What do you think?

 

In Master Slytherin's "What Lies Beneath" there is a great version of good but asshole Snape. Jbern’s “To Fight the Coming Darkness” presents an evil Snape who makes a great antagonist. Which would you prefer?

 

Both can work, as long as it's written well. Snape and Malfoy are unpleasant bullies, but not "evil" in canon. Since they were redeemed, it's a little hard to imagine them as really "evil", since when it's done in a fic, it's ridiculously overblown cliche shitfest.

Regardless of their morality, since they both cause so much trouble for Harry, I prefer them dead. Not good or evil, don't really care which, as long as it's realistic, but dead.

 

And as for Malfoy... No, he has no use. Have Harry kill him ASAP.

 

When in the world was Malfoy redeemed? Snape was, yes, but he's still an unmitigated asshole who has no business teaching children. Malfoy only switched sides because he feared Voldemort was going to kill him due to his father was failing in his tasks given by Voldemort and himself failing to kill Dumbledore. There's nothing redeeming in that.

I've viewed, since I read it, the scene where Harry walks in on Malfoy crying with Myrtle as a pivotal scene, where Malfoy could've started the road to redemption. Since Malfoy still chose to attack Harry... Well, I've believed he made his decision to follow Voldemort. He only switched to save his own skin when he couldn't handle it.

Snape is usually poorly written so I have no preference for which side his loyalties lie as long as its well written. I greatly prefer Malfoy as evil for anything that starts after HBP, but post-OotP I'm more amenable to redemption for him.

 

They work better as actual characters rather than evil caricatures of themselves or implausible redemption stories that have to ignore most of what they did in canon.

Unless you're writing about a crapsack world, a story has space for maybe one unambiguously evil character before things get dumb. Voldemort has dibs.

 

Snape never really was evil. He's just a thundering douche with the maturity level of an angry 14 year old and about ten tons of pure self-loathing.

Malfoy likewise was never really evil, just a pathetic little worm who spent his entire life hanging off his rich daddy's dick to feel semicompetent.

They're both more pitiable than detestable.

 

Either one is hard to pin down as good or evil, but I think the question can be answered satisfactorily by analyzing which side of the war they end up helping.

In regards to that, having Snape help Voldemort in earnest seems to make him almost too much of an asshole to make sense. It implies a level of douchebaggery that seems to defy a single human being's capacity for shitkicking. It would be bad enough to make him, in many ways, worse even than Bellatrix or Tom, with a hint of Wormtail. Confusingly evil as opposed to infuriatingly pathetic.

Conversely, watching Malfoy aid the Order is simply annoying. His positive deeds are still bathed in the glaring light of his past actions as a spoiled cunt.

 

re·deem
/riˈdēm/
Verb
Compensate for the faults or bad aspects of (something): "a disappointing debate redeemed by an outstanding speech".
Do something that compensates for poor past performance or behavior.

He was a scared and reluctant Death Eater, his entire family switched sides mere moments before Voldemort's defeat, Harry and his friends didn't beat his ass during the Battle of Hogwarts, he had a place in society after Voldemort's fall despite his previous actions. Perhaps redeem is too strong a word, but apparently switching sides was enough.

 

Perhaps it was just another case of a lot of death eaters getting away with it?

Depending on your setting you can have them be anything. But in canon it was the mystery behind Snape (and him being a jerk) that made his character so appealing. If you don't have that then it isn't really Snape any more. It's hard to do without changing his character since we know which side he is ultimately on now. For Draco, he wasn't good or evil either. Just a prick but still only a child.

Both of these characters work best by being neither.

 

So long as you make it interesting, good or evil can work equally well.

What can't be changed is that both of them are pricks. If you're going to have them as good, model them along the lines of, say, Spike from Buffy/Angel. They'll help out, so long as their aims align with yours, but they'll be absolute bastards about it.

 

Way I see it, Snape and Malfoy Sr are both followers and will align with the most powerful leader around, and Malfoy Jr follows Sr's lead. So in a scenario where there's a new mover and shaker on the board, I can see them all being 'redeemed' just by being minions of someone who's not kitten-puntingly evil.

