Hogwarts Sorting: Why I Hate It

[extrapenguin]

We've all encountered it: "Here is a post sorting these characters from an unrelated canon into Hogwarts Houses!" and then the inevitable ten billion comments arguing that no, character X is totally a Hufflepuff/no, a Slytherin! etc. I have a number of problems with Hogwarts Sorting, so, here goes.

1. Oversimplification of characters
My biggest bugbear is that it inevitably degenerates into "is this character heroic, smart, ambitious, or hardworking?" (or some other tetrachotomy of plain adjectives), and since almost all characters worth thinking about contain multitudes and thus fit more than one category, it's meaningless. The reasons I like characters are their three-dimensional living, breathing complexity (or potential for it), and asking "But which one-dimensional archetype does the character belong to?" is the antithesis of it. Then there are the questions of interpretation: is this character's hard-workingness a reflection of their ambition, or do they only appear as ambitious because they're so hard-working? We don't know, and the question might be relevant under some contexts, but it's much more fun and productive to contemplate outside the Hogwarts house system, where the categories have so much baggage from Harry Potter canon that the categorization is skewed by unconscious biases to stick the faves into the heroic house(s) and the villains into the villain house.

Additionally, this whole thing encourages the "archetype plus 1-3 quirks" characterization style that I hate. Instead of seeing the character as in canon (and, okay, maybe simplifying based on that if necessary), people just go "oh, X is such a Gryffindor!" and ignore all the messy, loose bits that make the character actually interesting. It's reflected in fic, and it's reflected in people's discussions. This happens regardless of the archetype chosen, so Hogwarts houses aren't solely to blame, but they are part of a phenomenon I loathe and wish would go away. (Since it culminates in people simplifying X into an archetype, and saying "Oh I don't think X could ever do [thing X did in canon, repeatedly, which the narrative called into attention constantly]" based on the archetype they consider X to be a part of to be incapable of doing the thing.)

2. Houses ill-defined but also 100% British
In addition to the above, there's also the fact that the categories themselves are nebulously defined! We get a few descriptors of each house, but much more for eg Gryffindor than Hufflepuff, so a lot of the house sorting definitions are fanon – and different people have osmosed different pieces of the fanon; cue lots of arguing with shadows.

The houses were conceived as part of the British boarding school book tradition, as well as as a metaphor for different kinds of schools in Britain, where Slytherin is representative of exclusive private schools, and thus the entire Hogwarts house system is inextricably tangled up with class in a way that fandom ignores. It's also inextricably tangled up with Britain and the British boarding school genre and Britishness, and the further away from that cultural context you go, the more it turns into ripping the characters from their roots and pushing the corpses around in meaningless piles while they drip blood and viscera onto the ground in a perfect metaphor for British imperialism. It is often like trying to decide whether a shape is a square or a triangle, when the shapes are in fact all circles of varying colors.

3. Ubiquitous and inescapable
Regardless, if this were restricted to only a few people in some fandom corner, I'd just roll my eyes and move on, but it's absolutely everywhere, inescapable. I get into a new fandom and there's debate whether a character is in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw, and the only thought I can muster is that the entire dichotomy misses the point of the character; the character doesn't belong on one side of the line in the sad, but comfortably occupies a territory around it, unaware that people might even draw a line there.


In conclusion, I just find it unhelpful, unfun in the way it just ... disregards all the things I like about the characters (their background and complexity), and inescapable. Stuff like the sortinghatchats system attempt to fix it by making it a matrix and actually defining the categories, but it's still tied to its Hogwarts past that clings to it like the frost to a traveler at the gates, and would've been better served severing the tie, though that'd have meant even fewer people would've heard of it. Categorization using Magic: the Gathering colors, brought up by ehyde, is more interesting and has less problems, since it's meant to be game mechanics based and the five colors should be roughly equal in game balance. Other sorting systems, like horoscopes and MBTI ("horoscopes for middle management") are also uninteresting, though due to the way sorting into them is less ubiquitous and there are more categories, I do not loathe them quite as much.

Comments

[chromemuffin]

Ah, everything I have ever felt regarding the Hogwarts Houses, stated concisely and with excellent metaphors! I feel like this line just about sums up every issue I've had with trying to sort characters into these four houses: "is this character's hard-workingness a reflection of their ambition, or do they only appear as ambitious because they're so hard-working?" There are also those characters whose ambitions are heroic in nature, and very few who are purely "smart/knowledge-seeking" without being ambitious or hardworking as well.

