Here Is A List Of Things That Snape Canonly, Definitely, Absolutely, No-need-to-look-for-proof Did (I

Here is a list of things that Snape canonly, definitely, absolutely, no-need-to-look-for-proof did (I saw it on tumblr so it must be true)

- Stalked Lily. He had a pair of binoculars in his office, and also a newspaper with two eye hole cut into it. Snape used to sit in the tree outside Lily’s bedroom window, or the bench in her favourite park, and hiss menacingly at children and the elderly as they walked by

- Couldn’t take no for an answer. When Lily told him to fuck off, Snape immediately summoned his fedora and a guitar, and sang a sad song called nice guys finish last. He followed Lily round like a puppy, crawling and begging, until she finally kicked him which prompted Snape to kick any puppies he saw for the rest of his life

- Terrified children. Snape used to hide round corners dressed in a variety of costumes, such as killer clowns, vampires, monsters, and the taxman. He would jump out at children, shout ooga booga! and hiss menacingly (which also came in handy during the stalking)

- Stole from James. As most people do with their favourite bully, Snape idolised James and thought he was wonderful. Thus Snape would eavesdrop during class to find out what tips James had so he could write them down. Pride? What pride? Nobody needs pride when James Potter is around, that swell dude, so awesome, so rad. Even his bullying victims love him. Snape even stole James’s so he could run his fingers lovingly across the pages

- Made Sirius go to prison. Just like with James, Snape adored his other bully to Sirius to such a degree that he strived to know everything about him, including whether he was a Death Eater or not (Snape and Voldie are BFFs and Voldie tells Snape everything). When Sirius was arrested, Snape could have told the truth that he definitely knew every single Death Eater in the world and that Sirius wasn’t one of them, but some children were looking so he had to be scary instead by not telling the truth that he was 100% definitely absolutely sure of

- Was an adult at the same time he was a child and student. Yes, Snape was neglected and abused, lived in poverty, had one (1) friend, and was severely bullied at school which led to him falling in with a group of young Death Eaters who preyed upon the vulnerable but– BUT—Snape also abused his students as a teacher, which means that all that other stuff is okay because teenage Snape should have thought twice before adult Snape was mean to kids. I mean, James and Sirius absolutely knew that Snape was a dick teacher so their bullying towards him was a-ok. God Snape, why weren’t you more aware of your future self like your bullies were?

- Never did anything good. Ever. Spying on the Dark Lord to the Dark Lord’s face? Using Occlumency against the greatest Legilimens in the world? Saving the life (multiple times) of the kid of the one woman you ever loved and the man who bullied you for years? Giving your life to save said kid and the wizarding world? Nah man, none of that matters if you were a mean teacher too. Don’t you know that being mean cancels out everything good you’ve ever done and makes it void? God, Snape, why didn’t you know that?

Thoughts on Snape?

I think he is a very good representation of a man who felt insecure in his manhood; his male ego was permanently wounded by James' bullying and he decided to make it everyone else's problem by being the most insufferable teacher at Hogwarts. Add to this that he is a halfblood and only his mother was around, iirc? Snape, Voldemort and Harry all act like foils of each other in that sense, but whereas Voldemort fixated on his blood status as the main reason for his insecurities, Snape fixated on Lily. His character is all about male entitlement, he was obsessed with her at Hogwarts and then showed to have no boundaries as he went into her house to cradle her dead body in front of her traumatized kid. He only saw Lily as a trophy to be possessed, which you can see from the way he hated Harry, because Harry reminded him Lily wasn't his and that Lily had sex with another man. His interest in the Death Eaters was only secondary to his obsession with Lily and I think Lily rejecting him pushed him toward joining the Death Eaters, because, once again, his male ego was bruised and he needed to replace it with something else.

He remained mysterious up till the end and his back-and-forth with treason was very compelling to read about. So I hate him (as a "person") but he is such a good character narrative-wise and he is very interesting to study

Anyone ever pissed at Snape because he literally had the students buy shitty potions textbooks?

Like literally the same book he used when he was at hogwarts

The same book he spent time correcting so that it actually worked

That’s the book he had his students buy, and then he didn’t give them the corrections.

