Harry Potter: Why Was Snape The Half-Blood Prince?

When you boil each "Harry Potter" book or movie down to its essence, each one is a contained mystery story. In "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) need to uncover the person trying to steal the magical stone that can grant eternal life. In "Chamber of Secrets," the gang needs to figure out how to defeat the enormous basilisk slithering through the plumbing of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It goes on and on like that throughout pretty much every "Potter" installment, including the sixth one in the franchise, "Half-Blood Prince."

When Harry stumbles across an old Potions textbook filled with scrawled, invented spells — like ones that levitate your enemy from the ceiling by their ankles — that's only attributed to the "Half-Blood Prince," he goes a little nuts trying to figure out who's behind it (when he's not tailing his nemesis Draco Malfoy, played by Tom Felton, to prove his fellow student is working for the dark side). Eventually, it's revealed that Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) is behind the nickname, the spells, and the ingenious Potions hacks, and the explanation is honestly pretty straightforward. Snape is a "half-blood" wizard, meaning his father Tobias Snape was a non-magical Muggle, and his mother Eileen was a witch... whose last name was "Prince."

Very clever, Severus.

Snape's story is, all things considered, pretty bleak. His home life was difficult, with his parents frequently at odds, and as a bright young child, he had nowhere to turn... except for his best friend and unrequited love Lily Evans. Bonding together thanks to their shared magical abilities — which drives a wedge between Lily and her sister Petunia — Snape and Lily become close before they head to Hogwarts, where they're sorted into different houses. While Lily ends up in Gryffindor, Snape finds himself in Slytherin, and those two houses are always at odds.

Things only get worse from there; Lily, a Muggleborn witch, hates Snape's pure-blood elitist friends, and Snape can't stand the boys who hang around Lily trying to impress her. Making up spells and excelling at Potions — a subject he would eventually teach at Hogwarts — Snape scribbled in the margins of his textbook, but unfortunately, his bully James Potter ended up using half of those spells against him, especially the ankle-dangling one.

Yeah — James Potter. Lily ends up marrying him, the two have Harry, and Snape watches bitterly from the sidelines as his high school enemy gets the girl.

Snape probably would have preferred to never deal with the Potters again, but that certainly doesn't work out for him. Before the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) tries to kill the Potters, believing that he has to kill baby Harry to fulfill a prophecy, Snape begs Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) to protect them... and still, Dumbledore fails. Lily is gone, having sacrificed herself for her son, but as Dumbledore tells Snape, Harry survived, and he'll need considerable help when Voldemort returns to finish him off.

It's then that Snape becomes a double agent for Dumbledore, tricking Voldemort into believing that he's one of the Dark Lord's Death Eaters while really working to protect Harry. Only a truly skilled wizard could have created spells as an inexperienced teenager, and Snape is exceptionally powerful, which allows him to block his mind from Voldemort and make the evil wzard believe that Snape is truly his lieutenant. This is a pretty bold move, all things considered, but Snape loved Lily enough to protect her son, even if Harry is half-James — and, as Snape loves pointing out, a lot like his father.

Snape's gambit couldn't last forever, though, and eventually, the self-styled Half-Blood Prince is found out. At the end of the sixth book and movie, Snape kills Dumbledore, shocking Harry — who has no idea that Dumbledore's death was planned by the two powerful wizards — who then watches as Snape absconds with Voldemort's forces. Throughout "Deathly Hallows," though, Snape is always helping Harry, whether he's bringing the Sword of Gryffindor to Harry in secret or collaborating with the late Dumbledore's talking portrait.

This leads to a sticky end for Snape, who ends up dead at Voldemort's hands — well, technically, the non-hands of Voldemort's snake Nagini — and is able to give Harry his memories to take to Dumbledore's Pensieve, revealing the truth about everything. Harry finds out about Snape's identity of the Half-Blood Prince under duress in the aftermath of Dumbledore's seemingly sudden death, but he finds out the rest of Snape's secrets after the wizard is already gone.

To say the legacy left behind by Severus Snape is complicated is... a bit of an understatement. Yes, he constantly risked his life for Harry's benefit; this much is true. He was also routinely abusive to a bunch of children. Despite being an undeniably talented Potions master, Snape played favorites like nobody's business, and was really only ever nice to his Slytherin students. He had a decent reason to dislike Harry, perhaps resentful of protecting a student who not only openly hates him, but acted and looked like Snape's high school bully. He didn't have a reason to outright despise poor Neville Longbottom, a talented but anxious student who ran afoul of Snape early on and never fully recovered. It got to the point where Neville's Boggart, a magical creature taking the form of his worst fear, manifested as Snape. This really doesn't seem like a particularly healthy learning environment by anyone's standards.

In the end, Snape may have chosen his nickname of the Half-Blood Prince, but he's remembered through Harry's son — and James' grandson. Harry names the younger of his two sons Albus Severus after "two headmasters of Hogwarts," specifically saying Snape was one of the bravest men he ever knew. Whether or not this means Harry got the last laugh is up to you, but despite Snape's best efforts, it does seem like the name of the "Half-Blood Prince" died with him.