I am annoyed because the vast majority of my social circle has started meaning the sortinghatchats version of Hogwarts houses when they say Hogwarts houses and I think it is a bad system. That is, now when I say “Slytherin” people think “Cares about their social circle as a primary, improviser as a secondary” and when I say “Gryffindor” people think “Cares about their deeply felt principles as a primary, charges at things as a secondary”, and so on, and this is not the thing I want to discuss when I talk about people’s Houses.
The primary thing is just a bad simplification of meta-ethics. Like, don’t call a person a Gryffindor, just call them an intuitionist, there is already a name for this thing. Ravenclaw primary is basically just moral realism with an intellectual aesthetic. The secondary thing is somewhat more interesting but I think it’s badly defined. What makes a Gryffindor “charging” different from a Slytherin improvising anyway? Their charge is supposed to inspire others? So Gryffs are basically just more-attractive Slyths now? What makes a Ravenclaw working hard to build tools and use them to solve problems any different from a Hufflepuff working hard to solve a problem? It seems like Ravenclaws are just Hufflepuffs who wait longer to pick a problem to solve.
I get that Hogwarts houses stick together a bunch of traits that shouldn’t actually necessarily be stuck together. Hufflepuffs are stubborn and hardworking and loyal and fair and patient and kind, Gryffindors are chivalrous and honourable and courageous and spirited and rule-breakers, Slytherins are cunning and ambitious and ruthless and look after their own, Ravenclaws are intelligent and curious and knowledgeable and witty. So what if I’m stubborn but selfish, rule-breaking but pretty cowardly, prideful but not too ambitious, witty but with no particular love for knowledge? Where do I fit? When a friend calls themself a Hufflepuff, do they mean they’re stubborn or that they’re kind?
So you have to separate it up somehow. You have a ‘primary’ section that details whether you’re more kind or brave or ambitious or curious, and a ‘secondary’ section that details whether you’re more stubborn or inspiring or sneaky or smart. But I think this can be done way better and I would like everyone to do it better.
Here is the version I use in my head.
A House is an ideal.
Imagine a great hero arrives one day and saves the wizarding world from a great evil. This hero experiences trauma and tragedy, perhaps losing their family or being injured in the war, but they are unbowed and unbroken. The bad guys are throwing everything they can at them to intimidate them and break them, but this hero can look them straight in the eye and charge forwards anyway, because they’re driven by a sense of purpose and a feeling they’re fighting for more than just their own survival. They acquire secrets from the past and great magics by questing far and wide and overcoming every challenge sent their way with a dauntless fighting spirit and endless enthusiasm and some help from their friends. They’re relentlessly aggressive in battle, and they always duel with a little gleam in their eye that says they’re right where they belong. The enemy try to turn them to the dark side but their bright, shining inner principles won’t let them betray their cause. In the end, no matter how powerful their enemies are or how far their reach extends, the enemy breaks before our hero does. And they have a limitless store of energy that lets them play and feast and write songs and play pranks whenever they’re resting between battles. When they win, they return to a position of service to the people rather than grasping at leadership; they were doing this for principles, not for power. That’s the Ideal of Valour, the thing Gryffindors would rest happy if they felt they had lived up to.
Imagine some other threat arises, something that hero can’t batter down with their heroic bravery. Perhaps the hero topples the bad guy and the power vacuum needs filling and there’s a bunch of competing factions dancing on the line between tense truce and outright hostility. And then in the centre of the chaos emerges another hero. They belong to no particular faction, but their absolute loyalty to the welfare of the people has been tested time and time again and been proved absolutely unshakeable. Make peace, they plead. And it’s a long, slow process, but eventually it just… happens. The hero has many friends - they’ve shown themselves a reliable ally to many people in the past - and besides which nobody could seriously plot to assassinate someone so relentlessly cheerful and friendly. They see the best in everyone and work to nurture it, lend a helping hand to every young wizard who might have a bright idea that would build new systems and a new stronger peace, and somehow still make time for their friends. Occasionally there’s a crisis and the hero is, without exception, to be found in the centre of it, working through the night for as many nights as it takes. They make promises, promises that a certain individual won’t be harmed or a certain task will get done, and people lean on them because they’ve never been known to break their word. They are fair and just and kind, both as a negotiator and as a leader, and they eventually bring everyone together into a whole that incorporates the best ideas from all the factions. There’s some rogues, some battling, and the hero responds with endless patience, always on the front lines when they’re needed there and on the back lines performing healing when that becomes a priority, not necessarily winning every battle but stubbornly winning the war. That’s the Ideal of Reliability, the thing a Hufflepuff would be lucky to live up to.
