Nymphadora Tonks is awesome. Not only is she capable of transforming herself into an exact copy of any other person in existence, she's also a super bad ass Auror with mad wizardry skills. Okay, so she's a little clumsy around household items, but what she lacks in the home maker department she makes up for in the bedroom. Although she certainly has a strange taste in men, she is strong-willed enough to keep a previously celibate werewolf in check despite his best attempts to keep her at arms' length.

She can also ride a broomstick better than the average witch, if you know what I mean.

In the last year of her life, she nabbed the man she had been longing for, gave birth to a werewolf's kid, got Harry Potter to be the godfather, and still had time to fight in the Battle of Hogwarts. And in a romantic sense she is the most awesome witch of all, for she died next to the love of her life whilst saving a school of children.

Simply put, Nymphadora Tonks is awesome.

 

I lol'd. Tonks fan myself, so yeah, I pretty much agree with you, Averis.

I can't think of any ways to awesomise anybody myself, but props to Blaise (for starting this thing will Badass!Bill) and CareOtters for Arthur's awesomisation especially.

 

I purport that she was actually hexed by a powerful dark wizard early on in her Auror career; the reason why she is so clumsy is that the objects themselves move to trip her, and she has magically influenced bad luck. The hex was designed to eventually kill her but she's survived it for years with only minor injuries by staying sharp and having great reflexes.

 

Had she married Bill like some of the Weasleys wanted, he'd have bitch-slapped that curse all the way back to its caster and some poor bitch in Azkaban would be falling all over dementors.

 

Enough said :awesome

 

Marietta Edgecomb is the shit.
After leaving Hogwarts, with her face still cursed; She began to follow her mother's creed of killing mudblood scum, starting with Lavender Brown; who during the Battle of Hogwarts, pushed off the tower to her quadriplegia and eventual suicide - which was a spectacular death, no one suspected she had enough talent to charm her wheelchair to go fast enough, to actually derail the Hogwarts Express in the head-on collision.
Marietta's rise to power in the ministry was fast and brutal, becoming minister of magic by the age of 26. By 29 she had passed laws enough to drive mudbloods out of the country, and exterminate every single werewolf, vampire and veela on the continent; The latter causing some random curse breaker, who thought he was awesome, to be eviscerated by rookie aurors when he attempted to storm the Ministry of Magic in a fit of rage, over his pet veela being sent through the veil of death.

Her face was cured when Hermione Granger was forced to end the curse and nullify the contract that caused it, when the Ministry hit wizards managed to track down her missing parents who had opened up a 2 surgery dentist, in a small town called Nimbin, on the east coast of Australia.
They were only found when their assumed names were pinged on the local police's computers, when they were arrested for trafficking marijuana after being caught, with enough stored in their offices, to have a street value of $750,000 Australian dollars. - Naturally the Ministry of Magic had to confiscate the evidence. The department of mysteries had a large order of chocolate frogs delivered, as well as several barrels of fire-whiskey. They haven't been heard from since.

 

I am not amused.

 

This is terrible. Not only could I not follow half of it, but what I did understand was idiotic. You're suppose to use canon reasons, not make up some implausible future that made no sense whatsoever.

Better Marietta:

She never wanted to be the snitch. She never wanted to go to the DA meetings in the first place. She only did it to support her friend, still fragile from the loss of her boyfriend. Cho needed her, even if the only reason she was going was because she liked Harry Potter. Marietta never really cared for Harry Potter. But she would support her friend.

And when Umbridge called her up for the interview- aka interrogation -she couldn't lie. For fucks sake, her aunts job was on the line. That was more important than some silly little defense club (she wasn't entirely convinced Voldemort was even back, after all).

So she told, and never regretted it. Even when Voldemort came into the open again, she new, that with the knowledge she had them (Umbridge had been just a teacher in her mind, granted, one with a distinctly horrid fashion sense, but even that wasn't exactly a crime) that she made the right choice. The deformity on her face stayed, by she wore it with both pride and shame. Shame for her ignorance and naivete, but pride, because she did it for her family.

Yes, I took a few (read: many) liberties with her character. But that's how I picture her.

 

No, that was good, just enough twisting to make it plausible and you used nothing but a few moments in Canon to justify it. Good way of fleshing her out within the confines.

@admonkey???or: Use canon. Grab a minor character and roll with it.

 

You guise, monkeything was making a joke...


I think.

 

Bartemius Crouch, Sr.

