Harry Potter falls into the former, mainly because it’s a fantasy novel based on (well, what do you know) fiction. With that crystal clear, we can assume that this novel is meant for entertainment. Now, for all of each of us, there’s varying forms of entertainment. Some just want to read it to get lost in the world of wizards and witchcraft. Others want to analyze this novel for underlying themes (most of which I think are hogwash).

It doesn’t bother me one bit how hypocritical anything is (unless it blows the plot away, kind of like time paradox plot driven stories…oh, I HATE the concept of time paradox). As long as something can get me interested and forgetting about these hypocrisies, then I would consider it successful.

Not saying that the hypocrisy isn’t there, because it is. I agree that just thinking “I don’t want to be Slytherin, put me in Gryffindor” and placing Harry into Gryffindor was….well….it threw away the main point of a sorting hat in the first place.

This is all just my thoughts.

In the end, we can all agree that the Harry Potter series was most enjoyable.

Also, JKR wrote book 1 as a desperate effort to keep herself afloat. It was a fluke that the book took off and gave her the opportunity to write more. It was supposed to be a 1 volume, self-contained story for basically elementary school students, so the premise and separation of good and evil needed to be obvious and easy to swallow. Moral complexity would have stymied JKR’s purpose in writing it. Later, however, she clearly shows the breakage in stereotypes that she shows in the beginning: Harry tells his son that being in Slytherin is ok; one of the bravest men he’s ever known was in Slytherin, Draco has a change of heart, along with his family, and helps in the defense effort (eventually, and only after almost dying, but still).

It is Harry and Hermione that are the beacons of challenging normal modes in this series, as Harry is consistently called an “odd” wizard and is doing things that regular wizard society would consider untoward or antiestablishment. It is implied that this is because of his muggle/difficult upbringing, giving Hermione the same path, as she is the best young witch in the series and comes from a muggle household. This is affirmed in the final book when Ron is the one who has all the problems with the horcruxes, never having been away from mummy or having to deal with institutional discrimination, as he is a pureblood.

If you want to get really deep, the main abstract to conquer is, in fact, racism, as that is basically the whole reason for all the villains’ actions. This is overcome with love and friendship, yada yada, and those taken for granted or treated poorly because of their ancestry prove themselves to be so much more than anyone expected of them, surpassing their oppressors in value.

I appreciate the attempt at an unmasking here, but given the premise and purpose of the first novel and the subsequent character development, I must admit that I see no validity in your proposal at all.

JKR’s series isn’t very solid. Consistency is a problem all major book series tend to have. The harry Potter books have a lot of problems like plotholes (eg. The Time Turner, etc.) but class distinction is one that is handled pretty well.
You make a good point about the Slytherins being exiled during the finale. This is somewhat similar to a sub-plot in Homeland(the TV show), the CIA, is prioritizing a bunch of suspects, and one of the main protagonists out rightly tells them to target the middle-Easterns in the list first. He gets called out for racial profiling. The protagonist however justifies his decision saying that it’s really actual profiling because most of the terrorists he’s been dealing with are from there.
In the finale, the situation was beyond just hostility, they were at war. Most of the death-eaters they were fighting against were family members of the Slytherin kids. You can’t always afford to be politically correct in the middle of a crisis. Sending them back to the dungeon , was a pretty realistic decision, IMO.

The book and the movie are complete different worlds really (Harry has blue eyes in the movies… wtf). One of the biggest problems I had with the last movie was the ending when all the Slytherins are just dismissed as bad and assumed to be on the other side, while in the book they are given an opportunity to choose. As we have seen throughout the series, Slytherin has always been defaulted to bad. Also, as other commentators have noted, Rowling has emphasized the importance of understanding that things are not always black or white. So the point in the end that summarizes the picture of Slytherin for the whole series and the untold future of that world, is that in the end it is your choices that count. Just like Slytherins were given the choice to fight for the good guys in the final battle (in the book), and just like plenty of non-Slytherns choose to do bad things. Which is why Harry tells his son in the epilogue that it doesn’t matter what house he ends up in, when Albus Severus worried about ending up in Slytherin.

So Snape, not a major heroic character. Luna Lovegood, not a major heroic character. And it seems to me that saying Hermione belonging in Ravenclaw, and Cedric Digory belonging in Gryffindor sort of undermines your point.

Also, I disagree with most of what the author of this article had to say. I don’t see any philosophical inconsistencies with sorting people by house; in fact, sorting people by their deepest values seems like a good way to sort people. Ambition isn’t a bad thing.

And I think Peter Pettigrew is a pretty solid example of an evil wizard, and HE wasn’t in Slytherin house…