No... but I'll look into backing it up with CANON. Sorry, that was a cheap shot, I know what you mean, so I won't get into the caliber of that question.
I'll look into it but if I remember correctly they did say that that was why the unforgivables were unforgivable, because you had to want to do what they did to that person.

Well, we know for a fact that bella said that rightous anger wasn't enough to really power the crucio.. that you had to want to hurt the other person. But like I said, I'll dig out the books later.

But the points remain, that Dumbledore's supposed wisdom in trusting Severus is highly questionable.. and by no means is it a valid rationale for assuming Snape is going to be redeemed.

In fact the question of whether or not Dumbledore has any wisdom at all is highly valid the way I see it. His actions throughout the books have not just shown him to be "fallible" but they've pretty much conclusively shown him to be an incompetent, do-nothing, dumbfuck.

He hasn't made one correct decision in the whole fucking series, period, from the moment he first appeared, dropping Harry off on the doorstep to the moment he died he was an abysmal example of stupidity. I mean Christ almighty....dementors attack potter during a match in front of the whole student body and what does he do? NOTHING! Sure, he saves potter, but beyond that he does nothing to make the campus safe. Wow... what a fucking brilliant and wise course to take. Nooooo, let's not take steps to ensure the safety of the student body by maybe going out and destroying the dementors, let's not just tell Fudge to go fuck himself sideways with a broomstick and take the story of the demetors attacking a student directly to the press... no... instead let's do nothing... that's surely the wise thing to do.

Never even mind his "wisdom" in leaving a freakin 1 year old with a bunch of douchebags like the Dursleys. Oh... that's a fucking STELLAR example of how wise he is and how much he's learnt about human nature in his hundred plus years of being alive. I mean if Mrs Figg was there to watch him all those years he HAD to have gotten regular reports on the Durleys behavior. So either he's incredibly dumb and trusting, or he set up Harry's life to purposefully suck donkey balls.

No... The facts speak pretty damn clearly here....Dumbledore is either a totally fucking clueless idiot or he's a malevolent force for evil that needs to be stamped out (And I don't give the lemondrop sucking jackass the credit of being smart enough to be malevolent), and that means that relying on his wisdom as some sort of proof for Snape being good is just plain stupid.

 

While we are ripping into Dumbledore, I'd like to ask why it took An Entire School Year to review the (very few) pensieve memories of He-Who-Would-Become-He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The memories weren't particularly traumatic for Harry. It could have been done over a weekend, or alternate evenings for a week or two. All that time spoon-feeding this information to Harry: surely AD could think of some better way to spend his last few months on earth?

And Why The HELL didn't Dumbledore stop Draco Malfoy? TWO nearly lethal attacks on students, with the Golden Boy jumping up and down and yelling that Draco was acting odd, and no one bothered to investigate? Now that I think about it, Draco is more wizard than he looks - he kept an Imperious on Rosmerta for months. And he DID manage to get the Death Eaters into Hogwarts.

I've been drinking this evening - so if I said something stupid, please don't flame me. It's been an unpleasant day.

 

Part of the reason for Dumbledore's unrealistic and sometimes boneheaded behavior is unfortunately due to JKR's plotting. She likes to stretch things out over the course of roughly a school year and do 'the big reveal', the main event, the shocker, right near the end.

The formula does heighten the suspense and makes for some good reading but it also makes for some real head-slapping as you wonder just what in the h e double hockey sticks is wrong with half the people in the books.

 

You forgot:

4.) He is a spy for Dumbledore and has unsuccessfully been tricking Voldemort. Voldemort knows Snape is a spy and feeds him low value scraps of information so the Order of The Phoenix will chase after small-potatoes operations, while they are caught completely unawares by the high profile raids, massacres and whatnot.

or

5.) He is playing both sides but hasn't successfully been tricking either one of them. He's just an unwitting pawn in a pointless game of back and forth between two chess masters who both let him believe he is a bishop, when in fact he is a pawn, each of them hoping that the other chess master thinks he's a bishop as well.


As for Snape treating his non-Slytherin students like shit and ruining people's futures as part of his cover; his behavior is completely beyond the pale, outrageous and out of line. Anyone acting like he does would be fired in an instant. That he hasn't been fired would be a huge red flag to Voldemort that Dumbledore is protecting Snape's position at the school. Why would Dumbledore protect Snape unless the potions master is helping the old man, spying for him?
It wouldn't even take a genius Voldemort to put two and two together and get 'Snape's a Spy'.