I've seen this done well with a powerful, politically savvy Harry on multiple occasions, though the whole 'Snape has the emotional maturity of a rock' thing has to be negotiated first.

 

Do you think Snape murdered people during his Death Eater days?

 

Probably, yeah. He seemed to be pretty thoroughly involved in it up until he realised Lily might be in direct danger (rather than the generic danger of being opposed to Voldemort). That's literally the only thing that pulled him away from it.

For fanfic purposes, I've seen him just be used as a sort of potions equivalent of Ollivander, too valuable/useful to send out on the frontlines so kept back at HQ brewing up the various shit they might need, and that's fair enough, but even then, you've got to accept that at least some of those potions would have been poisons or whatever

 

He's a bit more than a bully; he's also a racist, and has a deep cruel streak.

To me, cheering for the potential death of a particular group of people, to their faces, feels like more than bullying, or merely 'talking the talk' he's learned at his father's knee.

He strikes me as the type to knock eggs out of birds' nests, kick dogs, and discreetly kill the neighbors' cat because it pissed him off. He was pretty eager to see blood, during the whole Buckbeak execution thing.

Of course, we know what tends to happen to those types of people, when they reach adulthood.

Hehe. A sentiment that is near and dear to my heart.

Only two that we know for certain.

James and Lily, by proxy.

By that same token, he attempted to murder Harry and had Neville's parents tortured to insanity -again, by proxy.

I mean, come on, Snape heard the first half of the prophecy and said to himself, "This means there is a person who will be able to stop my boss, who is murdering people left and right, and plans on either killing or subjugating all of the muggles and muggleborns: People like Lily and her parents.

"On the one hand, I can keep this from him, and hopefully he will be stopped. On the other hand, I can warn him, thus enabling him to continue his evil deeds with near-impunity. It also goes without saying that, if I tell him, he is one-hundred percent certain to kill every child who fits the description in the prophecy, in order to ensure his victory.

"What should I do?"

And, he ran straight off to tell Voldemort. :facepalm

Even if Snape never so much as sneered at someone after that, he'd already ensured that Voldemort would start killing babies who fit the prophecy, along with their families (after all, they had previously defied him). He did that, and it was a conscious decision. He had to know what was going to happen, even if he didn't specifically know who it was going to be happening to.

From the looks of things, Snape only started regretting this decision around the time he found out he'd pointed Voldemort straight at Lily... or, at least, after he found out Lily was killed because she didn't step aside and let her child be murdered.

As 'mistakes' go, consciously attempting to ensure Voldemort's long-term victory by telling him he needs to start murdering newborns is a pretty big one; 'Oops' doesn't quite cover it.

And, he never seems very repentant about what he's done, except that it got Lily killed. Presumably, he would have been okay with Voldemort killing scores of muggleborn, muggles, political enemies, and James and Harry, as long as Lily was around to keep alive Snape's stalker-ish dreams of eventually reconciling his way into her bed.

Think of it as Snape overhearing some invasion plans, then running to Hitler to tell him when and where the Allied Forces were going to attack on D-Day... and then Snape found out Lily was going to be on one of the support ships. Oops.

Snape may never have fired his 'gun' at someone, but that doesn't mean scores of people aren't very predictably dead due to his actions. That, years later, he feels sort of bad about it, but seemingly only because his crush got killed, doesn't make him a good person. It makes him a selfish person who is still solely fixated on a woman who didn't want him, and he made the mistake of telling the Allied commander what he'd done, thus putting himself firmly under the man's thumb.

Snape is as much Dumbledore's cat's paw as Harry was, except Harry was doing it because doing the right thing more or less came naturally to him. Snape would barely recognize the 'right thing' if it bit his ugly nose off.

You can decide for yourself what that says about Snape's moral character.

 

Snape will do what it takes to survive - he'll play both sides and will want to be on the winning side in the end.

Draco is a backstabbing little shit. I can see him as a training dummy for Harry in his school years, but out of Hogwarts, even Wormtail has more potential because at least he's an animagus. Malfoy's skill set revolves around throwing insults, calling on daddy and looking in the mirror.