Arguable, it's a big world with a veery long history, but I get your point. Anyway, nowadays we do have systems that allow us to come as close to a 'fair' judgement as possible, and they are far more applicable in real life than my own exercise in thought, and I won't bother pretending otherwise.

Pansy's situation is interesting, and I agree with you that she was between a rock and a hard place. Such situations must be analysed carefully so to avoid injustices afterwards. I don't think much beyond a little social stigma that came from being a supporter of Voldemort's regime happened to her though, the little we saw from the post-War world showed that not much had changed. Also, she was barely an adult (legally speaking) and was in a very stressful situation.

 

ThatGreekLady You missed the point completely. What I'm trying to say is that we have a very narrow and biased opinion of Slytherins i.e. never seeing things from their perspective.

The notion of almost all Slytherin students being total jerks is... somewhat true, but there in comes the point that we haven't seen all Slytherins, and your generalization is proved wrong by the fact that there are Slytherin students we haven't even heard of.

How many of those became DEs, huh?

Slytherin house wasn't always accepting only the pureblood dogma following witches and wizards. It is only since recent years that this (bigoted ideology) began to show in the Slytherin House. Look at Myrddin Wyllt, Phineas Nigellus, Slughorn etc. etc.

That's not even it, even those who were born in bigoted families (because of Tom Riddle's influence on younger, older Slytherins) opposed it i.e. Andromeda Black.

And before you go out saying, "You can't say that Slytherins are good because of some of the exceptions!"

I'll refer to you my previous post, in which I calculated as to how many people from the 1942-1980 Slytherin group became DEs, and how many didn't. For those that don't want to go back and read, it was found, by my calculations, that Slytherin would have about an eleventh of it's total group from the years 1942-1980 (The year in which TMR first made a Horcrux and then the year when Harry was born).

This only proves my point that we have a very, very, very narrow view of Slytherins, and we can't possibly generalize all of them in a right way.

You doing this reminds me of those who judge muslims because of the few they've seen.

 

I think the best authority we have on "what Slytherins are like" is the Sorting Hat. From the three canon songs we have following quotes on the qualities of Slytherin house:

"Or perhaps in Slytherin – You'll make your real friends, – Those cunning folks use any means – To achieve their ends."

"And power-hungry Slytherin – Loved those of great ambition."

"Said Slytherin, "We'll teach just those – Whose ancestry's purest.""

"For instance, Slytherin – Took only pure-blood wizards – Of great cunning just like him."

So yeah, Slytherin is the house of power-hungry backstabber racists, with the first quote being the most revealing (as all the rest refer to Salazar, not the contemporary house).

But more importantly I think the sorting and the houses are kind of a cheap way of creating "complex" characters. Simply by saying a person is a Slytherin you can infer that said person is a cunning, ambitious pure-blood who doesn't let morals limit their options. If you then say that the said Slytherin is a muggleborn, there's immediately tension: how ambitious they have to be to have been sorted into Slytherin? How rough time did they have in school?

With two words you get a character with a backstory and personality, and you can get away with so blatantly using stereotypes because the house labels are magically affixed by a magical hat. It's magic, so of course it is correct.

Of course it works for all the other houses, too. Sirius's "betrayal" was made all the worse because Gryffindors aren't supposed to stab you in the back (though luckily there was the stereotype affixed to the house of Black, which explained it all nicely...), Hufflepuffs acting like dicks towards Harry in CoS and GoF was even worse because Hufflepuffs are supposedly nice guys, and petty bullying is even more surprising in Ravenclaw because they are supposed to be smart enough to know better.

Slytherin house is supposed to be the stereotype of evil, but at the same time one of the big themes (if not The Theme) of the series is that stereotypes are a bad thing and that you shouldn't judge people based on them.

 

That's a much better question to ask than "is Slytherin a pit of evil?" I suppose you could be onto something here, seeing as Hermione is an author self-insert and IIRC, dementors were supposed to represent depression JK struggled with after her mother's death.

 

And Lockhart was based on her ex, and Snape was based on her chemistry teacher, and others I don't have the energy to dig up right now.

Which is why I maintain that the institution of Slytherin House is one that's definitely portrayed as distasteful and a negative. But people are going to keep making assumptions and getting defensive over fictional houses they identify with, so whatever.

