Yes yes yes! What is Snape?

What Is Snape?, by Orson Scott Card, is a fantastic essay, and a must-read for anybody who can’t understand why I love Snape and alternately despise and dislike James Potter. (In fact, it reminded me of perfectly good reasons to despise and dislike Sirius Black.)
I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about LotR being written as a sequel to The Hobbit, though. I am under the impression that LotR was in the works long before the Hobbit was written, and although it seems like a sequel because of when it was published and some story elements, it wasn’t originally planned as one. But I could be wrong. I’m no Tolkien scholar.
Anyway: good stuff. And I agree completely that if Rowling has a big reveal and shows Snape to have been a bad guy all along it will lack artistic integrity in the extreme (or, as I usually say it, show that she really is a shitty writer after all). Good stuff.