Ain't no wank like a Hogwarts Elite wank
I feel like I ought to defend everyone who got hurt today, because I've noticed that angry people don't always articulate the way they mean to. So in an effort to smooth over hurt feelings all around - we Slytherins are diplomats, because diplomatic people earn loyal followers when the revolution occurs - here's what I think.

(My big fat top-of-the-post disclaimer: I am not personally angry with any Ravenclaws, or even Ravenclaw house as a whole. I am not defriending anyone over this. I am only attempting to calmly and rationally point out to Ravenclaw house why their joke was not, by and large, well-recieved. I'm also plagiarizing most of this from myself in a comment to arasan earlier, if you're having a sense of deja vu.)

A lot of nasty things were said today, some of them in jest, some of them over-the-top outrageous, but here's the thing - you can't joke around if you're not in on the joke. It's not the pretend nastiness of the Claws who were in it that made the whole thing spectacularly unfunny, it's the real nastiness of everyone who wasn't. It's as though you jokingly call me a bitch, and I, not knowing you're joking, reply that you're a self-absorbed slut. You might have been joking, but I wasn't, and we both know it. And I can't take it back. And it's just THERE, this very real ugliness hanging between us that can't be dismissed as all in good fun.

And so we were all forced into this position of not only having been played, but also having been provoked into being the bad guys, because we don't get to dismiss anything on the grounds of a prank. Somehow "I was joking!" "...UH ME TOO" doesn't quite cut it. I know a lot of Claws have assured us that they're not angry about anything that was said, given the context, but I don't like that it was said at all, you know?

On a different tack, you've got to take into account that some people just naturally don't like being pranked. (I'm one of them.) Some of you have thick skins or grew up with lots of good-natured ribbing or just really like pranks, but some of us don't, and I don't have a lot of tolerance for the "Lighten up, it was just a joke!" defense. For many people, being the butt of a joke is a touchy subject. I'm not saying that you should never pull a prank so no one's ickle feelings get hurt, but I do think that you should never pull a prank UNTIL you're able to accept that for every person who says "LOL GOOD ONE," another is going to be really unhappy with you for it, and that is their right. It doesn't make them humorless, it makes them human. It means they have sore spots that you don't have.

Lastly - because this is an English Essay on the Etiquette of Pranking, and my points must run "First," "Then," and "Lastly" - I gotta admit, I just didn't find the whole thing funny IN CONTEXT. The context, of course, being, "Hey, look! A bunch of Ravenclaws saying really cunty, out-of-character things, which is obviously a joke because none of them would seriously SAY something like that!" But look, I'm gonna paint myself as your target audience here, which is to say a longtime hogwarts_elite member (...holy shit, two years this week) who's pretty familiar with Ravenclaw house (I can't swear to this, but I THINK I've got more Claws on my friendslist than any other house) and I was not that blown away by the outrageousness. No, no, I'm not saying I think you guys are a bunch of bitches, but the fact is that I don't know everyone in the house, and for many that I do know, I don't know you well enough to say that you'd NEVER be a bitch, just that you USUALLY aren't. So no, I can't say that finding out that some of my friends sort of suck is my idea of a scream. "Aw, why is so-and-so acting like such a BITCH? I thought she was cool," was pretty much my end reaction. (It's nice to find out you all were joking and do not, in fact, suck, but neither is it all that funny, in my estimation.) And if I feel this way from MY perspective, which is to say that of an old-timer, I really can't imagine how alienated I would have felt witnessing this when I was a hatchling. I think I would have turned in my wand and backed away from the crazy.

So, to the Ravenclaws - kudos on coming up with and executing what was, in theory, a pretty epic joke. Just please try to understand why not everyone was happy about it?

Now go toss some jizz in the Snaps Cup and love each other a little bit more.