Sure, you can say that it's all part of the game; that Snape has Voldemort thinking that Dumbledore only thinks Snape is spying for him, when in fact Snape is the Dark Lord's loyal minion. But that puts Voldemort in a position where he has to give Snape at least some accurate info to reveal to Albus, or else the headmaster will get suspicious. Why would Voldemort want any of his plans, no matter how small, revealed?

Not only that, why does anyone think Snape is a good spy? Where's the proof?
Some people seem to assume that Snape has been a spy for the 'light' since he left Hogwarts or sometime thereabouts.
The truth is, Snape didn't have to do any real spying until Voldemort was resurrected in Harry's fourth year. Before that, there was no Dark Lord to spy on. The earliest he could have acted as a spy was after he doomed the Potters by giving Voldemort the partial prophecy. And what good did he do then? He either wasn't trusted enough with information of the Halloween attack to prevent it from happening and he wasn't entrusted with the knowledge that Pettigrew was the turncoat. Not trusted = poor spy.

What good has he done since then? None. That whole business with the Department of Mysteries; Snape was worse than useless. After a whole year of Voldemort running this scheme, Snape couldn't find out any pertinent details? Bullshit.

And what good was he in HBP? None. If he was such hot shit as a spy, he wouldn't have gotten forced into taking the Unbreakable Vow. If he was a skilled spy, Voldemort and the death eaters would have trusted him enough that he could have said, "Hey, who gives a shit what Bellatrix thinks? She's a paranoid bitch!" and the others would have said, "You're right, she's crazy! We trust you, Severus."

But no, he had to take the vow because none of them trust him. Some super spy he is. After all that, the little shit, Draco, still wreaks havok on Hogwarts because, disregarding whether or not Albus had to die to keep Snape and/or Draco alive, he didn't give anyone in the school one ounce of warning. At the very least, the casualty count could have been kept to Dumbledore alone but instead we have Death Eaters loose in the school trying to kill students! He couldn't even pry the plans about the charmed necklace plot from Draco? Now he's not just a shitty spy, he's a shitty Legilimens as well! If it was that fucking important to Albus to keep those two strutting, sneering turds alive, he should have just handed himself over in September '96 and cut down on all the fucking collateral damage!

In the end, he's only had to play the spy from May-June 1995 to May-June 1997 and during that time he has done absolutely no good whatsoever. Snape is not a master spy, he's a prick with poor hygiene.

If he's loyal to Voldemort, then he only fooled Dumbledore because the old man wanted to be fooled, not because Snape is a decent spy. He was too blinded by his need to see the supposedly inherent good in everyone to believe Snape was a Death Eater to the core. All the other good guys mistrust him and, if they don't, it's only because 'Dumbledore trusts him.'

Yeah, well Dumbledore fucked up on more than one occasion from trusting people, didn't he? Tom Riddle, the Dursleys, Pettigrew, Quirrelmort, Crouch/Moody, Lockhart... The list goes on and on and fucking on. That Dumbledore would trust Snape on top of those assholes only proves that Dumbledore trusted too easily, not that Snape is a master spy. Either that, or master spies are a dime a dozen in the magical UK.

If he's loyal to Dumbledore, he's an even bigger failure due to the complete failure to bring them any useful information from the enemy. The good guys have been caught unawares at every juncture due to lack of information. And, as I said before, his behavior is so atrocious that only a Dumbledore who was working with Snape would have let him keep his teaching position, thus making him an obvious plant, so it's no wonder Voldemort won't tell him a damn thing. Snape Is A Useless Spy. And so far, he's done nothing but hurt the 'Light's' chances of winning.

Maybe if he had Filch's job it wouldn't be quite so obvious that Dumbledore had his hand up his ass.

Bottom line:

If he was spying on Voldemort, he failed because Voldemort never trusted him with anything of real importance unless he simply had no choice (you're the only potions master in town), he never relayed useful intel to the Order and he never had any clue what the Dark Side's plans were.

If he was spying on Dumbledore, he still wasn't necessarily a decent spy because no one liked or trusted him but Dumbledore and Dumbledore was a Pollyanna who trusted too easily and refused to be anything but willfully blind to the evil in anyone but Tom Riddle (and he chose to do nothing about him when he had the chance).
Albus drank the glowing Kool-Aid in the cave, after all. If Snape was Voldie's man, then in the end, Albus was a Jonestown patsy who was done in by blind faith. Harry could have put a knife in the old fart's back just as easily as Snape, considering he hands out trust like lemon drops.

Whatever else he may or may not be, Snape is no great shakes as a spy. Wizards are just brain-damaged from inbreeding.

