Slytherins believe in the importance of taking care of their own. Everyone else is a person, but so are they, so a Slytherin’s job, before everything else, is taking care of them and theirs. This makes what Slytherin are known for, their ambition and ruthlessness, stand out strikingly even while a Slytherin’s core is not inherently selfish or cut-throat.
All of the Houses contain people with great ambitions and great desire for accomplishment and the furthering of their goals. Gryffindors will take on the world to do what they think is right, and are willing to make sacrifices and overrule those who would compromise on what needs to be done, and that’s nothing if not ambition. What makes the Slytherin ambition stand out so significantly is that it’s seen as a selfish ambition, and a guiltlessly selfish one at that. That drive is tied to personal achievement instead of idealistic achievement, and that makes it easier to point at.
But this is key: selfish ambition is idealistic ambition for a Slytherin. A Slytherin’s first priority is to their loved ones not because they love deeper or harder than the other Houses (they don’t), but because it is wrong to betray or abandon your people and right to defend and promote them. Loyalty and defense of your own is an inherent part of the Slytherin morality.
A Slytherin does not generally feel guilty for valuing themselves, for taking time for their own mental or physical health, or for sacrificing other things for the safety and happiness of the people they love. They might feel vulnerable, or judged, or guilty for not feeling guilty, especially if they live in the kind of family or culture where humility and self sacrifice are seen as the greatest goods– but without watching eyes and the words of peers and authority figures bouncing around their skulls, a Slytherin would feel comfortable and even validated in the idea that they have both a right and duty to take care of their own selves before anything or anyone else.
An exception to this is a Slytherin who’s managed to kick themselves out of their inner circle. For whatever reason, they don’t feel like they deserve their own help or kindnesses. Their “me and mine” priorities are still apparent but now it’s only “mine.” They fiercely and selflessly prioritize the individuals they love, value, or feel responsible for, while excluding their own self. A Slytherin like this can look somewhat like a Hufflepuff Primary, erring towards selflessness, but take a look at how they prioritize between their best friend v. a stranger in need. If they feel guilty for abandoning the stranger, they’re probably a Puff; Slytherins feel desperately like they owe things to their people, but they don’t feel like they owe people in general. (Also keep an eye out for a Burned Hufflepuff in this example, though– a Slytherin wouldn’t care strongly about not helping the stranger, except for general empathetic tickles; a Hufflepuff would be survivably eaten up inside; a Burned Puff would force themselves not to care because it’s the only practical thing).
Not prioritizing their own would feel wrong to a Slytherin. It would feel selfish, and might feel like giving into social pressures instead of standing up for what matters to them. This can hold true emotionally even when logically, prioritizing you and yours is not the best thing to do. In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen, a Slytherin Primary who only wants her family to be safe, almost runs away from her place as an important political symbol on the chance that she and her loved ones could make it on their own, hiding from the capitol. She doesn’t– but she really wants to, and when things go wrong she feels guilty for not acting to put her loved ones first.
Individual loyalty is something tied to Slytherins in the books and movies, but isn’t something that gets focused on. “Or perhaps in Slytherin you’ll make your real friends,” the Sorting Hat says in the song from Harry’s first year. It doesn’t explicitly use the loyal like it does for Hufflepuff, but that’s consistent because often, Slytherins don’t look loyal. If you’re not one of their most important people, who you can often count on one hand, they’re not particularly loyal. Loyalty doesn’t have an inherent worth for Slytherins the way it does for Hufflepuffs. Loyalty is less given and more earned.
And we have canonical examples of Slytherin loyalty, extreme and dramatic as it is. Slytherin loyalty is Narcissa Malfoy abandoning her Dark Lord for the sake of her son. Slytherin loyalty is the way Pansy Parkinson freaks out every time something injures Draco, and the way she was willing to sacrifice Harry to save herself and her friends (and the way she expected other people to agree with that judgement call).
It’s Slughorn’s guiltless willingness to distance himself from Dumbledore’s war–until old Dumbly gave him a reason to risk his own precious skin. It’s Snape, unwilling to let go of Lily Potter even after decades have passed and her son has grown up an orphan; even when there is nothing still to gain from holding onto his loyalty to her, and even when he hates her son.
