All the main villains were Slytherin. Even if some of the kids from there were decent, why would you keep a group that was basically a villain factory around?
This is not to say I agree with any moral calls to eliminate Slytherin from the mythos, just that I think it was poor writing. But I mean they are children's books, and they dumb down a lot of shit in books for kids.
I mean the alternative is letting all these sociopaths just wander around and become rogue wizards (or outright kill them), so I guess sorting them into the bully frat at least lets you channel their destructive tendencies into more constructive activities at least some of the time. It's childrens' literature, we've been pleading with these morons to read another book for like eight years at this point.
I don’t necessarily object to “this house is generally filled with shitty people,” I object to the part where the books occasionally go “no, it’s for ambitious people and ambition often leads to corruption, but that doesn’t make them all bad,” then constantly undercuts its own premise by making almost every named Slytherin character both cruel and dumb, making almost all the Slytherin graduates evil, not really introducing any counterbalancing examples, and then doing absurd things like saying—in the climax of the final book when all of Hogwarts is coming together to fight Voldemort’s army—that all the Slytherin students were ejected because they unanimously voted to turn Harry over to Voldemort.
It isn’t the existence of “bad people frat” that bothers me. It’s the consistent incompetence with which the author tries to pretend she created a group and system with nuance that just isn’t there.
It was always kind of stupid:
This house is for the brave kids,
This one is for the smart kids,
This one for the kind kids,
And this one for the evil kids.
All the main villains were Slytherin. Even if some of the kids from there were decent, why would you keep a group that was basically a villain factory around?
This is not to say I agree with any moral calls to eliminate Slytherin from the mythos, just that I think it was poor writing. But I mean they are children's books, and they dumb down a lot of shit in books for kids.
I mean the alternative is letting all these sociopaths just wander around and become rogue wizards (or outright kill them), so I guess sorting them into the bully frat at least lets you channel their destructive tendencies into more constructive activities at least some of the time. It's childrens' literature, we've been pleading with these morons to read another book for like eight years at this point.
I don’t necessarily object to “this house is generally filled with shitty people,” I object to the part where the books occasionally go “no, it’s for ambitious people and ambition often leads to corruption, but that doesn’t make them all bad,” then constantly undercuts its own premise by making almost every named Slytherin character both cruel and dumb, making almost all the Slytherin graduates evil, not really introducing any counterbalancing examples, and then doing absurd things like saying—in the climax of the final book when all of Hogwarts is coming together to fight Voldemort’s army—that all the Slytherin students were ejected because they unanimously voted to turn Harry over to Voldemort.
It isn’t the existence of “bad people frat” that bothers me. It’s the consistent incompetence with which the author tries to pretend she created a group and system with nuance that just isn’t there.