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Super-Fandom-y pre-US-Election-Day post for flist variety.:-)
I've been thinking about this for a while...it's perhaps almost a rant, but maybe not. It's about this phenomenon that probably reflects the HP books but also makes fandom less pleasant sometimes, or at least keeps people from communicating. And it drives me crazy because I'm always getting accused of it.:-) Perhaps not unjustly so, for all I know, so I want to talk about it.
My favorite part of OotP was the Sorting Hat song. Finally, I thought, a good idea. It got ignored, yes, and I assumed the students would learn they were wrong about doing that. But being in fandom, I feel like you can really see how difficult that's going to be, because damn, people love to see Gryffindors and Slytherins fight. It seems sometimes like they exist on a see-saw where cutting one down automatically raises the other or vice versa. I've seen this go both ways, where, for instance, somebody says a Slytherin did something bad in a scene, and the response is, "But the Gryffindor was doing this bad thing!" Or, "Gryffindor sucks. He did X," responded to with, "How can you say he's worse than Slytherin! Slytherin did Y!" Sometimes it gets tangled up in motive as well-“Well, yes Slytherin did X, but he was responding to Gryffindor doing Y!" or vice versa. Which is weird to me because honestly, you'd think that it was unheard of to examine the actions of someone reacting to something else! I mean, even if you're talking about a literal self-defense situation, you can still examine the actions of what someone did. If I killed someone to stop them from killing me or someone else I might feel I did the right thing but I could still accept that I actually killed someone without pretending I did something else (like "counter-killed" them). It doesn't mean I'm denying that the other person was about to kill somebody.
Now, there are some situations where bringing in one house to talk about the other makes a point--for instance, if one is pointing out a specific double standard, explaining somebody's motives in a scene or how it would look to the other person. Or contrasting a character's stated moral belief and the one they live. The houses do obviously egg each other on and often bring out the worst in each other, so it's hard to keep them completely separate. But I feel like those valid connections seep into places where they don't belong in fandom, just like they do in the books.
This kind of see-saw effect just seems to be everywhere and when I think about canon it seems fundamentally off. Gryffindor and Slytherin are not natural opposites the way they're often portrayed in the collective fandom mind. They're both, imo, representing certain different outlooks on leadership that have existed in the world. So rather than look at the qualities the hat lays out in PS/SS that people usually use to describe what makes a Slytherin or a Gryffindor, I want to try to look at exactly what we see in canon and what that tells us about the flaws and strengths of each house.
It's hard to find a strength for Slytherin because let's face it, they haven't really been given any. We barely see them, so there's little we can really say about how they function. This is what we do see: They judge people based on their breeding. They're snobs. Purebloods are better than half-blood, who are better than Muggleborns. They move in a pack (or at least are described as being a gang from the outside) which is exclusionary. They make fun of people outside their gang. It's not quite correct to say they laugh at others' pain on principle, because they have of course been shown to get upset over other peoples' pain as long as that person is one of them. Usually we see them acting on their own personal desires and that's it. So it seems like what they represent is a system where all people are not created equal, where the world is a strict hierarchy. They tease, humiliate and insult those who show weakness. At their worst they become Death Eaters and decide people not like them don't have a right to live.
On the positive side, they probably do appreciate history, can have a healthy (as well as an unhealthy) respect for authority, they can be creative and fun. Perhaps most interestingly, there are two Slytherins who potentially made difficult moral choices even when it didn't benefit them personally: Snape and Regulus. Both of these characters believed in Pureblood Superiority but rejected its most extreme conclusions with Voldemort and so perhaps had to rethink the whole idea. This is probably yet another reason I despise the idea of the "good Slytherin" who unites the houses by never buying into this stuff or figuring out it's bad off-screen.
So basically, what we seem to be dealing with, with the Slytherins is a particular side of human nature, one that's brought us such charming but different things as slavery, imperialism, and genocide.
Then there's Gryffindor. Well, off the bat we've got more positive qualities. Many of these students have been shown to *want* to be good people and *want* to be unselfish, protect the weak, have humility. They like to have fun--often of the slap you on the back hard kind. They don't openly judge people based on their bloodline (though it would be inaccurate to suggest they are free of prejudice, of course).
