Gryffindor & Slytherin roles (was Villain!Dumbledore)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 177774

Ceridwen:
> This is where I thought Rowling was going with the Slytherin thread.  
> Sure, Slytherins are outright bigots more than we were shown of the 
> other houses.  But it's bigotry as well to see someone sorted into 
> Slytherin and think, yeah, they're bad.  That's a subtler form of 
> bigotry, but it can be just as devastating to the Slytherins if 
> someone with that attitude was in a position to affect their lives.  
> Slytherins aren't uniformly rich, Snape proved that.  A Gryffindor 
> personnel director in a position to hire people with an anti-
> Slytherin bias would perhaps prefer "anyone but a Slytherin."  It 
> isn't based on race, or on class, or on birth status, just on 
> Hogwarts house.  It's still a prejudiced -ism.


Pippin:
I think Rowling did go there, she just didn't go there in the way
that some expected. I think we get balled up talking about 
good and evil because that is really meta to the way the
characters perceive each other. The adults rarely speak of
others as good or evil.  The word that comes up all the
time is "trust". 

Hagrid says that in Voldemort's time you couldn't tell who
to trust, and intimates that he doesn't trust Slytherins. In the 
second book we learn that Salazar Slytherin didn't trust 
Muggleborns and this distrust lingers especially, but not only, 
in Slytherin House. In the third book the  issue is trusting 
werewolves, in the fourth, foreigners and half-Giants, in the fifth 
Harry himself and the Giant Grawp, in the sixth Snape, and in 
the seventh book Dumbledore. 

In all these books we see the harm mistrust based on
false grounds can do. The issue of employment is more than
dealt with in all of them. Lupin can't get a job, despite his eminent 
likability, because no one will trust a werewolf. As it turns out,
there are legitimate reasons to  fear the werewolf philosophy
of Fenrir Greyback, but no legitimate reason to project that
fear onto Lupin. There are also legitimate reasons to 
distrust Lupin, as he's a coward, but that hasn't got anything
to do with Fenrir. 

There are legitimate reasons for disliking the Slytherin philosophy 
and legitimate reasons for disliking individual Slytherins. But
there's no legitimate reason given in canon to project dislike of 
that philosophy onto individuals. We have only Hagrid's 
bigoted remarks: never was a wizard who went bad that 
wasn't in Slytherin, and "bad blood" in the Malfoy family, both of 
which are denied through Peter Pettigrew and Sirius Black. As
Sirius says, all the pureblood families are inter-related. If
Malfoy blood is bad then the Weasleys and the Blacks should
be tainted too, along with the Potters.

As a child Harry feared some of his Slytherin abilities and tried to 
deny them.  He then projected that fear onto all the Slytherins 
he knew, and saw Snape as hating him because he, Harry, was
an enemy of Voldemort, the wizard who went as bad as you
could go. Of course Snape did hate him, but not for that reason.

As we learned for certain in DH, Harry is capable of dark magic. 
just as he feared. The Hat was not wrong.  The good news is 
that he had a choice about this ability. But so do the Slytherins 
themselves.  Snape did. If he needed the help of a higher power,
that does not make him different than anyone else. No, Snape
was not acting on interior principle alone. But neither was anyone
else, except Harry, maybe, for the few moments in which he
dropped the stone and faced Voldemort alone and with no
hope for himself. 

The point is, the Hat's assessment of your abilities does not mean
that the Hat, or the House, controls how they are used. That's what 
Harry learned about Snape, it's manifest that he learned it, and it's 
much more important, IMO to overcoming RL prejudice than 
learning to like Snape would have been. Um, unless you think
that people should only hire their friends, of course <g>.

Harry never finds a Slytherin he really likes. But in business,
politics and war, canon shows us, who you like isn't as important
as who you can trust. Dumbledore could trust people he didn't
like very much, eg Snape, because he tried to get to know 
them despite his dislike, and to do that he kept his distaste to
himself for the most part. As he says, that's manners. 

IMO, Harry's message to Al is that he needn't deny the Slytherin
in himself if the Hat finds it there--Harry and Ginny already know 
who he is and the Hat's judgement won't change that.  But if Al 
needs to deny it, the Hat could let him, as it did with Harry. 
Harry trusts Al, because he knows him. 

Significantly, IMO,  the one person Harry warns Al against trusting
is his own brother, the Gryffindor James.  '"And you don't
want to believe everything he tells you about Hogwarts," Harry
put in.'

Pippin
just realizing that Dumbledore's "I am going to tell you everything"
should be understood in the same sense as Harry's promise to
give Griphook the sword. Didn't say *when* he was going to
tell Harry everything, heh heh  heh ::loves DH::