Probably Harry would get worse treated with no McGonagall, Gryfindors to protect him. An Half Blood like him would get abused by every blood purist and treated like dirt.

 

Nah, I don't think so. The first thing Malfoy did when he learnt who Harry was was to ask for his friendship.

 

But does Malfoy equal to all Slytherins? We know from canon they have many blood purists.

 

IMO -"I don't know yet what you did with the sorting hat Potter, but you'll be expelled for that. I'll make sure of it." Disgust/disdain.

Canon Snap seems to be a stuck up git, I don't think he is gonna think diferently of harry for his house. Probably gonna shoot about how he can't do anything like other (other Potter ) , how he wants to stand out...
Gryfindors or Slytherin Harry gonna still have his father face. If he was a red head girl well...

 

Malfoy himself was a pretty massive blood purist.

Which reminds me, given that "Mudblood" is clearly treated in-story as being equivalent to the nastier racial slurs it always surprised me that Draco never got in trouble for using the term. I mean, if someone in a normal middle school kept blathering on in front of teachers about how "soon we'll kill all the n*ggers" the way Malfoy did in Chamber of Secrets, there'd be a massive shitstorm.

 

Malfoy is fairly good at making sure he isn't caught.

 

Taure, I just can't. I won't be able to take anything you say seriously as long as your avatar looks as it does now.

 

It helps to not think about it.

 

Would there really be all that much of a shitstorm though. Keep in mind that Umbridge is one of the highest ranking officials in the MoM and consistently demonizes non-humans and half-breeds (which would extend to muggleborn, but I may be confusing fanon for this.) It may have been a nasty racial slur, but it seems to be only be socially unacceptable amongst Dumbledore's crowd.

Not to mention, there seems to be a large lack of lasting punishment in Hogwarts, we know that corporeal punishment is banned, and there's only ever one expulsion (that i can remember.) The rest is house points, which in the grand scheme of things doesn't really matter that much, and completely contrived detentions which range from being sent into the Forbidden Forest with only the protection of a hound, and signing letters. How any of that teaches the students to learn not to do illegal things is beyond me.

 

I think it's pretty clear that a Slytherin Harry could easily sway Snape multiple ways. There is no "one" way to influence him to be better. No matter what, Snape is a bitter, damaged, arrogant jackass. He bullies because he was bullied, which means the easier targets. He insulted Hermione after the swelling solution hit her teeth in GoF which was quite awful.

But I think that if you redirect Snape's hatred, and really connect Harry more to Lily and less to James, he can end up liking (begrudgingly) Harry regardless of the House. I mean I argued that myself in my FTMTT story. Snape will always be a bully and a huge jerk, but the Slytherin thing is to me just a small factor.

In Slytherin, Snape might resent Harry more, thinking it's some kind of trick despite evidence to the contrary, or it might confuse him, also infuriating him. It depends how you play it out.

 

My theory is that Snape doesn't really hate Harry exactly. Instead, Snape hates himself. He's spent the last decade or so wrapped up in self-loathing so when Harry Potter comes back with her eyes but his face -- it's just the result of his greatest failure. Harry is just a convenient way to externalize his self-loathing. So, he doesn't really hate Harry -- the Gryffindor that's got a talent for flying and Defense and who'd rather die than let his friends get hurt and so on -- he hates the progeny of James and Lily Potter because it's a result of his biggest mistake.

Despite the similarities in Snape and Harry's upbringing, they reacted to it in very different ways. Harry became better than the perception the Dursleys tried to foist onto him -- being a fairly noble, courageous, and upstanding person. Snape however became the very thing he hated - an abuser - which was likely exacerbated by his greatest mistake. Snape has something of a talent of destroying the only things he cared about -- he basically destroyed his own relationship with Lily and then later on, reporting the prophecy got Lily killed.

If that's the case, my suspicion is that Snape won't explicitly bully Harry in the presence of non-Slytherins, but he'll continue to treat him like crap at every other opportunity. Regardless of how much Harry proves himself, he'll always been the son of James and Lily Potter in his eyes. (Sort of the inverse of how a lot of people are drawn to the Boy-Who-Lived, but don't go about knowing Harry)

IMO, the only path to getting Snape to have anything besides loathing for Harry is to involve Lily somehow. I'm not sure if reminding him that Harry is also Lily's son would help, because he would also remember that it isn't her son through him. I wonder how an encounter between Snape and Lily-resurrected-by-the-Stone would go.

 

Severus Snape is not some little teenager; he is an old man, and despite his flaws, I highly doubt he lacks the intelligence to not prescribe to the belief that whatever House a person enters into actually matters. Even if he does show outward prejudice, I doubt from an intellectual standpoint, he would ever think Draco Malfoy is more talented than Hermione Granger or has a stronger will than Harry Potter, even if Snape would never admit it.

It really wouldn't matter where Harry ended up, or even how he acted. Snape would hate him just because he looks like James.

So please get rid of the naive and childish delusion that Snape would ever like Harry.

---------- Post automerged at 10:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:58 PM ----------

If you found out your ex-friend was partially responsible for the death of you and your spouse, as well as the orphaning and abuse of your child, and then went out of his/her way to bully your 11 year old child....

How would you react?

Sure, there are some delusional fanfiction writers who like to think Lily forgave him, but let's be honest, there's a 99% chance she loathes him with every fiber of her being.

 

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter. From an intellectual standpoint, Snape is not going to think Draco is any less Draco, regardless of where he ended up.

The House someone ends up in may reveal deep personality traits, but the importance is so low that putting any type of actual label on someone, aside from those who chose where to go or went because of tradition, is not intelligent in the least.

There is no point is entertaining delusions. Snape is a bitter, old man, who willingly entered a terrorist group that murdered an unaccountable amount of sentient beings. He is stubborn, prideful, arrogant, and has no problem putting his society in peril.

These are not the traits of a forgiving man, and something so inconsequential as where the Sorting Hat puts someone will have no bearing on whether he treats those he hates any different.

 

As an aside, can we stop calling Snape an old man? He was 31 during book one and died at age 38

 

When you combine all of the experience he has had in his life, it is quite hard to think of him as anything less than an old man.

 

Snape definitely wasn't old in a strictly physical sense, but personality-wise he does fit the classic image of a bitter old man who has lost everything he cares about. I certainly like the one suggestion that part of why he hates Harry isn't because he sees James Jr., but because Harry's a living, breathing reminder of the fact that he's responsible for Lily's death.

 

The Sorting Hat wanted to put Canon Harry Potter in Slytherin, and would have, if Harry had not met Draco beforehand.

I don't think Snape would like Harry, regardless of his personality or skills.

 

I'm not sure Harry would need to be a massively different person to go to Slytherin instead of Gryffindor. After all, as Dumbledore points out at the end of Chamber of Secrets, Harry's got plenty of Slytherin qualities. Honestly, it seems like the biggest reason he picked Gryffindor over Slytherin in canon (and Dumbledore did emphasize that it was a choice) was that Draco was a prat who gave him an incredibly negative impression of the entire house.

So I think you could easily do an AU story where Harry's still his canon self when he goes into Slytherin. All it would really take is Harry meeting different people before he's sorted. Of course, spending seven years in a completely different social circle is going to have a huge impact on his development over the course of the story, so he'd pretty quickly diverge from CanonHarry.