Gryffindor & Slytherin roles (was Villain!Dumbledore)

[lizzyben04]

No: HPFGUIDX 177719

> 
> Prep0strus:
> But it wasn't. And so it's not a lie. It's truth. It's reality.  It
> may not be what many of us were hoping for, but that's how it is.  
The
> evil of Slytherin is not the responsibility of Griffindor - it is
> inherent to Slytherin.  It's not a ruse, and it's not sleight of 
hand.

lizzyben:

It is a lie in what it tells us about human nature. Writers have one 
fundamental responsibility, and that is to tell us what it means to 
be human. JKR's story lies about humanity, lies about good & evil, & 
lies about herself.

Adam:
> I believe that JKR took the qualities she finds wrong and 
distasteful,
> and imbued them into one particular house.  Then she created every
> character in that house to represent those ideas, to lesser or 
greater
> extent, but never allowing herself to go so far as to create a
> character within that house who can be good, and kind, and nice.  
They
> are tragically flawed because they exist within the construct she 
has
> created.

lizzyben:

I agree here, but w/one caveat. In doing this, JKR inevitably took 
qualities she finds wrong or distasteful in *herself*, and projected 
it onto this House of Bad. Slytherin becomes her shadow & scapegoat. 
And this is inevitable, because it's what we all do. If I had to 
create a house of "bad guys", I'd probably assign it traits that I 
find unacceptable in myself - because those traits would be most 
irrationally irritating to me. That's projection.

Adam:
> Every time something evil was done, it was done by members of this 
house.

lizzyben:

Evil is done by other houses, but it is ignored or overlooked 
because they are assigned "good."

Adam:
> I think a lot of people thought that by the end we would learn 
that in
> reality, there are good and evil Slytherins, mean and nice 
Slytherins.
>  That that is true of all the other houses as well.  That there was
> more to being a Slytherin than selfish ambition and pureblooded 
bigotry.
> But there isn't.  There never was.  So it can't be a lie.  And a 
lie
> we are 'expected to believe'?  Like JKR is pulling a giant Andy
> Kaufman-esque trick on us all?  No.  I don't think one has to like 
the
> world she has created, but it doesn't make it something that it's 
not.

lizzyben:

It is a lie, because it seems to say that Slytherins aren't really 
human; or as you put it "they aren't real people." Sure, these 
children go to school & cry & laugh & have parents who love them, 
but they aren't human the way you or I are. They're just this sub-
human mutation that contains all the bad traits of humanity & none 
of the good. But that doesn't describe real human beings at ALL. ALL 
of us are a mixture of good & bad, all are flawed, none 
are "superior". 

Adam:
> Griffindors cannot be blamed for how they think of Slytherins 
because
> they are RIGHT.  Slytherins ARE bad and wrong and represent what is
> wrong.  They DO represent prejudice and cruelty.  This is not a
> statement on Griffindors and how they are prone to prejudice and
> thinking - that would be a different story.  In this story, 
Slytherins
> represent what is wrong with the world, and the Griffindors and 
others
> who fight against that (including even the extraordinarily flawed
> Slytherins who  are only good by virtue of their non-Slytherin
> qualities but do fight on the side of good) are in the right.  They
> are also flawed, but they are fighting with what JKR perceives as
> wrong in the world - and that is the ideals of Slytherin, most
> perfectly represented in Tom Riddle.
> 
> ~Adam (Prep0strus)

lizzyben:

And that's a lie, too. This is a society where only Slytherins are 
ever portrayed as bigots. NO one from the other Houses 
uses "mudblood" slurs or has any prejudice at all. Yet, suddenly, 
the Ministry falls & the whole WW begins persecuting muggle-borns. 
That tells us nothing about how bigotry actually works 
in society. It's like saying, "Oh, all the math majors are 
racist, but NEVER the music majors". Yale students are racist, NEVER 
Harvard. Southerners are bigots, NEVER Northerners. Ridiculous. It's 
more about hating the assigned group of "bigots" than actually 
adressing the issue of bigotry in society. In real life, bigotry 
runs throughout society, finding expression in different forms. 
But here, only Slyths are ever bigoted, no one else? The way the 
entire WW seems to view Muggles as inferior or people to be 
persecuted/rescued is actually a much better example of systemic 
bigotry, but that is of course left unaddressed as the trait of 
bigotry is swept into the house of bad.

