[icon] Trust Snape

[parelle]

From this shirt , an icon with font selection, for puellacaerulea Because I was bored with studying and wanted to play with pretty fonts.  As for what I think, I'm not convinced either way on the subject.

Please credit bookshelvesofdoom.blogs.com (because I didn't think of the idea myself)

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Comments

[yechezkiel]

For the people interested in Harry Potter who haven't read book six (and I am sure there are some--I didn't read book five until shortly before six was released), spoiler alert.

I really enjoy and (when readers don't recognize it) am really annoyed by one thing in J.K. Rowling--her complete lack of originality. Dumbledore is nothing more than T.H. White's rendition of Merlin redone for a far less tendentious series. The "wise old man" is a fantasy archetype, and he often serves as the story's moral center; Dumbledore does this for the Potter novels in the way Merlin does in The Once and Future King and in the way Gandalf does in The Lord of the Rings. Part of Dumbledore's moral message has been a consistent tempering of the "them-and-us" (as opposed to "black-and-white", more on this later) view of Harry and company. A big part of this has been Dumbledore's undying faith in Snape's rehabilitation.

As Snape is the only Death Eater we know of to have truly recanted, he is the only candidate for testing the moral universe that has existed in the story since Book 1, which is a vaguely "Christianesque" one. (That is, it is not necessarily Christian, but it is a moral view that was unimaginable before Christianity.) You're correct in saying that the books have a black-and-white moral universe, but Snape in no way violates that in the way you assume. Snape embodies the redemptive character in Dumbledore's morality: He is white though he does look black; he is white though he does act black; he is white though he does despise the Hero. If Snape turns out to have killed Dumbledore as nothing more than an act of evil, the moral universe of the books turns capricious and cheap. Sure it's "realistic", but fantasy does not require such bleakness and is often quite unsatisfying if it does. Fantasy and scifi as genres are important in that they can peel back and present ideas--especially philosophical and ethical ones--without the detritus that clouds our vision in rational discussion.