Why I Don't Like Severus Snape

WARNING: This post will contain spoilers from Harry Potter, so beware if you somehow haven’t read it yet. It also includes my (slightly controversial) opinions, so you can feel free to argue with me.    

Harry Potter has been a very popular children’s book series for a while now. The story follows a wizard boy named Harry through his adventures on a quest to eventually defeat the Dark Lord. Despite having many interesting main characters, my focus today is on Hogwarts' potions (and briefly Defense Against the Dark Arts) teacher, Professor Severus Snape. To put it simply, I hate Snape. He abuses people and power, and makes bad decisions that hurt others for pretty much his entire life. And while he does some good things, none of them are for the right reasons, so I don’t count them as making him a better person. 

In his childhood, Snape was rather attached to Lily Potter. This grew from a simple enough crush to a creepy obsession that lasted throughout his life, and motivated almost everything he did. For example, every time he protects Harry, his motivation is that he’s the last piece of Lily. He helped the Order and listened to Dumbledore, because Snape owed him for protecting Lily. I’ve had people defend him by saying, “He was in love! He just really missed her.” The way Snape felt about Lily was not love, it was creepy infatuation. He had no respect for her, which we can see in several examples. He calls her slurs when she doesn’t do what he says, and tries to get away with it be saying he “didn’t mean it” and she is “different from everyone else”. Additionally, he has no problem hurting her loved ones, which we see several times. As children, Snape drops a tree branch on Lily’s sister, Petunia. Later in school, he sees his classmates using dark magic on one of Lily’s friends, and when confronted, sees nothing wrong with it and compares it to innocent pranks. After Lily’s death, Snape finds a photo of her with her family. He tears it in half and steals the part with Lily, so that he can pretend her love and joy is directed at him. 

He practiced dark magic regularly as a teen, including creating his own dark spells, which is a major red flag. During his teen years, he and the Marauders also have a bullying kind of rivalry going on, where Sirius and James prank him and he pranks them back. While this may seem harmless enough, it definitely turned more and more violent as they got older. As they matured, James and Sirius began to realize that they shouldn’t bully people, and moved on with their lives and better people. Snape, however, victimized himself and never became a better person, holding that grudge for the rest of his life. 

 Speaking of which, he made some other pretty bad decisions as a teacher. Throughout the books, he abused his power to manipulate house points and bully his students, specifically Neville Longbottom. Neville endured constant mocking, humiliation, and almost lost his pet. This was psychologically damaging enough to him that Snape, his teacher, was his greatest fear; even over the witch who tortured his parents to the point of insanity, and the Dark Lord himself. During this period of his life, Snape was also an active member of the Death Eaters, exposes Lupin as a werewolf, and tries to get both Lupin and Sirius sent to Azkaban even though he knew they were both innocent. 

I could go on with all the unfortunate little things that Snape has done throughout his life, but I have one last scenario for you. What if Harry Potter was female, and looked like Lily? Imagine how predatory Snape would have been towards this little girl. Quite frankly, that’s all I need to label him as a disgusting person. 

(credit to a youtuber, whos video I watched about a year ago and inspired some of thes points.)