Slytherin’s Prevailing Trait Isn’t Actually Evil
Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Sure, if your house is responsible for helping to mold the most evil Wizarding mind of all time, you’re going to get a bad reputation. Despite having to claim Tom Riddle, a.k.a. Voldemort, as a notable alum, Slytherin isn’t automatically the house for “bad” or “evil” wizards. In fact, when it was founded by Salazar Slytherin, it was done so with the hope of training and educating the most resourceful, cunning, and ambitious witches and wizards at Hogwarts. Yes, these traits can be dangerous in the wrong hands, but they’re not inherently awful.
In some ways, the house that was home to Lucius Malfoy, Dolores Umbridge, and You-Know-Who didn’t get a fair shake from J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series, because we, the readers, saw it through the protagonists' admittedly biased eyes. After all, both Draco Malfoy and his Head of House, Severus Snape, ended up being far more, well, complicated characters than downright villains by the story’s end. That fact alone should serve as a concrete reminder that you can’t judge a Hogwarts House by the megalomaniac serial killer it spawned.
The Slytherin V. Gryffindor Battle Goes Way, Way Back
Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter Dueling
The rivalry, or should we say never-ending feud, between Slytherin and Gryffindor is a constant thread that runs through both the Harry Potter books and the film franchise. From wand duels to Quidditch matches, the two houses are seemingly always engaged in a not-so-friendly competition. The discord between the serpents and the lions isn’t just about who can win the House Cup at Hogwarts each year, though.
It originated from a fundamental disagreement about the purpose of the school that happened between two of the school's founders. Godric Gryffindor believed that Hogwarts should open its doors to any young witch or wizard who wanted to learn. Salazar Slytherin, on the other hand, was vehemently against taking in students who weren’t pure-blood – that is, who didn’t come from a full lineage of magical folk. Their friendship eroded, and Professor Slytherin eventually left the school in disgust because the other founders sided with his new foe. The rest, from schoolyard squabbles to the rise of the Dark Lord and everything in between, is, as they say, history.
Slytherin Has Direct Ties To The U.S. School Of Wizardry
The Origins of Ilvermorny as told on Pottermore
Salazar Slytherin may have left Hogwarts in a snit after its founding, but in some ways, his legacy casts the longest of any of the founders’ shadows. That’s because his family line wasn’t just responsible for the creation of Hogwarts, but for another Wizarding school as well.
One of his direct descendants, Isolt Sayre, was born into a family that inherited their preference for pure-blood wizards from Slytherin. However, she rejected their views and escaped their controlling grasp on her life to start a new life in North America. There, she met her husband, a Muggle, James Steward, and they eventually formed the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
It’s an ironic twist of fate that Mr. Pure Blood himself would create a lineage that eventually welcomed and encouraged the development of half-blood wizards. It’s unclear how many Slytherins would even be aware of their founders’ connection to the school across the pond. Suffice to say that it wouldn’t have sat well with some of them.
Harry Potter’s Son Is A Slytherin
Albus in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
At the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, our beloved, bespectacled hero and his wife, Ginny send their son, Albus, off to Hogwarts for the first time with the promise that they’ll love him no matter what house he’s sorted into. Then, in the recently released play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the poor kid ends up sitting at the Slytherin table, and things get a little messy in the Potter household.
For all his talk of Snape’s bravery and the importance of unity in the Wizarding world, Harry Potter had a hard time dealing with the reality that his son was sorted into the house of many of his worst enemies. Of course, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to The Boy, er, Man Who Lived. After all, the Sorting Hat almost put him in Slytherin, and throughout the series, he was cunning, resourceful, and incredibly ambitious, which are all traits Salazar himself revered. So, though Harry struggled to accept the Slytherin in his son, he eventually realized that, in the realm of terrible things that a child can become, it could have been a whole lot worse.
Slytherin Is The First And Last House Mentioned In The Harry Potter Books
Slytherin Students
Gryffindor is obviously the house we learn the most about in the Harry Potter series, since it’s the one that our hero belongs to. So it’s a little bit strange that, despite its prevalence, it’s neither the first or last house to be referenced in the books.
In the fifth chapter of The Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry encounters Draco Malfoy at a shop in Diagon Alley. There, his future adversary proclaims that he knows he will be in Slytherin, and that he’d pretty much rather die than be a Hufflepuff. At that point, neither Harry nor the reader nothing about any of the houses, so Malfoy may as well have been speaking Latin to him.
Then, in the last chapter of The Deathly Hallows, Harry’s son Albus expresses worry that he’ll end up being sorted into Slytherin before his father consoles him and tells him it won’t matter (more on that later). These two references to the school that Harry himself desperately wanted to avoid being sorted into serve as an interesting bookend, regardless of whether or not Rowling intentionally made Slytherin the first and last house spoken of in the series.