And then maybe some day the wizarding world is in danger again, maybe this time from an ancient monster straight out of myth and song, brought out of hiding to strike by some ancient curse, and nobody can quite figure out what it is or how to harm it or what it wants or where it’s coming from. It doesn’t take three deaths before our new hero walks out of the depths of the library sometime in the small hours, triumphantly clutching a book. It’s in Latin, but that’s okay, learning Latin was part of the fun and the hero is kind of wondering if they’ll have time to pick up Ancient Greek as well when this blows over. They come up with a plan to take the monster down, and it works, because they thought of everything that could possibly go wrong. Of course they did; this is fun to them, this kind of challenge is what they do five of to relax in the evenings, they’ve played out this situation fifty times before in geeky roleplaying games. They never quite lead the charges against the threat, but they’re always there in the background, figuring out the passcodes to get through the ancient doors by cobbling together information from books they read for curiosity’s sake long ago and wild deductions they make on the fly, sparring with their friends with sarcasm and wit in battles of skill to match the duels themselves, escaping every inescapable-seeming situation with a trick they figured out while experimenting to see how magic works. And the achievement doesn’t stop when the threat is put down, because how could it? They love knowledge, they’re doing this for love, not any other motivation. In the hero’s life they come up with a cure for a deadly wizarding plague, reform parts of the ministry to be more efficient using spells of their own refinement, learn to listen to the winds and read the skies and snatch people’s secrets from a mere glimpse of their eyes, and do all of it with a sense of vague aggravation that they’re being dragged away from reading their books. Sometimes there are challengers, sometimes even challengers they actually have to fight rather than just deflecting with clever words, and the challengers very quickly realise that no amount of duelling skill is a match for the knowledge of thousands of years passed down through written words and contained within one ferociously precise mind. That’s the Ideal of Genius, which Ravenclaws dream of living up to.
And then there’s the individual who survives all of these threats, never quite standing up and declaring themself to be the hero, never coming forwards so boldly, but quietly growing stronger all the time. They run when threatened, retreat wherever their position is compromised, strike only when sure of victory. Very few people end up actually crossing them, because most people have been subtly manoeuvred to be acting for their benefit, but those who do don’t live to talk about it. They may not have the duelling skills of a hero, but they’re tricksy, they think things through. Everyone calls them a coward when they run off in the midst of a fight, but everyone owes them their lives when they reappear from a side tunnel to surprise-attack the enemy from behind at the perfect moment. They acquire power and secrets by pretending to ally with the evil power, all the while influencing the threat to be more precise, think more strategically, inflict less collateral damage. They rise to the top of the new government by flitting between whichever factions seem currently most powerful. They carefully shape the other heroes with a succession of well-chosen mentors and gifted books, sometimes openly, sometimes anonymously. And when some threat finally comes along that does threaten them, they are ready for it, they have power and networks and tricks and traps aplenty. They worry about the threat at first, but then it stumbles afoul of four of the twenty traps they set for it and they shrug and go back to secretly ruling the wizarding world. That’s the Ideal of Plotting, which any good Slytherin plans to live up to or at least help their protegees to get closer to.
Of course, no person really lives up to their ideal. I might want to be a glorious hero who fearlessly charges down dragons in the service of her cause, but in reality my willpower is shaky and my guiding principles aren’t quite clear enough. This is where the splitting up happens.
Your desire is what you wish you could be. When you dream dreams of glory and greatness and heroics, what kind of dreams do you dream? Do you see yourself leading the charge against the darkness, building communities and defending and healing, coming up with plans and discovering ancient secrets, or plotting in the background while surviving and gaining power? What is it that you long for? What do you wish you were good enough to become?
Your pride is the quality in yourself you take pride in. A Gryffindor takes pride in the moments in their life when they bravely stood up for others, when they won battles with others or with their fears. A Ravenclaw takes pride in what they know and have discovered, the clarity or speed of their thoughts and the potential of their mind. A Hufflepuff takes pride in their reputation for reliability, the friendships they’ve built, and the things they achieved by force of sheer hard work. A Slytherin takes pride in all the moments they might have lost and yet didn’t, their ability to survive and escape, all the tricks they’ve successfully pulled off and all the plans that came to fruition.
It doesn’t actually have to be what you’re good at. Someone who is poor and doesn’t have much can take pride in the few nice things they’ve managed to acquire. You can be a stupid Ravenclaw who takes pride in the few things they have managed to figure out. You can be a cowardly Gryffindor who treasures the one memory they have of themselves successfully overcoming a fear.