I hope Snape dies horribly in book 7. I hope his death is as pointlessly cruel as he has been and I hope he goes unredeemed because he certainly doesn't behave like someone who deserves redemption.

(in before tl/dr)

 

If I really thought that Snape had any chance at redemption ... well, I'd be a sucker. The *practical* fate for Snape would be to send him somewhere far away from children, and let him research potions peacefully for the rest of his life. Take him in to a fully-stocked potions lab, brick the door shut, and leave a window so owls can be his only contact with the rest of us. We'd get some nifty new items and he couldn't do any more harm.
(I'm feeling pragmatic at the moment.)

I don't doubt that JKR will have Snape die heroically in book seven, and I truly do believe that he'll take an AK for Harry, so that Harry can get to Riddle.

 

Got another one for you folks.

"Greasy git". Seen LOTS in fanfiction.

Try finding those words in juxtaposition in the books. It's like "wards" - they've become so entrenched in fanon people forget JKR didn't use the term.

Same for "greasy git", if you go hunting in the books - they don't exist.

 

Pardon the double-post, but I wished to address this part.

I am enclosing part of my reply in spoiler tags.

Spoiler

In TDH, she redeems him - sort of. But she does it her way. Voldemort tosses Snape aside like so much tissue paper because he needs Snape's wand. He even sarcastically says, "I regret it" after setting the snake on Snape to make him die a slow death. So no brave battlefield repudiation! Hah!

The interesting thing I've found about JKR is that she's taken a character who she admits was based on a bullying teacher she had in her own school years, and instead of making him a one-dimensional git of the highest proportions, chose to make him one of the most puzzling, ambiguous characters in all the books.

 

To elaborate on the very first reply: Tim Roth is even more to blame than Alan Rickman. He could have had the part, but he chose to do Planet of the Apes instead.

Oh, btw- his old HBP potions book is proof that he's holding out on his students. Harry went from an E on his OWLS to a spectacular O with that book. If Snape really knows all those cheats, he doubtless knows the mechanics behind them (and what he scribbled in his book isn't just from endless experimenting) and can easily teach all of his students to be a Potions genius.

And to reinforce what a bad teacher he is, convert O to the American A and E to B. Look at how many students were in Slughorn's sixth year class. Those are all the students who managed to get a B in Snape's class.

And Snape loving Lily doesn't redeem him, in my mind. It just explains him. It doesn't excuse his behaviour at all.

 

I actually thought it was really quite stalkerishly disturbing, the way he behaved around and regarding Lily.

 

Dude, you've been here since 2006 but you just made an extreme necro: noob-member's edition. WTF? I'm almost positive the necro rule applys to this part of the forum so unless you have something mad important to say, or at least something longer than that line you just wrote, don't post on anything older than a week and a half unless it is in the library.

 

Yeah, It's a pain in the ass. Either authors write Snape as some sort of misunderstood genius/nice guy or they make him Harry's butt-buddy.

Perhaps we should find the first piece of literature with Good!Snape, track the IP, and then use a few 2-ton bombs on the house.

If this is just extending a necro, sorry...I just read the first page and responded. It was at the top so I figured it was still going.

 

Perhaps, but you missed part of the fundimental exeptions to the rule.

He had something both salient and Unique to add to the discussion. Also if you check the dates it's at right around a month. Thirty three days (?) I think, so he can probably slide in under the bar.

I agree with Konn by the way. Snape was distinctly stalkerish toward Lilly Evans, and I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that Lilly would have dropped his friendship all together over the 'mudblood' phrase if she wasn't already feeling that. For once in cannon we see Petunia as the intelligent one as she's immediately creeped out by him, even as a child.

 

Redemption for Snape??? I think that is one more turn off for DH. Not to mention the whole 'I loved you mother but I was horrible to you'. Though I suppose you can blame part of that to Dumbles 'Master Plan'.

For me Snape is a character I love to hate. Sure Alan Rickman plays a good Snape in the movies, actually he plays evil characters really well.

Snape is a shallow git. Can you honestly say that the way he treats children in the book, ie abuses his power over them, is made with good intentions? No excuse can justify that kind of act. If you say he was doing it for the 'greater good' I would like to point out that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

Personally I think he has an inferiority complex, probably the product of his upbringing. In other words the only way he feel good is when he's pushing other people down. That makes him a bully.

Was he a genius? Nope. But he was damn good at potions. Otherwise he wouldn't be a Master Potions maker.

If ever I see a fic that has Snape starting to be nice to Harry, I stop reading.