Written by Erica Rose Jackson I’m taking a step away from my weekly blog challenge for this post. I’ve read a lot of Snape hate online lately and I felt like it was time to speak up. I, like many of you, was raised with Harry Potter, Snape being my favorite character from Prisoner of Azkaban on. He’s not a hero or a villain, he’s a man. All of us have flaws but they don’t necessarily make us a monster. We should work to fix them, of course, but no one in that book series is perfect. Dumbledore is actually a manipulative man who could have given Harry more from day one, probably saving many of the lives that were lost. I don’t see the internet filling up with Dumbledore hate posts. From book three, I could feel that Snape wasn’t the monster the book was making him out to be. When I read Order of the Phoenix, I actually thought Snape would die for Harry once we reached the end. I can’t explain what caused my instincts to feel this with Snape, but I did. As a character, he’s complex only revealing his truth in his death. He loved Harry’s mother, Lily and when she rejected him, he went toward the darkness. I don’t see this as depiction of Snape’s evil but evidence of Lily’s light. In what better way could J.K. Rowling show how pure Lily Potter was then writing her as the one ray of brightness in Snape’s life, once gone he faded to total darkness. He rejoined the light when her life was in danger, yes if it had been Neville he would have stayed a death eater, but that was evidence once again of Lily’s light. How could Harry Potter be the boy who lived and go on to defeat Voldemort if he didn’t have that same brightness within him? Snape devoted the remainder of his life, even though Lily wasn’t saved, to being a double agent and protecting Harry. Snape was disgusted with Dumbledore when he learned the truth, that he was protecting Harry only so he could die at the right moment. That is not evidence of a monster. Snape should not have bullied children in the school, he took intimidation too far, and this can’t be discounted by his lack of love as a child. His youth was awful but he could have chosen to rise above his background, people have done it. I think he was really mean to the students because he didn’t want to be a teacher, but he’d promised Dumbledore. We can’t brush away his actions for this reason either, but I believe Rowling wrote Snape the way she did to show that ally's can come in even the strangest, unexpected forms. All of this is to say, you can’t judge Snape by any one action, but his character as a whole. If you hate him, that’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it. But I imagine if you take a deeper look at the symbolism that follows his story, you’ll see him as just a man who tried. We can all try to do greater things with our lives but still fail in other areas. Snape is just a man, neither good nor bad.
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