common theme in the books of people being biased in favour of their darlings and seeing no wrong in them: Hagrid with Norbert and Aragog; the Dursleys with Dudley; Hermione with Crookshanks etc..

Snape is rather unprofessional in the way he lets his dislike of Harry show. He has perfectly sound reasons to dislike Harry in his own right, quite apart from Harry's resemblance to James, and it must be a rare teacher who doesn't detest at least some of their students - but they're supposed to do a better job of concealing that dislike.

As a result he is partly to blame for Sirius's death, although not for the reason Harry thinks. It was perfectly reasonable for Snape to needle Sirius, since Sirius was always needling him. He has every reason to feel about Sirius the way Harry feels about Dudley, but he still tried to save him, just as Harry saved Dudley. But when Harry went to fetch help for Barty Crouch Snr in GoF, Snape obstructed him. The timing of Dumbledore's appearance suggests that Snape was avoiding saying "The Headmaster is taking a leak" (and yes, Rowling does think about these things - think of the chamber pots Dumbledore found in the Room of Requirement), and Snape may have his own good reasons not to want to help Crouch, whose policy of torturing prisoners during VWI must have made Snape's task of betraying former comrades who trusted him exponentially more upsetting, but he also seems to be enjoying himself by being obstructive to Harry in a petty way. As a result, it's really not at all surprising that Harry did not immediately think of going to Snape when he had the vision of Sirius imprisoned at the Ministry - based on prior experience he had good reason to expect Snape would be obstructive and unhelpful, even if he was mistaken about that.

A bit like Harry, when he saved Dudley from the Dementors but then didn't bother to tell Vernon and Petunia that chocolate would make him feel better, Snape is protective but not very kind: he cares very much about other people's physical safety, but not much about their emotional state. He is dismissive of Bellatrix's suffering in Azkaban, although it must have been terrible, and launches a verbal attack on a Harry who has obviously just had a severe nosebleed. He must know that since Tonks is quite unconcerned, any more serious injuries Harry may have sustained have already been fixed, and he has lots of reasons for being in a bad mood - he's been called away from his dinner, so he's hungry and probably has low blood-sugar; he's missed the Sorting of what he knows will probably be his last batch of First Years as Head of House, before he will have to kill Dumbledore; and he's just been bounced out at by a Patronus which takes the form of one of his worst nightmares.

Nevertheless, on the face of it it was quite irrational of him to blame Harry and take points from him, since the blood on Harry's robe would surely indicate that he'd been delayed for medical reasons. Maidofkent points out, however, that had Harry been where he was supposed to be, any accident he might have had would have happened in front of witnesses and he would still have been with the body of the students. Even though Harry has clearly suffered some form of injury, Snape has reason strongly to suspect he was injured while doing something he shouldn't have been doing in a place where he shouldn't have been.

If that is what Snape's thinking in that scene, he's right, Harry is to some extent to blame for his own tardiness because he chose to spy on Draco, and he has nearly disrupted Snape and Dumbledore's vital plans by doing so - but it's difficult to see how Snape could know this, as it's unlikely he's had time to speak to Draco. I suppose it's possible Ron and Hermione may have told the staff that Harry hasn't showed up and that they last saw him go off following Blaise Zabini, leading Snape to question his Slytherins, or that he has overheard Draco and his gang sniggering about it; and it's also possible, given that protecting Harry is one of Snape's principal goals in life, that he had already noticed and worried about Harry's non-appearance, and now he's doing the "Haul your child out of the way of a speeding truck and then scream at it to get rid of the adrenalin because you've had such a fright" thing.

Saying that Tonk's werewolf Patronus looks weak in that scene may be Snape's way of regaining a sense of control over a terrifying memory - and we know he still is terrified of Remus as an adult, because in PoA he backs out of the room, not taking his eyes off close-to-full-moon!Remus. It may be a simple observation that Tonk's new Patronus isn't very bright or clear. Or it may be a valid comment on Remus's unreliable nature, or on the fact that basing your Patronus on someone you love but whose reciprocated love you can't rely on is a bad idea. If the latter, there must be some ironic thought going on about his own doe Patronus, which is very bright, but represents a relationship even more hopeless than Tonks's with Remus. Maidofkent suggests that Snape's Patronus is his happy thing because it represents the fact that he is still serving Lily and doing his duty by her - and if so it would say a lot about him that the thing which made him happy was the thought that he was doing his duty.

