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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3206 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 28, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Slytherin, obviously.

Uh, why is belonging to the evil house an obvious thing?

Because I am fascinated with the nature and exercise of power, reject much of contemporary consensus morality, am a conflict theorist, and neither practice nor encourage courageous behavior.

I'm far from the only person to be annoyed that Slytherin is supposedly just for "ambition", and yet it winds up being the hyper-evil house. I get it, it's a simplistic young adult boarding school adventure book, but the later books seem to try to get deeper/more mature.

I mean, it's a British book series, it's no wonder Rowlings saw "ambitious" as a synonym for "evil".

Anyway, more seriously, the main issue is that the book series failed to establish a single Slytherin as unambiguously good. Snape doesn't really count because despite being on the good side he spends all of the books being unreasonably nasty to Harry because of a grudge he had with his father, which is a very shitty thing to do to an orphan.

HPMOR does a much better job with this, because Slytherin's current behavior as the "evil" house — — comes from evaporative cooling. Slytherin gets a reputation for having all the death eaters and attracting all the dumb blood purists, so everyone who doesn't want to be associated with that convinces the Sorting Hat to send them elsewhere, which means Slytherin gets worse, and by the time Harry shows up, the cycle's been running for a fairly long time and the whole house deserves a rebuild.

I assume he meant that he holds a lot of opinions that Rowling would not share, and so would be considered evil in her book.

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