That alone makes him an unforgivable character because he liked to watch children fail.

always wondered how Snape never clocked that the diary/ring/Harry was a horcrux (other than the plot needed him to remain in the dark). Doesn’t add up that teen Regulus knew what it was and the 38 year old Dark Arts expert and professional double agent who has seen Voldy fail to die never worked it out

honestly, anon? same.

although i think we can work our way around this with a bit of canon-wrangling...

we can probably justify snape not clocking that harry's a horcrux during order of the phoenix, on account of the fact that he's presumably the only human horcrux in existence.

dumbledore says in half-blood prince that using animals as horcruxes is unusual because it's inadvisable, because the behaviour of a sentient horcrux can't be predicted or controlled [and it may, i suppose the implication is, therefore destroy itself, thus defeating the purpose of making it] - and snape is certainly taken aback by dumbledore asking him to keep an eye on nagini.

this could, however, be interpreted as snape being surprised that voldemort - who is highly-strung even by the standards of people who might encase their souls in inanimate objects - would have made an animal horcrux, even though he knows voldemort is able to control nagini through virtue of being a parselmouth.

connected to this, snape's understanding of the attack which harry witnesses on arthur weasley is that voldemort was mentally present in nagini when the attack took place:

“You seem to have visited the snake’s mind because that was where the Dark Lord was at that particular moment,” snarled Snape. “He was possessing the snake at the time and so you dreamed you were inside it too...”

voldemort is canonically known to be able to possess people - ginny weasley chief among them - and also, by his own admission in goblet of fire, to possess snakes. the assumption snape is making is that voldemort's control over nagini is one of the "standard" possessions the dark lord is capable of - and he must also assume, as mad-eye moody does and as the rest of the order accepts moody's account of, that harry's visions are the result of voldemort possessing or attempting to possess him.

indeed, there's an interesting sense in canon that many of the adult characters don't understand that harry's visions don't resemble what possession typically looks like - which is a genre convention which is in keeping with the overall narrative arc of the series as children's literature. the child-heroes need to be able to work everything out and the adults need to be, at best, politely disinterested - and this manifests itself throughout the seven-book canon in the fact that the child characters understand voldemort considerably better than any of the adult ones.

after all, the only person who points out that harry's experience isn't standard possession is also a child:

“Well, that was a bit stupid of you,” said Ginny angrily, “seeing as you don’t know anyone but me who’s been possessed by You-Know-Who, and I can tell you how it feels.” Harry remained quite still as the impact of these words hit him. Then he turned on the spot to face her. “I forgot,” he said.  “Lucky you,” said Ginny coolly.  “I’m sorry,” Harry said, and he meant it. “So... so do you think I’m being possessed, then?” “Well, can you remember everything you’ve been doing?” Ginny asked. “Are there big blank periods where you don’t know what you’ve been up to?” “No,” he said.  “Then You-Know-Who hasn’t ever possessed you,” said Ginny simply. “When he did it to me, I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing for hours at a time. I’d find myself somewhere and not know how I got there.”

from snape's perspective, then, the idea that nagini and harry are simply being possessed by voldemort - rather than that they're sentient horcruxes [and that harry is a unique type of sentient horcrux, and that voldemort could have been stupid enough to intentionally make his child-enemy who hates him into a receptacle for his soul] - is the result of him applying the principle of occam's razor: that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

snape does, however, acknowledge that harry and voldemort's mental connection is unusual:

“The Dark Lord is at a considerable distance and the walls and grounds of Hogwarts are guarded by many ancient spells and charms to ensure the bodily and mental safety of those who dwell within them,” said Snape. “Time and space matter in magic, Potter. Eye contact is often essential to Legilimency.” “Well then, why do I have to learn Occlumency?” Snape eyed Harry, tracing his mouth with one long, thin finger as he did so. “The usual rules do not seem to apply with you, Potter. The curse that failed to kill you seems to have forged some kind of connection between you and the Dark Lord. The evidence suggests that at times, when your mind is most relaxed and vulnerable - when you are asleep, for instance - you are sharing the Dark Lord’s thoughts and emotions. The headmaster thinks it inadvisable for this to continue. He wishes me to teach you how to close your mind to the Dark Lord.”