We do know, because he later sets Harry an essay on the subject, that Snape thinks that Patroni aren't necessarily the best way to fight Dementors, and we know that Tonks is so depressed over her on/off relationship with Remus that she loses her bright colours and ends up with drab hair. So the Happy Thought which powers her Remus-shaped Patronus isn't going to be very happy at all, and Snape would be right to think it might not protect her in an emergency.

Incidentally, Rowling's fudged interview explanation as to why Snape is the only Death Eater with a Patronus - that the Death Eaters were somehow too evil and Dementorish themselves to be able to conjure something so pure - makes absolutely no sense, since we are shown that Umbridge has an especially powerful and bright Patronus; but it does indicate that Rowling herself thinks of Snape as essentially pure-hearted and very different from the common run of Death Eaters. A much more sensible explanation would be that the Dark Mark somehow interferes with the ability to produce a Patronus, and Snape has to conceal the fact that he alone can do so, because it would give away the fact that he is doing something to block the Dark Mark's influence, and is therefore not loyal to Voldemort.

When Snape confronts Sirius and Remus in the Shrieking Shack he believes, wrongly but with good reason, that they are there to kill Harry and that Sirius is a senior Death Eater, so it's reasonable for him to want them sent to Azkaban. As with Bellatrix, however, even if Sirius had been the dyed-in-the-wool villain Snape thought him, his suffering in Azkaban had still been dreadful and it was cruel and unpleasant of Snape to gloat openly about handing him back to the Dementors - albeit that Harry too had been keen to do just that half an hour previously, and Snape was very overwrought by this point, being in the very place where Sirius and Remus had nearly killed him as a boy, and here they were again with Sirius still gloating about the murder attempt as if it had been yesterday, and winding him up.

He probably has a rather callous attitude to animals - he encounters them mainly as potion ingredients, shoots down flies, tests a potion on Trevor the toad and seems to be amused when Mrs Norris is frozen by the Basilisk, although what is amusing him is probably the sight of Dumbledore and McGonagall with their noses an inch from Mrs Norris's fur, rather than the injury to Mrs Norris herself (or perhaps he knows about McGonagall's Animagus form and is smiling at the thought that one "cat" is examining another). But a certain callousness towards non-human animals seems to be the norm at Hogwarts, and at least Snape doesn't torture experimental animals with Cruciatus, as false!Moody does without anybody apparently finding it odd; or encourage his class repeatedly to break a captive animal's bones, as Remus does; or allow his class to stick pins into a half-transformed hedgehog which is still conscious and suffering, as McGonagall does; or (maybe) feed a Hippogriff on piles of slaughtered pets and relish the idea of setting his dog on an elderly cat, as Hagrid does.

As regards Snape's threat to poison Trevor the toad, there is a kind of universal fanon, a misunderstanding of language, whereby people in general assume that anything labelled a poison must be lethal. In fact any substance which does more harm than good is technically a poison. Since the Shrinking Solution is intended to be drunk it's unlikely that it contains anything really dangerous - if it had something like ricin in it which was deadly if not properly cooked you'd expect Snape to emphasize this, and he doesn't, so it probably wouldn't do anything irreversibly dreadful to Trevor however much of a hash Neville made of it. Also note that in PS Flitwick uses Trevor to demonstrate making an object whizz around the room, even though this was probably quite scary for him, and in GoF Harry himself uses Trevor to practise the Summoning Charm on.

