Harry Potter and the Violence Inherent in the System.

I like Harry Potter, I like the books, and I like the movies. There are dumb things in the story, plot holes and things that are insufficiently explained, but that is fine, I can turn my brain off and enjoy a good story, I even like the ending, which can be a controversial statement to some people. Despite the complications during the story, it is usually a pretty straightforward good vs evil story with the villains an hero's clearly defined.

Except in one area. The house system in Hogwarts is pretty well known, and I don't need to go into detail here, except there is one house that is more or less the dedicated villain of the school, that of Slytherin. I feel like the good guys all have this massive blindspot about Slytherins, they get shit on basically at every turn and alienated by pretty much the entire school, including having the cup basically stolen from them on more than one occasion. They even basically stuck to the rules for most of the series! And then at the end, Dumbledore decides to go and give a bunch of bullshit points to Gryffindor because the celebrity student and his friends decided to be nosy and figure out how many rules they could break all at once, and just happened to foil a plot at the same time.

Is it any wonder they basically defected en mass to Voldemort when shit got real? Their peers and teachers all pretty much hate them because a hat said they were a bad guy.

A big theme that Harry an Dumbledore have during the series is about showing mercy to their enemies, and not judging individuals based on appearance or family, for the majority of the series this works out very well for them, Dobby and the other house elves are pretty important allies, the goblins were willing to work with Harry because of it, hell even showing mercy to Draco Malfoy turned out to be the right thing to do in the end. Yet they did not apply that to a full quarter of the school based simply upon what house they belonged too, and the other teachers pretty much fell right in line with it.

Malfoy was a little git from the very beginning of course, but it is entirely possible that the Slytherins would have had a lot less resentment if the rest of the school hadn't taken every opportunity to shit on them, and for the most part the Slytherins didn't do anything bad, outside of Malfoy's gang, the rest of them were apparently good students, they fielded a solid Quidditch team, and largely kept to the rules, we are told that they won the house cup pretty regularly before Harry arrived, and they would have at least once after if it wasn't for something pulled completely out of Dumbledore's ass at the last minute.

I guess that might have been an intentional point by the author, but it really felt like the idea was inconsistently applied if that was the case.