Moving outside of canon (because there are nearly no positive descriptions of Slytherins with canon– Narcissa is a bigot, Pansy a bully, Slughorn a spineless creep, Snape a child abuser):
Slytherin is Ender Wiggin going back to Battle School not to save the world but because his sister asked him to, and Bean going to Battle School because he could get an education there that would save himself and then staying to save Ender. Slytherin is Pepper Potts telling Tony that, to hell with the world, he needs to take care of himself first. It’s Andrea from The Walking Dead pulling a gun on the people who try to get between her and her sister’s body. It’s Toph Beifong not giving any fucks except that hey, Twinkle Toes needs her. It’s Briar Moss of Circle of Magicplunging into death itself, refusing to let Rosethorn go.
Where Molly Weasley, in HP canon, weeps but drops her son Percy when he turns on them for the Ministry, blood purist and loyal daughter of House Black Narcissa Malfoy betrays the Dark Lord and saves Harry Potter for Draco’s sake. As the final, epic battle of good and evil culminates and commences in Hogwarts, Narcissa takes her family and she disappears. The ideals of her war were only her priority until her son was in direct danger.
Slytherin and Hufflepuff are the two Loyalist Primaries. People, and not ideals, are at the core of their judgement calls. But where Hufflepuffs tend to bond to groups, Slytherins bond with individuals.
Slytherin Primaries are horrified to see someone let down a friend. To turn on a loved one for words as insubstantial as truth or justice or the greater good feels like a very particular kind of madness. Sure that’s what you’re supposed to do, a Slytherin might say, but that’s not what you actually want, is it? Your person is right here. They are real, and they are breathing, and they need you, and they are yours. It’s an extreme Slytherin who would let the whole world burn for the sake of a friend, but every Slytherin Primary would be at the very least tempted.
We discuss in the Hufflepuff Primary post how when someone is dropped from a Hufflepuff’s group of “people,” it is a dramatic fall into becoming a dehumanized “thing.” This Hufflepuff dehumanization can take many forms– outsiders, “other”ing people, having strong beliefs in the justification behind more institutionalized types of exclusion like racism, sexism, classism. But it’s a divide where there are people who are people, and then there are people who are not-people.
The Slytherin divide is very different. There is no mechanism inherent to the Primary that removes someone of their personhood. Rather, they are removed of their status. There is a possessive drive to Slytherin, and while that varies in intensity across different individuals, it puts the divide on the basic line of “mine” and “not mine.” We find it helpful to talk about it in terms of being in someone’s inner circle, but it’s not usually that binary. Like it is with everyone, loyalty comes in a gradient.
But Slytherin’s loyalty is more selective than the other Houses’. Where a Hufflepuff extends some initial degree of loyalty on the basis of your being a person, with a Slytherin any loyalty you gain is earned from the bottom up; you start at 0.
But when the major part of your moral system that you feel viscerally is to protect yourself and your people, there are a lot of gaps in how you interact with the world and with moral situations. What do Slytherins do when confronted with gross wrongs like slavery, like murder, like unjust war–wrongs that don’t touch their people? It depends on the Slytherin. But this is why we count a Slytherin as a Decided house along with Ravenclaw, despite the core of their moral system being very much felt.
Some Slytherins simply don’t care–they opt out of the moral complications of the rest of the world and what touches other people and choose a contented apathy about the things that don’t intrude on their space– but other Slytherins construct ways to interact with these situations.
Perhaps they do so by understanding that other people have connections as strong and important as their own, or by building something more complex. Sometimes Slytherins can build systems that look like Ravenclaw systems– systems based on observational data, on adopted systems, or by keeping the moral guidance that they were taught growing up. The defining difference between these constructed additional Slytherin systems and the Ravenclaw Primary system is that the Slytherins are aiming for function and don’t have the same drive for truth. It matters much less if the system they build is true than if it is functional. The system should optimize for what they care about and what makes them happy, but this moral code is not viscerally driving like a Slytherin’s desire to protect those closest to them.
Some Slytherins latch specifically on to the morality of their most important person (or people), either because they trust them or because they value them. Samwise Gamgee, the loyal hobbit who follows Frodo through hell and back, adopts Frodo’s system. Sam does great good, bravely and well, but he does it, “For Mr. Frodo! For the Shire! And for my Gaffer!” Jeff Winger from Community also sometimes follows this pattern, absorbing the moralities of his study group and best friends. Both these characters are, to put it simplistically, wearing bracelets that read “What Would Mr. Frodo Do?” and “What Would The Study Group Do?” etc. For Jeff, it’s a bit more because Annie will pout at him if he’s doesn’t at least try.