obviously, we know that the connection forged between harry and voldemort is that harry's a horcrux. but it's also the case that harry doesn't have the ability to see into voldemort's mind before voldemort is corporeal again. if we assume that dumbledore keeps harry's visions from the earlier parts of goblet of fire secret from snape - and there's no reason why this wouldn't be the case - then snape's understanding of the mental connection between harry and voldemort is presumably that it was caused by voldemort using harry's blood to resurrect himself.

after all, snape must know about the blood protection established by lily's death, since not only the full order [moody mentions it in deathly hallows] but the death eaters also know about it. he will also know that voldemort used harry's blood for the ritual because voldemort did this in order to show off - he's proud of the symbolism, and you can tell he was dining out on it right up until it spectacularly backfired...

the question then becomes whether snape truly deeps what dumbledore's saying when he tells him - during the half-blood prince timeline, but not revealed to us until the end of deathly hallows - that:

“On the night Lord Voldemort tried to kill him, when Lily cast her own life between them as a shield, the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort’s soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsing building. Part of Lord Voldemort lives inside Harry, and it is that which gives him the power of speech with snakes, and a connection with Lord Voldemort’s mind that he has never understood. And while that fragment of soul, unmissed by Voldemort, remains attached to and protected by Harry, Lord Voldemort cannot die.”

snape realises, without dumbledore prompting him further, that this means harry has to die. which means, i think, that we can justifiably suggest that snape has twigged that harry needs to die because - in order for a horcrux to be destroyed - the container needs to be damaged beyond all repair...

and - let's be frank - his little argument with dumbledore after this revelation makes perfect sense if he knows that dumbledore is speaking about harry as a horcrux:

“I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter - ”

snape's beef is that dumbledore secured his cooperation as a spy on the pretence that he could atone for his role in lily's death by protecting harry from voldemort, while dumbledore knew all along that this was never going to happen [snape does not, of course, know that dumbledore reckons harry will be able to return]. clearly, he would have preferred dumbledore to have just smothered harry as a baby, destroyed the horcrux, and saved them all the agony.

and so i think that it's canonically impossible that snape doesn't understand - eventually - that harry's a horcrux.

and i also think that it's canonically impossible that snape doesn't clock the others well before this.

after all, voldemort states in goblet of fire that the reason he's so pissed off by the death eaters who pretended to have renounced him after 1981 is because they knew he couldn't die:

“I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost... but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know... I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality. You know my goal - to conquer death. And now, I was tested, and it appeared that one or more of my experiments had worked... for I had not been killed, though the curse should have done it. Nevertheless, I was as powerless as the weakest creature alive, and without the means to help myself... for I had no body, and every spell that might have helped me required the use of a wand... “I remember only forcing myself, sleeplessly, endlessly, second by second, to exist... I settled in a faraway place, in a forest, and I waited... Surely, one of my faithful Death Eaters would try and find me... one of them would come and perform the magic I could not, to restore me to a body... but I waited in vain...”

[he is hamming it up so much here. the man understands camp.]

what he means by this - clearly - is that the fact that he'd made at least one horcrux was common knowledge among his minions, which provides the explanation for why regulus knew what was going on [which i've gone into more detail about here].

which makes sense - voldemort actually tells us in canon that his safeguards aren't that nobody knows he created the horcruxes [and also, if that's what he'd been going for, he'd almost certainly have killed slughorn.]

the section is too long to quote, but if you look at the bit in chapter twenty-seven of deathly hallows when he's panicking that harry and dumbledore have figured out his secrets, the thing he's afraid of isn't that they know he's made horcruxes, but that they've worked out what the objects are and where they might be hidden, something he was certain nobody other than himself would ever be able to discover.

the ring - for example - could only be located by someone who knew voldemort's full birth name, who knew that the name "marvolo" was associated with the gaunts, and who knew where the gaunts had once lived.

the locket - as voldemort understands it, since he assumes kreacher is drowned by the inferi - could only be located by someone who knew that voldemort had, as a child, been taken on an outing to the coast and had lured two children into a cave to torture them.

