As a nine year old I thought the Death Eaters were meant to be like the Nazis, but I guess Rowling is so dumb she didn’t make the connection until after she wrote them?

  • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    36
    ·
    7 months ago

    Well, just to try and be a bit fair (Rowling and HP both suck a lot, we can dunk on them entirely fairly) the sorting is explicitly quite arbitrary. Harry was told by the sorting hat that he’d be well suited to the nazi bad guy house, but he said he didn’t like that idea so it stuck him in the good guy main character house instead. And it’s not really life-defining as far as I remember, once you’re out of school you can identify with it or ignore it as much as you want, it doesn’t really follow you in any way on its own

    • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      50
      ·
      7 months ago

      Ironically Harry is so inert and cares so little about anything besides sports and defending the status quo that the hat was probably right in saying he’d make a good fascist. His only thoughts about endemic slavery are “I wish my nerd friend would stop being so annoying about all the slaves” and in book 2 he is preoccupied, not with the possibility that his ability to talk to snakes is an indicator that he’s made bad decisions/might be doing something wrong, but that people are being rude to him because he appears to be a fascist.

    • Sons_of_Ferrix@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      7 months ago

      It’s still weird that there’s a house where pretty much everyone who joins it turns evil, yet the school doesn’t ban them? Seriously, Snape is the only Slytherin who is arguably good but even he only did the right thing for incel reasons.

      • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        Yeah the one founded by an open wizard supremacist who created a snake monster to kill children he considered to be impure. The one named after him hundreds of years after his death.

      • AfterthoughtC - he/ him@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Snape feels like this stand-in for authority Rowling does not like/ does not want the reader to like, or a cheap plot device to trick readers into accepting Harry’s lack of development. Two things that come to mind:
        Philospher’s Stone: After Harry stopped Voldemort from getting the stone he is asking Dumbledore in the infirmary what happened after losing consciousness. Harry asks about the red herrings and Snape’s demeanor that suggest Snape was the true culprit. Instead of something reasonable like “Snape protected you because he is a teacher, it’s his job and there’s a huge difference between being nasty to discourage bad behaviour and wanting to harm you” Dumbledore says that Snape resents Harry’s father and that he helped Harry because he owes something to his father or something like that. Harry thus walks away without having to reexamine his own behaviour.
        Prisoner of Azkaban: When Harry sneaked out when he was not allowed to Snape catches Harry and starts interrogating him. The scene felt like we were supposed to see Snape as obstructive and not Harry as being irresponsible for sneaking out to places where he should not be when there is a (alleged) killer that wants him dead on the lose.
        Note that these were all in the first few books, way before the incel stuff got introduced.