Also if you don’t “reinterpret” through a lens like sortinghatchats, the way the Houses in canon are set up are pretty inherently slanted. We have a Brave/Good House, a Smart/Wise House, a Loyal/Tolerant House, and… Ambition/Me-and-mine-First House

It is real clear in the books which of those are supposed to be evil.

But… any and all of those “ideals” can be taken to harmful extremes. Gryffindors, brave, just, and noble, might go full Knight Templar and destroy the world chasing the wrong ideals (or the right ones, but for the wrong price). You even see it in canon, though canon doesn’t log it as a problem– Hermione literally traps a woman as a bug in a glass for like a year, because she writes gossipy news columns. She scars a girl for tattletaling. Hermione’s terrifying, y'all.

Hufflepuff, tolerant & evenhanded, can create awful villains. You know that fire captain’s speech in Fahrenheit 452, where he goes on and on about burning books so that no one can be special. If some folks have wings, you’ve got to cut them off for fairness’s sake? I don’t think that character is a Hufflepuff, but he’s playing with the potential extremes of their rhetoric. We could have just as easily had Hufflepuff as the villain House in HP, had Rowling hated ambition less–minimizing, muffling, resistant to change… (Umbridge is arguably a Hufflepuff villain– but of course JKR sorted her Slytherin)

Ravenclaw gets the second worst shaft in the books– Wise/Clever gets their head turned too easily. Quirrell & Lockhart both fall into this bucket, as does Marietta Edgecombe. But their stooges, or collateral damage, not villains of themselves. To be a hero in HP, your goodness needs to come from your gut, not your head. People ARE good or bad– which is an interesting take on a story supposedly against blood purism…

My least favorite example of this is Tom Riddle being “heartless” because of this circumstances of his birth.

Slytherin is marked as the House of ambition– an inherently negatively framed thing. It’s not made more nuanced at any point in the books. Slughorn, a “positive” example, is still cowardly, self-obsessed, and acts to save his own skin. Snape, at the height of his “heroism” (now that’s a different rant), is told he should have been sorted Gryffindor.

But Slytherin could easily have been as neutral or as positive as the other Houses. What inherent harm is there in ambition? It depends what your ambition is for– you can ambitiously dream of saving the world. Like bravery, or fairness, or intelligence, great evils or great good can be done in the name of any of these. It’s so interesting what canon chose as the one to mark as evil…

I think I got distracted from your point, op, but here’s some thoughts.

Also I definitely worry that the podcast is going to highly prioritize Slytherin primary majority media content, because we two tend to like them… Trying to get some less Slytherin canons in there for you all but I don’t think the next one, Gideon the Ninth, will necessarily satisfy that wish…