I'm so glad you're relieved-I know just what you mean about thinking uh-oh, I'm going to be even more alone.
I'm surprised at the Snape response too. I've talked to different ones--some, like me, think that he was basically really shrunken. He was a DE obsessed with Lily Potter, and that gave Dumbledore leverage to use him as a double agent. But it didn't do much to change him, and he didn't care about anybody else but Lily and his chosen way to love her after death through helping Harry. Some feel that once he switched sides he got better, but I thought I thought it was only marginally so. I think it improved his behavior, definitely, but it was more like training him into different habits rather than really changing him. Meanwhile he was probably encouraging the rest of Slytherin in all the areas he himself could no longer feel free to just indulge.
I would be interested in seeing your psycho-analytical take, even knowing it's pretty unfair. But I know stuff I've written has turned out to be really revealing that way, and in a book like this where it's such a hodge-podge with the one thing tying it all together being the author's ideas, it's hard not to see patterns.
But I know from fandom that a lot of people don't have the problems I do. Those people who for years have been telling me my issues were kind of stupid really do seem to have been on the same page as the author. Signs I thought were there telling me that I was supposed to be thinking about them mostly turned out to just be pointing to plot points.
The message may or may not have been palatable but at least it would have been digested - or spat out - in one sitting!
Oh yeah--no years going by to put more into it before you find out you don't want to do that!
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I'm surprised at the Snape response too. I've talked to different ones--some, like me, think that he was basically really shrunken. He was a DE obsessed with Lily Potter, and that gave Dumbledore leverage to use him as a double agent. But it didn't do much to change him, and he didn't care about anybody else but Lily and his chosen way to love her after death through helping Harry. Some feel that once he switched sides he got better, but I thought I thought it was only marginally so. I think it improved his behavior, definitely, but it was more like training him into different habits rather than really changing him. Meanwhile he was probably encouraging the rest of Slytherin in all the areas he himself could no longer feel free to just indulge.
I would be interested in seeing your psycho-analytical take, even knowing it's pretty unfair. But I know stuff I've written has turned out to be really revealing that way, and in a book like this where it's such a hodge-podge with the one thing tying it all together being the author's ideas, it's hard not to see patterns.
But I know from fandom that a lot of people don't have the problems I do. Those people who for years have been telling me my issues were kind of stupid really do seem to have been on the same page as the author. Signs I thought were there telling me that I was supposed to be thinking about them mostly turned out to just be pointing to plot points.
The message may or may not have been palatable but at least it would have been digested - or spat out - in one sitting!
Oh yeah--no years going by to put more into it before you find out you don't want to do that!