Nah, there’s nothing about being a spy that required that. He’s just a cunt.

And him not caring is half the point - Dumbledore does care. He cared even about Draco fucking Malfoy. That’s the difference. He cares, and decided to become a better person. Snape decided to wallow in his douchebaggery.

They might have had similar starts, but the choices they made led to very different characters.

 

No way. At the end of the day, Dumbledore is a genuinely good person for his entire run on screen. He started similarly to Snape, insofar as he was a self-absorbed and arrogant shit head until tragedy drove him to grow and develop as a person, but he finished that arc by the time Harry was born.

The only real mark against his character is that he weighed the happiness of an innocent child against the lives and freedoms of his society and found it wanting.

Whereas Snape is regularly petty, spiteful, and a bully to the people around him, often for no reason. He was growing into a better person, and I definitely think that if he'd had the time to complete his character arc, he could have been a good person, but he never got that chance. Snape started as a self-absorbed shithead, became a self-loathing shithead, then died before he could reach the next step.

 

A. Being a dick to gryffindors was part of his role as a spy.

B. I refuse to believe that a man of dumbledore’s capabilities would leave Harry with the Dursley’s and let him be subjected to Snape/experience the dangers Harry and other students did if he was good. Dumbledore uses people. He used Snape. He used Harry. He even used Malloy. All of them were a means to an end.

C. I agree what Snape did was wrong. However dumbledore left him in that position knowing snapes bitterness. After a certain point, dumbledore becomes responsible for snapes actions. And he did nothing.

Dumbledore is just as bad as Snape on a fundamental level.

 

I feel like you've fundamentally misunderstood Dumbledore. He's not Snape - you recognise he's kinder, and from a virtue viewpoint surely kindness is enough in itself.

If it's not, then look at what Dumbledore says - his quotes on love, virtue and goodness - how can he mentor what he doesn't know? This is hard-won knowledge for sure. His defining trauma is his flirtation with 'the greater good' and he's steered away from it for the rest of his life. He says in Deathly Hallows as much, in his conversation with Harry - that he fled to Hogwarts to avoid decisions dealing with ends vs. means and general politics, to limited success. Snape believes Dumbledore could value the lives of many over the lives of one particular person, that he could still pursue the greater good - and Dumbledore was willing to let him think so, but Dumbledore didn't believe it about himself.

We learn about Dumbledore's human failings in Deathly Hallows, but it doesn't undo the man we saw in the earlier books - and most importantly, you have to remember that Dumbledore wasn't really willing to sacrifice Harry to his death. He valued Harry's life over that, but he hoped Harry could choose it, that he had the moral strength - and he did. And it offered Harry salvation.

EDIT:

I know you have sophisticated and educated views on goodness and ethics, but I just don't see how you can square this. Levelling Snape's pettiness as Dumbledore's sin by some property of transferrence seems to be the opposite of how you've previously discussed virtue and good-action. As well as this, you seem to use the word charisma to cover up every positive interaction we see, and negate it, and I just don't understand that.

 

I'm sorry but you wot mate

If Voldemort wanted Snape to be a good spy, then part of that would have been making himself look good to the good guys. Being a petty dick does not a good spy make, in this case at least.

Where's that quote...

Snape chose to behave how he did, he knew he could get away with it because of his unique position between Dumbledore and Voldemort and he used the fact that Dumbledore sought to find good in people (case in point Draco Malfoy). It seems the only person Dumbledore ever truly gave up on was Voldemort himself.

 

I really like Snape as a character. He’s just a terrible person. To his dying breath he only cared about Lily and her eyes he could see in Harry.

He cared about Lily and honouring her sacrifice and nothing else in the entire world. And yet it wasn’t a petty love, or a lustful, or spiteful it was honest and enduring. His patronus was her, and from Dumbledore’s reaction we can see how heartbreaking a concept that really is. It started when he was eleven and it never wavered until his death. There’s definitely something to admire about the sheer insanity involved with his love for her.

That does however come with the caveat that he doesn’t care at all about anything else. Which is the antithesis of everything Dumbledore stood for. As in his own words “he cared too much.” He was placed in an impossible position where he had to sacrifice a child for the good of the world, dictated by the very fates and he managed to save Harry anyway.

Dumbledore is everything you want the kindly old mentor figure to be really.

 

Snape is what Dumbledore could have been if he'd had an abusive family and raised in poverty.

 

You should read the books again. Particularly the end of Book 7.

 

Eh, we don't know how true this is. People react to the same situations differently and Dumbledore and Snape don't have enough overlapping traits to claim this. I do think Dumbeldore's character arc would have been even messier with Snape's background, but that doesn't mean he would have turned out like Snape.

