Slytherin's Reputation was Re: CHAPDISC: DH, EPILOGUE

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 185615

Alla:
 
> Maybe the analogy with deciding to hate James' son on the spot 
works for you, but it certainly does not work for me.  Harry **met**
Draco Malfoy his classmate and Draco Malfoy is the one based on whom
he formed the opinion about Slytherin, well for the most part anyway.
We also have Snape of course, who treated him so lovely during the
first lesson.
> 
> There is also that matter that I do not think that Snape's hatred of
James is completely justified either, but that is an aside.

Carol responds:

Oh, dear. We're never going to agree on this. However, Harry's first
encounter with Draco--not when Draco insulted Ron, which certainly
gave Harry good reason to judge Draco as not "the right sort"--was in
Madam Malkin's and perhaps gives us a better idea of Draco's normal
behavior and attitudes, but there's no instant animosity. Harry senses
that Draco is spoiled (talking about "bullying Father" into buying him
a broom) and somewhat prejudiced against "the other kind" of witches
and witches (presumably Muggle0borns, a term that Harry hasn't heard
yt), but Draco doesn't directly attack him or insult him, in direct
contrast to James, who first insults Severus's choice of House. "Who'd
want to be in Slytherin, I'd go home, wouldn't you?" echoes Draco's
words about Hufflepuff, only Draco's words are a casual aside to a boy
he assumes already knows about the House system, not an insult
injected into a conversation he's not part of. James ends up tripping
Severus and adopting Sirius's repulsive epithet for Severus,
Snivellus. Draco, in contrast, attempts to become friends with Harry,
admittedly because Harry is famous, but it's Harry who begins the
mutual antagonism by rejecting Draco's offer of friendship. (I'm not
questioning his reasons for doing so; I'm merely contrasting Draco's
behavior with James's. Harry chooses to reject Draco's offer of
friendship; Severus has no choice but to regard James as the enemy
he's shown himself to be from Day One.

Setting aside James's motives for rescuing Severus from
Werewolf!Remus, an incident we don't know nearly enough about, they
don't change his attitude and behavior one iota. He and Sirius are
quite happy to attack Snivellus two on one when he's off his guard and
publicly humiliate him, using his own spell against him. Worst of all
is James's last remark, "Who wants to see me take off his underwear?"

I'd say that Snape has plenty of reason to hate James, whom even
Sirius calls an "arrogant berk" (along with himself). He even tells
James in SWM that Lily apparently thinks he has a big head (thinks too
much of himself), whereupon James takes out his anger on Severus. And
we also know that Snape's view of James and his friends as
rule-breakers was fully justified (more than he knew given the
midnight runs with a werewolf and the illegal Animagus forms), as was
his view of James as a bully (Lily says that he hexed people who
annoyed him in the hallways and we see in HBP that one of his many
detentions was for a spell that doubled the size of someone's head).

I see nothing to like about James and everything to detest from Lily's
perspective. (Why she was attracted to him despite that, I don't
know.) And I see everything to hate from Severus's. Granted, it's
wrong to visit the sins of the father upon the son and judge Harry as
if he were James Redivivus, but Snape's hating James is perfectly
justified, as Harry realizes even the first time he sees that memory
in the Pensieve.

To return to Harry and Slytherin, Harry has already been told that
*every* witch or wizard who went bad came from Slytherin, which we
know to be false, and Percy has told him that Snape favors the
Slytherins and is after Quirrell's job. Harry thinks that his scar
hurt because Snape looked at him, and before he even has a class with
Snape, he has a dream in which Snape, Draco, and Voldemort are all
associated in his mind (and Quirrell's turban is mixed up with the
Sorting Hat, which thought he would do well in Slytherin). The stage
is set for Harry to interpret Snape's interrogation in the worst
possible way, to see Slytherin in the worst possible light,
inseparable from Voldemort, and (later) to see Snape as trying to
steal the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone. 

I'm not blaming Harry; I'm just saying that he quite quickly picks up
the Gryffindor prejudice against Slytherin and never questions it
until after "The Prince's Tale." Even learning about Regulus doesn't
alter his thinking or open his mind.

Severus's hatred of James, and of Sirius, who goes along with him and
later turns more actively against his parents' House, is, in contrast,
completely justified, based not on his perception of Gryffindor as the
House of "brawn" but on James's own behavior but as an eleven0year-old
who perhaps doesn't know any better and as a sixteen-year-old (the
book says fifteen, but that conflicts with his birthdate in DH) who
should and probably does know better but is used to breaking the rules
and hexing people who annoy him and is immune to the deterrent effect
of detentions.

Alla:
> 
> Harry certainly formed an opinion of the whole house based on the
few representatives of it and in real life I would say that he should
check out other people before judging  whole house, except, where are
those people exactly?

Carol responds:

Good question. We have the names of a few Slytherins who never do
anything bad that we know of (Daphne Greengrass, for example), but we
see only the Slytherins that Harry knows and hates. JKR is saving her
handful of "good Slytherins" (with the partial exception of Slughorn)
until DH. It doesn't help Harry's perspective, or the reader's, that
all the children of Death Eaters seem to be in Harry's year.