 

The important part you miss is "stereotype". Pretty much everything about Slytherin fits into the stereotype of "evil" from fantasy literature: any means to an end, power-hungry, ambitious, cunning, dungeons, snakes, racism, Snape; even their sports team is defined by being brutish cheaters who play dirty.

You can't deny that all this was an intentional choice by Rowling: Slytherin is supposed to look and smell and sound like the stereotypical den of evil. The reality might well be (and is) totally different, but that's the outward appearance she gave them.

 

Eh, I read it like how Kvothe portrays nobles in his books. While the great majority of them are at least assholish some times, its pretty clear that he has a very low opinion of them and their values, which colors his views in no small way. His noble friends don't really behave like ones and he makes an effort to forget that they are nobles. Its not that all nobles are assholes, just that Kvothe had bad personal experiences with them, they represent values he dislikes and they are easy to be hated/disliked/mocked.

Slytherin is filled with privileged and traditional kids, something that clashes with Harry’s views and likes heavily. Contributing to our automatic sympathizing with the MC’s PoV, add to that the Christians morals tries to teach us that ambition, pride and elitism are automatically bad things, that we tend to dislike aristocratic characters, that we dislike the preppy kids who are such easy villains for kids movies and we have a good explanation why people insist on them being evil when it makes no sense to do that.

I do think that in the first and maybe the second book JK was painting them as antagonists for the school plots without realising she was compromising the entire House.

 

More like until at least book 5 they were shown as pure bad.

 

You say it yourself. Things are not always what they seem. Slytherin may look evil. That doesn't mean they are evil. And again, all of this holds more significance when applied to the first two, three books. Starting with GoF, we're reading YA, not children's literature. The image of Slytherin spoke more to kids reading PS than teens reading HBP.

Maybe there's just too much investment by people to put down the prism through which they see Slytherin. Invictus makes a good point by bringing up a non-HP example. I haven't read Rothfuss, but something similar to what he described is in the first Mistborn novel, where Kelsier single-mindedly hates the nobles for their transgressions against the peasants and negates arguments countering his view, not unlike ThatGreekLady is doing.

 

I don't hate Slytherin for your information I just think Rowling intended to use them to represent everything that is wrong.

 

I should have been more precise. I meant that you negate counterarguments, not that you hate Slytherin.

 

The Third book? Thing is... The Slytherin were totally right about Hagrid and Buckbeak, they were assholes about it, sure, but the Monster book thing and Hagrid way of doing things certainly didn't endear him to them. We don't see anything coming from McGonagall that indicates that Slytherin has any kind of reputation, and she only comments on Snape's gloating, and we see she is not above some (healthy) house rivalry.

In the fourth the Slytherin did nothing to aggrave what Harry went through, just willing to take part in 'taking down a peg' the boy responsible for them losing a some of the Quidditch Cups and the House Cups in a obviously less than clear manner (Dumbledore giving of points in the first two books stand out). In the fifth, with Voldemort's return and the Ministry going nuts, it's painfully obvious for me that the contamination Slytherin suffered by the Death Eaters was the main cause of that, with their parents/other relatives instigating or outright ordering them to take part in Umbridge's effort, or hell, since when teenagers give up free status and power to lord over their peers? Just see movies like the Wave.

 

Totally right about Buckbeak's...what? "Here is a creature I was explicitly told was extremely dangerous, along with the proper protocol for dealing with it so as to avoid grievous bodily harm. In my stupidity I decided to provoke it, and promptly received the promised mauling (but not really because its handler got in the way before it could really go to town on my ass). See, I was right along! It really was an extremely dangerous creature!"

Like, no shit. If I have a 130-pound Rottweiler and I tell you "do not provoke the dog, it won't like it" you don't get to claim the high ground when you poke it with a stick and it takes a chunk out of your butt.

(And that's part of my issue with the institution of Slytherin House. So many of its members act so stupidly. Draco could have committed suicide by Hippogriff with that stunt, and for what?)

(Hagrid's teaching methods are a different story, however)

 

Yeah, no. Hagrid is a teacher, it’s responsibility to gauge on the maturity and how ready his classes are for an animal, and he fucked up, badly, and Buckbeak did violently attack a student, anywhere a dog violently attacks a person its put down, it was not a wild animal as Hagrid did not let it go back to the wild and only after the entire process started he had the idea.

