Why do we like Snape so much?

Why do we grin in the dark theater when he first comes on the screen?

Of course we like the others… the perpetually surprised Ron, the gorgeous and brilliant Hermione, kindly Dumbledore, kindly Mrs. Weasley, kindly… well, there sure are a lot of kindly grownups. Maybe that’s part of it. I mean, we were all children, we all dealt with lots of grownups, and honestly, how many of them were really kindly? They fed us; they made sure we didn’t get struck by buses. Not all of them liked us, though. Some of them pretended, and we were fooled for a little while. Maybe a kindergarten teacher with a sweet face and tiny hands and a gruff voice that only came out when things got “out of hand”. A shocking surprise to a five-year-old. Or a beautiful and distant aunt who gave gifts but couldn’t bear dirt and noise… and we didn’t know that before we leapt into her lap happily, covered in mud. Some grownups were scary.

Some never tried to seem sweet. Our 11th grade English teacher gave a long speech that began “I am not a popular teacher.” And she wasn’t. We didn’t like her much.

So much of our childhood was about figuring out what the grownups were about. Who seemed nice? Who loved us? Who was Good? And then we further figured out that the ones that were nice weren’t necessarily the ones who loved us, and the ones that loved us weren’t necessarily Good, and all sorts of variations in the mix.

So when cranky Snape comes on screen, maybe we remember some of that. Maybe we remember the day we realized that the 11th grade English teacher was the best teacher we ever had. Does it make her any nicer? Nah. Does it make us like her more? Maybe. We do know enough about Snape to know that he’s probably a good guy. A Good Guy. (Rowling may throw us a curve later, but that’s our interpretation for now.) So we see him through many lenses: his cruelty towards Harry and the gang, our memories of our own cruel teachers, our knowledge that crabby does not equal evil, our sense that he is a solid human.

We really like Snape.