[ SECRET POST #2283 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2283 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 032 secrets from Secret Submission Post #326.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

But, with regards to Snape, considering his moral standing rather than his relation to the protagonists, I think there's a lot of shit that he does that's morally questionable and dickish in the extreme. Yes, in the struggle against Voldemort he's on the right side. But the question of all the other stuff that he does - particularly his cruelty and vindictiveness as a teacher - just isn't addressed.

It's treated as if his sympathetic background, and the fact that he's against Voldemort, makes up for all of that. And so the extremely cruel stuff that he does throughout the books just isn't addressed any more. As aubry said, once the sympathetic background appears, it's as though the villainous stuff that he does disappears.

tl;dr - Snape as a teacher does some stuff that's pretty inexcusable and horrible and cruel, but once his sympathetic background comes out, all that stuff just gets ignored.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, Snape does do a lot of really shitty things to the students under his responsibility. That makes him an asshole, not a villain. Sometimes "good guys" can be shitheads. That doesn't make them villains.

Revealing Snape's backstory was one of the things that cleared up whose side he was actually on -- the mystery of which, from a narrative perspective, had been the purpose of showing him being an asshole to the students. After that mystery is resolved, there would have been little point to dwelling on his shitty behavior to make the reader question his allegiance. If anything, that's a failure of the storytelling, rather than the character.

[(Anonymous)]

That's kind of my point? I guess? He's a good guy but in a lot of ways, a bad person. Which is fine, he's a morally complex character, but the way he's treated in the series, any consideration of the things that he does that are bad disappears, to a certain extent, after it's revealed that he's on the side of the angels. Which is a problem, and I agree that it's a failure of the storytelling, and I think that's all I've really been arguing. Once it becomes clear that he's good from a story-structure point of view, there's no further consideration of the things that make him ambiguous from a moral-character point of view, and that's not necessarily a good thing. I think that's all Aubry was saying to start off with.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm really not sure how it could have been handled otherwise in the narrative, though, without completely reworking huge chunks of the story. Because the ways in which Snape is kind of a shitty person and the way those traits manifest plays a role in the narrative early on; they make the protagonist, and therefore the reader, wonder whether Snape is on the main villain's side. After it's made clear that he's not, maintaining that sort of ambiguity serves no narrative purpose. Dropping that threat results in glossing over some of the character's personality traits in the last book or so, but with as much else as is going on during that time in the story, I'm not sure how significant a flaw that really is.

[truxillogical]

It could probably have been better handled by Harry not choosing to name his son after Snape just because he was one of many many people killed in the fight against Voldemort. Snape loved Lily, so there's that, but it was kind of a selfish, possessive sort of love (that inspired him to do heroic things, yes, but still). And he helped them defeat Voldemort, but, well, so did a good number of people.

Heck, and I say this as someone who quite likes woobie-Snape and read/wrote my fair share of Snape/Lily fanfic back in the day and talked about asphodel and wormwood and how smug we were gonna be when it turned out we were right--the way it plays out, anything heroic Snape ever did still seems spawned out of that twisted, possessive love he had for Lily. It's a selfish sort of heroism (one more motivated by grief and guilt than the need to Do The Right Thing. Also, I imagine it's easier for a man like Snape to face death without being brave, figuring his own life isn't worth anything now). Which is, y'know, fine and makes for an interesting character. I just wish that, after the books got reasonably complex, we got Harry naming his son after the man and calling Snape "the bravest man I ever knew" as if doing heroic things, for whatever the reason, makes you A Good Hero.

[(Anonymous)]

A lot of that can be attributed to the Death Equals Redemption/Never Speak Ill of the Dead tropes. Snape may have been an asshole when he was alive but after he died (revealing his 'sympathetic' backstory) Harry was able to retroactively justify his behavior to fit with his new 'heroic' status.

So once he was dead a) Harry felt guilty about hating him since he died helping him defeat Voldemort and b)being dead, Snape could no longer continue to act like a dick, thus giving Harry no further reason to dislike him and allowing Harry to entertain the illusion that he would have stopped being a dick once he was no longer pretending to be the servant of Voldemort.