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).
no subject
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).