It's noteworthy that when Snape flees aross the castle grounds after killing Dumbledore, he allows Buckbeak to strike at and claw him and doesn't try to defend himself, even though this is an at-least-pony-sized flying carnivore with big claws, and could easily have killed him. It would surely have been quite easy to knock Buckbeak out of the sky and it would not have slowed Snape's progress any more than Buckbeak himself was doing. It's difficult to see any self-serving or political reason why Snape would fail to defend himself here - it's just more evidence that he isn't by nature a very physically violent person, and/or that his own safety just isn't one of the things he takes into account, and/or that he doesn't want to kill an innocent beast who is only doing his job - although we don't know whether it's Buckbeak or Hagrid to whom Snape is being kind here.

It's also telling to look at what kind of pressure Dumbledore thinks will influence Snape's behaviour - especially if you believe that Dumbledore is wise. When Dumbledore is trying to get Snape to agree to kill him, he raises the need to protect Draco's soul, Snape's promise of obedience and his own hope for a clean, merciful death - at no point does he say "If Draco doesn't kill me and you don't at least try to do so yourself, you will die of your Unbreakable Vow." Before the Polyjuice chase, portrait!Dumbledore warns Snape to keep his head down and not do anything which might blow his cover, because it's important that he should remain in Voldemort's favour so that he can protect the students - at no point does Dumbledore say "If you blow your cover you'll be killed". Clearly, Dumbledore does not think that Snape is strongly motivated by his own survival - and we see that despite the portrait's warning, Snape still risks discovery in an attempt to protect Remus (whom he doesn't even like) during the Polyjuice chase.

JK Rowling says of Snape's death "Snape didn't die for 'ideals'. He died in an attempt to expiate his own guilt. He could have broken cover at any time to save himself but he chose not to tell Voldemort that the latter was making a fatal error in targeting Harry. Snape's silence ensured Harry's victory."

Since Snape believed himself to be sending Harry to his death (unless Dumbledore had confided the meta-layer of the plan to him off-stage), it probably wasn't guilt over his part in the deaths of Lily and James which moved him here, but guilt that he had ever contributed to Voldemort's rise - and I would say that feeling guilty because you joined a political movement which turned out to be evil was an ideal. It's also slightly perverse of Rowling to deny Snape political ideals when John Nettleship was a lifelong and very active socialist, and it doesn't really fit with the fact that Snape was willing to go along with Dumbledore's plans in the end even though they might entail the death of Lily's son, and the fact that he took risks to save people even though that might risk blowing his cover.

Clearly, serving Lily wasn't the only thing he cared about. As Silvialaura put it on the discussion group Loose Canon, in reply to a suggestion that Snape had had no choice about loving and serving Lily, "He did chose to stay, fight and screw up his life after Lily died, instead to mourn her in a nice resort in the Caribbeans... So at one point he must have changed from 'I want Lily' to 'I want Lily safe even if she's not mine' to 'I want to work for the same things Lily wanted' and eventually, 'I want to work for things that are right even if Lily may not agree'."

[N.B. The Cursed Child acknowledges that Snape worked for the cause itself, not only for Lily, and I suppose that's been authorized by Rowling, but The Cursed Child also rubbishes some of the other characters and it's probably cheating to cherry-pick what's good in it and treat that as canon while ignoring the train-wreck of the rest of it.]

As for the rest of her statement about Snape's death, I presume that JK means that Snape understood what Voldemort meant about the Elder Wand, knew that he could save himself if he admitted that it had not been he who disarmed Dumbledore, but kept quiet about it and died rather than reveal information which would have helped Voldemort in his forthcoming battle with Harry.

The oft'-repeated claim that Snape is a bad teacher, or that he "tortures" his students by his sneering put-downs, is rather childish. In real life sarcastic, sneering teachers tend to be quite popular, especially with boys. [Yes, Harry and Neville find Snape's sarcasm annoying but they aren't real boys - they are figments of the imagination of a woman.] Nor is Snape the only teacher at Hogwarts to employ this kind of sneering criticism: it is Filius Flitwick who sets a student the punishment of repeatedly writing "I am a wizard, not a baboon brandishing a stick".

