Why Do You Think Kingsley Will Be Revealed As A...

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Anonymous asked: Why do you think Kingsley will be revealed as a Slytherin? Because he's pure-blood and a leader type? I would love it if it were true, but J. K. Rowling doesn't exactly have a history of making characters who aren't at least morally ambiguous Slytherins, so I'm not counting on it …

It’s not so much of a belief as a hope - I don’t necessarily think JKR will reveal him to be Slytherin, but I really hope she does.

(I’ve had this hope for…basically forever, but the hope was bolstered when I saw the Shacklebolt name on the pure-blood family list.) Really, we canonically don’t know much about Kingsley save that he’s an Auror with a deep, slow voice*. Being an Auror implies bravery, but not all Aurors are Gryff (Tonks!) So really, we have no indication which House Kingsley might have been in, and given the lack of other info I’d love to believe he’s Slytherin (secondary preference: Ravenclaw. Just because let’s have some more unambiguously good Ravenclaws who aren’t willing to sell out Our Heroes (Xeno, Marietta) or get into that “they did terrible things but they sure are interesting” (Ollivander; Quirrell of the PM bio seems to have this attitude of “I’ll either capture Voldemort or learn from him, either’s cool.” JKR often casts Slyths as unambiguously evil and Claws as lacking a moral center**, so it would be nice to see some more characters from both Houses who are good - *the cerebral Houses don’t have to be amoral and being intelligent should not automatically erode your moral compass, grumbles the cerebral Ravenclaw.*

Anyway, back to Kingsley - I’d love to see Kingsley as a Slytherin and am also thinking that if JKR wants to keep any pretense of “Slytherin isn’t so bad!” in light of Pottermore’s revelations, she needs an actual present-day Slyth who’s a good person - and we have precious few people who are definitively heroic and could be generously defined as tertiary characters and still lack a House***. Right now, Pottermore is trying to say “Slytherins aren’t all bad! The rumors are overexaggerated! We’re good people who just own up to our Dark wizards!” and then present Merlin as the single example of an awesome non-Dark Slyth - Merlin, who’s been dead a thousand years (and is also clearly not Camelot’s Merlin because dating doesn’t work, but that’s a different post.) Right now, if you look at characters who are purely good - not “cowardly professor who is compared to a spider and a slug and is prejudiced and has to be goaded into fighting Voldemort” (Slughorn) to “reformed Death Eater who did bad things and then had a change of heart and died heroically” (Regulus) or “bully turned Death Eater who got in too deep and backed out” (Draco) or “a named Slytherin who doesn’t seem to have done anything explicitly foul in the text” (Adrian Pucey, Daphne Greengrass)**** - we have Andromeda Tonks. That’s it. Andromeda Tonks.

I mean, we can headcanon and try to flesh out characters and work around things, but in terms of what the text and Pottermore have presented…we have a lot of purely evil villains, a lot of flawed villains-turned-heroes or at least villains-turned-people-who-help-our-heroes, a couple of neutral background characters, and one person who’s pretty awesome but has thirteen words of dialogue and one appearance in the entire series. Even a lot of the background Slytherins are described in unpleasant terms - the way they look, the way they act (the Slytherin Quidditch team being founded on cheating and violence, apparently), the way they react (Theodore Nott mocks the idea of a love potion being the most powerful in NEWT Potions), and…it’s really not all attributable to Harry’s POV. There are too many actual objective actions that happen, things like the Inquisitorial Squad being 100% Slytherin…but this is retreading old ground. The main point here is that, where the Welcome Letter looked like it was trying to backtrack on canon and present Slytherin as a more well-rounded House, the revelations since have only served to pile on as showing Slytherin as the evil House (Lockhart being very nearly Slytherin, Umbridge being Slyth - yes, this was actually revealed a few years ago at a Casual Vacancy signing and was also pretty obvious from the OotP text, but apparently a lot of fans weren’t aware, and PM makes it official.)