(also 100% British is a very good point! I've had people ask me to make a four house system for a Japanese school of magic which is...?? not a thing they would do?)

All in all, attempting to sort people, including good characters, into any classification system just irks my psychologist self. :p

[extrapenguin]

(also 100% British is a very good point! I've had people ask me to make a four house system for a Japanese school of magic which is...?? not a thing they would do?)
Hm, good point that the whole "let's sort people" urge is also at least partly cultural, in addition to this particular sorting system being tied to one specific culture! (In Finland, division into houses would be alphabetically by surname. At most, in old times, based on region one hailed from.)

[chromemuffin]

Indeed! Dividing ourselves into groups may be human nature, but each region and culture has different groupings they would use! In Japan, it would either go the way of private tutors, schools for the children of nobility, or lessons run out of temples in towns and villages. If they did all attend the same school, it'd be divided by social class or profession, with no trace of animal mascots in sight.

[extrapenguin]

OH YEAH animal mascots were also a part of Hogwarts canon! I have completely forgotten their existence, lol. A lot of it is very, very British in an inescapable way.

(And in Finland, the Swedish-speaking ruling class's children would be sent to a different school for the "better folk" that had a different magic tradition entirely, methinks.)

[china_shop]

Additionally, this whole thing encourages the "archetype plus 1-3 quirks" characterization style that I hate.

Haha, yes. *sigh*

I have so little familiarity with Harry Potter generally (it mostly just passed me by) that I find it reasonably easy to ignore this phenomenon, because my eyes just skate past, but I can totally see how annoying it would be, especially if you're looking for in-depth character meta!

I do occasionally wonder about enneagram types, which at least allow for healthy/unhealthy movement along axes, but I myself am a very a-typical One, so it's not like I see those as little boxes characters need to fix into. For me, it's more about tendencies and patterns of behaviour: under stress, people like this tend to get more like that. And then see if that movement rings true for that character.

ETA: And then forget all about it and just write fic. *g*

[extrapenguin]

I did read all 7 books, and they were a decent enough combo of British boarding school/children's lit (à la Enid Blyton) and fantasy at the start, but then did a badly executed subgenre change. Not the best lit I've read, and not something I'd have expected to become so popular, even if I did read them because of the popularity.

Hm, good point about the enneagram allowing division into 9×3 types, instead of just 9, what with the 4w5 and 5w4 being different types etc. The more types, the less grossly inaccurate the typing will be, and the more nuance can be preserved.

And then forget all about it and just write fic. *g*
LOL, yes. It can be interesting as an academic exercise, I guess, but it is not useful (or occasionally the opposite of useful) for ficwriting and characterization.

[china_shop]

I read the first three books and saw the first three films, but I never cared about the characters, so the films were just confusing. Plus I was always indignant that Diana Wynne Jones and Margaret Mahy weren't getting more attention, when there was so much attention on that particular genre. ;-P

The thing I like best about personality typing systems is that they remind me that it's not that everyone else is trying to be like me and doing it badly -- they're being themselves extremely well! So it makes me less judgy. *g*

I'm not sure Hogwarts Houses would have the same effect.

[extrapenguin]

I never watched any of the films; I've never been big on audiovisual stuff. (I only get into fandoms for such if the canon has subtitles. *g*)

The thing I like best about personality typing systems is that they remind me that it's not that everyone else is trying to be like me and doing it badly -- they're being themselves extremely well!
That is an interesting use for them I haven't encountered yet! Also, what do you mean, other people aren't just imperfect imitations of me? Thinking about Hogwarts Houses, I doubt they'd have the same effect, because they're just "are you brave, smart, loyal/hardworking, or ambitious/evil?" and those aren't even archetypes, just adjectives of which most people are two or more.

[schneefink]

I do agree with you on all points. I just, uh, sometimes still do it for fun. I like thinking about how a character might develop differently depending on which House he was in, i.e. which aspects of his character were most encouraged, and how they are perceived based on that, and how that influences characters' relationships. There are some HP AUs that I like a lot. But sorting characters in a vacuum, so just because they "clearly belong to X House", is imo silly and impossible.

[extrapenguin]

I don't actually mind it in the context of HP AUs! There's a reason for sorting them, then, and my feelings on setting change AUs aside, the way the character was raised would definitely affect them.

[hamsterwoman]

MBTI ("horoscopes for middle management")

Haha, I've not heard that characterization before, but that's really funny!