An aside here: I've already listed the names of some of the other
Slytherin students, not one of which matches up with a Death Eaters'
name, but I'll add that not a single Slytherin student, including some
of the bullies on the Slytherin Quidditch team, matches up with the
name of a Death Eater. The Death Eaters we know of other thn Malfoy,
Crabbe, Goyle, and Nott, appear to be childless. We know, for example,
that Bellatrix and Rodolphus are childless as is Yaxley (who says
something about being unmarried). Many of them spent fourteen years in
Azkaban; surely, if those DEs had children, Hermione, at least, would
know their names (Oh! There's a Dolohov in fourth year!) but we never
hear about them. It seems to me that Harry's perspective is distorted
by three of the four Death Eaters' sons that he knows as well as by
the pervading anti-Slytherin prejudice among the Gryffindors. Of
course, their perspective is equally distorted by an anti-Gryffindor
prejudice, as we see with Blaise Zabini, who is admittedly a
Pure-Blood supremacist but has no ambition to be a Death Eater. (BTW,
I wonder why Theodore Nott and the other Slytherin girls weren't in
the Slytherin compartment. Was Theo with the four girls?)

Alla: 
> Where are the students who do not think and  do like Draco Malfoy 
does?  Yes, I know people argued about invisible Slytherins that exist
and are good people ( the examples given were just name characters).
To me they are not part of the story except being there in name only.
To me author meant for me to form an opinion of the whole Slytherin
student body based on selected few. 

Carol responds:
I think it's telling that neither Theodore Nott nor Blaise Zabini (nor
Daphne Greengrass, for that matter) became part of Umbridge's
Inquisitorial Squad. There's a core group of Slytherins, all in
Harry's year, including Draco, Crabbe, Goyle, Pansy, and Millicent
Bulstrode, who have that bully mentality. Of that group, only Crabbe
and Goyle are named as liking to Crucio other students, and only
Crabbe becomes a full-fledged Voldemort supporter. (Pansy is only
being a self-serving coward, wanting to save her own skin and possibly
those of her friends by turning Harry over to Voldemort. She's not
saying that they should join Voldemort to fight against the school.
Draco, of course, learns the hard way that his father's path is not
for him. He becomes a DE and regrets his mistake.)

But, as I said earlier, JKR wants us to see all the Slytherins in the
same light, as Harry does, throughout the earlier books so that she
can spring her surprises on the reader in DH.(I do wish that she'd let
use see Theo or Blaise fighting for Hogwarts against Voldemort, but
you can't have everything. At least we have Snape, Slughorn, and
Regulus as indisputable heroes and the humbled and humiliated Malfoys
choosing neutrality.)

BTW, JKR shows us exceptions to the general rule not only among
Slytherins but among Giants (Grawp), werewolves (Lupin), and Centaurs
(Firenze--and later, Magorian, Ronan, and even Bane, the most
anti-human of the group). She seems to be saying that with proper
direction and education, ingrained group traits, including violence
and prejudice, can be overcome.

Another aside: It seems to me that several things will have changed at
Hogwarts in the time that Harry's and Ron's children attend, aside
from a new headmaster/mistress other than the anti-Slytherin
McGonagall and a portrait of Snape in the headmaster's office. The
DADA class will no longer be cursed, so they'll have an effectual and
permanent teacher. Possibly, the new headmaster will care a bit more
about actually educating the students than Dumbledore did, Imagine
forcing Binns into retirement so that the students can get a fair and
accurate view of WW history--including the Slytherin contribution to
the fight against Voldemort--rather than a constant droning on about
Goblin (and occasinonally Giant) wars. And Voldemort had one excellent
idea: making Muggle Studies mandatory. Granted, his approach (and
Alecto Carrow's) was exactly backwards. But mandatory Muggle Studies
emphasizing Muggle cleverness and accomplishments (not just
"eckeltricity" and wiring diagrams but literature and music and art
and architecture and inventions and science, ad infinitum) as opposed
to Muggle "inferiority" would do a great deal to reduce anti-Muggle
and anti-"Mudblood" prejudice. (Slytherin passwords could also be
monitored to make sure that words like "Pure-Blood" weren't used.)
Prejudice isn't inborn. It has to be taught, and Hogwarts is the place
to undo it. 

Meanwhile, there's no Voldemort to recruit the Slytherins or anyone
else tempted to become bullies or wield power over Muggles and
Muggle-borns, and as far as we know, there are no more children of
Death Eaters at Hogwarts. Slytherin is free to produce, not followers
of Tom Riddle, as it did fifty years ago, or would-be Death Eaters as
in did in Severus's or Harry's time, but people like Horace Slughorn,
only mildly prejudiced and able to overcome it--and Regulus if he
hadn't been drawn into the Death Eaters or Severus if he'd been
Sorted, willy nilly, into Gryffindor (without having first encoutered
James). If the Sorting Hat drops blood as a criterion for Sorting and
allows Muggle-borns in, Sorting for ambition instead, the average
Slytherin would probably be a Half-Blood clone of Percy. And people
like Crabbe and Goyle would find themselves Sorted into Hufflepuff.

Carol, who thinks that judging a whole House based on the sons of
Death Eaters and a few other bullies is exactly like judging all black
people based on drug-dealing gang members in a Chicago slum