Supplement to My Previous Post — Reexamining Slytherin and the Wizarding Society of the Time
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeverusSnape/comments/1t0od92/timeline_of_the_perception_of_slytherin_and/
After some of the arguments and discussions that happened under my previous post, I decided to write a follow-up post to reorganize and supplement a few points after going back and rechecking the material myself.
To be honest, that original post was mainly intended for people in the Snape subreddit who might actually be interested in discussing the topic seriously. But for some reason it suddenly gained far more attention than I expected, and a lot of people who clearly were not interested in the actual subject of the post showed up just to leave completely unrelated comments.
(Which was honestly strange to me, because the post was never arguing that “Slytherin had no problems” in the first place.)
Still, even if the experience itself was not particularly pleasant, some of those arguments did help me revisit a few details and confirm certain things again, so I decided to collect those points here.
1, The Timeline Around Voldemort and the Death Eaters
When Voldemort returned to Hogwarts to apply for the Defense Against the Dark Arts position, this was during the period shortly after Dumbledore had become Headmaster.
In Prisoner of Azkaban, Lupin says that Dumbledore had only recently become Headmaster around the time they entered Hogwarts. Meanwhile, the Wizarding Almanac places Dumbledore’s appointment somewhere in the mid-to-late 1960s, so I usually describe it as roughly between 1965 and 1969.
Some readers speak as though the Death Eaters were already openly and actively operating as a fully recognized movement at that point in time, but the text does not actually present things that way.
During that conversation, Dumbledore explicitly says that he has heard rumors about Voldemort’s followers. When he mentions specific names associated with Voldemort, Voldemort reacts with visible displeasure and discomfort almost as if Dumbledore knows information he was not supposed to know.
Dumbledore then casually jokes that he simply keeps in touch with local bartenders.
But that reaction matters.
If the Death Eaters had already been a widely known and openly recognized organization before the war fully escalated, there would have been nothing particularly surprising about Dumbledore knowing those names.
The fact that Voldemort reacts that way strongly suggests the opposite: these people were still operating through hidden and informal networks, not as a publicly established ideological bloc that everyone openly recognized.
2, Anti-Muggle Prejudice Was Not Limited to Slytherin
Muriel Prewett is a senior member of the Prewett family and the great-aunt of Molly Weasley and the Prewett brothers, who were associated with the Order of the Phoenix and most likely Gryffindors.
Yet Muriel herself is not portrayed particularly positively in the books. Ron outright describes her as a nightmare. She behaves like an overbearing and rude old relative, and if you look at her dialogue carefully, you can clearly see traces of prejudice toward Muggles and Muggle-borns.
Below are translated excerpts from my language edition since I do not currently have access to the original English text directly in front of me:
“Oh my, is this the Muggle-born girl?”
“Her posture is dreadful, and her ankles are far too skinny.”
And later:
“They say she pretended otherwise, but she was Muggle-born.”
She never uses a slur like “Mudblood,” but the text still clearly presents her as someone who carries prejudice toward Muggles and Muggle-born witches and wizards.
That is why, in my previous post, I argued that dismissive attitudes toward Muggles were not something unique to Slytherin alone. They existed much more broadly throughout wizarding society.
3, The Deleted Character “Mafalda”
Before Rita Skeeter was created, Rowling originally had another character planned for Goblet of Fire: Mafalda, a relative of Molly Weasley.
Mafalda was supposed to enter Slytherin and provide Harry and his friends with information about what was happening inside the House. Eventually, Rowling removed the character because she felt the role did not work naturally within the story.
But Mafalda’s background is interesting.
She was the daughter of a Squib father and a Muggle mother.
Arthur and Molly found her irritating and unpleasant personality-wise, but the important point here is something else entirely.
Would Rowling really have designed that kind of character if her intention was for Slytherin students to function as a single monolithic category defined entirely by genocidal ideology or racial extremism?
The existence of a mixed-background Slytherin child in Rowling’s own early drafts already complicates the idea that Slytherin students were originally conceived as a unified ideological bloc.
And I think that says quite a lot.