the diadem could only be located by someone who knew that it wasn't actually lost, knew that helena ravenclaw could be manipulated into revealing where it was, and knew how to open the room of requirement - which voldemort canonically believes is impossible for anyone other than him [even though this makes absolutely no sense to me - there's furniture everywhere, babe?].

the cup could only be located by someone who managed to bypass gringotts' famously tight security, gain access to the lestranges' vault, pick out the cup from among all the other objects stored within [which would also require them to know that a shop-boy called tom riddle stole it from a woman called hepzibah smith] and then not get crushed to death by a rising tide of molten metal.

the diary is much less closely guarded - although voldemort evidently believes that lucius malfoy can be trusted to keep it safe until he tells him otherwise. but this - as dumbledore tells us in half-blood prince - is because voldemort wants it to be used, so that the chamber of secrets can be reopened, and that he's therefore prepared to take the risk of it being destroyed because he believes that his other horcruxes are so secure that the loss of the diary won't matter. this is also, i suspect, his view of nagini - which is why him moving to protect her is taken by both dumbledore and harry as the signal that no other horcruxes remain.

snape must know, then, that voldemort has made horcruxes, because voldemort must, however obliquely, have told him so.

and he must figure out that the diary and the ring are horcruxes specifically. he's clearly the source of dumbledore's information that voldemort's fury when he discovered the diary had been destroyed was "terrible to behold".

and he must be the person who prompts phineas nigellus black to drop the info that dumbledore used the sword of gryffindor to break open the ring. harry and hermione assume this is something black lets slip without knowing its significance, but we know from the prince's tale that he visits them at snape's request in order to find out how the horcrux hunt is going.

[on the sword of gryffindor, snape's statement - "and you won't tell me why it's so important to give potter the sword?" - has to be taken as asking why the sword is so crucial to the destruction of a horcrux that he's being forced to go to great personal risk to give it to harry in order for this overall argument to work... but i think this reading is plausible - not least because voldemort knows that harry was left the sword in dumbledore's will, since wizarding wills are examined by the ministry, and could undoubtedly find out very easily if he wanted to that the sword snape places in the lestranges' vault is a fake.]

the reason that snape doesn't participate in the horcrux hunt in any more specific way relates to the point about genre conventions and child-heroes made above.

the reason that the horcrux hunt takes the form it takes isn't because horcruxes themselves are magic so arcane and unknowable that only the trio, dumbledore, and voldemort are aware they exist. it's because harry - even more than dumbledore - is the only person who knows voldemort well enough to figure out what the horcruxes are made from and where they are.

[this is why i don't vibe with stories which assume the hunt goes quicker if snape - or sirius or anyone - helps the trio. the point is that nobody but harry could figure out that voldemort would be seething about not having a vault at gringotts, or that he would have hidden the diadem the night of his failed job interview.]

snape appears to know the adult voldemort reasonably well, but there's no evidence at all that he knows anything about his life prior to c.1970 - either from dumbledore or from voldemort himself. this means that he would be absolutely no help when it came to guessing what the horcruxes were - the diary, ring, cup, diadem, and locket all presuppose the knowledge that voldemort was once called tom riddle, after all.

which makes him useless to harry when it comes to hunting them down. by the time dumbledore dies, harry knows with near-absolute certainty what five of the horcruxes are: the diary, ring, cup, locket, and snake. he knows for a fact that two of these have been destroyed, he and dumbledore believe they've just got their hands on a third, and he knows where a fourth is [nagini, next to voldemort]. the location of the cup - and the form and location of the sixth horcrux, the diadem - is something only harry has the ability to work out. the seventh - harry himself - is information dumbledore has ordered snape to keep hidden until the appointed time.

meaning that snape clearly does know what a horcrux is - both in theory and when four [diary, ring, nagini, harry] of voldemort's own are put in front of him - but that this knowledge is sufficiently incomplete as to be irrelevant to the quest harry's engaged in which takes up the narrative's time.

I don't know if you have already answered this question: is there something in Snape's life that you wanted to see in The Price's Tale? For example, I think we deserved more information about "the prank".

I haven't yet! Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this ask...

