MuggleNet.com's What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End? - Softcover

Schoen, Ben; Spartz, Emerson; Gordon, Andy; Stull, Gretchen; Lawrence, Jamie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1569755833 ISBN 13: 9781569755839

Publisher: Ulysses Press, 2006

Synopsis

The creators of MuggleNet.com, the Web's leading Harry Potter fan site, draw on their intimate knowledge of the previous six books in the series, a personal interview with J. K. Rowling, and tips and suggestions made by millions of fans to offer speculations concerning the contents of the seventh and final volume in the blockbuster series. Original.

About this title

About the Author

What more can we say. Teenagers who start a Harry Potter fan site that now gets 20 millions hits per month and is so good, popular and famous that J.K. Rowling gives it an award on her personal website and grants the founder an interview with her (and she doesn't give many interviews).

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Snape

Severus Snape is a dark and complex character: an exciting mix of the good (when he keeps saving Harry’s life), the bad (his murder of Dumbledore springs to mind), and the ugly (enough said). In other words, he’s a bit of a git and he knows it. He’s been a Death Eater in the past, and for all we know he could still be one right now. One minute he’s going out of his way to save Harry’s life during a Quidditch match [SS11] and the next he is sneering at him with all his might. Just what is it with Snape, and what on earth is going on in that twisted mind of his? And most importantly of all, whose side is he really on?
What can be in no doubt is that Severus Snape is, on the face of it, a very unpleasant man. Questions of loyalty aside, when he was a teacher he repeatedly delighted in using his position to bully students he’d taken a dislike to (i.e. those who weren’t from Slytherin), and to blatantly favour his own house. He is petty, vindictive, and able to bear grudges for enormous lengths of time. For this he is universally disliked (except by Slytherin students of course), mainly due to the fact that he is so fundamentally unlikeable.
On the other hand, he’s quite obviously a brilliant wizard with an exceptional amount of talent. He’s a fantastic Occlumens and Legilimens, and we shouldn’t forget that he was unquestioningly trusted by Albus Dumbledore, the greatest wizard of the age. There’s also the small matter of him being the only man ever to have successfully defected from the ranks of the Death Eaters [GOF30], if he did in fact turn spy for the Order of the Phoenix against Voldemort and not the other way around.
The two sides of Severus Snape don’t sit very happily together, and they leave a huge question mark hanging over him, particularly with regard to where his loyalties lie. Suspicions have been raised right from the start of the series that he has secretly been working for Voldemort all along, and that despite what Dumbledore says, he never genuinely left the Death Eaters at all. There are an awful lot of people who think that Snape’s story of defecting from the Dark Lord’s ranks and returning to spy on him was an elaborate lie upheld by his skill in Occlumency, whilst he was really spying on the Order of the Phoenix for his Dark master.
Killing Dumbledore didn’t help much, of course (assuming that Dumbledore is really dead) [HBP27]. Doing that sort of thing was hardly likely to endear him to the Order, or make people see him as one of the goodies. Having said that, there’s also a lot to be said that makes him seem pretty cool after all. What we really need to do is to make sense of the whole thing, and so in this chapter we reveal once and for all whose side he is really on!
As you’d expect there’s a huge amount of information on Snape contained in HBP, but the evidence starts well before this: on the very first night Harry sets eyes on his Potions teacher in 1991, in fact [SS7]. One thing that’s for sure is that JK has deliberately set Snape up to be a mystery, and so there are frequent contradictions and a huge number of red herrings. But if you look at it carefully enough, you always arrive at the same place: Snape is one of the good guys. He might not be nice, and he might have revoltingly greasy hair, but he is on the side of good and always will be. What follows is an explanation of why, and an exploration of what his allegiance is likely to lead him to do in Book 7.

Snape’s Double Life: How to Judge His Loyalty

A lot of people believe that JK thoroughly debunked the “Snape is Good” theory in the MuggleNet/Leaky Cauldron interview (July 2005), and will already be thinking that what we’re saying here is a pile of garbage (to put it politely) just because of that. If you look at it carefully, though, you’ll see that there’s no debunking of any type going on. All JK does is avoid the question, which tells us nothing (apart from the fact that it’s important and she doesn’t want to talk about it). What was said is this:

MA: OK, big big big book six question. Is Snape evil?

JKR: Well, okay, I'm obviously – Harry-Snape is now as personal, if not more so, than Harry-Voldemort. I can't answer that question because it's a spoiler, isn't it, whatever I say, and obviously, it has such a huge impact on what will happen when they meet again that I can't. And let's face it, it's going to launch 10,000 theories and I'm going to get a big kick out of reading them so [laughs]. I'm evil but I just like the theories, I love the theories.

Is that really someone confidently debunking a theory? Or is it someone floundering around and attempting to avoid the question? You’re free to make up your own mind, but as far as this book is concerned, we need a bit more than that! We need cold hard facts, and we need to know how to interpret them.
The important thing to remember is that whatever side Snape is truly on, and whatever he is only pretending to be, he must still make some concessions to the part he is acting. In other words, if he is really evil but pretending to be loyal to Dumbledore, he still has to perform some duties for the Order correctly and supply Dumbledore with some (non-vital) information about the Dark Lord and his plans in order to keep his cover. If he is really loyal to Dumbledore but pretending to be a Death Eater then he must similarly pass some accurate information about the Order to Voldemort.
His true loyalties can be judged by what he does that he didn’t have to do just to keep up any pretense...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ulysses Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1569755833
• ISBN 13: 9781569755839
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 180