Desires and prides just captures the basic distinction between someone who isn’t brave but longs to be, and someone who takes deep pride in their bravery and wants to do more of it. You might long to be smart enough to live up to a Ravenclaw ideal, but accept that you never will be and take pride in your Hufflepuff determination. You might dream of bravely leading charges like a Gryffindor, but in practice take more pride in the times you’ve narrowly avoided losing with a clever trick than the times you’ve bravely won.
There’s also comforts; the thing you feel comfortable and natural doing. Again this doesn’t have to be what you’re good at, but it usually will be. It’s the Ideal you feel at home mimicking, that comes as easily to you as breathing. Perhaps you wish you were a community-builder and take deep pride in the times you’ve displayed integrity, but in practice you’re comfortable with curling up in the library with a book so that’s what you fall back on; you have Hufflepuffs desires and prides but Ravenclaw comforts. Perhaps you wish you were a long-term planner with tricksy plots and you take pride in the times a plan has successfully worked, but you’re much more comfortable solving your problems by hitting them with hammers; you have Slytherin desires and prides but Gryffindor comforts.
There will also be some variation within houses; a Gryffindor trying to live up to the Ideal of Valour will look a little different to a Gryffindor trying to live up to the Ideal of Chivalry or of Fearlessness. A Ravenclaw aiming for the Ideal of Wisdom will be a quite different person to one aiming for the Ideal of Wit.
Some Ideals are somewhere on the border. Is Patience an Ideal of the Hufflepuffs or the Slytherins? Is Cunning Slytherin or Ravenclaw? Is Honesty a Hufflepuff Ideal or Ravenclaw? How do we distinguish between the Honour of a Gryffindor and the Integrity of a Hufflepuff? These are the people I would call Slytherpuffs or Slytherclaws or Ravenpuffs or Gryffinpuffs and it is up to them to choose with which other people they wish to study and grow, where they feel at home and which other Ideals feel closest to theirs.
Choice is paramount. It doesn’t matter if your desires, prides and comforts are all Slytherin; if you choose to follow a Gryffindor ideal, for whatever reason, you are a Gryffindor. If your desires are Slytherin, your prides are Ravenclaw and your comforts are Hufflepuff, it’s your own choice which is more important to you.
But yeah, desires/prides/comforts seems to work well, to me. I, for instance, have very much Hufflepuff desires, Slytherclaw prides, and Gryffindor comforts. I choose Hufflepuff. I want to tell people that I live up to an Ideal of Reliability, rather than an Ideal of Valour. I follow the footsteps of Helga. But I’ve called myself all the Houses in the past because I wasn’t separating clearly whether I was talking about what I am usually, what I consider to be my best moments, and what I long to be.
And we see this kind of thing play out in the Potter books! Hermione has Ravenclaw prides and Ravenclaw comforts, but she chooses to follow her Gryffindor desires. Neville may not be very good at the Gryffindor virtues, and probably has Hufflepuff comforts, but he has Gryffindor prides.
Frankly, though, you could sort yourselves based on Gryffindor=red, Ravenclaw=blue, Hufflepuff=yellow and Slytherin=green. You could do Gryffindor=fighter, Hufflepuff=cleric, Slytherin=rogue, Ravenclaw=wizard. Just please discuss meta-ethics without passing it through a Harry Potter filter. Meta-ethics is interesting on its own!
I liked this a lot aesthetically. The key question here is what problem we are trying to solve. To me it seems that what we’re getting at here is creating a typology of heroes according to the skills they bring to bear. Here, “hero” is a person who creates (or tries to create) large impact on the world, positive according to some reference system of ethics (otherwise they would be a “villain”).
Now, it seems to me that if we forget about Harry Potter and try to solve this problem for the real world, we will arrive at slightly different categories. I propose the following types:
* Poet: A hero who educates the multitudes and inspires them to great deeds. This includes great artists, writers and political thinkers.
* Courtier (Senator?): A hero who is good at navigating politics and getting people to do what they want (a.k.a. manipulating). This includes great politicians and businessmen.
* Vizier (General?): A hero who is good at administration and optimization of complex organizations. This includes great high ranking public servants and managers. Usually these people are not as recognized by history as the others.
* Scholar: A hero who is good as solving complex problems that require a combination of knowledge, creativity and abstract thought. This includes great mathematicians, scientists and engineers.
Of course, often a hero needs some combination of several of these skillsets. Also, the desires/prides/comforts division is as applicable here as in Hogwarts Houses.
I guess we can roughly round them as Poet = Gryffindor,
Courtier
= Slytherin, Vizier = Hufflepuff, Scholar = Ravenclaw, but these are not exactly the same.