In the darkest days of Voldemort's first rise, this was the hard-arse that truly kept the country together. He authorized the Aurors to use the Unforgivables against the Death Eaters. Finding his own son in cahoots with the Dark Lord, he chucked him straight into Azkaban.

When his wife grew ill, he refused her pleas until the very end. Finally, he agreed to see their son released from his torture, but Crouch Sr. wouldn't, couldn't let his son roam free. First, he circumvented the protections of Azkaban to replace his son with his dying wife, giving her enough Polyjuice to keep her son's form until she passed away.It was an operation of Bond-like precision, executed after his fall from grace.

For a DECADE he kept the boy under the Imperius curse, under lock and key in their own home. He only flubbed it at the end from the fatigue of age and isolation, plus the machinations of the last loyal Death Eater and the Dark Lord. (Sure, Voldemort was limited in power at the time, but he had enough power and skill to break through Barty's Obliviations on Bertha Jorkins).

Aside from his well-known rise and fall, he was a capable politician and administrator- even after the scandal ruined his chance at being the next Minister, he retained enough influence to become Director of the Department for International Magical Cooperation (basically Ambassador for England to everywhere else). It didn't hurt that he knew more languages than Dumbledore.

Given that he was Director of Magical Law Enforcement and chief prosecutor of the Death Eaters, he was no slouch as a duellist, either.

Barty Crouch, Sr.- Renaissance man. Regrettably, we only meet him when the Dark Lord had already taken away all that mattered to him- his family, his honour, and his will.


(I love this thread.)

 

Rejected for idiocy and lack of canon. jadedmutt supersedes.

Fixed. It makes more sense, and gives him more credit.

Ooh, that was a nice touch.

 

Percy Weasley.

Yeah, that's right, the black sheep of the Weasley family. But I think he gets a bit of a raw deal. He starts the series as a Prefect, an early sign that Dumbledore at least holds him in high regard (ok, Draco and Pansy get the badges in their fifth year, but from what we see they're the best of a bad bunch).

He's a damn genius: O.W.L.s - 12 of them, and he gets top grades in all of them. It's not clear whether top = Outstanding, but either way, that's two more O.W.L.s than Hermione, the 'brightest witch of her generation'. He gets top grades again in his N.E.W.T.s. We're talking serious intellect, dedication and magical skill here people.

While we're talking about his skill and dedication, think about his romantic side - Penelope Clearwater and (apparently) a woman named Audrey. You just know that he's putting all the hard work he put into his studies into the bedroom as well

Transfiguration prodigy? In the Battle of Hogwarts, Percy turns Thicknesse into a sea urchin, while taking the piss out of him. Not only is that a little bit badass on its own, remember that it's human transfiguration, a notoriously difficult bit of magic. We're talking Barty Crouch Jr (himself a rather awesome character) at least, not to mention McGonagall - yeah, Percy's as good at Transfiguration as the woman who replaced Dumbledore.

He's a man who cares, notably the only Weasley at Hogwarts to even notice that Ginny was not at her best, and he does his best to look out for Ron even after he's been estranged from the family. Sure, he backed the wrong team, but who hasn't done that at some point?

The whole working for the Ministry thing is undoubtedly his worst moment, but it's what makes him human; he fucked up, stays where he is because he's just so damn stubborn, but when the shit really hits the fan he comes out, reconciles with his family and kicks arse as he does it. He's got the brains and skill to get into a good position at the Ministry straight out of Hogwarts, and within a year he's working for the Minister himself. People have said that Fudge and then Scrimgeour wanted him as a spy, or a source of information, but he'd severed all contact with his family. And give him credit - he may have made the wrong decision, but he honestly believed in the Ministry, and he stuck to his guns about it.

So raise your glasses to Percy Weasley - a man of principle, a man of action when necessary, and the real academic genius of his generation.

 

I know this particular 'awesomizing' is going to vastly condemned by most of DLP, but goddamn it, I'm going to write it anyways. And yes, I'm aware of the bias in the tl,dr, but I don't really care - most of my extrapolations make a load of sense when talking about this very human character.

Yeah, I'm talking about Severus Snape.