Malfoy offended the animal by insulting him, he did not poke or beat him or goaded him, he talked to the hippogriff, that's him just assuming that an animal is an animal and not fluent in human dialog, sure its a magical beast, but he is a 13 with minor experience with magical beasts at best. A muggleborn could have easily made thr same mistake due to biggrr ignorance. This class is for them to be TAUGHT about magical beasts, starting low and not with a fucking semi sentient murder machine with a pride to match.

 

Snakes being the symbol of evil comes from at least as far as the Bible, as well as the portrayal of ambition and cunning as sins. And dungeons by the very definition are not nice places, and are associated with torture and cruelty.

I'm not saying that you should consider them evil, quite the opposite, in fact. The whole big reveal in the first book was that it wasn't Snape (the Slytherin) who was the bad guy, even though Rowling did her very best to make us think that it must have been Snape.

That's what Rowling does: she paints things black and points at them and tells us that there's the baddies, and then turns it around and reveals that in fact the real bad guys are somewhere else. We get that with Snape in PS, with Riddle in CoS, with Sirius in PoA, with CrouchMoody in GoF, and with Snape again in the end of HBP and DH.

As I said earlier, one of the big themes in the series was that stereotypes and prejudices based on them are bad. As a part of that theme Rowling presents us with clear stereotypes, and then proceeds to tear them down by showing that the individuals don't necessarily conform to them.

 

Do you guys really think Rowling wanted it to be seen that there was "prejudice" against Slytherin? Because from what I saw people were prejudiced against them because they were indeed jerks.

Harry wasn't prejudiced against Snape because he was a Slytherin, he was prejudiced against him because Snape was overall a pretty bad person who bullied little kids.

 

There is evidence to suggest that there was prejudice against Slytherin. Fanon definitely exaggerates the prejudice against Slytherin (mainly in really Slytherin-centric fics) but its pretty clear that the other three houses don't like Slytherin. A minor example would be how when Slytherin is playing against another house in Quidditch, the three non-Slytherin houses would always cheer for whoever isn't Slytherin. However my favourite example has to be this part from the GoF sorting ceremony. Its an unimportant scene in terms of plot and canon but its interesting in regards to Slytherin's reputation.

So Fred and George don't see the newly sorted Slytherin as being just a regular kid who happened to be in Slytherin. Rather, they seem to dislike Slytherin as a whole, regardless of what the people in the house are actually like. After all, what could Fred and George REALLY know about a newly sorted kid's life? It also makes the Twins look a bit immature given how they are like 5 years older than Malcolm in the first place. Though given JKR's portrayal of every other Slytherin who wasn't named Andromeda Black or Horace Slughorn, I wouldn't be surprised if Malcolm Baddock hated muggles, or was a pure-blood supremacist or was related to Death Eaters. Given how most Slytherins were pure-blood supremacists.

Even Harry's thought to himself reminds us, the reader, that Slytherin is the evil house. It is the house that turns out more Dark witches and wizards than any other. Its not just Harry's POV that confirmed that, its canon that Slytherin has more dark wizards than any of the other Hogwarts houses. To the point where the only non-Slytherin Death Eater is Wormtail... who was a hatstall that almost went to Slytherin and that, according to the Sorting Hat itself, should have been a Slytherin. Every inner-circle Death Eater (the DEs of importance, not the fodder ones) was either a Slytherin or implied to be a Slytherin. After all, Quirrell was a follower of Voldemort, but he wasn't a real Death Eater since he never had the Dark Mark nor was he in the inner-circle like Bellatrix/Snape/Lucius/etc.

Harry's interactions with Snape aren't really a Gryffindor-Slytherin interaction but rather a student-teacher interaction. Harry's house as well as Snape's are both irrelevant considering the source for their conflict has nothing to do with Gryffindor or Slytherin. Rather, Harry's view of Snape is purely because he hates the way Snape treats students and showed favouritism to the Slytherin students.

However, James and Sirius were prejudiced against Snape for being in Slytherin. We even get this when James talks down Slytherin no different to how Draco mocked Hufflepuff in book 1, saying they'd leave if they were sorted into Slytherin/Hufflepuff respectively. Clearly JKR made a conscious decision to make the James/Draco parallel for a reason, especially given Draco's was in PS and James' was in DH, and that was to show that the prejudice cuts both ways. The Marauders' reason for antagonising Snape was mainly motivated by being in Slytherin, given how they deemed Slytherin and Junior Death Eater to be synonymous. Other factors, such as the James-Lily-Snape love triangle, were completely irrelevant. Even if Lily didn't exist, the Marauders-Snape conflict would still exist.