Draco and The New Death Eaters. Was: Good Slytherins

[severelysigune]

No: HPFGUIDX 97771

[oops - snipped a bit too enthousiastically here - the context is 
that of Slytherin students forming a fresh band of DE's]

Potioncat:
<< And I wonder how that will affect the teachers, particularly 
Snape? >>
> snip <

Sigune here:
Of course I have no canon to support this assumption (as yet?), but I 
thought that one of Dumbledore's reasons for hiring Snape, and more 
importantly, making him Head of House, might be to prevent Slytherins 
from going over to Voldemort. 
I have to confess that at this moment I don't really see how Snape 
should have worked on this, but we don't get much of an insight into 
the internal affairs of Slytherin House in the books, do we?

In any case it has always struck me that the Slytherins are a kind of 
outcasts at Hogwarts, despite the fact that they are purebloods. I 
don't know very well how to formulate this... I mean, Slytherin is, 
academically speaking, a 'good' house, is it not? It is successful as 
a unit. And then there is the fact that it is mostly composed of the 
offspring of wizards who rank rather highly in the WW. Yet it has a 
bad reputation and the other houses band together against it.

Just imagine being sorted into Slytherin. It means you are 
automatically branded 'other' - "There wasn't a wizard who went bad 
who wasn't in Slytherin", that sort of thing, and it is not even 
true. A student sorted into Slytherin would have no other choice than 
to band together with the likes of Draco Malfoy (yuck!) because there 
do not seem many other options. I don't know of any canon evidence 
that shows Slytherins mixing with people from other houses (but 
PLEASE correct me if I overlooked stuff). Is this because of a 
reluctance of the part of the Slytherins, or on the part of the 
others? (Probably both.)

What I want to get to is - apart from Draco Malfoy, who clearly 
thinks he is better than anyone else, I think a number of Slytherins 
might actually feel inferior in a way. Or their pretended superiority 
might be a reaction against their forced seclusion as a group. I 
don't think it simply means they are evil and will go over to Voldy. 
Snape has done a great job of boosting the Slytherins' self-esteem, 
seeing that under his guidance they won both the House and Quidditch 
Cup seven years in a row prior to Harry's arrival. It seems to me 
that IF anyone has influence over the Slytherins, it would be Snape, 
and I can't imagine he would let his students join the Death Eaters 
if he can prevent it. Draco Malfoy is only one student out of a whole 
house; I don't know if we can take him to represent the whole of it. 
So, I guess I am suggesting that I don't think Snape will find 
himself in a situation where he has to really *fight* his own 
students, though he may have to use his persuasive skills (wonder 
what *they* are, LOL) at some point.

Hm. Does this sound very confused? If so, I apologise :).

Yours severely,

Sigune