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[bigboxmart]

Not all Slytherins are jackasses. Not all Slytherins are purists. Not all Slytherins would stab their mother in the back just for the sheer fun of 'looking out for number one.'

Comments

[shurhaian]

Back before the series had been written to its completion, I had vague notions of a Slytherin character who would look at the canon Slytherins, think "So, your height of 'ambition' is to lick the boots of an already-defeated wizard who isn't even true to his own pure-blood-supremacist philosophy?" and want nothing to do with them. Said character might have been an antagonist to e.g. Harry, but only in wanting to overshadow him.

Never did get into RP or fanfic with that char, and it's probably just as well.

But yeah. JKR really didn't do the House any favours; any time she went on about how not all Slytherins were bad, in the books, it... kinda rang hollow.

Been years since I read them, though, I'll admit, so perhaps I'm seeing it all through a sort of backwards nostalgia. At any rate, yeah, you'd think the world at large could have a bit more imagination about what goes into the House than just a bunch of rich snobs out for the evulz.

[yoritomo_reiko]

The thing is, people forget that the books deal with the unreliable narrator. Harry is a good guy and a lot of people forget that he could easily have gone Slytherin instead of Gryffindor. It just so happens that the first Slytherin he really meets, though, is Draco Malfoy, whose family are a bunch of boot-lickers. And the only other Slytherins we see are Draco's friends, who are also sycophantic Voldemort followers.

We never find out about the decent Slytherins because they just don't bother with Harry.

[shurhaian]

Draco's friends. A number of Draco's peers. Snape's manifest unfairness and favoritism(however much JKR tried to turn him into a Good Guy at the end, it arguably feels rather tacked on). An entire order of sycophants, any of whom have known house affiliations were Slytherins... and not a single one of them who just butted heads with Harry because he was popular and who wanted to bump him out of the spotlight.

Such a character could have made, in my mind, a much more awesome and believable foil for Harry than Draco, even if s/he only came into the picture after the first few books(so that even Harry might find the lack of any other bigoted behaviour conspicuous enough to note).

Besides which, even if it is the unreliable narrator, that's the author's choice.

(And Harry himself isn't always the best of people, to put it very mildly. Sometimes his greatest ambition seems only to be in the Guiness Book of Records for either sulking or petty sniping at his friends/allies or both.)

[anddot]

Arguably in the first couple of books or so, Draco was butting heads with Harry just for the sake of popularity. He extended an offer of frienship to him and got turned down. It was only really in later books that Draco's goals became political - even then I was given the distint impression they weren't exactly his notions. Before that he was just a kid who didn't like the attention Harry got.

*distinct

[anddot]