Their danger lies more in self-righteousness and having the Slytherins as rivals obviously don't help them there, because they represent things that modern thinking considers so obviously bad that they have little reason to question whether they're right compared to the other house. They're not snobs, they're not prejudiced against Muggleborns. Unfortunately because they "know" they're right they rarely examine their own actions and they too have scenes where they take pleasure in the pain of other people because those people “deserve it.” Being against Voldemort covers just about everything they do. Hermione's justification for her Polyjuice plan is that "killing Muggleborns is worse than brewing a difficult Potion." On the surface she sounds right, but if you actually look at the facts, she's presenting what she's doing in a pretty dishonest way. And those things are important because they are exactly the type of things that cause big problems in the story.
Sirius is not wrongly imprisoned on what one might call Slytherin principles. He's wrongly imprisoned on just these principles: we know we're right, we have to keep the bad guy from getting away. If we give him too many rights, he'll use them to trick us. So we'll only give those rights to the people we already think are good guys. That, I think, is where many readers wind up shaking their head, because you have characters who know they want fairness when it applies to themselves, but don't seem to realize this particular thing you don't get by destroying Voldemort. And that's another side of human nature that's brought us other charming but different things like imperialism, the crusades, and The Patriot Act. It's that line of thinking where questioning the mindset makes you the enemy. They risk throwing away a potentially fair system because they mistakenly think Voldemort and Slytherin embody every potential evil.
These two mindsets aren't completely different--obviously you can see parallels in both of them. Both sides cast people out for questioning the party line, and in OotP especially the reflections start coming more and more often. But while they echo each other, they're also two groups of people each moving on their own potential path of destruction. Sometimes they push each other further in a bad direction or a good one, but they aren't joined in terms of really causing each other's actions. One side may provide the thing the other is reacting to, but they don't choose their actions for them. Often in the same situation they would react differently. So they shouldn't be held accountable for the other side's actions, but they still can be held accountable for their own actions and the fact that they do have consequences. They might operate on different planes but neither one is free of potential danger or immorality. So pointing out that one side at least isn't the other side or finding ways in which something one side does is also done by the other has very limited usefulness, imo. You have to be able to take them both separately and not always leap for a comparison to the other side that makes them look better.
This, to me, is probably the one way that fandom makes me enjoy the books a lot less than I would if I weren't in the fandom. Because I can deal with the events that happen in the books, and the characters thinking this way. But when I see it translated into real life as if this is the way things should be, whichever side a person is on, makes me lose a little hope that we might straighten ourselves out. Sometimes it seems like the real danger/evil that Slytherin represents is the temptation to believe in evil as a tangible, outside force. By making Gryffindor often look good by comparison, they coax the characters into darker psychological places-and those places aren't bad in themselves. They may just be a place they need to be. What's scary isn't that they go there, but that they don't realize they've gone there because they've still got those evil Slytherins to compare themselves to and say, “Nope, I'm not them. I'm completely good and innocent.” That's a wonderfully freaky idea to me. While I doubt seriously it would happen, all the good guys could wind up having committed murder, torture and blackmail and be completely consumed by rage and despair while the “bad” kids die ignorant but innocent. Because already there have been times when actual actions of one side have been overlooked while potential actions in the other are bad enough. Or, on the other side, desires of one side are overlooked in order to condemn the actions of the other. Really you've just a bunch of really messed up people.
Obviously, this post is probably coming out amidst a flurry of election posts. On one hand the idea of a little distraction-I know I'm so afraid to think of what could potentially happen tomorrow I'd rather think of anything else. Otoh, though, while I'm usually a big believer in fantasy and imagination being a good thing, I will say that I hope the half of the population of my country that seems to be living in a fantasy world wakes up in reality tomorrow. I know it would be a nasty shock to admit, all at once, that the sunny heroic picture people seem to be fond of is all a lie, that the Bush administration isn't Dumbledore or Gandalf or Captain Kirk and that all those stories about deception and chaos and disaster in the world are not creations of the liberal media but the world they live in. I love searching for the reality within fiction; I prefer to vote against fiction in reality.
