[ SECRET POST #2252 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2252 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Billie Piper - Doctor Who/Secret Diary of a Call Girl]


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03.
[Steam Powered Giraffe]


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04.
[Teen Wolf]


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05.
[Kuroko no Basket]


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06.
[Princess Tutu]


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07.
[Kuroshitsuji]


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08.
[Queer as Folk]


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09.
[The Reward]


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10.
[Spartacus: War of the Damned]


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11.
[The Following]


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12.
[Les dossiers du Professeur Bell]


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13.
[Misfits]


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14.
[Saint's Row The Third]


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15.
[Penn and Teller]


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16.
[Harry Potter]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 093 secrets from Secret Submission Post #322.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

16. http://i.imgur.com/aDrDF7H.jpg
[Harry Potter]

[kaijinscendre]

That is what I hate most about Harry Potter. Oh, the Slytherin students become Death Eaters? Of course they did. All the other students treat them like evil pieces of scum and then you have this group of adults who are like, "Come on, join our club. Here is a place where you will be respected and cared for." Of course they are going to join!

I love Professor Mcgonagall but that scene in Deathly Hallows where she locks the Slytherin students up rubs be the wrong way. Most of them have probably done nothing, yet they are locked up in dungeons for no reason.

[feotakahari]

Reminds me of what Sluggy Freelance had to say on the subject. "[Slytherin] is the house for bad guys. Reward them amiably? Treat them with respect? They may become good. And then our paperwork would be all screwed up."

[(Anonymous)]

Well, in general, I think that there's a huge amount of things in the world of Harry Potter that just don't make sense on close examination. That doesn't make it a dystopia - that means that it's indeterminate. The world doesn't make sense and people come up with their own interpretations to fill the blanks and resolve it, and one of those interpretations is that it's a dystopia.

That said, I actually think that this aspect of things makes more sense than people give it credit for. I think people fail to realize the extent to which Slytherins, and the opinions and the political positions that Slytherins are linked to, are normalized in the world of Harry Potter as it's presented in the books. I mean, we really do see the books entirely from the perspective of one group of people, who are the hard-core, militant edge of the people opposed to the Slytherins. But wizarding society as a whole is pretty cool with racism and classism. It's much more willing to give status to Malfoy than to Weasley, it's perfectly content with Slytherin House. Its only problem with Voldemort was that he was insane and murderous, but his essential politics were not that far out of the mainstream. I mean, at the end of the day, wizarding society as presented in the books is astonishingly conservative and racist. People in wizarding society just don't really disagree with the Slytherin point of view, and so they view the existence of Slytherin House as non-problematic.

[terra_mythos]

This always weirded me out, too. I mean, these kids are far too young to really know what they'll turn out like, and the social conditioning of the Houses is very strong. Not to say there aren't heroic Slytherins or vile Gryffindors, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

You can excuse it as a "magic (the sorting hat) knows what they'll turn out like ahead of time" or something along those lines, but I don't buy it, even in a fantasy world.

[(Anonymous)]

While this bothers me too (I say that as someone who is still in the fandom all these years later), JKR HAS said she never meant for this to be how they're portrayed. I think that JKR wrote certain backstories pretty poorly, and this is one of them. I believe her when she says they're not all supposed to be bad and that we're limited by Harry's POV - it's just not very clear from the books. Couldn't Moody or someone have been a Slytherin?

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't JKR a Calvinist in addition to being a Sirius/Remus No Homo? Their fates are all preordained if so.

[shukivengeance]

Agreed.

[(Anonymous)]

People like OP who get all up in arms about how the wizarding world is clearly a horrible place will never not be fucking hilarious to me.

Besides, the hat is magic. It doesn't place kids depending on their current selves, but on who they will ultimately become/who they really are deep-down inside. At least, that's how I always saw it, and it makes the most sense to me.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel like they get into Slytherin because of the way they were raised, not that they leave Slytherin being like that because of the house itself. Death Eaters will tend to have Death Eater children and Slytherins will probably raise Slytherin children. One doesn't necessarily require the other, but it just sort of happens that way.

[dreemyweird]

I... know what you mean, but for me there's always a concept of "inner morality".
That is, while IRL the Houses would be fifty shades of not okay, in-universe they're perceived as normal, and so I see them the same way. I think I tend to blend with the author's point of view while reading books.

Some things bother me, of course, yet I can find no obvious criterion which would help to distinguish all the ideas acceptable from all the ideas unacceptable.