For starters, this guy got a raw deal right before Hogwarts. Any kid that grows up in a broken home and still maintains a drive towards excellence and a modicum of ambition can be respected. And then he goes to Hogwarts, and gets routinely treated like shit by the school 'popular kids' - James, Sirius, Remus, and Peter. And yet instead of cowering, he fights back - for all intents and purposes, on his own. He refuses to take shit, no matter who it is. Furthermore, let's consider his life in Slytherin - for intents and purposes, it probably was a living hell, because you can't tell me that with all their bloodline obsession that they wouldn't have figured out Snape's not a pureblood. Sure, Sirius said that Snape was hanging around with a bunch of would-be Death Eaters in GoF, but let's look at that in a little more detail. Firstly, Sirius has tended to be an unreliable narrator when it comes to his school days, and secondly, if all the Slytherins knew about Snape's bloodline and he STILL managed to be accepted by them, that means he must have shown some serious fucking skill and cunning to get in their ranks.

Let's push this a little further: Snape's unquestionably a prodigy. He's one of the three wizards in this generation of canon who was cited with inventing his own spells - the other two being Dumbledore and Voldemort. Furthermore, he knew magic so well that he could:

1. Edit the contents of his textbook (let's look more closely at this - the text was cited being fifty years old when Harry received it, so tracing back, it would have been thirty years old when Snape used it. That's pretty fucking impressive to overrule thirty years of experimentation)

2. Create new spells that could be cast regardless of any recognizable intent or emotion. We're talking about some powerful magic, cast without any driving emotion at all, witnessed by Harry's utter shock when Levicorpus and Sectumsempra turn out way more powerful than he ever expected.

3. He clearly knew more about the subject material than was ever expected on examinations, as shown during his OWLs. That likely meant he either worked his ass off studying or had an intuitive grasp of the subject material - or both.

4. He reportedly knew more curses than any other student coming into Hogwarts at that time, according to Sirius. If we take Sirius' word as valid (a bit of a big if), and we take in the fact that in Snape's home, his father Tobias hated magic and would not have taken well to any spellbooks being stored in the tiny house, the fact that Snape could still amass that kind of knowledge is quite remarkable.

5. Learn enough powerful magic to be accepted into Lord Voldemort's inner circle. Voldemort would have likely known of Snape's half-blood status, and the fact that he got all the way up to the inner circle of the Death Eaters would have required prodigious skill. This also implies that since Voldemort used Snape as a spy, Snape would have learned Occlumency by that time as well - it makes sense, considering how intelligent Voldemort is and the necessary need for a spy to lie and protect his mind thoroughly. And given the prophecy was given on a winter night before Harry's birth in 1980, this would have meant Snape learned the prophecy between 1979 and 1980 - when he was twenty years old.

6. He's the ONLY professor in Hogwarts that has ever been called a 'Master' of his profession. Now although it's only mentioned in passing in the first book, let's take a look at this. At that point in his life, Snape is 31 years old, and is cited as a 'Master' in his field. At the very least, he's a respected Professor who has already been teaching for 10 years. That's pretty fucking respectable, particularly considering his age.

7. He becomes even Dumbledore's go-to person when it comes to the Dark Arts. That's right - the only person that Voldemort ever feared is deferring to Snape when it comes to Dark magic.

8. When the Ministry falls to Voldemort, Snape is appointed Headmaster of the school. Now that's pretty obvious why Voldemort did it - Snape's an educator and a highly loyal and ruthless Death Eater. But let's look at this from a few more angles. Firstly, as Neville testifies, no students were ever killed under Snape's watch, and given the bloodthirsty streak that Amycus and Alecto have, that's pretty damned good. Secondly (and more interestingly), Hogwarts itself has the ability to deny access to the Headmaster's Office when it deems the Headmaster/Headmistress not legitimate. We saw that with Umbridge. And yet Snape was accepted. Did Dumbledore have something to do with that? Maybe, but I doubt it - even though Dumbledore was very good at his job, I don't think he would have the power to influence the castle itself to accept Snape as a Headmaster for an entire year.

9. He can cast a Patronus Charm - a fully-formed Patronus Charm. I know, that's not a huge deal, but he's also a Death Eater, and from the comments Rowling has made in interviews, even despite the Dark magic Snape has used, he can still cast that charm (interesting what his happy memory would be...)

10. He's one of the two wizards in the world who can fly. Without a broom.

11. He's good enough at Occlumency to block Voldemort from finding out his true motivations - arguably one of the best Legilimens in the world.

12. He was able to defend himself against two Hogwarts professors in combat - Minerva McGonagall, and Filius Flitwick, the latter being a Duelling Champion. Yeah, he ran, but let's be honest - the fact he got out ALIVE is pretty impressive.

