Not Slytherin, not Slytherin

[derannimer <susannahlm@yahoo.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 51302

Dicentra wrote: Slyths aren't the evil ones because they've won the 
house cup for 7 years running or because Lucius buys them all Nimbus 
2001s or because JKR needed some villains and decided to dump on one 
house to make things easier.JKR is most definitely biased against 
House Slytherin, but it's because Salazar Slytherin hates "Mudbloods" 
and wanted to impose that value system on Hogwarts admissions policy. 
Good heavens, the man hid a *basilisk* in the castle to wipe 
out "undesirables" centuries after his death. His heir--Tom Riddle--
mounted an enormous campaign to "cleanse" the WW of "the wrong sort."

JKR hasn't marked the Slyths as bad just to prop up a shallow
dualism--she's setting up the central conflict of the series:
Muggle-lovers vs. Muggle-haters. Inclusion vs. Elitism. Acceptance
vs. Genocide. Love vs. Bigotry.

Now me:

Yes, and that's exactly the problem I have with her portrayal of the 
Slytherins. 

The Sorting Hat does not put the biased in Slytherin; it puts the 
*ambitious* in Slytherin. Ambition is, canonically, the standard the 
Hat uses to Sort the Slytherins. So why is it that all the ambitious 
just happen to also be all the bigoted?

Why wouldn't there be studious bigots, or brave bigots, or hard-
working bigots?

Why is there *such* a one-to-one correspondence between ambition and 
evil in the books? And between ambition and bigotry? 

*Why* do all the bigots get put in Slytherin? Yes, Salazar Slytherin 
himself was a bigot, but that is not the standard that the Hat uses 
to pick the Slytherins, so that alone doesn't seem to explain it. 

This is one of the biggest problems I have with the story: the 
conflation of the school rivalries and the larger struggle. *Why* is 
it that all the Bad Guys are coming out of *one House in a boarding 
school?* The one house, moreover, that Harry most wants to beat at 
Quidditch?

I don't know; usually I enjoy the way the genres in the books 
interact, but the Boarding School/ Fight Against Evil concurrences I 
find problematic. The Gryff/Slyth rivalries tend to reduce and 
*shrink* the broader conflict, for me. 



Derannimer (who loves Snape)