I have an entirely different take on this, and I expect people will throw firewhiskey bottles at me for it. Please do not light them on fire this time before throwing - I prefer drinking them, thankyouverymuch. :)
Let’s look at this a different, albeit probably not popular, way: what if Dumbledore didn’t command anything and Snape recognized, either intuitively or by Legilimens, Dumbledore was almost DOA when he got there, or was at that time in for a painful, torturous death or other fate by the potion he drank or for the injury sustained to his hand earlier? I mean, DD himself says that the potion was "no health drink" and that he "came back, after a fashion." It’s a possibility he was doomed, based on his words, regardless of the other considerations about Snape and his motivations.
Perhaps Snape was or wasn’t asked by DD, and I’m not sure that matters if you look at a "bigger" picture. We know that JKR has seen a close family member, her mother, live and die thru a slow, debilitating disease which culminated in death - what person wouldn’t at some time think even fleetingly for that pain and suffering over a long period of time and escalating towards the end to go away for the person they loved? How helpless it is to watch this happen to a loved one and know there’s nothing you can do? It’s not out of the realm of possibility that something as painful and conflicted as this might make its way into her writing.
If you think about it that way, the debate is no longer about about what DD did or didn’t do, or what Snape did. The question and discussion could be if you knew someone was suffering, in pain, and was going to die a terrible death in the short term, would you end their suffering? Would you even for a moment think about it, whether you did it or not? Would it be the right, but not easy, thing to do? And heaven forbid that the person afflicted should ask you to do it? Maybe even demand it? Some may say yes, some may say no, some may not have any answer at all. Some might call it mercy and humane, and others murder and reprehensible. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
None of this is out of the realm of possibility anymore than Snape just simply murdering DD and being a traitor. The problem, understandably, is that in JKR’s desire to keep the mystery in her series until the end, we don’t have enough detail to tell us what happened one way or the other.
I’m already in Snape rehab and ready to catch those bottles with fireproof mitts just in case....
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