The Cringe of Being a Slytherin Stan

5/29/2024 - My wife and I are watching travel YouTubers try different foods in Universal Studios Orlando’s Diagon Alley. One of the hosts bursts with excitement when they spot merchandise themed to Hogwarts house Slytherin, remarking that they identify as a Slytherin and name Draco Malfoy as one of their favorite Harry Potter characters. This seemingly innocent love for a fictional house in a fictional school makes my stomach churn a little. Anyone familiar with Harry Potter lore will know much about Slytherin House’s history, including its most infamous graduates and its namesake wizard, Salazar Slytherin. Slytherin’s history features racist bigotry and murderous supremacism which all too closely resemble real-world violent supremacist movements. Suffice to say that to support Slytherin and its graduates is essentially to support the Harry Potter franchise’s equivalent to Nazism and white nationalism.

According to Harry Potter lore, Salazar Slytherin, founder of Slytherin House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry, wished for the school to admit only students from families of purely magical ancestry, meaning they have no non-magical (Muggle) ancestry whatsoever. Such individuals are referred to as “purebloods.” When Slytherin’s wishes were ignored and students with Muggle-born or mixed heritage were admitted to Hogwarts, he left the school, leaving a terrifying ticking time-bomb of a trap within the darkest depths of the school. This trap was a monstrous basilisk, an enormous snake-like creature able to kill just by making eye-contact with its victims. The basilisk’s orders were simple: Kill any and all students of mixed heritage, referred to using the slur “mudbloods” by students in Slytherin house and adherents to Slytherin’s ideology. Slytherin House’s troubling history raises many questions.

One’s first question is why Slytherin House was allowed to continue existing, given its namesake was a genocidal supremacist whose bigotry inspired Harry Potter supervillains like Gellert Grindlewald and Voldemort. Slytherin House is even acknowledged in the Harry Potter books and films for being, essentially, a training ground for future Death Eaters. The Death Eaters, the violent militant followers of Voldemort, bear a strong resemblance to Nazi Stormtroopers and contemporary extremist groups like the Proud Boys and KKK. If it is such common knowledge that Slytherin House is churning out violent extremists destined to swell Voldemort’s ranks, then why not shut down Slytherin House? Why allow such evil to fester within the walls of Hogwarts itself? An equivalent would be if the German government allowed the Hitler Youth to continue operating after the end of World War II.

One must also ask Harry Potter fans who identify as Slytherins and Death Eaters how they rationalize their chosen fandom. This is not to say that calling yourself a Slytherin means you’re a Nazi or racist. But it does mean you’re knowingly overlooking the violent, bigoted ideology of Slytherin House and the Death Eaters. To open this up to other fandoms, the same could be said of Star Wars fans who identify with the Empire or First Order, both of which are blatant sci-fi equivalents of the Nazis right down to their style of uniforms, iconography, and the use of the term “storm trooper.”

Being a fan of Slytherin House and the Death Eaters, or the Empire in Star Wars, doesn’t make one a Nazi, racist, or an extremist. But these entities, while fictional, represent their fiction’s equivalent of very real, very dangerous and hateful ideologies. If you’re going to support Slytherin House or whatever, then you should fully understand what you’re supporting. It is irresponsible to support even a fictional organization while overlooking the evil and hate it represents, especially when it’s a reflection of real-world evil and hate that has re-emerged from the gutter to threaten our world today.