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

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 180564

> Mike:
> I wasn't really interested in nuance from Voldemort, I just wanted to 
> be scared of him throughout. 

Pippin:
I think Fudge is the first to state, in PoA, that without his followers 
Voldemort is not dangerous. The really scary thing about LV  is his
ability to organize and direct the disaffected elements of the WW 
in a unified assault on the Ministry. I can't imagine Giants, dementors,
purebloods and werewolves deciding to work together on their own.
If you think about it, that makes Voldemort a lot scarier, and a lot
more like the dangerous dictators of the real world. 

Mike:
> and I never saw him doing any prodigious feats of magic, something 
> that would justify his immense and frightening reputation as the 
> brilliant, uber powerful, evil wizard of the age.

Pippin:
That he could duel on a level with Dumbledore would be enough to
scare most wizards silly, IMO. Slughorn, Kingsley and McGonagall
together couldn't finish him, even with his powers weakened by
Harry's protective spell. JKR doesn't give us the spectacle of battle,
I agree. I'm pretty sure she could, but since she could hardly 
depict the horror of war as it truly is to young readers, I think
she wanted to avoid the impression that it's glorious.
 
> > Betsy Hp:
> > So I assumed that the deep stuff would come from Harry's 
> > interaction with the actual antagonists of his story: Slytherin.
> 
> Mike:
> Would have been fine with me. It's what I expected too.

Pippin:
The actual antagonist of the story, IMO, is Harry.  Voldemort
and Slytherin are only mirrors. Harry's great struggles are with himself;
with his  feelings of helplessness, weakness, anger and loss. 
Beating the bad guys just proves he's really over it.

Seeing Harry's changed feelings about Scrimgeour as the explanation
of his feelings about Snape suddenly made me see why Snape's loyalties,
like Dumbledore's betrayal, were as nothing. If *you* only had an hour
to live, would you want to spend it feeling guilty? or betrayed? What
Harry discovered was not how to forgive but that, just as life was too
short to spend buried in the misery of grief, it was too short
to spend finding fault with others -- or himself. 

That's where the life lesson is, IMO. It doesn't *matter* whether
your hate is justified or not -- either way, life is too short for it. 

Mike: 
> As for Slytherin as a whole, all I really wanted was for them to 
> realize that this stupid pure-blood mania got them where they were, 
> caught in the Voldemort web of deceit. But, like you said about 
> Harry, the Slytherins didn't seem to learn anything either. In any 
> case, 99% of the Slytherin students didn't suffer any repercussions 
> for those beliefs. 

Pippin:
I don't like the idea of punishing people for their beliefs, no matter
how wrong-headed they are. Anyway, how often do true believers
actually change their minds? I expect most of the real bloodists
were bloodists to the day they died -- but people who didn't have
any personal allegiance to the bloodist cause, which was probably
most of Slytherin,  no longer were under any pressure to pretend 
they did.

Slughorn, Regulus and Snape all "got it" -- but the whole point for
Harry is to realize that people he doesn't like, or wouldn't have liked
if he'd known them when they were alive, are not thereby capable
of the worst he can imagine. That he might actually have liked them,
if he'd met them under different circumstances, as he liked The
Half-blood Prince, is beside the point. 

What I find telling is the contrast between Harry's first impression of
Slytherins, "Perhaps it was his imagination, after all he'd heard about
Slytherin, but he thought they looked an unpleasant lot" and his
last, where the only thing he particularly notices about Draco is
that he's going bald. He no longer looks at Slytherins and imagines
things. 

Pippin