There are definitely moments I wish had been included in The Prince's Tale, but I feel like it's difficult to separate what's in it/what's missing from it from Rowling's own issues as a writer and the way they intersect with Snape's story, or rather, how she tells it. Namely, her issues around writing women and her lack of research and minimal understanding of radicalization and fascist movements. Not to be a downer, because I feel like this is a very fun ask that's probably more about having curiosity around the character of Snape and playing around with what may have been there that we didn't see, but I can't help feeling that those moments are missing often because of what Rowling herself was overlooking or not thinking of.

I wish there were moments between him and Lily that showed us why they were best friends. It can't just be because they were the only magical kids in Cokeworth. There isn't one scene we see between them where Lily is affectionate or their mutual chemistry is apparent, not even a wry smile. The closest scene is when they're laying in the grass by the river as kids and Lily is asking him about the magical world. We understand through Snape's memories that he had a great deal of love for Lily, but it's not really apparent why. Rowling's issues with writing women as fully developed, interesting characters gets in the way, and although we're told they were close friends, we're never shown it. I'd have loved to see a moment or two where we see why they clicked. It could have been woven into the existing story as simply as the two of them exchanging a wordless criticism with just a shared look in the compartment on the Hogwarts Express when James and Sirius were being mean.

But it could also have been something more meaningful - after all, these are Snape's final thoughts, the most important moments of his life that connect to the information he needs to convey to Harry. Maybe a birthday gift Lily gave him, something small, a book she bought that she saved up her allowance for, and the impact on Snape of her putting thought and effort into it. I honestly would have loved something even as simple as just seeing Lily's humor and Snape's - not just him smiling when she says his name, but the two of them laughing freely. The tragedy of that lost friendship would have hit even more if we had seen a mutual affection, an understanding between two best friends, and an innocence that was consumed by a war and their separation into rival houses.

I also wish we had seen any of Snape's home life. We get the impression that he didn't like to talk about it too much and that Lily may not have quite understood how bad it was (given that Rowling has said that Snape's dad beat him with a belt, and the only reference to his home life we see is Lily asking if his parents have stopped arguing, plus the glimpse of them doing just that when Harry breaks into Snape's mind in OOtP). We have a couple of allusions to Snape's relationship with his mother:

He knows a fair bit about the wizarding world, including about dementors and Azkaban, what to expect at Hogwarts, and the Statute of Secrecy. Presumably, as there don't seem to be other wizards in Cokeworth, his mother has told him about these things. Either that or he overheard her talking to someone else/read her letters to someone/found information on it among her things (like wherever she kept her textbooks that he would inherit).

When Lily asks him, “Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?” Snape hesitates before replying no. This implies that he's aware of pureblood bias in the wizarding world, and is making a decision about how much of his knowledge to share with Lily, or perhaps about his own stance on it. (There's something lovely in his perceiving her insecurity and choosing to shield her from knowledge that would exacerbate it.)

On the train platform, Eileen is described as, “thin, sallow-faced, sour-looking” as well as greatly resembling Severus.

This isn't much to go on, but we can reasonably infer a complicated relationship, and a woman who is emotionally closed off and/or judgmental. She's a wizard who dresses her son in hand-me-downs so either she's not very good at transfiguration or she doesn't care about him enough to allow him the basic dignity of clothes that fit and make him comfortable. I would have loved to have seen a moment or two in Snape's memories that show his relationship with his parents, and they could have been a good opportunity to also show his (possibly codependent?) relationship with Lily as he goes to her for comfort after. I don't think she would have consciously offered him any, but rather that she was a way for him to escape his home life and convince himself that he was fine. His closed-off response when Lily asks him if his parents are still fighting implies that the subject has come up before, but also that Lily doesn't understand how bad the situation is and Snape doesn't want her to (which makes sense, most abused children don't realize how abnormal and extreme their experiences are - we accept the norms we're presented with). There could have even been something as simple as Snape showing him mom a new bit of magic he learned to do and her trying to suppress it in him lest his father see and get upset, and him then showing his new skill to Lily who appreciates it and tries to learn it. This is just an example, but it would have shown a tense dynamic at home in which Eileen prioritizes not angering Tobias to protect Severus, who as a child would only perceive a kind of rejection that he seeks Lily out to replace with validation. This would make sense in the dynamic Rowling set up, and is more complex and interesting than his "greedy" looks and Lily's questions about the wizarding world.

