Slytherin-Ever So Evil after all?

[Danger Mouse]

No: HPFGUIDX 69131

I loved Order of the Phoenix, but my biggest disappointment was with Slytherin.

I never believed Slytherin himself was an evil man. I thought that the rumors of his being a vile Pureblood fanatic in the same vein s the Malfoys and Blacks was based on 1000 years--his views get distorted from, perhaps, mistrust of muggle-born students to full-blown racism. Bah. 

I've always seen the Slytherins as the group nobody understands, that aren't Ever So Evil at all. I thought we'd only seen a couple bad apples and there were, somewhere, "good" Slytherins. After all, in Chamber of Secrets, Rowling was all about our choices shaping us--we've seen characters switch sides several times (Snape to "good," Peter to "evil," for example) yet three books later, we've *never* seen a single Slytherin strive to go against the flow of his/her fellow students. Personally, I never read Slytherin as the Evil house--I just thought that ambition was particularly likely to be found in Evil people, though Bravery, Loyalty/Hard Work, and Intelligence are as well... Anyways, my views of what Slytherins were can be summed up in a paraphrase of a lovely piece of fan-fiction, Answer to the Authors by A.L. Milton:

Slytherin qualities include our defiance of authority, our endurance, our independence and our utter disrespect for convention, pious platitudes and the pseudo-sentimental emanations of established authority. In short, we are sly, cunning, ambitious and tough. On the good side such qualities can produce people like H. L. Mencken and T. E. Lawrence. On the bad side, they can produce Martha Stewart.

Was anyone else disappointed in Order of the Phoenix's portrayal of the Slytherins? Are they really an Ever So Evil House that deserves to have their dungeon permanently flooded?

-Dan

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