Half-Blood Prince

SPOILERS!

To take up some space, just in case anyone got to this page by accident, here's a picture of me at Barnes and Noble last night:

Post-HBP discussion of my theories and predictions

I finished the book earlier today, having gotten it at midnight (yep, I wore my Free Lucius shirt). Here are some assorted things I thought of (also seen in my LiveJournal).

1. REGULUS A. BLACK. DUUUUUUUUUH. *smacks Harry upside the head*
2. SCREW YOU, TONKS/REMUS SHIPPERS! SCREW YOOOOOOOOOU! He's way too old for her.
3. SNAPE/LUPIN IS STILL THE OTP! "NEITHER LIKE NOR DISLIKE" MY ASS!
4. Ahem. Getting a little more coherent: I should really stop attempting to make predictions. I was wrong on almost all counts. I was sure Snape hadn't gone back undercover. I thought I had an airtight case. Unfortunately, there's one crucial point I didn't take into account: Voldemort is A MORON. What about when Snape prevented Quirrell from killing Harry, huh? How did that conversation go?
   Snape: So, you see, I didn't know it was you. I thought Quirrell just wanted the Stone for himself.
   Voldemort: OK, but what about when you prevented us from killing the Potter boy? That had nothing to do with protecting the Stone and if you were still my loyal follower, you should've wanted to see Potter dead for the sake of revenge. Right?
   Snape: Um... hey look, there's a birdie.
   Voldemort: Ooh.
   Snape: Yes.
   Voldemort: Ha ha! Birdie.
   Snape: Right.
   Voldemort: What were we talking about?
   Snape: You were just saying how awesome I am. I think you were about to give me a raise.
   Voldemort: Okie!
   
5. But I was dead-on about his dad being a Muggle! Rawk.
6. And maybe this is going to be unpopular but I think I've already branded myself a die-hard Snape apologist anyway so here goes: he's still with the Order. When Dumbledore said "Severus... please..." he was telling Snape to kill him. Snape had told him everything, including about the Unbreakable Vow. At that point, after the Vow had been made, either Dumbledore or Snape had to die. They have a plan.
   
   ...OK, you're probably wondering why Snape didn't just refuse that part of the vow. If he'd refused, Belatrix might have had all the proof she needed to convince Voldemort that Snape wasn't trustworthy (something she obviously wanted very much to do). It was still a case of Dumbledore's life or Snape's: Snape would've been killed if he didn't take that part of the vow.
   
   What I want to know is whether Narcissa was really just desperately trying to save her son or if she was manipulating Snape. Could go either way.
7. Unfortunately, at this point the only way Snape's going to redeem himself is by dying to save Harry. The only other option is that I'm wrong, he is evil, he doesn't redeem himself and Harry kills him. So not looking good for Snape either way. Sigh. At least the Tonks/Remus means Remus might be less likely to snuff it, now that more characters would be affected by his death. Then again, Hamlet Ending...
8. I'm disappointed that we saw practically none of Grawp or Firenze.
9. I gasped when Snape got the DADA job. I hadn't been spoiled on that one.
10. It sucks that I was spoiled on Snape being the HBP because I totally would've figured it out on my own. Cramped handwriting, and all.
11. When I got to the bit about Nagini being a Horcrux I was like "OMG1 CHANGELING HYPOTHESIS!one" Harry is a Horcrux, resulting from Lily's death! Maybe. It depends on whether it's possible to create a Horcrux by accident. Also, if Voldemort intended to use Harry's death to make the sixth one, what was the object going to be that would house the last piece of his soul (well, second to last, before the one he kept in his body)?
12. Why not just call them zombies? I'm just saying.
13. I was sad when Aragog died. Um. I laughed when Dumbledore died. Sorry (but I knew that was coming whereas Aragog was a surprise).
14. Slughorn deliberately gave Harry Snape's old book. He's up to something. I don't know what.
15. Dementors BREED?! I do not want to think about how that works.
16. Um, Harry/Draco anyone? Seriously, Harry was so much more obsessed with Draco than he was with Ginny.
17. Occlumency must be a lot easier and/or more powerful than Legilimency. Draco can block Snape, Snape can block Voldemort. No matter how powerful the Legilimens, it seems like it's not that useful unless you're dealing with someone who's completely hopeless at Occlumency (like Harry).
18. It was cool how Snape just blocked all of Harry's curses with practically no effort. I'd had the suspicion that Snape wasn't really very good at dueling (I mean, how hard is it to beat Lockhart in a fair fight?) but he's proving to be a wizard to be reckoned with even when it comes down to duking it out with wands.
19. You know what else makes me think Snape is still on the Order's side? The Death Eaters had been ordered not to kill Harry but Snape could've hurt him a lot worse than he did. He hurt Harry a little, it sounded like the magical equivalent of slapping him fairly hard, and that was only after becoming enraged enough to shout, which is unusual for Snape. And he gave Harry some excellent advice: "Blocked again and again and again until you learn to keep your mouth shut and your mind closed." Throughout the whole sequence, while the other Death Eaters were firing off curses behind them, Snape was only trying to get Draco safely off the grounds. Apart from Dumbledore and Harry, he didn't hurt anyone himself and he certainly could have. If he'd been a genuine Death Eater then there'd be no reason, after killing Dumbledore, to go on pretending that he was on the Order's side and it would've made sense for him to do as much damage as he could on the way out. But instead he did as little as possible, except for knocking Harry over.
20. On the other hand, it could be argued that Snape didn't know Harry was present at the top of the tower. If he were on Voldemort's side and wanted to continue spying at Hogwarts, he could've thought that 1) nobody would know it was he who'd killed Dumbledore, since the other Death Eaters were, as far as he knew, the only witnesses and any of them could have been blamed by the Order and 2) the other Order members could have seen him leaving the school and have thought that he was trying to catch the Death Eaters, then later he could have come back claiming that they'd captured him. Not that I believe this one but for the sake of thoroughness, I thought I ought to include it.
21. Speaking of that scene, the image of Buckbeak chasing Snape off the grounds is pretty funny.