Now there's three things to be discussed when Snape comes up. No, I take that back, there's four.


1. His treatment of Gryffindors and pretty much everyone he dislikes. Yeah, it's incredibly unprofessional - yet no teachers in Hogwarts call him on it. Yeah, it's pretty disgusting he behaves like this in the classroom - yet Hermione still manages to pull top grades from him, regardless of his loathing of her. Hell, even Harry manages to consistently pass the course, and Snape hates Harry with a passion. I think it's more likely that Snape just hates incompetence in the Potions classroom and is too impatient to stomach stupidity, and from everything we've seen, it's kind of justified. I mean, the man's got to deal with classes of irreverent students who routinely cause highly dangerous accidents with toxic chemicals and concoctions - no wonder the guy's on edge. As for hating incompetence and too impatient to stomach stupidity... hey wait a minute, that sounds a hell of a lot like DLP...


2. His treatment of Harry. It's explainable, and it's a very human flaw for Snape to have. James treated Snape like SHIT, and stole Lily away (we'll talk more about Lily later). So for Snape to see Harry every single day, behaving quite a bit like James (though not entirely like James - Snape's not always being exactly fair to Harry, but I'm going to chalk that up to error on both sides), it must have been torture for the man. And let's go down the list: Snape saved Harry's life in first year. In second year, Snape never treated Harry any worse, considering the fact that the school was actively demonizing him for being the Heir of Slytherin.

Then there's third year. Lupin's at the school - one of the bullies that made Snape's life hell, and who routinely sticks up for Harry regardless of Harry's behavior. Sure, we never actually SAW Lupin do anything to Snape, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen - he still watched idly by in Snape's worst memory. And when Snape finally does snap at Harry during the Hogsmeade incident, upon retrospect, Snape was right. Snape's a disciplinarian, he followed the rules, and Harry kept flaunting them - for what end? He kept putting himself in danger with Sirius Black on the loose - hell, Lupin called Harry on this - and Harry doesn't show the slightest iota of remorse. And then when Harry accuses Snape, saying that James saved Snape's life, I'm inclined to back Snape here. It was a nasty prank that could quite have gotten Snape killed, and given what we saw James and Sirius behaving like when they was Harry's age, James was only covering his own ass.

And then we have the well-remembered scene in the Shrieking Shack. Keep in mind what Snape sees. Snape's got no reason to believe that Lupin or Sirius are telling anything but lies, and let's face it, it's easy for him to justify that Lupin - a respectable and reasonably powerful wizard - has Harry, Ron, and Hermione under his control. So yeah, he gets caught by surprise and he doesn't believe anything Harry says, but why would he have any reason to, particularly when Sirius keeps goading him to attack? If anything, it would have made things a hell of a lot cleaner if Snape had held himself together and waited, but we've all had moments where we finally get a chance at revenge - and in Snape's mind, revenge against Sirius was righteous. No wonder he was pissed beyond everything when Sirius escaped, particularly when he guessed that Harry had something to do with it.

So nothing huge really happened between Snape and Harry in GoF, but let's go straight to OotP. Snape's undoubtedly under enormous pressure at that point - he's acting as a fucking quadruple-agent, and still managing to get around Umbridge. And let's consider this - if he's actually running missions for the Order or Death Eaters while he's at Hogwarts, he's getting around a fuck-ton of security to do it, and that's pretty damned impressive.

And so when Harry is thrust on him for Occlumency lessons, Snape's doing a job he hates with mutual animosity between himself and Harry, and while everything he does proves spectacularly unsuccessful, blame can be laid on both sets of shoulders here. Harry resoundingly doesn't try to clear his mind in the evenings and refuses to take the lessons with any degree of seriousness, and as Snape has zero patience for incompetence, it comes out in the teaching. And let's take a bit of a closer look at Snape for a second here - he's trying to teach an unwilling student something involving emotional control, which he has had to master to survive, and so when Harry refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of the lessons, that's pretty justifiably infuriating.

Then we have sixth year, where Harry's IQ drops into the negatives and he acts like a fucking smartass to Snape. Snape gives him detention, and Dumbledore supersedes it. Can you imagine how angry Snape would be with that? He's taken a fucking Unbreakable Vow - meaning his LIFE is on the line - and he can't even justifiably discipline a student without the Headmaster interfering, a Headmaster he's risking his life for? And yeah, I stand behind Harry's punishment for using Sectumsempra against Malfoy. That spell is questionably dark magic, but it could have killed a student, and Harry chose to utilize it in a duel without knowing what it was. Snape doesn't know if Harry knows or not, but either way, Harry nearly killed Malfoy - a student whose life in inextricably tied to Snape's own.