 

Snape wasn't a spy again until Voldemort's resurrection and so everything he did up to that point was unnecessary. His pettiness toward Hermione, Neville, and other children happened for years before that and he was notorious for it by the time Harry even reached Hogwarts. He terrorized children to such a degree that the literal physical manifestation of Neville's greatest fear, a traumatized orphan who lives with the knowledge that the people who tortured his parents into a vegetable state are still alive, was Snape. He drove children to tears and did so in a vicious, premeditated way in order to assault their insecurities and flaunt his favoritism. Equating Snape's lifetime of shittery with Dumbledore's lifetime of atonement is baffling.

 

I think you need to redefine your concepts of ‘care’ and ‘honor’.

Snape did not care about Lily Evans/Potter. He was obsessed with the caricature he’d developed of her, even well before her death.

It’s a little hard to actually love someone while joining a cult that specifically murders people like that person. Or to knowingly doom that person to a life of unhappiness just so you can have them survive. Or to make their only child absolutely miserable.

Shit is toxic.

 

No, fuck off.

Yes, because the world is black and white like all those amazingly well written Dark!Grey!Harry Fanfics. Dude embraced a place where he belonged because he belonged nowhere else. Was he an idiot? Sure. He was also a teenager.

 

That isn’t like being goth, joining some strange conspiracy group, or even some racist organization.

They literally killed people.

You can’t handwave that with a “he’s just an ill adjusted teenager.”

 

No you.

It's a matter of history that Snape joined a group that actively sought the death of Lily and people like her.

 

There's no accounting for taste. Some people just identify strongly with loser characters who pine for women they can't ever be with, wanting to kill the man she's with and their child, and killing the lesser races finding a group of people with whom they belong.

 

Anyone think Snape’s life could’ve been a 1980s Brat Pack film? He’s best friends with a girl who grows up to be hot and popular. He falls in love with her, but she doesn’t return the feelings. He gets bullied by the popular jock and his friends. His love interest falls in love with the popular jock. He joins a race supremacist murder cult in his angst. Unintentionally causes the death of his love. Sounds just like Lucas or Pretty in Pink.

 

He can do both.

A feeling of belonging isn't mutually exclusive from joining a murder death cult. It's not like the terribleness of the organisation strips one of basic human emotions.

Your first argument seems to be that he was a horrible person so his feelings are irrelevant. Sure. It doesn't mean that his feelings aren't there or that he can't feel positive emotions that aren't tainted with some abstract notion of evil. Do terrible people only feel tainted emotions? I'd argue no.

Your second argument seems to place love on some sort of pedestal free of the bitterness, angst, loneliness and misguided rage of a teenage boy. He joined seemingly due to a mixture of the intoxicating nature of dark magic and friends that may or may not have been manipulative. His best and only friend now hated him and he's constantly hunted down and bullied by those that society deems acceptable. You expect a teenage boy to be able to wrestle through that shit and come out smelling like roses?

A really fascinating book that deals with some of these themes is Murakami's "Underground" which deals in part with how perfectly ordinary but somewhat marginalised members of society were seduced into joining the cult behind the Tokyo Sarin Gas attacks of 1990. In his interviews with people who did end up joining the cult it's clear how ordinary the members of the cult were and how intensely relatable some of their experiences were.

My view is that: In Harry Potter, Snape is a reprehensible human being, who's spiteful, petty and just all round vile. Basically, he's an angry, bitter child who never grew up. His sole redeeming feature is the love that he holds for Lily. This love is pure and enduring and manifests in his Doe Patronus, which is "a kind of positive force, a projection of the very things that the Dementor feeds upon – hope, happiness, the desire to survive." It draws a strong intentional parallel with the love Harry has for his father and how it manifests in his Stag Patronus. This is the only good thing about Snape but it can be admired nonetheless.

And that's all I'm going to say on this topic because I don't think any of you cucks will be able to convince me otherwise in a thousand years.

 

I’m not saying it is. What I’m saying is that you can’t handwave it away as “oh he’s just a teenager”.

 

I was going to respond in the spirit you started in because despite being a Snape apologist you've got some good points, but then you devolved into calling everyone who disagreed cucks and refusing to engage.


sNaPe DiD nOtHiNg WrOnG.

 

It just seems like a lot of mental energy to spend for a tiny corner of a tiny corner of a fandom. Especially when it was like 5 guys saying the same thing and liking each other's comments. It's hard to engage with an echo chamber. So eh? Also cucks is just an inherently funny word, don't @ me.

On another note I do find interesting the gap between the people that enjoy/tolerate gay relationships between men and women in stories. Are lesbian relationships better written in general or is it just DLP's corner of the internet?