(Before I move on from the Snape and Lily childhood moments, I also want to say, I really don't like Rowling's use of the word "greedy" in The Prince's Tale. It feels aggressive and judgmental, and also out of place in describing a child who lives in abject poverty. My assumption is that what she meant was more of a hunger in Snape's face, or perhaps a determined ambition to get to know Lily, which would align with how his personality is otherwise written.)

The other thing I would have loved to see more of is his Death Eater arc. The whole point of Snape giving these memories to Harry is to explain himself, and convince him to listen to Dumbledore's instructions at the end (which, btw, Dumbledore's portrait could have done, but we all love a bit of drama, so fair). The idea that Snape defected from the DEs only because Lily's life was threatened feels like a weak character motivation and is one of the many ways that Rowling illustrates her naivete and lack of understanding of fascist movements, their use of radicalization as a tool to prey on vulnerable people, and their cult-like dynamics (and that's probably why she fell victim to radicalization herself). I've written a little bit about it before (please don't make me find the link), but I think that Voldemort's going after Lily wasn't the catalyst in Snape's defection, but the final thread that snapped.

When he and Lily argue outside Gryffindor Tower after SWM he doesn't deny it when she accuses him of wanting to be a Death Eater, but he also doesn't own it. He doesn't take pride in it and try to convince her that if only she understood what he does, she would get it. By that point he's been established as an ambitious boy who knew what house he wanted to be sorted in even before starting school - when Lily is sorted into Gryffindor, Snape is sorted into Slytherin so quickly that it's clear he hadn't even considered changing his mind in order to follow Lily. He scoffs at James on the train when he says he wants to be a Gryffindor. It can therefore be assumed that Snape isn't refraining from arguing with Lily because he's deferring to her opinion or trying to appease her. While an argument could be made that he lost his confidence through years of bullying by that night outside Gryffindor Tower, I think that, if anything, that would have made him feel an even stronger need to identify with a group like the aspiring DEs in Slytherin. There's also a bit of a disconnect between the way Lily refers to him and his friends wanting to join Voldemort and be DEs, and no one having come to Snape's defense that afternoon, not even from his own house.

And while this has veered off a bit into meta, my point is: Snape's experiences of becoming a Death Eater and eventually defecting seem complex and I would have loved to have been shown more of it. It would have been a useful thing to convey to Harry as well. Was there a moment when he became disillusioned? Was there a moment when he started feeling shame? Maybe he thought, as someone who had been bullied for years and abused at home, that once he was on the other side of that experience and in a position of power over someone else, he would feel confident and secure and safe. Maybe the first time he experienced being in that position, he instead felt pity and shame and it was like having the rug pulled out from under him. Revenge is never as satisfying as you think it will be, and something either happened to Snape, or was maybe always there, to make him choose to treat Sirius humanely at the end of PoA and hand him over to the authorities instead of using the excuse to wreak vengeance on him firsthand. I'd have loved to see moments that show us his growth as a person - profound realizations in volatile circumstances that prompted him to find a way out from Voldemort's ranks, and maybe a glimpse of how dangerous that way out was.

Rowling held so much back about Snape - a complex, grey, nuanced character - in order to drop this big reveal about him and Lily at the end of DH. When she finally told his story, all of it was focused around Lily, a character who wasn't developed and who we only see being reactive. The veil is lifted on Snape but only enough to show that he had a deep love for Lily (who, by the way, I think he would have referred to as Lily Evans even after her death, not Potter, and I will fight Rowling on this but then I'd fight her on a lot of much more important things so that's not saying much). We still don't find out much about Snape's life, background, or experiences, and even less about Lily. I wish there had been a lot more to The Prince's Tale than "sorry kid, I did it all for your mom because of my guilt in failing her as a friend." It's one of those moments that feels exciting when you first read it, but the potential to build it out into something that improves on re-reading the books was kind of lost.