Anyway, I do love sorting characters as a pastime, and for me, the more systems the merrier -- Hogwarts houses is a quick an easy one (though, yes, in the non-matrixed form, so rough as to be meaningless for many characters), but I'm happy to explore any kind of division, like Hexarchate factions or whatever.

But this is a great and very fair point:

people just go "oh, X is such a Gryffindor!" and ignore all the messy, loose bits that make the character actually interesting. It's reflected in fic, and it's reflected in people's discussions.

Obviously, fanon tends to drift away from canon in general, and people oversimplify characters regardless, but it's certainly true that once you have a simple category to stick a character in and calcify your thinking of them as belonging to that category, it's a lot easier to ignore / forget everything that doesn't fit that category.

For me, the fun of sorting is in taking a character I'm interested in and holding them up to a variety of sorting systems and seeing where they would fit in with each taxonomy. Often there isn't a good fit in a particular one, but examining a character through that lens brings into relief some aspect of their personality I hadn't previously considered, or had not considered in that context. Or it makes me realize that, viewed through this taxonomic approach, they have a lot in common with this other character from the same or different canon, and it would be very neat to see how the two of them would react to each other.

But I can definitely see how the ubiquitousness of it would be really annoying if it's not your own cup of tea, or if it renders the fanon less interesting (the characters I tend to be most interested in sorting are ones from canons with not a lot of fanon floating around, or where I'm not part of the fanon discourse).

[extrapenguin]

The thing with systems is that they're all tied to their contexts, so while I do accept thinking about characters in H*archate factions, or Hogwarts Houses, or Avatar Nations in the context of a H*archate/Harry Potter/A:tLA AU, it just ... doesn't make sense outside the context of the world. The rootedness applies to the systems in addition to the characters, and removing both from their contexts just makes it an exercise in frustration.

For me, the fun of sorting is in taking a character I'm interested in and holding them up to a variety of sorting systems and seeing where they would fit in with each taxonomy. Often there isn't a good fit in a particular one, but examining a character through that lens brings into relief some aspect of their personality I hadn't previously considered, or had not considered in that context. Or it makes me realize that, viewed through this taxonomic approach, they have a lot in common with this other character from the same or different canon, and it would be very neat to see how the two of them would react to each other.
I guess I just don't "need" sorting to get to do this? I do most of my contextualizing via fic, anyway, and it just ... doesn't seem useful or interesting. It's also often presented as a way of figuring out The Truth of the characters, instead of a neat classification exercise or whatever.

[zeest]

Yeah I'm not fond of Hogwarts sorting either. I only find it useful as a shorthand for the more prominent aspects of a character's personality and their role in the story, but it's not something I would use myself and can't muster any interest in any extended discussion on the sorting.

[extrapenguin]

Even for shorthanding the more prominent aspects, wouldn't some other method of description or classification be more useful?! Like "The Wise Mentor" or "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" or "they are very inquisitive and shy" or whatnot. And the extended discussions inevitably descend into wank about what it means to be Slytherin or whatever.

[zeest]

Yeap, there are definitely other more useful methods of description! But people will still use the Hogwarts housing sometimes and that's the only useful thing about it for me. And like you said, there are better ways though I think all shorthand descriptions will be lacking in some way unless the characterisation is really that thin.

And yes, the inevitable descend into wank... I just... really have zero interest in that.

What your characterization reminds me of

[ng_moonmoth]

"Oversimplification of characters"; "Houses ill-defined"; "Ubiquitous and inescapable" -- this has a way-too-close similarity with gender, no matter whether the culture recognizes just the common two, or has a few more thrown in for good measure. So why not think of a house as one's Hogwarts gender?

OK, let me try a thought experiment. Suppose a Malfoy got sorted into Hufflepuff. Given that they, and their whole family, would expect them to be a Slytherin, does that make them a trans Hufflepuff? Are they at all likely to handle this well? And what about their relationship with their family if they embrace their Hufflepuffness?

And your thought about someone where there's debate about which house someone belongs to, that they "comfortably occup[y] a territory around [the line], unaware that people might even draw a line there", describes my gender identity perfectly. So thanks, I'm going to think of house identification as Hogwarts gender from now on. I bet it makes a whole lot more sense that way.

ETA: Oh yeah, "line in the sad" is a great typo!

Re: What your characterization reminds me of

[extrapenguin]

Huh, "hogwarts gender" is a pretty decent analogy! I'm not really up enough on Harry Potter canon or trans experiences to be able to comment on the extended idea, but it'd make an interesting fic if nothing else.

