Gryffindor & Slytherin roles (was Villain!Dumbledore)

[stephab67]

No: HPFGUIDX 177755

> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sistermagpie"
> <sistermagpie@> wrote:
> > (They seem to totally ENJOY being this scapegoat as well. The way
they're seen by others is exactly the way they are. If Slytherins were
real people I would absolutely suspect that I wasn't getting the real
story, but they're not real. They're entirely made up to be exactly
this. Why would anyone want to be in Slytherin? It's a mystery to me.
Don't ask me to fathom how a Slytherin's mind works.)

Stepha67:
It goes in the other direction as well:  when Snape meets James and
Sirius on the Hogwarts Express, his distaste for them, due to their
behavior, turned him off to Gryffindor.  Of course he seemed to be
more inclined to want to join Slytherin even before that, but the
incident on the train solidified his opinion of Gryffindors.  He
wondered to Lily why anyone would want to be in Gryffindor.

To me the Slytherins are portrayed as pretentious, superior jerks
rather than inherently bigoted, in the sense that they think Slytherin
House is the best house and all the others are lame.  Kind of the way
people feel about their university, if they're at a Big 10 or Pac 10
school.  Yes, some of them are bigoted, maybe even most of them, but
those seem to be mostly the Voldemort supporters, or people who like
his ideas but aren't necessarily on board with him.  The DEs, on the
other hand are all bigoted.  I don't consider Slytherins to be
automatically DE/Voldie supporters.  For example, we don't ever hear
anything about Blaise Zabini supporting Voldemort.

Jen wrote:
"Families who believed like Slytherin continued this tradition. The
Gaunts and Blacks were two such families, one choosing to inbreed in
order to remain pure-blood and therefore superior in their minds, and
the Blacks, choosing to say others who 'diseased' the family
bloodline didn't exist anymore and weren't part of the family. These
families identified heavily with Salazar Slytherin and/or Slytherin
house, and when Dumbledore became headmaster, he was viewed as a
particular enemy because he was seen as a champion for rights of
those with impure blood."

Stepha67:
Absolutely, but not all Slytherins were purebloods, like Voldemort
himself, or Snape.  I take the pureblood mania to be more of a
Voldemort thing rather than a Slytherin thing.  Sometimes the two
connected, especially with the Malfoys.

As for the pureblood/DE hatred of mudbloods, I'd like to note the
hatred they also hold for those they call "blood traitors," people
like the Weasleys who are pureblood but who don't believe they are
superior to mudbloods.  Bellatrix voices this view when she tells Ron,
after she has decided to torture Hermione for information, that if
Hermione dies she'll be moving on to him next since she considers
blood traitors to be just as bad as mudbloods. In the beginning of DH,
Voldemort embarrasses Bellatrix and the Malfoys by "congratulating"
them on Tonks's marriage to Lupin: it's embarrassing since Tonks is
not only a half-blood but now also married to an outcast.  Draco's
made similar comments about blood traitors (although I can't seem to
locate them at the moment), and for him (as well as the Malfoys in
general), the Weasleys have committed the additional sin of being
poor.  But that's another issue all together.