Aang, from Avatar the Last Airbender, builds himself a stunning replica of his beloved deceased father figure Gyatso’s ethical system and he lives in it all his life. Latching onto a parental figure or early (sometimes, in media, deceased) influence’s morality is a form of love common for young Slytherins. Train Heartnet of Black Cat (who Saya changes so completely), Kai of Korra (who takes in Jinora’s culture like it’s his own morality), and Edward Cullen of Twilight (who takes Carlisle’s pacifism to self-hating extremes), are all examples of that.
Alternatively, a Slytherin might spend a lot of their time living in a Primary model–it might matter deeply to them to do good and right. If they have that drive for truth, they might have a Ravenclaw Primary model as opposed to just a Slytherin’s functional construction. They might also have a Gryffindor Primary or a Hufflepuff Primary model. They could even have a Slytherin Primary model– but one that is loyal and dedicated to a larger group of people, like a whole peer group, the population of a whole city, or even humanity in general. (This can look a bit like a Hufflepuff– one major visible difference is that particularly Slytherin sense of possessiveness.) They could live in that model for all conflicts and decisions that are separate from and non-threatening toward their most important people and be very functional with that.
MCU’s Tony Stark is an example of this type. (He’s also an example of a Slytherin who has kicked himself out of his own inner circle). He is a Slytherin Primary dedicated to Pepper and Rhodey (and, as of Avengers 2, he’s likely coming to value the other Avengers this way), but he has built a driving model to allow him to interact ethically with the rest of the world. It is this model that drives Iron Man and his sustainability and charity projects. This model (we think it’s probably Gryffindor Primary) is likely also what will drive him to one side or the other in Civil War. As long as Pepper or one of his own is not in direct danger (though the danger to himself is irrelevant), Tony will act firmly in service of his model.
But dropping that model in order to stand by someone you love, or in order to protect yourself, doesn’t feel like a failing. Sticking to that modelled morality at the expense of betraying or abandoning one of their own would make a Slytherin feel guilty and wrong. Being able to put the things and concepts you like aside for the sake of the people who need you feels more righteous than any moral posturing. It feels practical and it feels right, just as strongly as a Gryffindor Primary’s internal moral compass points them.
It’s a people based system, but it’s still an intuitive model of right and wrong. Betraying your own is the worst kind of crime. Loyalty is precious and terrible; it makes you vulnerable. It’s given sparingly, deeply, and a Slytherin will stand by their loyalties through the same death and fire that a Gryffindor would brave for the sake of doing the right thing, or a Hufflepuff to help someone in need.
In the same vein, when a Slytherin realizes that someone else doesn’t put the same value on the people they profess loyalty to, they might react similarly to a Gryffindor realizing that morality isn’t intuitive to everyone. Some things are just wrong, a Gryffindor might protest. But they’re your child–your spouse–your friend, a Slytherin will cry, confused and unsettled. How could you?
Petrified or Burned Slytherin
While there are certainly Slytherin Primaries who don’t care about any people who aren’t theirs, many Slytherins, especially ones who enjoy being more social, have wide circles of friends and acquaintances; people they will go out of their way to help, and whose company they enjoy, whose confidence they trust (to a point). What defines a Slytherin is not a lack of these concentric circles, but rather how sharply those lines of stratification are drawn. Wanting to help someone doesn’t mean you’re loyal to them. Wanting to help them at the expense of your comforts, your values, your commitments and sometimes even your self–that does.
You end up with Slytherin Primaries on both ends of the spectrum: ones who have decided that a huge group of people are “theirs” (to the extreme of: the world is my responsibility and I have bonded to every single individual contained in it), and ones who have decided that they themselves are not one of their most important people, but maybe a friend or lover is.
You can also get Slytherins whose only important person is themselves. This can be done healthily, especially for short periods of times, but when it’s driven by a fear of those close attachments, it becomes a phenomenon we call the Burned or Petrified Slytherin.