American fen tend to take Snape's sarcasm as more serious than it is, and the Marauders' attack on Snape as less so, because in the US sarcasm is generally seen as some sort of verbal attack, and there is a tradition of hazing and pranking which is more or less culturally sanctioned. But here there is very little tradition of hazing (and where it does occur it is usually stamped on from on high), so the Marauders' treatment of Snape is not only cruel but unusual, while sarcasm is a standard form of humour. It is not, as American fen often assume, something designed seriously to undermine the victim, because both sides know it isn't serious and indeed, although Harry and co. find Snape's catty remarks annoying there's no evidence that anybody except Hermione is actively upset by them.

Here in Scotland it's perfectly normal for working class men to address each other as "Ya mangy cunt" and mean it fondly. There's this odd British detective series called Rosemary and Thyme, made between 2003 and 2007, about two landscape gardeners who solve crimes. One of the episodes is set in a boys' boarding school and there's this delightful schoolmaster in it, kind, gentle, a bit old-fashioned, cares deeply about the school and about the boys - whom he addresses collectively, with the deepest affection, as "you disgusting little maggots".

And although classroom put-downs are nowadays regarded in some quarters as a crime, The Times Educational Supplement apparently used to have a "Best teacher put-downs" feature, where sarcy remarks to students were celebrated as an art form. [I don't know how long this ran for but I saw a good example being quoted in another publication.] Winston Churchill's talent for verbal put-downs - some of them far crueller and more heavy-handed than anything Snape ever comes up with - is widely celebrated and treated as a sort of national treasure, and the artist Rigby Graham, who came from the same sort of area as Snape, was so widely admired for his spectacular rudeness that apparently people used to frame his rude letters and hang them on the wall. In netspeak, Snape likes to pwn his students, in a way which is rather immature but not necessarily any more truly malicious than when teenagers do it to their mates.

Half Blood Ponce has also pointed out that the Wizarding World regards it as absolutely normal for parents publicly to humiliate their children by sending them Howlers.

Snape's job is to get the children though their OWL and NEWT exams, and he does. Even Umbridge, who is trying to find fault, says that his classes are quite advanced for their age, and he himself says that he expects them all to pass OWLs - showing more faith in Neville than McGonagall does. Only as regards the Slytherins, whose head of house he is, is he responsible for their well-being and happiness, as distinct from their pass-rate: and he seems to take care of them fairly well. For the rest, he does a competent job of getting them through their exams and keeps them alive while he's doing it, which is what he's paid to do, so as far as that goes he's a fairly good teacher.

It's true that Rowling has called Snape a bully to his students, but he certainly isn't a bully in the classic sense of selectively picking on the weak, since he is about equally abrasive to the powerful (except Riddle, whom he is stitching up): in fact he seems to be the only character able and willing to bawl Dumbledore out when he thinks the old man is being an idiot. And one must remember that as a teacher, to some extent it's his job to be a bit of a bully, as it is for a sergeant in the army.

From Cracks in the Cloister: Muffins with the Monks by "Brother Choleric"

At least, it's his job to boss the students around a bit, especially in a subject which (like the army) provides such rich possibilities for serious injury, and if he doesn't have the calm natural authority that, say, McGonagall has it's almost bound to come out rather too strident. And teaching can be terribly stressful. One of my friends quit teaching after "something in [her] psyche went ping" and she picked a particularly annoying pupil bodily off the floor by his hair. And it wasn't that she got into trouble, because she didn't: she left because she was sincerely afraid that if she stayed she would sooner or later really snap and kill one of the little horrors.

Snape's not as good a teacher as Grubbly-Plank or Sprout, but probably at least as good as, and in some cases clearly better than, most of the rest of the staff. You also have to ask what each teacher is trying to achieve. As far as Potions goes, Slughorn is probably more likely to inspire students to develop a love of the subject - Snape more likely to imprint their minds with accurate recipes which might save their lives in an emergency. We are told that Harry brews better during his practical Potions OWL because he no longer has Snape breathing down his neck and making him nervous - but the fact that he is able to brew his test potion at all is presumably because Snape has hammered the recipe into his brain with constant repetition and nagging.