HP world is logically problematic, but emotionally I've never had a single tinge of worry about its structure and ethics.

[intrigueing]

No!!! Really???? It's not like this exact thing was one of the main messages of the whole series or anything!

/sarcasm mode

[eaten_by_bears]

That's a good point.

[celestinenox]

Yes, the particular House system in HP is very strange, and very much set up to cause friction and rivalry.

[(Anonymous)]

Didn't Dumbledore himself point out how fucked up the Sorting system is? I swear he said it to Snape once. Like, I vaguely remember a scene where Dumbledore was impressed by a particular display of bravery/loyalty from Snape and basically said, "We Sort kids too soon. You exemplify Gryffindor virtues and it's a shame the Sorting Hat couldn't have seen that when you were eleven."

[seventh_seal]

Yeah, sucks to realize that the one person who wanted to destroy the tool that arbitrarily pits kids against one another and brands them for life was ... wait for it ... Lord Voldemort.

[(Anonymous)]

Given how the rest of the school treats them then if you weren't a homicidal maniac with prejudice issues when you went in, you will be by the time you come out. Self-fulfilling prophecy much?

[ninety6tears]

What's interesting to me is that the actual sorting system in itself isn't a huge problem; it's the culture surrounding it and how much importance wizarding society casually places on the houses people come from and the cliquey segregation of it that is not at all discouraged by the school. Their social/moral lives wouldn't automatically be defined by the people they room with/compete with, but a lot of negative factors make it so that it very often ends up that way.

I do think JKR was conscious of it being sometimes a bad thing though.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel like the story would've been a lot more interesting if it was told from, say, Hermione's perspective instead of Harry's. Ron grew up immersed in the wizarding world, and Harry grew up in a muggle hellhole so the wizarding world seems like Disneyland by comparison, but Hermione grew up in the muggle world and had loving parents and a normal childhood, so she seems like the best character to give the perspective that the wizarding world is just as messed up as the muggle world, if not more.

And it's not just because of Harry's PoV that we see all Slytherins being evil douchebags- if I remember right, we don't really get a student protagonist who isn't a Gryffindor until Luna joins the team in book 5 of a 7-book series. More than half of the series is told exclusively from the perspective of the house whose rivalry with Slytherin is as big and old as Hogwarts itself.

[khym_chanur]

I like to imagine that the rest of the wizarding world goes "Wait, you mean you group people together based on personality traits when they're eleven", and the only reason why magical U.K. thinks it's normal is that it's been that way for a thousand years.

[(Anonymous)]

Why have a Slytherin House if everyone in there are going to be evil? Why not just kill the kids who don't sort into the other three houses instead of letting them grow up to be Death Eaters? I guess they need to be there for the other three houses to unite against them. The thing that made Gryffindor's House Cup victory in the first book so sweet was the Slytherins being tricked into thinking they had won and having the rug yanked out from under them literally at the last minute.

[world_eater]

Ah, the age-old debate:

A carefully planned masterpiece that reveals itself as the books and it's readers mature, or a lucky author that did not anticipate that a children's story does not translate well into more serious issues and unrightfully claims foresight?



I don't know, personally, from the juvenile way the epilogue was written I do believe that Rowling did not really consider the implications of her world when she started to write it, but that's just me. I've always enjoyed the books as they are, but I do love these discussions where people go into more depth :)

[(Anonymous)]

I always thought that everyone basically chose where they went beforehand through their knowledge of what each house was about or who was in it. I don't recall ever hearing about a character disliking their placement.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it comes down to this:

These are just children's books. A lot of us either grew up with them and became adults while reading them; or, we read them as adults after getting pulled in by the hype. We have fooled ourselves, therefore, into thinking that they are not just children's books. We think that they must have some deeper meaning, and that if we can just uncover that meaning, all of the plot holes and logical inconsistencies and silly bits will vanish.

Well, folks, there isn't some deeper meaning. It's just a silly story, and a flawed one, at that.

All of this hand-wringing reminds me of all of the literary critiques of Joy Luck Club. Amy Tan has said that it's just a story, and that it doesn't mean anything, but English professors everywhere still desperately want to believe that it does, so they analyze the fuck out of it anyway.

[citrinesunset]

Yeah, I agree that it's one of those details that don't really hold up well on closer examination.

Not only is it potentially limiting for the kids, but wouldn't it make more sense to encourage kids to learn how to work with people who have different personality types than their own?