Snapedom essay: Snape and Slytherin House

Just wanted to show off my latest banner for the Snapedom monthly challenges! April's challenge was on Snape and Slytherin House, and you can find my essay here on IJ. It's a subject near and dear to my heart, because as my fanfic readers know, I love writing about the Slytherins and fleshing out their characters, since we see so little of them in canon. (Except for Draco, of course, and we see him filtered through Harry's POV.) Of course, that makes it a little difficult to write an essay supported by canon evidence, so my essay is mostly speculation on how Snape might have felt about his students and vice versa. In a way, it's nice that there's so much left to the imagination, at least from a fanfic writer's point of view, since it gives us more freedom to write about the Slytherins without contradicting canon--not that going against canon has ever been a problem for me! ;)

The essay also contains a short review of the book "Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts," which contains a chapter called "Is Ambition a Virtue? Why Slytherin Belongs at Hogwarts" that argues that Slytherin is not just "the evil house" and does indeed belong at Hogwarts because ambition--in the proper balance--is a virtue. The problem with people like Voldemort is that they have an excess of ambition, but that does not make ambition bad in and of itself. It's a very good essay, and it's definitely nice to see someone defending Slytherin House. I've read some good and some boring HP scholarly works, and this is definitely one of the better ones.