The situation between Snape and Neville is peculiar. Undoubtedly Snape is overbearing and over-critical towards Neville and undoubtedly this is the wrong way to handle him. Yet, we see Snape give Neville one detention in six years and never take any points from him, apart from the one incident where he takes ten points for brawling from Harry, Neville and Ron as a group. On the face of it it seems absurd that a boy whose parents were tortured into madness by Death Eaters, and whose other relatives repeatedly put him in fear of death in an attempt to squeeze more magic out of him, should have as his Boggart a teacher who is an overbearing nag but who almost never actually punishes him. My initial thought was that Snape's constant criticism makes Neville feel he is a hopeless wizard and his family will therefore kill or disown him - or that he fears Snape will attack him for being bad at magic the way Great-Uncle Algie did, since he sees the Boggart-Snape as reaching for a wand. Duj has also pointed out that the Boggart class takes place only an hour or two after the incident with Trevor and the shrinking-potion, and Neville has just seen Snape again as they entered the staff-room, so it may be that Snape is on Neville's mind that afternoon in a way he probably would not have been at any other time.

But then I started to wonder what plot purpose is served by the Boggart incident. PoA and GoF reflect each other. In PoA everybody, especially Snape, mistakes an ally (Sirius) for an enemy and wrongly believes that he is a Death Eater who has come to Hogwarts to harm Harry. In GoF the same people mistake an enemy (false!Moody) for an ally and fail to realise that he is a Death Eater who has come to Hogwarts to harm Harry. Looking at the two books as a pair, I now suspect that the business of Snape being Neville's Boggart is a deliberate foreshadowing of Snape's big revelation at the end of GoF, and that Neville, with his family connections, knows that Snape is a former Death Eater.

Snape's irritation with Hermione is not unreasonable prejudice but largely justified - although he could certainly be more polite about it, and on the occasion where he calls her a know-it-all he's being genuinely unfair, because he asked for anybody in the class to answer. In general, though, when a teacher asks a question of the class they want to engage the whole class, not just the most able students, and find out who knows what: they don't want to be being constantly answered by one student who they already know knows the answer, especially as that may eventually discourage others from even trying. And students at well-run British schools are expected to be able to demonstrate original thought and analysis: quoting the textbook without adding any personal input is seen as a mediocre answer, and of course any good teacher would be dissatisfied with a mediocre answer from a supposedly star student.

I've been told several times that that's not the case in the US and that students in the US are expected to just quote what they have read, and not start to develop their own ideas until they get to postgraduate level. This explains why so many US fen think that Snape is being unfair to Hermione here. In case anybody thinks I'm making it up about the expectation at British schools being different, here's an interesting article about how quite young British children are increasingly being taught metacognition: not just independent thinking, but thinking about how they think. [Terry Pratchett, btw, said that witches have First Sight and Third Thoughts: that is, they see what is really there rather than what they expect to see, and they think about how they think about thinking. Second Thoughts - metacognition - was something he regarded as completely normal.]

Nevertheless it's probably fair to say that Snape would be an even better teacher, more likely actively to inspire his students as opposed to shoving them through the goalposts of OWL and NEWT like an overloaded wheelbarrow, if he didn't hector and hover and get on his students' nerves quite so much. Although it's true that he does need to micromanage to some extent to keep the class from blowing themselves up, it's also true that he's a nitpicking, negative person who rarely if ever gives anybody any house points (although when he takes points it's rarely more than ten, to McGonagall's fifty) and is much more likely to criticize than praise his students. Being a competitive person himself he may feel that sniping at the students will make them work harder to prove him wrong, because that's how he would react in their place - but it's quite the wrong strategy with nervy students like Neville who need to be encouraged.

In fact we see Snape praise a student only twice - once when he holds up Draco's work as an example of good practice during the first lesson, and once, grudgingly, to Harry during the Occlumency lessons ('I don't remember telling you to use a Shield Charm ... but there is no doubt that it was effective ...': from someone as negative as Snape this is praise indeed). There's no doubt that the fact that Snape praises Harry here is an important point which we should notice, not just a throwaway line JKR put in as an afterthought, because she has allowed readers to see some of her working notes for OotP and there's a column for the Occlumency lessons, which includes a session in which "Snape grudgingly approves ish".