4, James Potter and Personal Choice
People who saw my previous post may remember this Rowling quote that I brought up before:
“James could certainly have been kinder to this boy who was a bit of an outcast. And he wasn't. And these actions have consequences. And we know what they were.”
James treated Snape badly because he chose to do so.
Rowling explicitly says that he could have behaved differently. He could have been kinder. He simply was not.
Yet I have seen people argue as though James’s hostility toward Slytherin students was somehow an unavoidable result of how he was raised or what the Potter family supposedly taught him about Slytherin.
But if you frame it that way, you are effectively stripping James himself of agency and personal responsibility.
The point Rowling makes is the opposite: regardless of whatever prejudices may have existed socially at the time, James still had the ability to make his own choices.
And that matters.
Because acknowledging that possibility also means acknowledging that the social perception surrounding Slytherin in the 1970s was not some absolute or universally fixed ideological reality where every interaction was predetermined in advance.
That prejudice may have existed socially does not mean every hostile interaction was ideologically inevitable.
5, Grindelwald, Pure-Blood Families, and Collective Identity
Some people brought up that Grindelwald already had ties to certain pure-blood families associated with Slytherin before Voldemort’s rise.
And yes, that is true.
Families such as the Rosiers, Carrows, and Lestranges were connected both to Slytherin and to pure-blood ideology, and Grindelwald clearly had connections to at least some individuals tied to those families.
But I think there is an important distinction here.
The text never suggests that Grindelwald influenced Slytherin House as a whole in Britain in the same way Voldemort later influenced large parts of wizarding Britain during the First Wizarding War.
More importantly, the books repeatedly show that support for extremist figures within pure-blood circles was never completely unified or consistent even within the same families.
Sirius himself says that some families who initially supported Voldemort later distanced themselves once they realized what he truly was becoming.
That does not resemble a single ideological bloc where every member thinks and acts identically.
It looks far more like individuals making different choices shaped by their own beliefs, ambitions, fears, and family environments.
And that also explains why people from the same family can end up very differently aligned.
Leta Lestrange, for example, comes from the same bloodline later associated with Death Eaters and pure-blood extremism, yet she is portrayed as a morally conflicted and ultimately self-sacrificing character.
So yes, blood-purity ideology and extremism certainly existed.
But the existence of individuals connected to those ideas is not automatically the same thing as an entire House functioning as one unified ideological organism.
For reference, Grindelwald never even came to Britain in the first place because of Dumbledore.
6, The Problem Was Larger Than Slytherin Alone
Another important point is that prejudice toward Muggles and Muggle-borns was never portrayed as something limited only to Slytherin.
The books and related material show these attitudes existing internationally across multiple wizarding societies.
Durmstrang is openly described as hostile toward Muggle-borns, and the American wizarding world in the Fantastic Beasts era is shown treating relationships with non-magical people with extreme suspicion and restriction.
So the issue was never simply:
“Slytherin alone was corrupted while the rest of wizarding society was completely healthy.”
The prejudice clearly existed on a much broader social level.
And that raises an important question:
Was Slytherin some uniquely isolated ideological anomaly?
Or was Slytherin able to exist in that form precisely because those prejudices already existed throughout wizarding society itself?
Institutions do not exist in a vacuum.
If anti-Muggle prejudice and blood-status bias already existed internationally across wizarding culture, then it becomes difficult to treat Slytherin alone as some uniquely separate ideological infection disconnected from the society around it.
That does not mean Slytherin had no problems.
It means the problem was broader and more deeply rooted within wizarding society itself.
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The post ended up becoming quite long, so I’ll stop here for now.
Everything written above is essentially a reorganized version of the arguments and discussions that came up in the replies under my previous post. Some people may have already seen parts of these points through those comment threads, but I thought it would be better to collect and organize the more useful points in one place where they are easier to read.
Also, since a few people have been accusing me of using AI, I’ll be posting the original Korean version of the post in the comments as well.
All of my posts are originally written in Korean first. When they are translated into English, the tone usually ends up sounding calmer and more polite than the original.
The original Korean versions actually contain a lot more slang and rougher phrasing, so honestly, comparing the two versions might be interesting in itself.