Snape Stats
24 votes and 12 comments so far on Reddit
An old reddit post of mine that I think provides some insight into how fans judge Snape's morality and how that relates to their perception of Snape's redemption.
From the post's TLDR (but please do read it if you can!):
Takeaways:
No wonder Snape discussions are contentious: Almost evenly split on the redeemed question. (Petition for no stance on Snape's redemption to be labeled as "unpopular" ever again?)
Common ground: Both those who considered Snape redeemed and those who did not tended to recognize that Snape’s morality is dynamic and followed a U-shape. Almost everyone acknowledged that he reached his lowest point during his Death Eater years and improved so that at the end of his life, he had a moral rating that was similar to his pre-Hogwarts years.
A blank slate or a decent kid?: When rating Snape’s morality in childhood, those who considered Snape redeemed tended to rate him unambiguously positively, whereas those who did not view Snape as redeemed tended to rate him more neutrally.
Not blameless: When providing morality judgments for Snape’s actions as a Death Eater, there was no significant difference in morality ratings between those who view Snape as redeemed and those who do not. This suggests that those who view Snape as redeemed are not underestimating or excusing his actions as a death eater. (No more hurling “nazi apologist” about, how about it?) This makes sense; Snape needs to have done terrible things to be able to be redeemed from them.
Point of contention: The widest gap between ratings for those who believe Snape to be redeemed and those who do not is during Snape’s years as a double agent, corresponding to the end of Goblet through Dumbledore’s death.
More extreme ratings: Those who viewed Snape as redeemed provide a wider range of ratings on average than those who did not.
Personally I think it's fascinating that the widest gap between those who see him as redeemed and those who do not is during Snape's double agent years. Folks who did not think he was redeemed rated his morality during this time similarly as they did during his initial defection, whereas those who did think he was redeemed attributed to Snape some moral growth between the first and second war.
I think there's also something to be said about the difference in the way folks judge child Snape; you could imagine those who don't see him as redeemed thinking he didn't "do enough" make up for his moral failures, but... that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead, they do acknowledge that claws his way back to his original moral rating, but that moral rating was neutral anyway.