And yes! We absolutely deserved more information about the prank! Could have been great to see Lupin bully Snape actively before it, and compare it to his lack of involvement in SWM. Could have been fascinating to see the dynamic between him and James as the latter tries to pull him back, or even the moment in Dumbledore's office where he's told to keep quiet, and how that moment contributed to his radicalization! Harry spends most of DH processing and questioning his relationship with Dumbledore and learning about him, and seeing Snape have a similar experience from the opposite direction would have been fantastic. Ie. where Harry venerates Dumbledore until DH when he begins to doubt him, Snape doubts Dumbledore and grows to trust and respect him over time. I'm sure there's more that I could think of, but this answer is already incredibly long so I'll leave it here for now.

Slytherin and Eton: A Primer on the British School System.

Slytherin occupies an odd place in the Harry Potter fandom. In canon, while it is the house with the second most development, that development is almost entirely negative, with the house and a large quantity of its students acting antagonistically throughout the piece. Heck, Hagrid, the lovable gruff figure who acts as Harry’s (and thus the audience’s) introduction to the magical aspects of the series explicitely calls them the most evil house before Harry has even seen the castle. This, along with Draco Malfoy’s terrible introduction (Malfoy will be covered in detail later in the piece) and the fact that Harry is already having to distance himself from Voldemort by the time of the sorting, is the major reason that Harry chooses anything but Slytherin. While the house, or rather its representatives, are sort of given more naunce later with Slughorn, Malfoy’s Draco and Narcissus, and Snape, the core example of how it is treated in the series comes just before the final battle, when the entire Slytherin student body either sides with Voldemort (Crabbe and Goyle, and to a lesser extent Parkinson who is willing to hand over Harry to save herself) or refuses to fight the good fight at all. 

The weirdness comes from the fact that Slytherin is probably the most popular house to self identify as within the active fandom. Aside from having traits many consider positive associated with it (cunning, loyalty and ambition), it is also treated as the outcast house to the rest of the school, particularly the Gryfindors. The treatement of Slytherin therefore sticks in a lot of fan’s nerves, and understandably so. The notion of Houses, defining people at age 11, is already a weird way to handle things, after all, and defining an entire group of them as evil from the start? Yeah that’s not great, particularly if you identify with aspects of them. I myself would probably be a Slytherin or a Ravenclaw, so I can understand this distaste. But…here’s the thing. The reasons for treating Slytherin this way are not entirely diagectic in nature. The house is the centre of a massive pile up involving world building, characterisation and most importantly some fairly blunt and pointed social commentary about the British School system and society at large. 

