Sirius as Gryffindor (Was: good and bad Slytherins)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 175391

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" <justcarol67 at ...>
wrote:

<snip>

> At this time, Slytherin was not the House of Death Eaters and the 
> HoH was the blustering and greedy but innocuous Horace Slughorn, who 
> would have happily "collected" Sirius.

It wasn't the house of Death Eaters, openly known as such, but it was
the house of purebloods, especially people who think that lineage
matters.  As Neri pointed out**, it's always been the house of
thinking that pure blood matters, back to the beginning.  [I remember
many speculations that we'd get some nuancing and mitigation on
Salazar Slytherin's "Get rid of the Muggleborns, oh did I mention this
horrific snake I left here?" position.  Nothing in DH, so far as I
could tell.]  It's the house of Phineas Nigellus, who throws around
the word 'Mudblood' (to which, to his credit, having learned better,
Snape objects).

I don't think it's a stretch to see an 11-year old already having
problems with that kind of language and talk; it's no stretch to
assume that would have been in the air with a household of those who
both tended to be in and strongly identified with the iconography of
Slytherin.  

** http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/175311

To quote Neri, who I agree with wholeheartedly here:

"You don't see any Gryffindor or Ravenclaw family filling their houses
with lions or badger motifs, the way 12 Grimmauld Place is filled with
serpent motifs. In effect, Slytherin is identified with the racist
ideology of the fanatic purebloods, with Salazar Slytherin as their
prophet and house Slytherin as their youth indoctrination institution.

It is not individual Slytherins who are bad. It is the ideology that
Slytherin house has identified itself with."

-Nora remembers these same arguments after the last book, and the book
before, and...