In addition, he in a sense praises Harry by omission when Harry breaks up the incipient wand-fight between Snape and Sirius at Grimmauld Place. Sirius is angry with Harry, but Snape is not, and just accepts Harry's impartial intervention and doesn't have any problem with a fifteen-year-old telling two adults how to behave. This, combined with the careful pre-planning of the scene where Snape expresses approval of Harry (albeit somewhat lukewarm and stiff approval) when Harry finally makes some effort in the Occlumency lessons, suggests that JKR is showing us that Snape doesn't have a problem with Harry when he can see that Harry is doing a good job. Nightfall Rising has pointed out that the idea of a young(ish) boy trying to stop two adults from fighting will also have great resonance for Snape.

He is not, as often portrayed in fanon, bound to rubbish anything done by Harry or anything done by any Gryffindor even if it's obviously good. We see him as a boy make a remark about Gryffindors preferring brawn to brain, in response to a gratuitous insult to Slytherin, but except for the brawling incident we never see him take points from any Gryffindor other than the Trio, and prior to DH we only once see him give detention to a Gryffindor (Neville) other than the Trio - and the detention with Hagrid which he gives to Neville, Ginny and Luna in DH is more of a covert reward, since he must know it's going to devolve into a meeting of the Harry Potter Fanclub.

Harry expects Snape to mark him "Exceeds Expectations" when he makes a good potion (although this is just after the Pensieve debacle and Harry's potion is, for whatever reason, broken and lost), so even though he hates Snape he expects Snape will mark him reasonably fairly according to his performance. And Snape comes from the sort of area where "not bad" is the height of praise, so most of the time he will acknowledge good work by keeping silent, or even just by criticizing it in a less vitriolic tone than usual. Any truly canon-compatible Snape is going to be sour, difficult and ill-mannered, probably rather spiteful and a bit childish and sulky, not sweet or charming. But he will also be brave, protective and self-sacrificing, and I would argue that the idea that he is unreasonably prejudiced against Gryffindors is not only not canon but not canon-compatible, since if this prejudice (so beloved of fanon) really existed you'd expect to see some evidence of it. There is some evidence that he really is biased in favour of Slytherins, or at least that some of the students believe he is, but not that he is biased against any particular house, so whatever prejudice he may have comes from unfair love rather than unfair hate.

Much has been made of the fact that many of the crowd Snape hung around with at school later became Death Eaters, and judging from what Lily says, it was apparent that they were heading that way by the end of fifth year. Schoolboy Snape makes an excuse for a friend of his who supposedly tried to use a Dark spell on somebody, under unknowm circumstances, while Snape was not present. It is not clear, when Snape says that Mulciber's behaviour was just a joke, whether he means "It was Dark magic but it was funny" or "He was only kidding that he was going to use a Dark spell."

The same people who say that this proves that young Snape was an evil bully tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that Remus did little to stop his friends' bullying behaviour, and even joined in with it, while he was a prefect (his is the first voice on the Map to jeer at Snape, and the Map was made in fifth year). They forget that James, Sirius and Remus were best mates at school with somebody who grew up to murder (that we know of) twelve Muggles, Bertha Jorkins and Cedric Diggory, and single-handedly sought out and resurrected the Dark Lord - and I find it hard to believe there weren't at least some signs that Peter was a bit sinister while they were still at school. James not only remained friends with Sirius after Sirius came close to murdering a classmate, but actively encouraged him to go on persecuting his victim. Harry not only remained friends with the Twins after their near-murder of Montague, but persuaded Hermione not to help Montague by telling Madame Pomfrey how he'd been injured. Remaining loyal to friends whose behaviour is becoming increasingly worrying seems to be a Hogwarts Thing, but as usual only Snape gets blamed for doing what everyone around him is doing.

