To Harry, 3 things are his great quests/passions: a) avenging his parents; b) his friends; c) being a soldier for Dumbledore and confronting Voldy, etc-- and he would never let go with any of those things, not until death.
Yeah, that's my point. All of those passions come directly out of Harry's personal emotions and that's why he would never part with them and why he needs them (although, I'd debate the whole avenging his parents bit because I think it's less about vengeance than it is making the work of those who loved and protected him worthwhile....is that just a fancy way of saying vengeance? I don't know). The things that Harry will fight for hardest, Dumbledore seems to be saying, are the things that he has a direct, emotional connection to. He was so bummed out about having to kill Voldemort and the prophesy before book 6 because he was thinking about it in a 'for the greater good' sort of way; it was a duty thrust upon him rather than something he had chosen. And I mean, I know I'm generalizing hugely here, but I think that when you're talking about representation in novels, you are going to have to generalize to some degree. Not to mention, JKR has generalized the base characteristics of each house, and that's what I'm mostly going off of. So I'd say that this sort of selfish passion that motivates Harry (because it is selfish, it's all about the things he's concerned with personally) and that actually turns out to be a good thing is something that comes out of Slytherin, the flip side of selfish ambition.
Tonks is totally a Hufflepuff, no question (she trips over herself in her eagerness to help people and do things, it really should have been pretty obvious, though I mistook it for ambition). But I don't think the loss of her powers was supposed to be considered just sort of normal disappointment or unhappiness, especially since the other person in the book who started losing her powers a)died because of it and b)did so because of some pretty dramatic emotion. True, Tonks didn't completely collapse, but JKR deliberately put in a connection between her and a person who did. So I'm not trying to put her in Slytherin, I'm just saying that the emotions she's experiencing here seem to be more common to Slytherins than to people in other houses, probably because Tonks is a Black and the Blacks were mostly Slytherin (and somewhat unhinged), like you said. But her depression also relates to the Gaunts, and so I think that's why I feel like the house association does come in for her, because she's not just connected with the Blacks genetically, but also with what's basically the (also very unhinged) root of the Slytherin tree.
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Yeah, that's my point. All of those passions come directly out of Harry's personal emotions and that's why he would never part with them and why he needs them (although, I'd debate the whole avenging his parents bit because I think it's less about vengeance than it is making the work of those who loved and protected him worthwhile....is that just a fancy way of saying vengeance? I don't know). The things that Harry will fight for hardest, Dumbledore seems to be saying, are the things that he has a direct, emotional connection to. He was so bummed out about having to kill Voldemort and the prophesy before book 6 because he was thinking about it in a 'for the greater good' sort of way; it was a duty thrust upon him rather than something he had chosen. And I mean, I know I'm generalizing hugely here, but I think that when you're talking about representation in novels, you are going to have to generalize to some degree. Not to mention, JKR has generalized the base characteristics of each house, and that's what I'm mostly going off of. So I'd say that this sort of selfish passion that motivates Harry (because it is selfish, it's all about the things he's concerned with personally) and that actually turns out to be a good thing is something that comes out of Slytherin, the flip side of selfish ambition.
Tonks is totally a Hufflepuff, no question (she trips over herself in her eagerness to help people and do things, it really should have been pretty obvious, though I mistook it for ambition). But I don't think the loss of her powers was supposed to be considered just sort of normal disappointment or unhappiness, especially since the other person in the book who started losing her powers a)died because of it and b)did so because of some pretty dramatic emotion. True, Tonks didn't completely collapse, but JKR deliberately put in a connection between her and a person who did. So I'm not trying to put her in Slytherin, I'm just saying that the emotions she's experiencing here seem to be more common to Slytherins than to people in other houses, probably because Tonks is a Black and the Blacks were mostly Slytherin (and somewhat unhinged), like you said. But her depression also relates to the Gaunts, and so I think that's why I feel like the house association does come in for her, because she's not just connected with the Blacks genetically, but also with what's basically the (also very unhinged) root of the Slytherin tree.