That's classic scapegoating. The word "scapegoat" comes from a 
ritual of the ancient Israelites - they would take a goat, 
symbolically pour all of their sins into it, and then cast it off 
into the desert, purifying their society of sin. And human 
scapegoats work the same way - the society projects their own sins 
onto them, then casts them out. And that's what happens with this 
false dichotomy of the "good noble Gryfs" and their inverted mirror 
of "evil awful" Slyths. Real people have both nobility & awfulness 
within them - but in this story, all the nobility is kept to the 
Gryfs, while all the bad traits are cast off onto the Slytherins. 
It's like splitting off a piece of yourself & calling it "other". So 
within the lie, the book is saying something very true about human 
nature & our eternal search for a outside scapegoat for our sins. 

I don't believe in a supernatural evil, or that evil is something 
that only some other horrible people are capable of. I think the 
capacity for evil is within every human heart, just as good is. But 
in this world, it seems like readers can instead simply divide 
people into the "superior good group" & the "inferior evil" group. 
And to the extent that the books seem to suggest that one group of 
people (Slytherins) actually *are* inferior, bad, subhuman, or 
deserving of contempt & disrespect, I believe that message is evil. 
Not that the books are, or that JKR is, but that they do seem to 
channel & express that recurring impulse in human nature. 

Sorry to keep beating this particular drum. The respected Zimbardo 
actually wrote a book on the reasons why people do evil things, 
titled the "Lucifer Effect". And in this book, he pinpointed one 
major factor that makes good people do evil things - dehumanization. 
His site devotes an entire page to the concept:

"At the core of evil is the process of dehumanization by which 
certain other people or collectives of them, are depicted as less 
than human, as non-comparable in humanity or personal dignity to 
those who do the labeling. Prejudice employs negative stereotypes in 
images or verbally abusive terms to demean and degrade the objects 
of its narrow view of superiority over these allegedly inferior 
persons. Discrimination involves the actions taken against those 
others based on the beliefs and emotions generated by prejudiced 
perspectives.

Dehumanization is one of the central processes in the transformation 
of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton 
perpetrators of evil. Dehumanization is like a "cortical cataract" 
that clouds one's thinking and fosters the perception that other 
people are less than human. It makes some people come to see those 
others as enemies deserving of torment, torture, and even 
annihilation. ...

It is all done with words and images. To modify an old adage: Sticks 
and stones may break your bones, but names can sometimes kill you. 
The process begins with stereotyped conceptions of the other, 
dehumanized perceptions of the other, the other as worthless, the 
other as all-powerful, the other as demonic, the other as an 
abstract monster, the other as a fundamental threat to our cherished 
values and beliefs. With public fear notched up and enemy threat 
imminent, reasonable people act irrationally, independent people act 
in mindless conformity, and peaceful people act as warriors. 
Dramatic visual images of the enemy on posters, television, magazine 
covers, movies, and the internet imprint on the recesses of the 
limbic system, the primitive brain, with the powerful emotions of 
fear and hate."

http://lucifereffect.com/links_dehuman.htm

When the novels say that people are basically born good & evil, that 
we can segregate out the evil children & justifiably view them 
w/contempt & hate, that is a lie. When it seems to support 
dehumanizing an entire group of people, that's an evil message. But 
there is a truth within the lie, in that the books show the deep 
impulses towards dehumanization, scapegoating & projection in human 
nature. And to that extent, it does tell us something about what it 
means to be human.


lizzyben