I've been thinking about this for a while...it's perhaps almost a rant, but maybe not. It's about this phenomenon that probably reflects the HP books but also makes fandom less pleasant sometimes, or at least keeps people from communicating. And it drives me crazy because I'm always getting accused of it.:-) Perhaps not unjustly so, for all I know, so I want to talk about it.
My favorite part of OotP was the Sorting Hat song. Finally, I thought, a good idea. It got ignored, yes, and I assumed the students would learn they were wrong about doing that. But being in fandom, I feel like you can really see how difficult that's going to be, because damn, people love to see Gryffindors and Slytherins fight. It seems sometimes like they exist on a see-saw where cutting one down automatically raises the other or vice versa. I've seen this go both ways, where, for instance, somebody says a Slytherin did something bad in a scene, and the response is, "But the Gryffindor was doing this bad thing!" Or, "Gryffindor sucks. He did X," responded to with, "How can you say he's worse than Slytherin! Slytherin did Y!" Sometimes it gets tangled up in motive as well-“Well, yes Slytherin did X, but he was responding to Gryffindor doing Y!" or vice versa. Which is weird to me because honestly, you'd think that it was unheard of to examine the actions of someone reacting to something else! I mean, even if you're talking about a literal self-defense situation, you can still examine the actions of what someone did. If I killed someone to stop them from killing me or someone else I might feel I did the right thing but I could still accept that I actually killed someone without pretending I did something else (like "counter-killed" them). It doesn't mean I'm denying that the other person was about to kill somebody.
Now, there are some situations where bringing in one house to talk about the other makes a point--for instance, if one is pointing out a specific double standard, explaining somebody's motives in a scene or how it would look to the other person. Or contrasting a character's stated moral belief and the one they live. The houses do obviously egg each other on and often bring out the worst in each other, so it's hard to keep them completely separate. But I feel like those valid connections seep into places where they don't belong in fandom, just like they do in the books.
This kind of see-saw effect just seems to be everywhere and when I think about canon it seems fundamentally off. Gryffindor and Slytherin are not natural opposites the way they're often portrayed in the collective fandom mind. They're both, imo, representing certain different outlooks on leadership that have existed in the world. So rather than look at the qualities the hat lays out in PS/SS that people usually use to describe what makes a Slytherin or a Gryffindor, I want to try to look at exactly what we see in canon and what that tells us about the flaws and strengths of each house.
It's hard to find a strength for Slytherin because let's face it, they haven't really been given any. We barely see them, so there's little we can really say about how they function. This is what we do see: They judge people based on their breeding. They're snobs. Purebloods are better than half-blood, who are better than Muggleborns. They move in a pack (or at least are described as being a gang from the outside) which is exclusionary. They make fun of people outside their gang. It's not quite correct to say they laugh at others' pain on principle, because they have of course been shown to get upset over other peoples' pain as long as that person is one of them. Usually we see them acting on their own personal desires and that's it. So it seems like what they represent is a system where all people are not created equal, where the world is a strict hierarchy. They tease, humiliate and insult those who show weakness. At their worst they become Death Eaters and decide people not like them don't have a right to live.
On the positive side, they probably do appreciate history, can have a healthy (as well as an unhealthy) respect for authority, they can be creative and fun. Perhaps most interestingly, there are two Slytherins who potentially made difficult moral choices even when it didn't benefit them personally: Snape and Regulus. Both of these characters believed in Pureblood Superiority but rejected its most extreme conclusions with Voldemort and so perhaps had to rethink the whole idea. This is probably yet another reason I despise the idea of the "good Slytherin" who unites the houses by never buying into this stuff or figuring out it's bad off-screen.
So basically, what we seem to be dealing with, with the Slytherins is a particular side of human nature, one that's brought us such charming but different things as slavery, imperialism, and genocide.
Then there's Gryffindor. Well, off the bat we've got more positive qualities. Many of these students have been shown to *want* to be good people and *want* to be unselfish, protect the weak, have humility. They like to have fun--often of the slap you on the back hard kind. They don't openly judge people based on their bloodline (though it would be inaccurate to suggest they are free of prejudice, of course).