And then we have seventh year... where Harry hardly interacts with Snape at all, and the only time they make any personal contact is when Snape is dying and following Dumbledore's last orders to give Harry all the memories he needs to off Voldemort. Yeah, loads of animosity there.


3. I can't go any further with this digression without discussing Lily, so here it is. First, let's clarify a few things: Snape comes from a broken home, and it's unquestioned that he's not an attractive man. The second thing sucks for him - a lot. There's not much he could have done about that - his family doesn't have massive money, he doesn't have influence, the only thing the damn kid has going for him is a load of brains and cunning.

So then he meets Lily, and he falls for her. That's believable. She's pretty, she likes him as a friend (it's debatable whether it's more than that, but that fact's pretty much irrelevant to this conversation), and for the first time, Snape's got somebody he can talk to and confide in. That means a lot to kids, especially considering the fighting that was going on at home, and the fact he couldn't likely confide in his parents - particularly not his dad.

So then he goes to Hogwarts, and he and Lily are sorted into rival houses. And Lily's with James, who hates and picks on Snape relentlessly. And yet for five years, amidst Voldemort's first rise to power, Snape and Lily remain friends across house lines. Can you imagine the hell both of them probably went through for 'consorting with the enemy' (I can see Lucius and James both using those lines)?

Then comes Snape's worst memory. Now I really can't forgive Snape for calling Lily a Mudblood - monumentally stupid decision on Snape's part. But is it any better when Lily calls Snape 'Snivellus' - and then walks away, leaving Snape to be publicly humiliated. And then when Snape goes to apologize, she blows him off? Not even a trace of forgiveness, everything was Snape's fault, he's obviously irredeemable. Yeah, that's exactly what a physically unattractive, socially-awkward, mostly friendless, incredibly insecure sixteen-year old boy needs to hear from his best and likely only friend. Fucking wonderful.

On a side note, am I the only one who was seriously pissed when Lily blew Snape off like that, and am I the only person that thought someone else might have been pressuring Lily to be so cruel? It doesn't really seem like her, from the snippets I saw, particularly to somebody who was supposed to be a close friend.

So let's fast-forward now, and Snape just finds out he's betrayed Lily to Voldemort - the only woman who has paid him a scrap of attention, he's now implicitly responsible in her impending death. Talk about fucking tragedy, firstly, but what does he do? He runs straight to Dumbledore, and pleads for them to be protected. And so Dumbledore protects Lily and James, and they STILL end up dead. And in that moment, Dumbledore uses Snape's grief and guilt and gains a spy for life - and this is AFTER Voldemort is already gone. And so Dumbledore keeps Snape employed at Hogwarts.

Now I've heard a million and a half times from every Snape-hating writer that Snape was weak and he should have just gotten over Lily and moved on. Oh really? How was he supposed to do that when:

1. He's not attractive and he knows it

2. He's socially awkward and he doesn't have any true friends to help him (god, I hate to pile on sympathy for the guy, but he had rough teen years)

3. He's very introverted and despises failure, which makes him a very disagreeable person for most people to get along with. Keep in mind he despises his own failure as well, so he's got a healthy load of self-loathing that he reinforces and justifies

4. After Lily's death, he is at Hogwarts - where, exactly, is he going to go out and meet new women? Who is going to accompany him? Where is he going to learn any of the social skills he needs, considering he pretty much doesn't have them at that point (he's likely socially stunted after Lily's departure, and transition to Death Eater/ex-Death Eater doesn't help)? Furthermore, I think everyone is ignoring the massive label 'USED TO BE A DEATH EATER' that was well-publicized and would have hung over his head for years. Sure, Lucius has it too, but Lucius has money - what does Snape have?

5. He's on retainer as a spy to Dumbledore for the rest of his fucking life. Yeah, if everything else doesn't stunt one's social life, I think this would. The man is now required to keep secrets for a living, secrets that could easily get anyone close to him killed very fast. Even if he wanted another relationship, that would stand stubbornly in his way.

So when Harry arrives at Hogwarts and encounters a bitter, jaded, utterly vindictive Snape, it's kind of understandable how he got there.


