(Anonymous)
I don't think Snape and McGonagall were close, either, but they seem to have liked each other. McGonagall's as subtle as a baseball bat to the head. If she disliked Snape we'd know about it. I think by the Harry era she'd come to appreciate Snape as a trusted and competent coworker. No deep affection, though. For all her fangirling of Dumbledore she never understood him, and Snape is equally too complex for her.
OTOH, Snape is fond of McGonagall. At the end of OotP he becomes quite emotional when she shows up. "Out of St Mungo's, I see!" is a Captain Obvious line that he'd sneer to pieces from anyone else.
Agreed that Snape and Madam Pince would probably get on, too. Besides that they're both stern disciplinarians, Snape can be trusted around books. And Madam Pince is definitely cranky and misanthropic enough to be Eileen. But it would be risky for Eileen to use an anagram name; Voldemort is too good at them. Also, Pince has a big beaky nose and receding chin, while Eileen had a "long face" and presumably, an ordinary nose (since Harry doesn't mock it). Snape as secretly-Pince totally works for me, though. :)
I used to imagine that he might have been friendly with Bellatrix or Narcissa, but clearly it wasn't so. Which adds to the general frustration in that whenever we get a potential friendship for Snape in canon, it turns out there's no there there. Of the few characters he truly likes on the page, no one cares half as much about him as he does about them.
-L
OTOH, Snape is fond of McGonagall. At the end of OotP he becomes quite emotional when she shows up. "Out of St Mungo's, I see!" is a Captain Obvious line that he'd sneer to pieces from anyone else.
Agreed that Snape and Madam Pince would probably get on, too. Besides that they're both stern disciplinarians, Snape can be trusted around books. And Madam Pince is definitely cranky and misanthropic enough to be Eileen. But it would be risky for Eileen to use an anagram name; Voldemort is too good at them. Also, Pince has a big beaky nose and receding chin, while Eileen had a "long face" and presumably, an ordinary nose (since Harry doesn't mock it). Snape as secretly-Pince totally works for me, though. :)
I used to imagine that he might have been friendly with Bellatrix or Narcissa, but clearly it wasn't so. Which adds to the general frustration in that whenever we get a potential friendship for Snape in canon, it turns out there's no there there. Of the few characters he truly likes on the page, no one cares half as much about him as he does about them.
-L