It’s been a running gag that what racism is to the American political discussion, classism is to the British. This is not entirely true (for one thing we are certainly not over racism or xenophobia here), but there is a nugget in there. British society is heavily class stratified society. We have some of the worst mobility in the developed world, and much of our political system is dominated by a very small part of society.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is that there is a particular branch of the schooling system that dominates government, known as the Public Schools. That name can be confusing at first. The original group of Public schools vastly predate the mandatory schooling system; the oldest of them predate Columbus’ birth by over a decade. Not his voyage to the Americas, but his birth. The original idea was that they would take promising boys who normally would not get an education, due to them not coming from families who could afford them to be educated, hence the name Public Schools. Nowadays these are all elite private schools, not linked to the department of education. While approximately 7% of the population attend these schools, 33% of the members of Parliament (MPs), 50% of the Peers in the second chamber of government and 70% of the top judges are educated here. Heck, of the 54 Prime Ministers who have led the country, 32 were educated at one of three Public schools; seven at Harrow School, six at Westminster School and nineteen at Eton College. Compare that to the 9 prime ministers educated, as I was, in state schools. These institutions form part of the basis for a web of connections that defines a lot of the elite parts of British society, not just in politics but in business, in media and in higher education as well; the “old boy’s club” that provides a barrier to entry for a vast swathe of society. While supporters of these systems will note that efforts have been made to overcome this, with around 310 of Eton’s pupils receiving financial assistance, but that means that the remaining 1,000 students come from families that can afford the £12,000 per term fees, and these students are only male. The idea that this system is anything close to meritocratic is not just laughable, it is the equivalent of starting a discussion on orbital dynamics with the word’s “assuming a heliocentric universe”. Another point to make? The entire House structure comes from these schools. Eton has 25 Houses, and in this case they are literally houses; they are where the boy’s sleep at night, since it is a boarding school. While not unique to Public Schools, they are heavily associated with them in British culture. I’m adding this in because Rowling didn’t just make up the concept of splitting the children into groups. As a teenager she attended Wyedean School, which notably historically had a four House system (oh look it’s almost as if there might be a connection), before abandoning it as the school grew (I can’t find anything about when this happened, but it could well have been after Rowling studied there). Hogwarts itself, while it is an individual school, is also a condensation, celebration and condemnation of the British School system as a whole, being the only wizarding school in the UK. Umbridge isn’t just a single throughly unpleasant inspector, she is a stand-in for OFSTED, the body responsible for school inspections. It’s notable that in Harry’s year in Gryfindor,  you have, among others, the dirt poor Ron, the muggle born Dean and Hermione, the Irish half-blood Seamus Finnigen (and given that this was written in the 90′s holy shit is UK and Irish relations another can of worms I am not going to open here because this already too long but will be glanced a bit at in a later bit of this essay). It’s honestly hard for me to not read Gryffindor and Hufflepuff as stand-ins for the UK state schools, Ravenclaw for the private schools, and Slytherin as the public schools. Remember what I said about how Slytherin is treated as the outcast part of the school? Well, it is honestly treated much like the rest of the UK school system treats the private school. How is that? Well, when it snowed in my school days and we all went to the main park, the one thing that would immediately unite all the state and a lot of the private schools was the arrival of the public school kids (particularly since they tended to try and pick snowball fights with everyone while throwing classist insults around). Slytherin is in many ways the house of privilege, and not necessarily earned privilege. Lucius Malfoy, until his ousting when he plays his hand too hard in the second book, is the leader of the Board of Governors and escaped Azkaban despite his crimes, while it is explicitely stated in the first book that Slytherin has won the House cup for repeatedly in the previous years, mainly due to Snape bestowing preferential  treatment on his own House (and yes I do think it was fine for Dumbledore to pull that last minute switch, since Harry Ron and Hermione had just legimately just prevented Voldemort from returning. That kind of deserves some credit. The Neville bit might be pushing it but again, the timing was just pretty tight). But there’s more to what Slytherin represents, and this comes back to what I was saying about how charactisation is involved in this pile up, particularly the characterisation of Slytherin himself. Specifically the characterisation of him as a rascist shitfucker. I know that’s blunt but so it is the characterisation. He left a giant monster behind for the sole purpose of having it one day unleashed on a load of kids for the crime of not being born to magical parents, and Slytherin the house has historically been defined as much by its stated qualities of cunning and ambition as it has been by this continuing tradition of racist ideology. The Sorting Hat song is not the full picture as to what defines the Houses; they have grown beyond that, both in universe and in fandom. This characterisation comes back into social commentary because, yes, the UK has had and still has a long history of racism and xenophobia, from our imperial history to the Troubles in Ireland to how Eastern European and muslim immigrants are treated now. So why does Slytherin House still bare a stain from Slytherin the man? Well, in a word, it’s tradition. Remember what I said about the age of these institutions? Yeah, that’s not a joke. The Public School system, the Oxbridge higher education that it feeds into, are heavily influenced by traditions that have grown up over the ages. Heck, it used to be that in Eton, the youngest boys in the House were basically servants to the older students and staff, a practise known as “fagging” (I am not even joking). Wizarding society in general is also heavily steeped in the past; the steam train of the Hogwarts express, for instance, or the very concept of the Houses themselves. Heck, while it is never confronted directly, quite a few characters talk about how the Sorting isn’t the best idea, most notably the Sorting Hat itself. Slytherin the house has passed down the ideals of Slytherin the man in its culture, just as the UK has passed down racism, classism and xenophobia in ours. If Voldemort is the embodiment of these issues at their most violent, then Parkinson is them at their most passive; she is willing to go with Voldemort’s demands to save herself, and is willing to accept the racism and classism throughout the books. This is what I meant by a collusion between characterisation, world building and social commentary. The books were written while Rowling was viturally penniless, and a lot of the social commentary in them reflects this, including the way Slytherin is portrayed. Is it fair to the characters of Slytherin? Should she have been more naunced about it? Well, yes. There’s a reason I called it a pile up, but if you are treating the resulting mess as simply being in universe, you are going to miss a lot of important aspects about why she created it the way that she did.