Their danger lies more in self-righteousness and having the Slytherins as rivals obviously don't help them there, because they represent things that modern thinking considers so obviously bad that they have little reason to question whether they're right compared to the other house. They're not snobs, they're not prejudiced against Muggleborns. Unfortunately because they "know" they're right they rarely examine their own actions and they too have scenes where they take pleasure in the pain of other people because those people “deserve it.” Being against Voldemort covers just about everything they do. Hermione's justification for her Polyjuice plan is that "killing Muggleborns is worse than brewing a difficult Potion." On the surface she sounds right, but if you actually look at the facts, she's presenting what she's doing in a pretty dishonest way. And those things are important because they are exactly the type of things that cause big problems in the story.
Sirius is not wrongly imprisoned on what one might call Slytherin principles. He's wrongly imprisoned on just these principles: we know we're right, we have to keep the bad guy from getting away. If we give him too many rights, he'll use them to trick us. So we'll only give those rights to the people we already think are good guys. That, I think, is where many readers wind up shaking their head, because you have characters who know they want fairness when it applies to themselves, but don't seem to realize this particular thing you don't get by destroying Voldemort. And that's another side of human nature that's brought us other charming but different things like imperialism, the crusades, and The Patriot Act. It's that line of thinking where questioning the mindset makes you the enemy. They risk throwing away a potentially fair system because they mistakenly think Voldemort and Slytherin embody every potential evil.
These two mindsets aren't completely different--obviously you can see parallels in both of them. Both sides cast people out for questioning the party line, and in OotP especially the reflections start coming more and more often. But while they echo each other, they're also two groups of people each moving on their own potential path of destruction. Sometimes they push each other further in a bad direction or a good one, but they aren't joined in terms of really causing each other's actions. One side may provide the thing the other is reacting to, but they don't choose their actions for them. Often in the same situation they would react differently. So they shouldn't be held accountable for the other side's actions, but they still can be held accountable for their own actions and the fact that they do have consequences. They might operate on different planes but neither one is free of potential danger or immorality. So pointing out that one side at least isn't the other side or finding ways in which something one side does is also done by the other has very limited usefulness, imo. You have to be able to take them both separately and not always leap for a comparison to the other side that makes them look better.
This, to me, is probably the one way that fandom makes me enjoy the books a lot less than I would if I weren't in the fandom. Because I can deal with the events that happen in the books, and the characters thinking this way. But when I see it translated into real life as if this is the way things should be, whichever side a person is on, makes me lose a little hope that we might straighten ourselves out. Sometimes it seems like the real danger/evil that Slytherin represents is the temptation to believe in evil as a tangible, outside force. By making Gryffindor often look good by comparison, they coax the characters into darker psychological places-and those places aren't bad in themselves. They may just be a place they need to be. What's scary isn't that they go there, but that they don't realize they've gone there because they've still got those evil Slytherins to compare themselves to and say, “Nope, I'm not them. I'm completely good and innocent.” That's a wonderfully freaky idea to me. While I doubt seriously it would happen, all the good guys could wind up having committed murder, torture and blackmail and be completely consumed by rage and despair while the “bad” kids die ignorant but innocent. Because already there have been times when actual actions of one side have been overlooked while potential actions in the other are bad enough. Or, on the other side, desires of one side are overlooked in order to condemn the actions of the other. Really you've just a bunch of really messed up people.
Obviously, this post is probably coming out amidst a flurry of election posts. On one hand the idea of a little distraction-I know I'm so afraid to think of what could potentially happen tomorrow I'd rather think of anything else. Otoh, though, while I'm usually a big believer in fantasy and imagination being a good thing, I will say that I hope the half of the population of my country that seems to be living in a fantasy world wakes up in reality tomorrow. I know it would be a nasty shock to admit, all at once, that the sunny heroic picture people seem to be fond of is all a lie, that the Bush administration isn't Dumbledore or Gandalf or Captain Kirk and that all those stories about deception and chaos and disaster in the world are not creations of the liberal media but the world they live in. I love searching for the reality within fiction; I prefer to vote against fiction in reality.
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