#also i'm so sorry if you're on mobile this is a helluva long post | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

asriels · 7 years

Note

I'm not sure if you're still in the hp fandom but how diffrent would the story be if a- Harry was a Slytherin and b- Alice and Frank had lived? I hope you're well, xxx

Oh man. What a question. What a big question.

Now for A—I’m sorry, you’re probably going to hate thisanswer. But I can’t ever see a version of the story where Harry is sorted intoSlytherin. Not only because JKR’s conceptualisation of the world and Slytherinin particular is so restrictive (which I won’t go into now but is like…thebiggest argument against Slytherin!Harry bcus JKR really, really wants Slytherins to be The Bad Guys), but also because the HP books are somuch about choice.

Choice comes in on so many levels. It’s in-your-face (“It is the choices we make, Harry, that showwho we really are, far more than our abilities”) but there is so muchunderlying interest in choice, andthe human capacity to choose their path for themselves. Harry’s free will istaken away incredibly early on in his life—as an infant, he has no say in wherehe goes or what happens to him once he is with the Dursleys. Even once helearns about Hogwarts, he’s not really given a choice on whether he goes—he’san eleven-year-old child, and Hagrid says to him “you’re going to Hogwarts”, soHarry decides, “I’m going to Hogwarts”. It’s a choice, but really he doesn’thave an alternative. Even the things he takes with him to Hogwarts are decidedon for him. He’s so lost in Diagon Alley he just accepts what he is told—buythis wand, take this pet, get these robes, don’t get a broomstick.

The first big choice he makes, really makes, for himself, iswhen he turns down Draco Malfoy’s invitation to sit with the future Slytherinlot. He picks Ron. And I think that is such a formative moment for Harry thatthere is no way after that that he could be in Slytherin. Draco and his friendsremind Harry of Dudley—the cousin that has bullied him his entire life. All the‘good’ people Harry has met so far have told him that Slytherin is a ‘bad’house, and the only real encounter with Slytherin Harry gets is an introductionto nasty bullies who remind him of his awful cousin, so that opinion isinstantly reinforced. He dislikes Draco from the moment he meets him in MadamMalkin’s. I don’t think he’d have gone to sit with him even if he hadn’t metRon. So I don’t blame Harry at all for begging not Slytherin, and I honestly cannot imagine a scenario where he’snot sat on that stool asking for the exactsame thing.

And the Hat—because this is JKR’s world, and she’s so muchabout choice—listens. It will always listen.

I’m forever interested in posts that say “imagine Harrybeing in Slytherin and being friends with people across all houses” and all thefascinating meta that can come out of that but it just…rings hollow for me. Don’t get me wrong, if you like it, keep at it. You do you.

I’m coming at it from a point of view that it’sa nice idea, but my experience growing up in a boarding school in this countryhas made me very, very aware of how unlikely it is. Bearing in mind that Harryis a kid who’s spent most of his life trying very hard to ensure his peers don’thate him—although with little luck—I don’t think he’d be sticking his neck outat eleven and defying the boys he has to literally live with nine months out ofthe year to make incredibly swift and close friendships with people everybodyelse in his house hates. I can see a friendship developing in later years, whenthey’ve all matured and learned to think for themselves more—but I still reckonany situation that has Harry in Slytherin would have him isolated and miserablefor a good couple of years at least, and that’s really not going to end well for a boy who can hear giant snakes in thewall and who has a mainline to the darkest wizard of the last century.

Like, Harry might end up making friends with Ron andHermione anyway, but I doubt it. We see that Ron is outgoing, ebullient, funand generally kind; Hermione is bookish and quiet and comes off as a bitinsufferable. Not only would they be unlikely to make friends with each other,but an unhappy Harry in a negative dorm room environment would be more like theHarry we see in OotP—withdrawn, sullen, suspicious—and I really can’t see anyfriendship forming instantly. We have to remember that these areeleven/twelve/thirteen year old kids, not late teens or twenty-somethings withthe benefit of reflexivity and distance. Kids feel first and think second, andthat would get in the way of these three coming together in a huge way.

And Harry needsRon and Hermione. If the series is about choice, it’s also really aboutfriendship and loyalty and love. I mean, that’s obvious to anybody who’s readit. It screams about love. It wantsus to believe in love and treasure love and ascribe immense power to love. Lovemakes Harry who he is—not just the literal physical protection his mother’slove gives him, but the platonic love he feels towards Ron and Hermione and hisromantic love for Ginny and the filial/maternal love he shares with MollyWeasley. Love and choice and loyalty are the ABCs of Harry, and if he was inSlytherin I think he’d be severely lacking in at least two thirds of them.

Also, let’s not forget he’d have Snape—bullying, abusiveSnape—as his chief guardian figure whilst at school. So instead of trading theDursleys for the strict but ultimately kind and caring McGonagall when he goesback to school, Harry would be trading them for Snape. Can you imagine growingup under the immediate care of a teacher who is willing to completely abuse hisauthority to outright bully you and other children? I’d like to think thatother teachers would intervene, but based on the fact that nothing was doneabout Snape at Hogwarts until he straight-up murdered the headteacher, I doubt it.

