Slytherins come back WAS: Re: My Most Annoying Character/Now Rowling's control

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 180345


> > >>Carol:
> > One of the themes of the books is that what appears to be true,    
> > including what Harry perceives to be true, isn't necessarily true.
> > <snip>
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> See, and again, this is where discussions pile up.  Because I 
> honestly don't think this was a theme at all.  Harry was, for the 
> most part, right about everything.  Rather than Harry learning that 
> his first instinct was probably wrong, he learns that his first 
> instinct is usually right.  Only birds of his particular feather can 
> be full on trusted.

Pippin:
Huh? So, Harry was right about Snape, Fake!Moody, Scabbers, James,
Sirius, the reason that he had a scar, what Dumbledore was like,
do I have to go on? Sometimes his instincts are right on. Sometimes
they aren't.

Betsy:
> Slytherins returning to the fight would have been a massive shock to 
> Harry because it would have shown an old, comfortable prejudice of 
> his to be wrong.  *We never get that scene*. 

Pippin:
Right. And yet Slytherins return to the school at some point, because
they're clearly still part of Hogwarts in the epilogue. The novel doesn't say
when they returned.  Reasonable people have different theories. Doesn't 
that kind of *prove* that it's ambiguous? 

We don't see Harry getting that massive shock because we don't ever 
see him finding  out they'd come back to the school at all, much less
when.

JKR doesn't show us Harry realizing he's prejudiced against Slytherins,
because, IMO, she wants *us* to realize that. She wants us to be able
to reach that conclusion independently. 

I agree that Rowling wants us to dislike Slytherins. But IMO, she wants us
to realize that it's a prejudice, all  by ourselves, not because she said so  
and not by making Harry feel bad about it.  Because the truth that canon 
holds up for  us, IMO,  is that prejudice is like the Imperius curse: until you 
try to fight it, it *doesn't* feel bad.

IMO, she's teaching us the way  Harry learned about the Imperius,
by putting us under the spell. You can't fight it unless you know 
how it feels. 

It feels lovely, doesn't it, not to think,  just to believe what you're told? 
Unless, like Harry in Fake!Moody's class,  you're listening to that little 
voice in the back of your head that says, "Why?" 

Why should I think Slytherins are cowards? Because Phineas
said so? But he didn't say that, he said they were brave, but they would
try to save their own skins first, if they had a choice. 

He doesn't say what kind of a choice he means. Voldemort would always
try to save his own skin first rather than save someone else, because he 
believes there's nothing worse than death.  But I think we learn in DH 
that he's not typical..

Because their banners weren't in the RoR? But that was only for DA
members, and no Slytherins got invited to join. 

Because Draco ran away from Quirrelmort? Well, Harry should have
run too, only he was overcome by his scar and had to be carried off by
Firenze.

Because none of them challenged  Voldie single-handed, face to face? 
Few wizards have that kind of bravery, Gryffindor or not.

And then there's that great big coward, Snape, only he turns out to be
probably the bravest man Harry ever knew.  So much for Harry always
being right about everything. <g>

What Slytherins do we ever see run away and leave something they care 
about in peril?  Only the ones in the Great Hall, apparently.  But if the
only reason we think they did that is because they're cowards, and
there isn't any other evidence that they're cowards -- well, we're 
running in a circle, aren't we.

You said in an earlier post that an epic shouldn't be ambiguous. But
the epic part  isn't ambiguous -- Voldemort fell just as decisively
as Troy. The powers of all four Houses, united in Harry and united in
battle, were matched against the powers of Slytherin alone. Pure epic. 

The culture hero wins because  his culture works better. Hurrah.
Whether you believe any Slytherins came back with Slughorn or not,
it's clear that the WW has decided that McGonagall was wrong and 
Hogwarts is better off with Slytherins than without them.

And please, when were Slytherins ever the designated victims of the
WW? Are they slaves like the House Elves? Exiles like the Giants? 
Are there laws that they can't have jobs? Or wands?

No. There's some social discrimination against Slytherins but the worst 
*official* discrimination we see is McGonagall's attempt to expel them,
and that doesn't hold. So it doesn't work that Hogwarts just needs them
back so they can pick on them.

 Yes, prejudice and dark magic are still going to be problems in the
WW. They're not entirely defeated, and the good guys aren't entirely
innocent of them.

But  does Homer give us an epic defeat for running off with someone
else's wife?  Are the Greeks so pure they would never do such a thing?
Well hardly. Odysseus helps to defeat the Trojans and recover Helen,
only to find some of his fellow Greeks are trying to steal  Penelope from him.
And yet, it's pretty clear from Homer over all that he thinks wife-stealing
is bad. 

It's pretty clear in Rowling that she thinks prejudice is bad too. 
But Harry, decent as he is,  is not a saint, and he often doesn't realize
he's doing something bad until there's a consequence. *That's* the 
point of not punishing him, IMO -- to show that even a person as 
decent as Harry is not so noble that he  always knows right from wrong.  

That doesn't mean there isn't any good and evil, it just means that we
shouldn't expect it will  always be easy to tell the difference. We don't
talk about "dark science" but we could...teaching evolution is dark to
some, others think we shouldn't be building bombs or hunting whales.
People of good will don't agree on these things, and even when we
do, there's that very human tendency to say torture is bad until we
want to do it, whereupon it becomes aggressive interrogation.

So, the Dark Arts are bad until someone want to use them, in which case they're
DADA. Sometimes  you do have to do things for the greater good, sometimes
you have to fight fire with fire. But there are consequences.

The books aren't evil, IMO. But Rowling always warned us they'd be dark.

This is a world where your choices can turn you into a monster so horrible,
so repellent, that no decent person would care what happens to you. It may
not be so easy as the innocent believe, and you can still choose differently
next time -- until your choices run out. But it can happen. That's what
little Albus is afraid of, and Harry more than most has reason to take
such fears seriously.

It's a nice sentiment that Harry would love his child no matter what he did,
but Harry doesn't live in a world where that's possible. Anyway, he knows
what comes of loving your kid so much you can't see anything wrong with
him. 

It's not a world where you know what the good guys are going to do without
the trouble of asking them. It's a world where *no one* knows what evil they
can do until they try.

And yet Harry, knowing all this, says it makes no difference to him if Albus
becomes a  Slytherin. He doesn't say, like Dumbledore, that Snape was so
brave he could have been a Gryffindor. He says a Slytherin was brave, just
like Dumbledore said that Cedric, who had the highest qualities of 
Hufflepuff House, was brave. 

The hat invites us to think that there never was a brave wizard that
didn't come out of Gryffindor, but like other assumptions, that
one was shown to be  false. 

Pippin