Slytherins/Krum are/are not Jews.../The Houses Again

[Annemehr]

No: HPFGUIDX 173616

 
> bboyminn:
> 
> The question is, which came first the chicken or the
> egg? Do you really think Slytherins are sweet innocent
> kids who have been wrongly put upon by the other houses,
> or do you think Slytherin acted in a manner that made
> them deserving of all the scorn they received?
> 
> Personally, I think Slytherin has created their own
> alienation from the other houses.
<snip>


> Magpie:
> Exactly. There's nothing the other houses should or could do. Their 
> behavior regarding Slytherins has been completely right and they 
> aren't responsible for any badness in Slytherin at all. The best 
they 
> can do is be magnanimous to this group of people in their school. 
> It's nice to hope that one day they'll change, but until they do 
> they're the flaw in the school. 


Annemehr:
This reminds me of an old thread from 2004 about the Sorting Hat and 
the "Permanent problem of Slytherin House."  Back then, I thought JKR 
had set up the situation in order to resolve it in the series (or 
begin to), but perhaps whoever put the word "Permanent" in the title 
was prescient.

Anyway, I still believe *most* of what I said then, and this is the 
most pertinent part:

I believe (and would guess that JKR intends) that the 11-year-olds who
are sorted into each House have very similar *amounts* of character
flaws. The thing that really makes the difference, though, are that
in Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, those flaws are likely to be
very randomly distributed among their students. However, in
Slytherin, though the first years are as a group *no more* flawed than
their counterparts, there is likely to be an unusually high
concentration of children who would tend to believe that the ends
justifies the means and/or that having been raised in the WW or having
purer blood is inherently "better."

This means that SSlytherin's choice of students is going to have very
real consequences to the students even of today. For example, in any
one Gryffindor dorm, you may get an ambitious student, a lazy one, and
one who is neither of those but a bit of a bully. They are all
different, and with luck may tend to moderate each other's faults.
But in Slytherin, where the faults that exist will tend to be more
similar, they will feed an reinforce each other. Not only that, but
there is the absence of Muggleborns who may have acted as a
counterbalance, the "us against them" mentality that's engendered, and
the likelihood that a Slytherinly way of thinking and acting has by
now become an actual tradition of the house to be passed down to the
new members.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/99587

The Slytherins have a rough road ahead, because of the way Salazar 
Slytherin arranged his House a thousand years or more ago.

Annemehr

P.S. From two of the Hat's songs we know, we do find some 
justification for Snape's comment to James and Sirius that Slytherin 
is a house for brains, not brawn, whatever connotation you take from 
the word "cunning":

Book 1:
'...Or perhaps in Slytherin, You'll make your real friends
Those Cunning folk use any means, to achieve their ends....'

Book 5:
> > 'Said Slytherin, "We'll just teach those whose ancestry is 
purest...
> > For instance, Slytherin
> > Took only pure-blood wizards
> > Of great cunning, just like him...'