On a more pedantic and picky level, the plot just…wouldn’thappen if Harry was a Slytherin. He probably wouldn’t venture into thatforbidden corridor, he wouldn’t have Hermione around to figure out thePhilosopher’s Stone was hidden in the school, and he wouldn’t even make it pastthe Devil’s Snare without Ron and Hermione. That’s trusting, too, that Harrywouldn’t internalise the other Slytherin’s prejudices about Hagrid and startlooking up to him less (strong as Harry is, he’s still a kid, and it’s all tooeasy for children to absorb the feelings and prejudices of those around them)and therefore never find out how to get past Fluffy. And if Harry doesn’tventure down into that dungeon, then Voldemort never finds out about theprotection Lily left, and everything changes.

I’m not saying Slytherin Harry wouldn’t be fascinating—it would—butI don’t think the series would be about Harry if he was. Voldemort would goafter him, sure, because Voldemort is a megalomaniac mass-murderer who wouldn’tbe able to stand having been beaten by a one-year-old child first time around.But Harry wouldn’t be Voldemort’s arch-nemesis. He’d be a minor roadblock onhis path to world domination. He wouldn’t foil Voldemort’s plans early on, he’djust be…around. Trying to get by. And probably completely fucking miserable forlike 90% of his teenage years. Lupin being around in his third year would bereally good for him, but still….Snape’s going to be unable to resist outingLupin as a werewolf at the end of the year, and for Harry to lose thatpseudo-father figure without a support system to fall back on is going to MessHim Up.

I’m sorry that I can’t give a better answer to this but I amjust completely invested in the connections Harry makes to Hermione and theWeasleys and the person they make him into. Harry is able to develop into ahero primarily because of the friends he makes and the people he finds to lovehim—and I think if you take them away (which putting him in Slytherin would, due to the prejudices within theworld) it’s just not going to have the same moral to the story. Gryffindor gives him the belonging he has been desperate for his entire life, and I don’t think he’d be the same without it.

Also, I’m super into the Next Gen, and I love to Sort LilyLuna into Slytherin and her brothers into Gryffindor, and have them all grapplein their own ways with their dad’s legacy. His membership of Gryffindor is abig part of that, so I’m probably super biased towards keeping him firmly inthat house.

And, quickly, because I realise how long this is now—Frank andAlice being alive would be a fascinating change, but primarily with regards to Neville.I didn’t get the sense they were particularly close to James or Lily (I mean,obviously they were friends, but Ididn’t get a best-friends-would-fight-against-the-wizarding-world’s-main-authority-Dumbledore-to-change-Harry’s-lifevibe from them) so I don’t think they’d really have much impact on Harry’sstory. They might give him access to memories of his parents he couldn’t getfrom anywhere else, and I can see him looking to them for guidance in the sameway he looks to Molly and Arthur Weasley for the sense of parental love andsecurity he’s never got anywhere else, but I don’t think his overall plotlinewould be that much affected.

Also if Frank and Alice ever found out about the prophecy,can you imagine the guilt they’d feel every time they looked at Harry? Because they’dbe relieved it wasn’t them, wasn’ttheir son. And that would be a terrible thing to carry around. It wouldcomplicate everything they felt about Harry.

Neville on the other hand—oh, Neville with his parents.Probably Neville with younger siblings. Neville without a childhood under thethumb of his very strict grandmother. What kind of a boy Neville might havebeen! Still nervous, I’m sure, still insecure—but much less afraid of himselfand of the world. That fight we see in him at the end of Philosopher’s Stoneand in later books—I think we’d see a lot more of it, and we’d see it sooner.

I’m utterly fascinated by the idea of Neville with hisparents around. But I also would miss that moment where we find out it’sNeville who’s killed Nagini. So unexpected, because nervous hapless helplessNeville is not who anybody would have expected to kill the last Horcrux. Butthat’s what makes the moment great, and it’s a thread that runs throughout theseries: heroes aren’t better than anybody else, when it really comes down toit. They are just people who have made a brave choice in the face ofinsurmountable odds. That’s what Neville does. And I think it carries even moreweight because up until then we’ve got the sense of a bit of steel insideNeville, but we don’t realise quite how wide a steely streak it is until thatmoment.

But if Neville had Frank and Alice around, I think we’d knowthat steel was there from the very first. In fact, coming back to my pointabout friendships, I think in a series that had Harry in Slytherin and Nevillewith his parents alive, it would be Neville who reached out to Harry and madefriends with him first. But that’s a whole fanfiction, probably.

P.S. I will always be in the HP fandom. I keep trying to get out but I think someone locked the doors. I love to mess around with the canon a whole lot, but I prefer to do it outside the constrains of the stories themselves. That’s why I love the Next Gen, and that’s why I think a lot about the Trio’s lives post-Hogwarts, and how they get to where they end up in the Epilogue.

#Anonymous #harry potter #thank you so much for asking this anon this made me so happy i love thinking Big Thoughts about harry potter #also i'm so sorry if you're on mobile this is a helluva long post #hp meta

9 notes · View notes