During our first year with Harry, two people at Hogwarts were established as enemies: Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape.
And yet all across the fandom, Snape is now referred to with remorse and sorrow, “Always” is a catchphrase and painful memorial, and Draco is mentioned with asperity. Draco, who was a child for almost all of the series, is given less forgiveness than a grown man.
I have a serious issue with this, probably because Snape is the most problematic character in the entire wizarding world.
Harry came to Hogwarts as an eleven year old who had been emotionally abused and treated like nothing for the last ten years by his own family, bullied and beaten by his cousin and his peers, without a friend to his name. And Snape - Snape who “loved” Harry’s mother so much, the same mother he called a mudblood - Snape spent the very first day trying to impress upon Harry and his classmates that Harry was stupid, the very same thing the Dursleys had convinced him of.
Snape, an adult entrusted with educating impressionable and vulnerable children, bullied a child relentlessly because he held a grudge against his father, and was worse than James ever could have possibly been because he was a teacher with power and influence. Children expect their teachers to protect them.
Snape was so cruel, that he was Neville’s biggest fear - Neville, a boy who had lost his parents to the Cruciatus Curse. His boggart should have been Bellatrix, their torturer, escaping or returning, should have been losing his grandmother too, should have been witnessing his parents’ incapacitation. Instead, it was the professor that made his life a nightmare - the one who attempted to poison his pet because he was so livid at his inability to perfect a potion.
Snape made fun of Hermione’s eagerness and love of learning even though she was the only student to study for his class. He ridiculed every student not in his own house.
That kind of evil isn’t excusable by a good deed or fighting for “true love”. That’s evil to the bone, a meanness that is in the fabric of who he is, despite whatever great things he may have done.
The only reason Snape joined the Order, or did anything remotely right, was because of Lily. That’s not him choosing to be good, or intrinsically changing, that’s his feelings controlling his actions despite his character. He didn’t save Harry because he was good, he didn’t work with Dumbledore because it was the right thing to do, he did it because his vendetta against her murderer was stronger than his belief in Voldemort. Had he became good, he would have begged Dumbledore to save Harry and James as well from the offset, and not been okay with the deaths of an innocent man and infant so long as his crush was safe.
Draco was bigoted from the start. He was foul, and believed he was better than other people because of the money he had and the blood in his own veins.
He was also eleven.
Never having been raised around accepting people or those of other blood statuses, being trained his entire life to believe a warped version of good and evil, it was never his fault that he thought the way he did at the start. Children believe what their parents teach them.
Was he mean? Oh, definitely. He picked on Harry, Ron, and Hermione with fervor, and never failed to harass Neville. He was not nice, but not nice is not the equivalent of evil. Good and evil are not a dichotomy; it’s possible to fall within the middle gray area. A majority of people do. Childhood bullies do not deserve to be lumped in with torturers and murderers, as were the rest of the Death Eaters.
Draco was forced to become a Death Eater and assigned an assassination to complete, with his and his parents’ lives in peril, at sixteen. It was clear he had breakdowns about the task. When the time came he couldn’t bring himself to kill another human being. He was not evil; even Dumbledore knew this. He was a misguided teenager brainwashed into believing the ways of a deranged murderer his entire life, but once he grew up and started to reconsider I think he changed, and began to understand the world as it truly was. In the Deathly Hallows Part 2 movie lies the only occasion in which I prefer the movies to the books: Draco, standing with Hogwarts, tensely leaving to join his mother, but having made it known which side he agreed with an who he had fought for.
In the epilogue, Draco and Harry nod to each other, both having grown up and realizing how similar they truly were, and that while they believed each other to be the enemy, Voldemort was the one ruining both of their lives all along.
What I’m getting at here is that we need to reevaluate our perception of good and evil. A few acts don’t overcome years of foul character. A child being a jerk because that’s all he’s ever known doesn’t make him completely bad. Evil people don’t lose sleep and weight over killing someone they’ve never liked to begin with. It’s not fair to allow Snape’s infatuation (because that’s what it was) to bring him redemption, while Draco growing and starting to realize who he is is still hated by fans everywhere.
At the end of the day, yes, one of these characters is good and one is evil. Have we really thought about which is which?
In Draco and Snape we have two Slytherins, two Death Eaters, two archenemies of Harry Potter. But only one of them became a Death Eater by choice.