Oops! Well, at least it was hilarious. It can stay. :P

[(Anonymous)]

Never quite got into the sorting hype, partly for the ideas you listed above (especially the grafting of sorting/houses onto characters from wildly different cultures) but also because I thought that sorting was essentially based on what you, the sortee, values the most and not an objective assessment of your personality. For example: Harry and Hermione both personally value bravery and courage, and so the hat sorts them into Griffindor over Slytherin & Ravenclaw respectively.

[extrapenguin]

That is an interesting and valid viewpoint, and one that's very underrepresented in a lot of sorting discussions, where it's mostly about the character's True Nature. I think I'd actually be more into the type of sorting you envisioned, where sorting would be more about "What would this character choose in this situation?"

[rheasilvia]

I didn't even like the house system in Harry Potter, where I think it basically dooms generations of children to be pressed into generally socially acknowledged and enforced stereotypes. (Especially harmful in the case of Slytherin, but also the other houses, really...)

[extrapenguin]

Indeed – it's meant to be a commentary on class issues and whatnot, so it works on a more meta level, but on the Watsonian level it's just terrible.

[alasse_irena]

Yes... The fact that Hogwarts is so prestigious in-world is kind of alarming to me because frankly it's a terrible school!

[krait]

I don't mind Sorting characters, in the sense that if you want to create an OC/work with a minor character whose House is never mentioned/crossover another canon's characters into the HPverse, you do need to spend five minutes working out what House they'd be in. Enough weight is placed on House that it's going to influence the story in some way.

However, I was never into the 'intricate descriptions of the character meeting the Sorting Hat and being Sorted' thing that was very popular in certain categories of HP fanfic; I found them unfun in the same way as lengthy wardrobe and hairstyle descriptions.

Horoscopes For Middle Management might actually be my least-favourite sorting system, though how much of this is due to the overwrought pretension of it all, and how much to my utter inability to remember random strings of letters, I couldn't say.

[extrapenguin]

Horoscopes For Middle Management has the disadvantage of middle management actually believing in it, which brings it down a lot. Also the entire pretension of it and the way the practitioners think it explains all the things.

Sorting characters in the Harry Potter universe is 100% fine, but people use it as a be-all end-all character describer, even when it's clear they never intend to work out a crossover. It is super annoying.

[krait]

Yeah, half the pretension is in the level of belief invested in it. (The other half's in the level of belief they've invested in its not being horoscopes.)

I really don't get the "Sorting characters for the sake of it" thing, either! For a fic, sure, but I can't quite grasp the point otherwise, except as a five-minute entertainment when sitting on the train or something. I can't imagine trying to use it as a ~deep insight~ into a character! :P Anything that can be summarised by a singing hat is probably not that deep.

[extrapenguin]

Well, to be fair to MBTI, it is based on something one at least technically has an input on, instead of just birth date. Unfortunately, people believe in it.

Hm, "five-minute entertainment categorization exercise" would be a pretty apt description of the maximum use of Sorting, though even then I'd rather divvy them up into categories not based on Hogwarts.

[alasse_irena]

I don't think I have as intense problems with seeing people sort characters into Hogwarts houses as you do (I'm still at the rolling eyes and letting it be stage), but I definitely have problems with how often in my life people ask *me* what Hogwarts house I'm in, and then when I tell them I don't feel any particular allegiance because real people don't sort tidily into ambitious/academic/brave/just, and then they nod safely and go "mm, probably a Hufflepuff? Or a Ravenclaw. You like reading."

I have equal problems with the way people refer to they're MBTI type as though this is something objective and inherent about them, not an externally constructed system (not to mention it's based on a bunch of simplistic binaries). When I see in people's sidebar on Tumblr like [name]|23|autistic|bisexual|INFJ and it bothers me that INFJ is being given the same kind of position and those other categories...

I'm expressing myself very badly but I hate categorising people and thus appreciated this post.

[extrapenguin]

When I see in people's sidebar on Tumblr like [name]|23|autistic|bisexual|INFJ and it bothers me that INFJ is being given the same kind of position and those other categories...
TBH, as a (spiritual) old, I would not give my name or age anywhere, ever, so I'm too busy side-eyeing that to really get up to the INFJ bit, lol. I guess people are allowed to build their self-identification around whatever, even if you and I think it's super dumb, but trying to classify other people despite objections is skeevy. (Classifying characters is merely pointless, see rant.)