    I talked about this a little above but I'll go into more detail here. Before HBP, we already had ample evidence that Snape really was working for the Order, not Voldemort. In chapter 2, Spinner's End, Snape explained why some of those things don't necessarily mean he's against Voldemort (like protecting the Stone from Quirrell). But there are two things he didn't explain:

1. When Quirrell/Voldemort tried to kill Harry at the Quidditch match, Snape stopped him. It was reasonable for Snape and Quirrellmort to assume that Harry would be neither necessary nor sufficient to protect the Stone, therefore if Snape's only motivation were to keep Quirrell from getting the Stone for himself, there'd be no need to keep Harry alive. Furthermore, if Snape had been loyal to Voldemort, he should have wanted Harry dead. He explained at Spinner's End why he didn't kill Harry himself (to keep his job and stay out of Azkaban) but that doesn't explain why he wouldn't allow Harry to die when Quirrellmort jinxed his broom and Snape was not involved. None of the other teachers present were blocking the jinx so Snape could not have been blamed for failing to save Harry any more than they could have.
2. Near the end of OotP, Snape's actions were not consistent with what we'd expect from someone who wants Voldemort to win but at the same time wants to remain at Hogwarts as a spy. Snape didn't have to send the Order members to the Ministry in order to maintain his "cover" at Hogwarts. He could have claimed afterwards that he didn't understand Harry's cryptic warning. Nobody knew Sirius would die so that can't have motivated Snape either.

added 7/21/05:
From The Leaky Cauldron/Mugglenet interview with JKR:
ES: Was Dumbledore planning to die?

JKR: [Pause.] Do you think that's going to be the big theory?

MA & ES: Yes. It’ll be a big theory.

JKR: [Pause.] Well, I don't want to shoot that one down. [A little laughter.] I have to give people hope.

MA: It goes back to the question of whether Snape is a double-double-double-triple-

JKR: [Laughs] Double-double-quadruple-to-the-power-of - yeah.

MA: …whether this had been planned, and since Dumbledore had this knowledge of Draco the whole year, had they had a discussion that said, "Should this happen, you have to act as if it is entirely your intention to just walk forward and kill me, because if you don't, Draco will die, the Unbreakable Vow, you'll die," and so on —

JKR: No, I see that, and yeah, I follow your line there. I can't — I mean, obviously, there are lines of speculation I don't want to shut down. Generally speaking, I shut down those lines of speculation that are plain unprofitable. Even with the shippers. God bless them, but they had a lot of fun with it. It's when people get really off the wall — it's when people devote hours of their time to proving that Snape is a vampire that I feel it's time to step in, because there's really nothing in the canon that supports that.

ES: It's when you look for those things —

JKR: Yeah, it's after the 15th rereading when you have spots in front of your eyes that you start seeing clues about Snape being the Lord of Darkness. So, there are things I shut down just because I think, well, don't waste your time, there's better stuff to be debating, and even if it's wrong, it will probably lead you somewhere interesting. That's my rough theory anyway.

OK... that sounds... bad. Well, crap. You know, I'm just going to keep this stuff up here, on the off chance that she's just messing with us. Why would she go to all that trouble in the previous books, convincing us that Snape's the bad guy then convincing us that he's not, only to turn around and go "no, just kidding, he really is evil." I don't like it.

    As I said above, knowing that an animal could be a Horcrux immediately made me think Harry could be a Horcrux. Another possibility (I first heard this idea from scarah2) is that Harry's scar is a Horcrux. That makes sense because we've already been told that it's a very unusual scar and that the Killing Curse doesn't normally leave a mark.

    If Harry's a Horcrux, how does the prophecy still work? We have to look carefully at the wording of the prophecy: