#painfully cis ravenclaw is a funny concept tho

[whetstonefires]

What is your Hogwarts house?

I don't think that's considered a question in good taste anymore lmao.

And, actually, I never liked it much even as a kid, because sorting discourse did not adhere to the framework shown in the text. It consistently drifted to rigorous application of the ruleset laid out by the hat in its little song, which was blatantly called out as a convenient simplification about one page after the formula was originally presented.

Like. The fact that each cohort is broken down into four roughly equal pods and lineage is clearly a major determining factor, as is personal preference, is made clear very early. This is a cultural institution, that shapes the characters who grow within it quite as much as it's assigned based on their innate traits, and within the framework of which people actively look for identity elements to define themselves by.

People in my high school would be sorting adult fictional characters and doing elaborate balancing of their True Natures as revealed by their various plot events and defining life choices and patterns of behavior in their own generally dramatic canons and I'd be like. Okay, what do you think they were like when they were eleven though.

What were their values at eleven? What parts of their potential to be Like That were developed enough to show up on a psychic scan by a sapient hat, at eleven? What backstories are we assuming they're coming into this from; this man is a duke from fantasy medieval europe are we going to analogize him to a posh normie family, or the magic snobs, or are we dimensional-teleporting his baby self into wizard school?

Look, assigning Hogwarts houses to grown-ass adults on the basis of their adult developed identities doesn't make sense, that is very clearly not how anything works, this is a child-sorting algorithm. You have to apply it to children or it's invalid.

...also I was a Ravenclaw. I knew this. Everyone who had ever met me knew this. Any and every online quiz I was convinced to take knew this. I was so boring. I could not even make a serious case for my being one of the people who'd argue my way into another category I was minorly qualified for, or get there on family values or something, because I didn't want to not be a dumb nerd and my family is also dumb nerds. I was such an easy sort it was no fun at all, I was a walking stereotype.

It was embarrassing, is what it was. I was a flat character with no depth, rip child me. It was like if you could fail astrology by adhering precisely to your horoscope.

(My younger sisters wanted to be Gryffindor but consistently tested Hufflepuff and vice versa respectively, and I do not at this time remember which was which. The tests that gave you percentile rankings did give them minors in the ones they wanted tho.)

Anyway looking back on this in reaction to your ask, I find myself reflecting that House affiliation actually worked very much like gender, in that the way it was assigned was treated in-story as being based on absolute inherent qualities that defined a whole person, but quite clearly per the text actually worked by finding a schema you had an acceptable percent overlap with at a young age, and then setting you up to be perceived and instructed through that filter for the rest of your life.

The affiliation had meaning! But it was mostly meaning derived from the affiliation, and its social weight.

The ability of characters to find the sometimes deeply hidden Potential to live up to the person they aspired to be, thereby retroactively justifying the Sorting they had cajoled their way into, is like a major story element, you know?

I feel like this is yet another one of those places where rowling is a fairly gifted drawer of engaging caricatures; where when she was drawing on her actual lived experience (as opposed to hearsay and stereotype) to create something imitating that thing (in this case Belonging To Category) by intuition, the result would have nicely proportioned parts and some solid symbolic details, and work on an internal level more-or-less consistently, if not necessarily according to any strict logic.

Rather than being realistic it had a feeling of reality, which is in itself a perfectly reasonable way to approach light fiction. I often find myself wishing I could work in this more gestural manner sometimes, instead of drilling relentlessly down to detail.

The trouble is that things like those verisimilitudinous gaps between what people do and how they interpret their own doing, which lend the setting a great deal of dynamism, are only sometimes intentional, and the longer she extends any one bit and the more seriously she attempts to take it, the more likely she is to fall into the gaps and loudly deny that she has done any such thing, while digging herself into a pit of stupid.