Harry Potter from a Christian's POV

Okay, so Slytherin house gets a pretty bad rap all the time. I mean, for crying out loud! Either you're ugly and dumb or beautiful and psychopathic or just plain self-centered! This pattern continues into situations where people try sorting characters from other franchises into Hogwarts houses. Slytherin gets Loki, Magneto, Mr. 'I will sacrifice anything and everything, including teenagers, to kill titans' Erwin Smith, Mr. 'Complain about everything and pick fights with the hero' Jean Kirstein, Cutler Beckett, Guy of Gisborne, etc.,  while everyone else gets the heroes! But I finally found it. The character who was specifically in a heroic role who is a definite Slytherin.  Now, for those of you who haven't seen Fullmetal Alchemist (I don't blame you if you haven't, it's theology is kinda 'eeeeeehhh....' ) Hughes is the best friend of Colonel Roy Mustang.  Maes is sort of the comic-relief of Mustang's group of underlings, ...

So basically, long ago (Medieval-Tudor ages of England) four of the most powerful magically gifted adults gathered together on the border of Scotland and built a school. Their names were Godric Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, Salazar Slytherin, and Rowena Ravenclaw (I know, right?) Anyway, in creating the school, they decided that their students would be sorted to the charge of each of them based off character traits which each founder appreciated. Thus now we have: Even after the founders passed away (or left) the teachers they had trained up under the kept with this tradition, sorting children according to character traits, but there were really not enough of them who were fluent in all subjects, so they started splitting up the teaching between them. Slytherins (who are known for their conniving ways) were prone to teach potions, Hufflepuffs herbology, Ravenclaws charms (which is a science and very complicated to get just right), and Gryffindors usually made the bes...

 1. Good writing. The writing was good, interesting, and naturally flowing. Enough said on that vein. 2.Black magic and demons weren't involved in any way. 3. Harry was a real kid. While you were sympathetic for Harry and cheering him all the way through, he did have his moments of impatience, confusion, and loud-mouthness which made him neither a perfect hero nor a brat, but an actual person. In fact, all of the kids were like that, neither fully wicked or fully good. - Hermione is bossy but loyal - Ron is brash, but cares very deeply for others - Draco is haughty but initially friendly to Harry - Neville is clumsy and timid but courageous when the time calls for it 4. Non-villainous adults! (IS THAT EVEN LEGAL NOWADAYS?!?!) In nearly all teen/middle grade fiction, the adults are: A. Dumb. B. Evil (from the scale of 'you're destroying the ecosystem!' to 'you took money out of my highly expensive college account to pay for my younger sibling's c...

To put it simply, 'good magic' and 'dark arts' sort of work like the Force, where a Jedi throws an opponent and a Sith strangles an opponent. Good magic is magic that doesn't typically cause physical harm, while the dark arts is magic specifically used to harm others, like in the case of the magic Voldemort tries to use to kill Harry.  It's the difference between the torturing curse that Voldemort uses on his victims and the puking pastilles the trickster twins, Fred and George, market for skipping classes at school. But sometimes the lines get a little blurry, especially in the last book. Though to be fair, the situation sin the last book were mostly 'terrorists are trying to kill our children!/We will be tortured and killed!' situations, not a 'the bad guys are going to take the unicorns away!' situation, so I think that gives the heroes the right to defend their children/families/homes by any means possible (then there's the whole...

 So Harry can produce magic without even thinking about it. Why does he need a wand, let alone go to school? Okay, so I'll try to keep this brief: Since Harry can't control his magic, he can't control the amounts in which he uses it. So he goes to Hogwarts to learn to control it (it should be noted that in the space of time between the incident at the zoo and Harry actually going to Hogwarts for the first time, he has not been in fear of his life, so he hasn't used magic in that time.) Hogwarts is a safe(ish) environment, so students aren't usually  prompted to do magic without meaning to, and classes are taught on how to make produce particular magic, or 'spells'. We don't get full details of how those first classes go (as it was a kid's book, and kids really don't want to read about deep philosophy and such when they're in the middle of an adventure), but we do hear how the children are taught in later books: - Professor Remus L...

So how did these characters get these powers? Well, to tell the truth, I think it's like the X-men. Basically, what I mean, is that somehow magic was introduced into the world a while ago (pre-medieval ages) and stuck around, influencing the genes of humans and typically staying within the bloodlines of the humans who it affected, much like in the X-men franchise, where Mystique + Azazel = Nightcrawler, Phoenix + Cyclops = Rachel (telepath/telekentic) or X-man (same). To quote Harry Potter Wiki: "Due to the dominance of the magic gene, children born to at least one magical parent will usually be magical themselves." Then there are these quotes from the books: "I'm a what? " "A wizard, o' course... With a mum an' dad like yours, what else would yeh be?" - HP and the Philosopher's Stone "What about you, Neville?" said Ron "Well, my gran brought me up and she's a witch," said Neville, "bu...