The Petrified Slytherin is a Slytherin who has no inner circle and no plans to get one. Whether through death, betrayal, abandonment (from either side), or through never having had any to begin with, the Petrified Slytherin has decided that having important people is too dangerous. Having those strong ties leaves you open to pain and weakness, and the pleasure of those connections aren’t worth the despair that comes from their seemingly inevitable loss. In this way, they close themselves off to meaningful connections out of what is ultimately fear (though from the inside, it’s far more likely to be experienced as a rational, sensible decision given the circumstances of the world), and gives them a stony exterior that seems impenetrable, resolute, and cold.
Even when not Petrified, though, the Slytherin Primary often seems cold. This comes not from any actual inherent coldness, but because they often show their warmth only to their inner circle. This is hugely influenced by your other houses, especially when you get the warmth of the Hufflepuff Secondary involved, or have a warm model– but even then, there is a special and somewhat exclusive kind of warmth saved for those who are held the closest.
A Slytherin Primary in our system is defined first and foremost by the intensity and priority of their loyalties to individual people, however few or many. And the way to break a Slytherin– whether you’re stopping their plans or crushing their will– is to either take away their people or to threaten to. Narcissa betrays Voldemort, fully aware of what that could mean for the safety of herself and her husband, because Draco was more important than anyone or anything. Azula of Avatar the Last Airbender, for all her coldness and lack of mercy, does what she does because she wants desperately to be loved and accepted by her father. When Annabeth, his friends, or his mother are threatened, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson loses all other priorities– his canonical fatal flaw is that he would let the world burn to save a friend. Nothing brings out the fierceness in a Slytherin like getting in between them and their loved ones.
To a Slytherin the inner circle of close loyalties is likely to be a much smaller number than the people they care about and consider friends. A petrified Slytherin is therefore not necessarily someone who is friendless, or who has no social ties, or who lacks affection for people. It’s not even a Slytherin without some sort of a hierarchy of important people.
A petrified Slytherin is a Slytherin who has decided, either consciously or not, that letting people into that inner circle– devoting themselves to someone with that deep, thoughtless Narcissa-type or Azula-type loyalty– is too dangerous. It’s too terrifying. When someone is that close, they become a huge risk. They might die, or you they might stop loving you, or stop liking you, or something awful might happen to them and it might be your fault. Something awful might happen to you because someone might threaten your people and use them against you, and you would be helpless. If you couldn’t find a way to maneuver through the situation, you would have to do whatever was demanded of you to keep your people safe, because nothing would be worse than losing them and having it be your own fault.
Surviving a situation like that (losing someone or having their lives used as collateral against you) is one of the ways we see Petrification often happen.
Not all Slytherins will Petrify in such a situation– Finnick from The Hunger Games, a Slytherin Primary whose only people are Mags and Annie, has resisted Petrifying even when there are good arguments that it would be a far more adaptive thing to do. The Capitol’s only way of controlling him is by threatening to hurt the people he loves, and even after Mags is killed, he stays resolutely attached to Annie. It gives him the strength to carry on, but is also the weakness that the Capitol is exploiting. If Annie died, Finnick would be very likely to Petrify.
Bean, in Ender’s Shadow, is a Petrified Slytherin for most of the book. He likes people, and sometimes idolizes people, but their main purpose in his life is the utility of them. His connections are a cold, logical thing, closer to an alliance than to a friendship, and often not mutually so. Bean is interesting because we never see the Petrification process. He’s born into a survival situation and is cold and hard and determined to live from the first page. It is only at the very end, when he grows attached to Nikolai and allows himself to consider the possibility that he, too, could have a family who he loves and who loves him, that we see that Petrification begin to melt away.
Jeff Winger from Community is another example. A ruthless lawyer only out for his own gain and without an attachment in the world except to maybe his car, he’s the perfect example of a Petrified Slytherin. His tentative, slow-moving back and forth journey into attachment to the other characters is a character arc of un-Petrifying. He’s better at it some days than others.
With female characters in particular, the petrified Slytherin is hugely tied to the trope of the Ice Queen. From TV Tropes: “Her signature characteristic is that she is cold; the ambiguity comes from what “cold” means. She has a cold heart, a frosty demeanor; she attracts but will never be wooed.” Characters who fit this trope are not always Petrified Slytherins, but the trope is an important parallel if not just because of the imagery they share: cold, hard, unyielding, nothing to lose.