Kingsley Shacklebolt the Slytherin wouldn’t fix all of this, but it would be a start. He’d be an actual Order member who was in Slytherin (let’s see Kingsley in Slyth, Hestia in Ravenclaw, and maybe some more of the deceased Order members in non-Gryff Houses! Fabian and Gideon Prewett are undoubtedly Gryff in my mind (and if JKR was going to reveal them as anything else I’d put money on Puff but I’m still thinking something like 90%+ probability of Gryff), but what about some of the other people in Moody’s pictures? It would be very nice to see Slyth and Claw representation here (partially because we need more Slyth/Claws who are good but also because we also don’t need more good Puffs who are cannon-fodder background characters who end up dead.)

Moreover, Kingsley the Minister for Magic would make sense in terms of being a Slytherin - a Slyth Minister would likely be more naturally adept at navigating politics and dealing, since cunning and ambition work well as leadership traits. “A certain disregard for the rules” fits both an Auror and someone who worked for the Order when doing both required defying the (then)-current Minister. Also, since I believe Scrimgeour was probably a Gryff and Fudge a Puff (and the Minister who presided over the fireworks/defeat of Voldemort the first time was a Ravenclaw, the “inalienable right to party” Minister), it would provide a nice sort of…symmetry’s not the right word here, but a nice sense of balance in terms of having had a Claw, Puff, Gryff, and Slyth in the office in the time period of the books.

Kingsley as a Slytherin Minister also makes sense on an in-world basis, as a Slytherin pure-blood would be acceptable to the Slytherin pure-bloods who weren’t exactly Death Eaters but also didn’t actively defy them (I’m thinking families like the Greengrasses here) - making Kingsley a Slyth gives him very wide electoral support, in terms of in-world politics (though idk how large a population we’re supposed to assume the reactionary elements are - but Lucius Malfoy’s money and what we’ve seen of how politics works in the WW seems to imply that they have an outsized influence in general.

As to whether or not JKR will actually make him a Slyth, I really don’t know - as you say, her track record is not the best. But I have vague hopes and will continue to headcanon him as such until Pottermore confirms otherwise, if only because he’s probably our last best hope of seeing a truly purely good Slyth on the site.

*reiterating now and forever that, with apologies to the actor who portrayed him in the movies, and with the full knowledge that he’s not British, Avery Brooks has been my fancast for Kingsley Shacklebolt ever since the very first time I read his description in OotP. Black wizard, shaved head, deep slow voice…I don’t often picture or hear particular people as characters, but this is one distinct exception.

**I’d argue that Marietta’s betrayal doesn’t really stem from a lack of a moral center but from other influences - protecting her family, believing in rules/authority, being uncertain of Harry - but we’re also not meant to see it that way (“I loathe a traitor.”)

***I’d call the Trio and perhaps even the Silver Trio and Draco primary chars; the Marauders, Snape, Dumbledore secondaries; Tonks and the better-developed classmates like Seamus, Dean, Ernie, Cho as tertiary; and other classmates and Order members as quaternary, but I could see where you’d lump in Dumbles/Snape/etc. as secondary chars and therefore would move everybody else up a rank. But basically, characters like Kingsley - his fellow Order members, students like Terry Boot or Anthony Goldstein or Daphne Greengrass - are background characters, named people who we know a teeny bit about, but not a heck of a lot. They’re people HiH would include as possibilities for a stamping vote but not that you could really write a bio about based on the info we have - we don’t know their hobbies, or generally much about them save a name, basic description, and an affiliation or two (DA, Order, House if a student.)

****Let’s face it, “they’re barely present in the books but they’re not specifically named as doing anything foul” is a pretty low standard and I’m not going to assume that this means that we’re meant to believe Adrian or Daphne are superb people on par with the actual fleshed-out examples from other Houses like Luna, Tonks, or probably 95% of Gryffindor.

Filed under metaish kingsley shacklebolt though most of this got rambly and more about slyth than kingsley in particular so sorry about that slytherin Anonymous

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23. hestiaschaetzeken said: yes make him slytherin. (and also yay for putting Hestia Jones in Ravenclaw. I roleplay her and my Hestia is a Ravenclaw too! She’s very precious to me.)
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33. madamxpresident said: Just thought of it reading this post but has Moody’s house been confirmed? I could see him in Slytherin for his ability to think like his opponents (paranoia seems like a largely Slyth tendency too). I could see him in other houses but I like this hc
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