Dissin' the Slyths

[dicentra63]

No: HPFGUIDX 38392

OK. I'm takin' on both Judy and Marina at once. 

::rolls up sleeves, spits on hands and rubs them together::

Anyone else want to play on my side?  Pippin?  Anyone?  Anyone? 

Say I:

I can't see this as prejudice or discrimination. Slytherins have fully
earned their reputations: the other houses don't dislike them because
of their heritage or any other arbitrary quality for which the Slyths
aren't responsible. They're disliked for the way in which they treat
other houses.

To which Marina says:

How much of a bad reputation can an eleven-year-old child "deserve" on
the very first day they start school? Yet the Slytherins are disliked
from the moment they're sorted (witness Fred and George hissing
Malcolm Baddock at the Sorting in GoF -- what did the kid ever do to
them?) 

And I make the following comparison:

If I were to wear my Utah Jazz tee-shirt in Seattle, Portland,
Sacramento, or L.A., I could expect a few raspberries and catcalls and
maybe even the finger (well, I'd get that in L.A. anyway).  But I
wouldn't take it personally because I know they're just reacting to
the basketball rivalry.  The House rivalries are the same kind of
thing: I doubt Malcolm took it personally that some Gryffs dissed him.
 It's expected.  If the Slyths had dissed him... now that would be
different.

Judy observes:

However, that doesn't make it OK for Dumbledore to stoop to the
Slytherin students' level; he is supposed to set an example for them.
 As someone said, Dumbledore is Headmaster and therefore should be
impartial.

And I say:

According to whom?  WE certainly think he should remain neutral in the
House rivalries, because that's our idea of fair and proper.  That
might not be the case at all in WW.  Remember, WW is messed up six
ways 'til Tuesday.  A pie in the face from the Hogwarts Headmaster is
the least of their problems.

I also asked:

To what extent is Dumbledore trying to prevent those at-risk kids from
turning out like many of their parents?  

Judy, who would melt all over Snape's shoes, responded:

Excellent point, and that seems like another flaw in how the stories
are written. JKR has repeatedly said that Dumbledore is goodness
personified (getting back to the original "Good and Evil" question.)
Furthermore, Dumbledore offers forgiveness to all who ask in the
leaving banquet scene in GoF. A "Go ahead, Slytherin Punks, make my
day" approach, where he is willing or even happy to have an excuse to
fight the Slytherins, just doesn't fit. But, we never see Dumbledore
trying to prevent the Slytherin students from joining Voldemort's
side. 

And Marina says, in that same vein:

Children have a way of living up -- or down -- to expectations. If
everyone from Dumbledore on down believes that the Slytherins are
destined to grow up to be slime and there's no point in even
attempting to stop it, well, then most of them will indeed grow up to
be slime. Even those who might've been salvageable at the start.

And Dicentra proffers yet another analogy:

It used to drive me to distraction when people insisted that Scully
and Mulder had a thing going.  "C'mon," they'd say. "They're both
young and attractive, they spend a lot of time together, they've
learned to trust each other, and let's face it, they don't exactly
have a social life outside each other..."  And I would say, "Look, the
writers have publicly declared that they don't have a thing going. 
Which means they don't."  But people insisted on SHIPping them until I
wanted to scream.  They just didn't get that fictional characters
operate only within the parameters they've been given, not according
to RL constraints.

The point I'm making is this: what Dumbledore did is a bad idea ONLY
if it affected the Slyths the way y'all imagine it must have.  And it
affected them that way only if JKR wrote them to react that way.  In
the context of Book 1 alone, there is no strategic mistake because
there are no DEs, no resurrected Voldemort, no path of darkness for
the Slyths to follow except one of their own making.  Maybe JKR didn't
have her chops down yet in Book 1, so Dumbledore's "tactical error" is
actually hers.  On the other hand, I would need to see evidence that
the Slyths and Snape took it any harder than Neville did when he ate
the canary creams. Do we hear them mutter about how they hate
Dumbledore and his kind because of how they're being treated at
Hogwarts?  Has Snape put Dumbledore's little trick in the same
category as Sirius's Prank?

I know we've got a Snapetheory that posits that Snape went DE because
he thought the concepts of good and evil were meaningless (rifles
through nearly finished Hypothetic Alley to find its name).  Ah, yes.
GEORGE'S SISTER DIANA seems to be the one.  A particular application
of the theory has it that Dumbledore's reaction to The Prank played a
strong role in his decision to wear the Dark Mark.  But as cool as the
theory is, it could be wrong.  Dead wrong.

I'll concede this point: if Hogwarts were operating in the Real World,
you could certainly argue that Dumbledore's little drama was in poor
taste at best, a tactical error at worst.

But as part of the Potterverse?  It's only a mistake if it was written
that way.

--Dicentra, tugging down her sleeves and going to wash the spit off
her hands