A thorough, heavy-duty essay on Pottermore, entitled The chapter which made us love... Severus Snape, sums up what is presumably an at least semi-official take on the man:

"This pattern [in which Snape appears to be an enemy and then is shown to be on Harry's side after all] is woven through each book - Snape is bad, Snape is good. Snape's a total git. Snape saved your life over and over. When Snape is tasked with the awful burden of killing Professor Dumbledore, he fulfilled everyone's narrative perfectly: here was the final proof that Snape was untrustworthy, yet we learn that he had to kill Dumbledore for noble reasons that barely anyone knew about.

"Snape's bravery is staggering. He is always viewed as the cartoon bad guy, yet what he furtively does for Harry along the way is his tragic secret - one nobody would be likely to figure out. Of course, Snape being who he is he makes no habit of being cheery, which doesn't help matters.

"It's almost like Snape created a kind of butterfly effect across all the books. It was Snape who overheard the prophecy that would go on to define Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter's lives for years afterwards. The prophecy can be seen as the catalyst for everything; it led to the death of Lily, his great love, and Snape spent the entire course of Harry's (and his own) life trying to make amends. If you think about it, Snape could be seen as the greatest instigator of the story's events."

The comment that "barely anyone" knew about Snape's motives for killing Dumbledore does sound as if a few more than just the two of them knew, and tends to bolster my suspicion that Aberforth and/or Hagrid knew about it....

The same essay continues:

"Snape dies looking into Harry's eyes. The eyes of the boy who survived, because the woman he loved died. The eyes of the boy who looks the spitting image of his father; the man who bullied him, then married the love of his life. Imagine having to look into those eyes in that moment; the eyes that both pained you intensely and yet made you feel love more than anything in the world. Snape's final moments are perhaps the bravest we have seen of any character.

"Within Deathly Hallows' lingering, final chapters we understand that Snape lived his life as a tortured, double-agent, constantly flickering from the good side to the bad like a broken light, and all in the name of an undying love that cemented his loyalty to Harry and Dumbledore.

"Right from the start in Philosopher's Stone, three, naïve children thought that the big meanie Potions professor was the antagonist trying to steal the stone. It is only at the end that we understand that he was the one trying to stop it all: always the silent hero behind the shadows. In 'The Prince's Tale' we unfurl the layers of quite a remarkable man. One whose name would be given, very deservedly, to one of Harry's future children.

"Snape has taught us that there are no good men and bad men, that we are born full of foibles, and complexities and painted in thousands of different shades. Whether we choose to see Snape as that mean professor, calling Harry 'our new celebrity', or as the chivalrous hero casting a meaningful Patronus, is up to you. But as Dumbledore often likes to say; 'It is our choices that show who we truly are'. Snape made some bad choices, and sometimes he was hard on Harry for no good reason. But he did spend much of his life making choices that would go some way to repair the one, truly terrible one."

Since it's on Pottermore and it's something a lot more than a few throwaway lines, this is presumably Rowling's own view of Snape, either written or authorized by her - that although he was "mean" and sometimes unfair to Harry he was loyal to both Harry and Dumbledore, tortured, tragic, noble, "staggeringly brave", the chivalrous silent hero hidden behind the shadows, a complex and remarkable man motivated by undying love and by the desire to put right his own boyhood errors, and the prime mover of the story. As Rowling has said on Twitter "He could have broken cover at any time to save himself but he chose not to tell Voldemort that the latter was making a fatal error in targeting Harry. Snape's silence ensured Harry's victory."

That Rowling herself apparently considers Snape to be the engine which turns the plot, and to have ensured Harry's victory by holding his tongue and turning down the chance to save himself, is a strong indication that the chapter-title The Flaw in the Plan refers to him. It is not, in the end, Harry's capacity to love which is the flaw in Voldemort's plans, as Dumbledore had expected: it is Snape's warm-hearted capacity to love, and Harry's cool-headed near-total lack of self-interest, which leads both of them to become a willing sacrifice to bring the monster down.