When a Slytherin loses their closest attachments, they are left with only their personal ambitions and with the morality system that is usually constructed around those loyalties. In the sense that the way that they now primarily frame their interactions with the world is constructed, they often appear to look like Ravenclaw Primaries here. The most visible and useful difference here, especially from the outside, is that they don’t have the Ravenclaw drive for truth. Their system doesn’t have to be true or right, but simply functional. If they have a Ravenclaw Primary model that gives them some of that drive, then they might be indistinguishable from the Ravenclaw Primary unless there are are counterexamples of Slytherin loyalty from other points in their life.
Despite it seeming to at least be a trend, not all Petrified Slytherins look like Ravenclaw Primaries. Petrified Slytherins with models of other Primaries might happily and healthily inhabit those models as their main way of interacting with the world, and this has the potential to be entirely functional. The reason that the model would remain a model though, and not indicate an actual change in Primary, would be that first, there still remains the possibility to un-petrify, and second, even if there is nothing substantial underneath it, the model could still be dropped.
This potential for to drop that model and fall to an underlying lack of structure and direction is part of what gives desperate Slytherins their reputation of being fearsome. Azula is a great, if extreme, example of this when she loses everything at the end of season 3 of Avatar. Mental illness (in the form of at the very least hallucinations and almost definitely a lot more) and trauma also have of course a huge influence on the intensity of everything that happens, but that basic directionlessness, the way that Azula has nothing left after she loses her father, the way she’s so susceptible to being haunted by her mother’s memory, hits so hard because she had structured everything around her Slytherin morality. She had no real goals or ideals underneath that, and so she had no structure to keep her up when that crumbled.
One of the good things about Petrification, as scary and awful as it is, is that it’s a good way to survive a bad situation and it’s possible to un-petrify (see: Defrosted Ice Queen). Because fear of attachment is at the heart of petrification, instead of needing reality to prove your doubts wrong (as the other fallen Houses must), you only need one person to prove that attachment is worth the risk.
Elementary’s Jamie Moriarty follows a common path here in that, despite her pretending to be un-petrifying for our protagonist Sherlock, the one person she ends up actually attaching to her is her daughter. She is the Slytherin woman who un-petrifies upon becoming a mother. Regina in Once Upon a Time also follows this path, becoming through that a subversion of the Evil Queen, who is often a Petrified Slytherin who does not un-petrify (see her mother, Cora, and the symbolic plot of removing her heart so that no one can use it against her).
It’s really common in media for characters who have closed themselves off to attachments to be called psychopaths, both by the fans and the writers, when they are, in fact, not. A lot of them have empathy, or at least the capacity for it, and are instead Petrified.The definitive and intentional split between the self and meaningful attachments, due to loss, trauma, selfishness, or fear, is different from the inability to intuitively create those attachments. Calling this “petrification,” rather than inaccurately calling it “psychopathy,” gives the character flexibility to recover from it that doesn’t end up as either a contradiction of established character or as a downplaying of actual serious mental illness.
To sum: Petrification happens when a Slytherin cares about their important people so intensely that pain from their loss, or the potential for future loss, outweighs the positives of having important people. It stops being worth it. Even if it leaves the Slytherin with a directionless system and a cold center where there is an aching potential for great warmth, it feels safer and better to not attach to anyone that strongly.
Slytherin is a Decided House, and Internal House, and a Loyalist House.
As a Decided House, Slytherins, unlike Hufflepuffs (our other loyalists), prioritize “their” people first. Those people are found and chosen by the Slytherin. It’s not about who is in front of them, or who needs them most, but who they have decided to love.
As a Internal House, like Gryffindor, Slytherin Primaries carry a certainty and a moral fortitude inside of themselves. When they are sure they are right, in the defense of themselves or their loved ones, they will not be swayed by outside influence or pressure.
As a Loyalist House, Slytherin puts people first. Unlike the Hufflepuff, they put their people first. They’re content with valuing some people over others without necessarily thinking some people are better than or worth more than others. In fact, putting their own people first feels right. This is something owed. Not valuing the people you profess loyalty to most would be a betrayal, a cowardice, an abandonment. The best thing you can be is there for the people you love.
Ambitions live in all Houses but Slytherins’ is notorious because it often looks the most selfish– it often is the most selfish. Part of a Slytherin’s morality is understanding that your first duty is to yourself and the people you love– higher minded goals are all pomp and circumstance, trying to make yourself feel good. At the heart of things, this is why we are here: for ourselves.
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