Ed Bellis posted...
I'm with CaS in that Snape's grandiose motivations don't excuse everything he does, and I feel like Rowling wants them to.
Actually, in interviews Rowling tends to be completely baffled that people like Snape. She tends to say stuff like "You're not supposed to like him; he's a jerk; you're supposed to like the nice guy!"
GenesisSaga posted...
Fact: Snape is written better than Sirius.
However, Snape also has four more books to be written better than Sirius in, and in Book 4, Sirius plays an extremly minor role. So of course a character with essentially quadruple the screen time is going to get far more moments to shine.
Um, amount of screen time has very little correlation with "better written". I can name quite a few characters from the Twilight novels with tons of screen-time. Doesn't mean they're well-written.
On the other hand, know who I would consider well-written?
Lily Evans -- yet she has maybe a chapter's worth of screen time at most.
Alberforth -- again, he's got about a chapter all told.
Helena Ravenclaw -- she literally has one chapter; one dynamite chapter, but one chapter.
I don't see anything that prevents a character with low screen-time from being "well written".
Maybe you meant "has depth/character development", and sure, this is an area where you need some space. But at the same time, Harry Potter isn't exactly the strongest series in this field--Lily Evans manages to have more character development than an embarrassing number of characters who have much more screen time (like lots of students in Harry's year who have a decent number of scenes, but don't do much in any of them).
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