I agree these qualities aren't bad, but in the books they are and that's the point.

 

By the standards of society? Since when are bravery, intelligence and loyalty looked down on anyway?

 

But the books did paint the whole house as bad. There might be good aspects of being ambitious and cunning, but they're not explored.

I don't buy that it's "Harry's POV" either. "Harry's POV" shouldn't prevent us from seeing any good aspects of Slytherin, if they exist at all.

 

Seems like the problem is you then.

 

Death Eaters represent everything that's wrong. It just so happens that at the time of the HP books, Slytherin was infested with the children of Death Eaters. It had thus earned its "dark reputation" (JKR's words) but only relatively recently. It was a transitory thing caused by Voldemort and begins to diminish post war:

http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/7/30/j-k-rowling-web-chat-transcript

Furthermore, we know from the Pottermore section on the Malfoy family that, contrary to much fanon, "pure-bloodism" is a relatively recent political philosophy and had not been dominant or even strongly influential for most of wizarding Britain's history:

https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-malfoy-family

(Pure-blood ideology is obviously supposed to mirror the radicalism of Nazism, not the conservatism of classism. Muggleborns aren't the working class of the magical world, they're the Jews).

So the Death Eaters and their corrosive effect on Slytherin is not the historical norm.

(P.S. Isn't this exactly the same topic as the other thread?)

 

I don't think these 'black and white' statements are true, but I think they are a lot closer to true than is realistic. I believe verisimilitude was sacrificed to plot and fancy in the details of the Houses.

 

There's a pretty strong implication in OotP that Harry's Gryffindor bravery and courage and desire to help people pretty much directly lead to Sirius dying and his friends being badly injured. Plus, while it's not precisely House qualities being framed poorly, it's hard to frame Sirius trying to feed Snape to Lupin when they were at Hogwarts as anything positive.

 

Do you have any counterexamples from the books? If no then everything is your own headcanon.

 

No, we don't see Slytherins paint their own house as bad but this doesn't mean shit. The Nazis wouldn't paint themselves as bad either.

 

I like the fact that TheGreekLady is just ignoring all the arguments that debunks her theory and picking up fight with Sesc across both threads.

 

My god what are the arguments? Slytherin symbolizes everything that is bad. Even the Slytherin founder was evil.

I didn't say every single Slytherin is bad. I said Slytherin as a whole symbolizes everything that is bad. It's a symbol of racism and racial genocide (and the founder in fact supported that genocide).

What good is there about Slytherin in the books? No , it's not Harry's POV, every single decent character says Slytherin is bad. Even Dumbledore implied Slytherin is bad when he told Snape "we sort too soon" like you can't do a half-decent thing if you're a SLytherin.

 

...I won't even dignify the first part with a response, but I seriously doubt that Dumbledore had that in mind when saying that they sort too soon. He was simply stating that bravery was, in his opinion, Snape's most defining trait in his adulthood.

 

I'm strongly inclined to agree with ScottPress. I think James Potter or even Dumbledore could have become Dark Lords (objectively speaking) by convincing the world that Slytherins were bad (like that one shot by ip82 I think). It just happened that Riddle was a Slytherin and a lot of his contemporaries gravitated towards his charisma.

The way I see it, the most powerful wizard (obj) would be from Slytherin, considering they're the ones who see things the least in Black and White and unlike Ravenclaws have a proclivity for field testing.

 

I think Slytherin was initially supposed to represent everything bad, but JKR realized late in the series that it was problematic to have a "house for evil people." Thus, you get sleazy (but not evil) Slughorn and the redeemed (but dead and never seen even in pensieve flashbacks) Regulus, and the sudden "Draco loves his family and thus isn't just a spoiled brat" (he was a ridiculous caricature in the early books).

 

I can't help but recall the bit in Chamber of Secrets where Dumbledore points out exactly how many Slytherin qualities Harry has, and all in a fairly complimentary way.

 

And then he pointed that Harry chose NOT to be in Slytherin unlike Tom Riddle, making it sound like Slytherin is a bad choice.