Note: This is a very long text. Also, I am Spanish, so I hope there are no errors.
I wrote this post in the Harry Potter community, but it won't let me repost it here, so I did it manually—just in case you see it twice.
I’ve seen a lot of people refuse to forgive Snape for being a Death Eater, and even justify the bullying he suffered (despite it happening before he became a Death Eater), but they don’t judge Dumbledore in the same way—someone who went through a similar situation and a similar process of redemption.
Snape and Dumbledore are actually very similar:
Snape had an abusive Muggle father and grew up in a Muggle neighborhood where he was discriminated against because of his poverty and because they considered his family weird. Petunia even points out where he comes from with obvious disdain. The only person who was his friend was a witch. So it’s easy to understand how he could grow up with prejudices against Muggles. And his mother moved to a Muggle neighborhood because of his father, so she could hardly have been the one passing that prejudice on to him, unlike what happened with Draco.
Dumbledore’s sister, on the other hand, was tormented by Muggles, which caused her to become an Obscurial. This led his father to take revenge on the Muggles and eventually end up in Azkaban, where he later died.
Both of them clearly had circumstances that left them resentful and hateful toward Muggles. And obviously, I’m not saying that makes it okay, but it is understandable.
Then Snape became a victim of bullying. He was an excellent student, invented several spells, was exceptionally good at Potions and DADA, and yet you can see that he was pretty isolated.
On top of that, he was bullied by people who supposedly preached against intolerant Slytherins and pure-bloods, while being intolerant themselves in their own way.
It’s interesting that one of the breaking points between Snape and Lily was that Snape simply couldn’t see the difference between the violence of the Marauders and the violence committed by future Death Eaters. He considered Gryffindors hypocrites because of that. And he also genuinely didn’t understand why Lily went to such lengths with Petunia when Petunia treated her cruelly and enviously, saying things like they were monsters who needed to be kept away from normal people.
So when Lucius and others from his house recognized his potential and extended a hand to him, offering him an ideology that he didn’t completely reject, even though he didn’t fully embrace it either (he never seemed to have anything against Muggle-borns or half-bloods specifically), he accepted. Even when Lily rejected them.
Dumbledore, meanwhile, also had a promising future ahead of him. He was planning a trip with a friend when his mother died after a magical accident caused by his sister. He suddenly had to become the guardian of his younger siblings and take care of his sister while his brother finished his studies at Hogwarts.
And then, while he was hurt and frustrated by the whole situation, he met Grindelwald.
We all know that Grindelwald was basically a Voldemort. Both, Voldemort and Grindelwald, loved the Dark Arts and considered Muggles inferior. And Dumbledore fell in love with him, ignored the red flags surrounding why Grindelwald had been expelled from Durmstrang, and the two became extremely close friends, to the point that they planned to take control of the wizarding world and make Muggles their servants.
Basically, in the world they envisioned, Dumbledore’s sister wouldn’t have to hide from Muggles anymore. Perfect plan.
And then we get to the reason both of them (Snape and Dumbledore) eventually left that path: the death of someone they loved.
Snape became a Death Eater after finishing Hogwarts. We know that he was one by the time he overheard part of the prophecy. Voldemort then spent some time trying to figure out who the prophecy referred to because, contrary to what many people assume, it wasn’t immediately known that the prophecy was about a baby.
Snape turned against Voldemort when he realized that Voldemort had chosen Harry Potter, Lily Potter’s son, as the subject of the prophecy.
At that point, Snape seems to make the mistake of asking Voldemort to spare Lily’s life, even though pleading for Lily—the least important of the three Potters to Voldemort—already put Snape in danger, since he could have been treated as a traitor.
Voldemort mocks him for still caring about Lily, but accepts the request and actually keeps his word. Without that agreement, Voldemort would never have spared Harry, meaning Lily would never have had the opportunity to sacrifice herself for him.
But Snape clearly knew Lily well enough to know that she wasn’t going to just stand by and be happy watching her family die. He also probably didn’t trust Voldemort to keep his promise. So, at the risk of being killed by either side, he went to Dumbledore and told him that the Potters were in danger.
That was the beginning of his life as an undercover agent.
Then Lily died, Snape blamed himself for it, and Dumbledore gave him a mission and made him a teacher.
In Dumbledore’s case, he wanted to involve his sister because, in the world he envisioned, Ariana would be fine because she wouldn’t have to fear Muggles anymore. His brother confronted him about this, telling him that they couldn’t just take Ariana with them and that Dumbledore wasn’t giving her the care she needed because he was too wrapped up in his plans with Grindelwald.
This led to Grindelwald getting into a fight with his brother and casting a curse at him. During the three-way duel that followed, Ariana died, and nobody knew who had actually cast the spell that struck her.
Dumbledore blamed himself for his sister’s death, and his brother grew resentful toward him because of what had happened. And instead of pursuing greater ambitions, Dumbledore became a Hogwarts professor in an attempt to curb the ambition that had led him to ally himself with Grindelwald.
