People saying “ah but if
Voldemort had chosen Neville Snape would never have turned” as a kind of gotcha
moment is so disingenuous and absurd. We don’t do it for anything
else. It’s like asking “would Hamlet want to kill Claudius if his father hadn’t
been murdered?” or pointing out that if Dantes hadn’t been wronged then he wouldn’t
have sought revenge.It is at heart like saying that
if Snape had had a stable family life and hadn’t been bullied in school, he
probably wouldn’t have become a Death Eater. It is interesting to indulge, but
at heart it doesn’t matter. Voldemort targeting Lily is the tipping point for
Snape. It’s what enables his change and his character development. That’s what’s in the text. What matters for Snape as a character is that after Voldemort targeted
Lily, he would have tried to save Neville’s life if it were threatened (which
he does in a reduced capacity when Crabbe is suffocating him).Sure but he still bullied actual children who were in his care
It’s almost like fictional characters – like real people – can both be good and bad at the same time.
Almost like a man can do tremendously heroic things and protect his students while being a bully and a cruel bastard. One thing doesn’t stop the other or deprive them of their respective importance.
It’s almost like literature and life are peppered with actually complex and difficult characters whose good and bad actions should be taken in account and not easily dismissed simply because it is easy and comfortable to think that people are either 100% right and good or 100% wrong and rephreensible all the time, leaving us blind to the possibility that, in reality, most people, and coincidently the most interesting fictional characters, are a mixture of both, often at the same time.
Who knew?
Yeah complex characters are good, but it doesn’t make him “the bravest greatest man I ever knew” or whatever the heck
Sadly, it does. Because…that’s what is in the books. You cannot disprove something that is a direct line of the books. You might not like it. Hell, there’s plenty of stuff in canon I don’t like. But it is there. And it is canon. And in the Harry Potter universe, Snape was the bravest man Harry ever knew.
There is literally nothing you can do about it. The reluctance to understand and accept canon is one of this fandom’s biggest problems and while that is understandable to a point it really means that any serious discussion of the text is skewed as seen by your reaction. You’re not engaging with what I said, you’re pushing your own feelings as independent from the text.
I mean if you want to build a whole fantasy in which Snape isn’t brave and his contributions aren’t important, that is fine. But that is only perennially related to the actual character, and to actual canon, and therefore, not really valid to the discussion of the original post.
I sometimes wonder if much of the reason Harry considered Snape “the bravest man I ever knew” is that Snape accomplished his moral 180 and all the self-reflection and acceptance of his mistakes that Harry regularly failed at even though he was never asked to do anything half so dramatic as switch moral alignments entirely.
Harry had the luck of his faction staying “the good guys” in his moral estimation the whole time he fought for them, whereas Severus watched his go from “my friends who will help me escape the influence of and fight against those bullies, Potter and Black, and their helper, Dumbledore” to “shit they’re actually just as vicious and evil as Black ever was and they’re gonna go after Lily in order to murder a baby.” The worst the Order of the Phoenix ever did to Harry was to not tell him some things and call him a child, and Harry, himself, gets to stay the good guy even after he
(accidentally)
carves up a classmate like a slaughterhouse pig. He has crises of conscience over that, and over the evidence of James and Sirius having actually bullied Snape pretty viciously, but they aren’t ones that force him to, say, switch sides and go to Voldemort begging for help because Dumbledore thought the prophecy meant he needed to kill Ginny.
That is—Harry can see what Snape did in the process of turning around and atoning, and he can see how hard it was for himself to have accomplished quite a bit less. And thus he knows, in the way of someone who fails to lift a weight half the size of what another man is carrying, how heavy that burden must be, and how much bravery it must have taken.
That part about Harry having the luck of his faction is particularly true.
Due to the nature of Snape’s defection, moving from the ‘bad guys’ to the ‘good guys’, fandom rarely mediates on how difficult that would’ve been for him, to actively turn his back on the people he shared a social circle with, all to aid those who were his enemies.
Moreover, it isn’t just that he defects, but he spies. He has to continue those old friendships and acquaintances, taking the information he learns in confidence and offering it up to Dumbledore – double-crossing those who he once agreed with and liked.
Ron embodies the Order’s failure to warmly welcome Snape when he remarks: “Snape never eats here,” Ron told Harry quietly. “Thank God.
C’mon.”I talk a lot about the duality of Snape – and this is no exception, where he dislikes those who he is aligned with, and he perhaps likes those who he is working against.
As Dumbledore said, sometimes there is a choice between ‘what is right’ and ‘what is easy’ – but more than that, his comment from PS about bravery is extremely relevant: “There are all kinds of courage,” said Dumbledore, smiling. “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
“
Bruja entre libros 