4. Snape's death sucked. It massively disappointed me, and Rowling should have given one of her most developed characters a stronger exit - he deserved at least that. But even the best of us can be caught by surprise - and keep in mind, Voldemort is STILL one of the most powerful fucking wizards in the world - how could Snape have expected to survive if Voldemort told him his number was up and then sending a fucking, invulnerable snake flying at his face? Yeah, kinda hard to get around that.


So, to conclude, Severus Snape got a very raw deal, but the fact that this man still managed to pull off everything he did and not get caught by Voldemort is pretty fucking impressive. The man's got brains, cunning, and massive balls for running a quadruple agent racket and surviving. And he's arguably one of the most heterosexual characters in the entire HP series, even though his psychological profile made relationships impossible.

All things considered, if I encountered a man like Snape in a bar, I would buy him a drink for being awesome. The shit he's been through, everything he's done - yeah, that deserves some fucking respect.

 

This could be made into a one-shot: Harry and his friends meeting in a bar on the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts, and Seamus gives him crap for giving his newborn son the middle name of 'Severus'. Cue impassioned rant.

That would be library-worthy.

 

I must agree with Silens Cursor. As much as I hate most of fanon version of Snape, canon Snape is one of the best characters in the whole HP series (that said, if I was Harry I don't think I'd name my son after him or any death friends/family members because it's just creepy).

I've never understood why she did that. Snape make mistake, a big one, but he wanted to apologize for it and Lily didn't let him. It was like she didn't even think how hard it must be for Snape with everything in his life from his family home to the House we was in and one time he insulted her, when he was already angered by Marauders, was enough for her to end their friendship. I was very bitchy of her.

 

@Celestin: Even published authors sometimes use crappy means to move forward the plot. I imagine JKR realized that having Snape and Lily argue over muggleborns and their place would be a perfect way to make them go their separate ways, but that was too long to be done in just a memory Harry witnesses, so she went with the "next best thing" and had Snape call her a Mudblood.

 

IMO, what Rowling was trying to convey (and partially or mostly failing, obviously) was that the Mudblood incident was the final straw. It's Snape's worst memory because it's the spot where he actually perceived the end of the friendship, and how he was at least somewhat to blame for it. But if we could go back and look at that year in depth, I believe we'd see that the waning of their friendship started way before that.

In Snape's memories, Lily talks about how she's had to defend her friendship to Snape for years, despite his friends' obvious use of dark magic, etc. She says that Snape calls everyone with her heritage a Mudblood - Snape had no response to that one. And that was just the ultra-condensed summary; who knows what other subtle reasons there may have been for the breaking of their friendship.

If Lily were older and wiser, she might have perceived Snape's love/obsession with her, and realized that with some properly applied effort she might have actually saved him from what he became. But she was a teenage girl, and the opportunity was lost.

Nice post, Silens. Snape's death did suck - actually, that's one of the reasons why I noticed Amelia Bones's awesome factor. Remember: James Potter, Severus Snape, and Amelia Bones were all killed by Voldemort himself. Two of them went out like bitches. The odd one out was Madam Bones. :awesome

 

You glossed over a few things Silens...
Firstly, the only scene we have of Snape's encounter with James is one that he chose, from his memories.

We have no idea if he'd started the bitterness between him and the Marauders, so saying they abused him is very questionable.

Secondly, we get one glimpse of a memory. That's it. Its ridiculous to judge from one memory and say that Snape is the victim, and James/Sirius/Lupin are the victims.

Additionally, saying that Lily blew him off is kinda unfair. We have no idea if Snape had called her names before, if he'd done something to her...

Basically, the picture you give of him is biased and from one side only.

I have no problems with saying Snape is powerful, that I agree with. He's probably around the top 5 most skilled wizards. He's a genius just under Voldemort, Dumbledore, and Grindelwald. Even then, it might just be because he's so young and his life has been so shaky.

 

I don't have the books to hand, but IIRC James and Sirius started calling him Snivillus on the Express in their first year. True, we don't know much about what he did in retaliation, but they did start it.

That said, I do agree that Lily blew him off is unfair (although again, I don't have the books to hand, so I could be wrong here). We find out in DH that he routinely called every Muggle-born but her Mudblood, that his Death Eater wannabe friends were harrassing her Muggle-born friends and that Snape was dismissing it as harmless pranks - basically, Slytherin versions of the Marauders, but in all probability more violent. It was hardly "You called me Mudblood so I'm abandoning years of friendship", more "You've been turning into more and more of a prick since we got to Hogwarts and I'm tired of defending you. Piss off."