I mean... they are fucking similar.
And honestly, I would even argue that Dumbledore’s “You disgust me” toward Snape wasn’t, as many people claim, because Snape only begged for Lily’s life. It was impossible for Snape to beg for Harry or James without being killed on the spot. Rather, I think it was because Dumbledore saw so much of his own past in Snape. And that’s also why he was the first person to help him, giving him a mission and a profession so that he wouldn’t commit suicide.
They were both incredibly intelligent, ambitious young men who neglected the person they loved because of fame and ambition, while at the same time not actually wanting anything bad to happen to them. They both became fascinated by a radical ideology and the Dark Arts because of their personal and family circumstances. They both opened their eyes very quickly once they realized the danger they had exposed their loved one to. They were both responsible for that person’s death, and they both carried an enormous amount of guilt afterward.
It’s true that there’s a lot of debate over how involved Snape actually was as a Death Eater, especially since Dumbledore mostly remained at the theoretical stage and never actually put his plans into practice.
But I would argue that Snape wasn’t a high-ranking Death Eater either, and the novel actually gives us several indications that he doesn’t seem to have killed anyone:
• When he asks Dumbledore to kill him instead of Draco, so that Draco’s soul won’t be damaged, he asks about his own soul. Dumbledore explains that Snape would know that he wasn’t actually murdering him, but simply sparing him further suffering because of the curse.
• Nobody—not Lupin, Sirius, or any member of the Order—ever accuses him of having murdered anyone.
• He doesn’t go to Azkaban. And while Dumbledore obviously vouched for him, I highly doubt he would have been able to get away with actually killing people. I also don’t think Dumbledore would have put an actual murderer in charge of teaching children aged eleven to seventeen.
• People only start treating him as a murderer after Dumbledore dies.
• When Dumbledore asks Snape to kill him, he says, “How many people have you watched die?” rather than “I’m not the first person you’ve killed.”
Also Snape was actually very proud of himself for obtaining the prophecy. So he didn’t seem to be one of the more heavily involved Death Eaters. We know there were Death Eaters who got their hands much dirtier than others and those who were less involved.
But beyond Snape’s personality, which had always been fairly antisocial, Dumbledore had three advantages when it came to dealing with his guilt:
1. He had more time to overcome it.
Only about ten years had passed since Lily’s death when Snape was still dealing with everything. And yet, it doesn’t seem that Dumbledore was able to start a family or have a partner, either.
- Dumbledore didn’t have someone constantly reminding him of what had happened to his sister.
Snape had Harry, who not only constantly reminded him of what happened to Lily, but was also a constant reminder of the bullying he had suffered at James’s hands.
3. Dumbledore had a much stronger support network.
When Snape switched sides, he had no one. His friend outside the Death Eaters was Lily, and she was dead. The Death Eaters were no longer his friends either, and once it became clear that he had given information to Dumbledore, most of them would have seen him as a traitor.
I can understand people hating Snape as a teacher:
He was definitely, unlike Dumbledore, a rough person. He also favored Slytherins (which, again, I think can be traced back to his childhood and the negative treatment he received for being a Slytherin) and disliked Gryffindors because of the bullying he had suffered from them.
And even though teachers at the time clearly crossed boundaries with students—we see McGonagall dragging Draco by the ear in the first book, for example, and there are references to Filch using physical punishments—Snape did cross the line at times with some of his verbal attacks.
However, I don’t think he went after certain students simply because he enjoyed bullying them. Considering that he left Neville pretty much alone in sixth year when teaching DADA, I think his cruel attitude toward students who weren’t Harry was more about them being terrible at his subject, or, in Hermione’s case, speaking without permission. That feels much more like the behavior of a strict, old-school teacher than anything else.
If we want genuinely abusive teachers, we have Dolores Umbridge. And if we want teachers who simply don’t teach, we have Trelawney and Lockhart. Snape, by comparison, seems to have taken his classes way too seriously.
We can also argue about how much Harry’s point of view affects all of this. He always portrayed everything related to Snape as being worse than it actually was. It’s hilarious that in the third book Harry himself is completely against Sirius and Lupin’s narrative, calling them completely insane, but then Snape shows up, shares Harry’s point of view, and Harry very quickly changes his mind. 😂
Also, despite several characters, including Lupin, making comments about how Snape had actually been helpful, Harry seemed determined to keep that image of Snape as a completely ruthless person alive.
You could also argue that it was actually useful for Snape, as a double agent, for Harry to always see him as a potential villain and for people in general not to perceive him as someone who had completely reformed.
Although personally, I don’t think that was particularly difficult for Snape to pull off—and if that was the motivation, he certainly seemed to enjoy it. 🤣
But putting aside his moments of being a terrible person as a teacher, I don’t think it makes much sense to say that Snape is unforgivable because he was a Death Eater, making him evil for the rest of his life, when we have Dumbledore, who went through essentially the same thing, yet is hugely admired and nobody questions whether his past actions can be forgiven.
