On the matter of a Single-Question Sorting Hat Exercise

[silveradept]

And speaking of anxieties, I wanted to talk some about melannen putting together a single-question Sorting Hat quiz, with a claim that it's based mostly on the canon of the Harry Potter books and the explicit point that the Sorting Hat is doing this to eleven year-olds, and not on the well-developed fanon that has followed and is commonly used in deciding things like Sorting Hat Quizzes that relies on someone's understanding of themselves as they are right now, instead of who they might have been at eleven.liv went over to another post to talk about how Slytherin is not necessarily the house of people who are certain of their place in the world, and it's a great secondary commentary about the descriptions of the houses and goes well with the more direct questions about house descriptions and the methodologies and assumptions of the situation that are in melannen's commentary section.

As it appears to me, the single question sort seems to judge your House based on two axes, knowledge and confidence. For example, Slytherin is the House of people knowing and having confidence in in their House. If, at 11, someone is confident in the house they're going into, and they know which house they're going in to, then they're likely to Sort Slytherin (assuming they don't convince the Hat otherwise). There's also an interesting discussion in the comments of the original post about whether knowledge and confidence is in the Hat instead of in oneself - a person who believes the Hat knows what house they're going to be in and has confidence in the Hat's ability to make those decisions might sort Slytherin. The Gryffindors sort knowledge and no-confidence, the Ravenclaws sort no-knowledge and confidence, and the the Hufflepiuffs sort no-knowledge and no-confidence. liv suggested that the Slytherins, as presented in the canon, have confidence and knowledge in where they ought to be, and a certain willingness to do what's necessary to achieve what they think they're owed.

For as much as it's difficult to imagine yourself as an 11 year-old staring down the Sorting Hat with everyone staring at you, the single question idea has a few permutations that could be explored, and I'm focused on one of them - specifically, that there's no space in the sort for someone who's confident about what other people think of them, but that isn't necessarily sure that's the part of them they want to go with for a situation that's going to determine their House setting for the next seven years. F'rex, throughout my primary schooling career, I was fairly easily classifiable as "the brainy one" (and that didn't leave, really, through the rest of schooling - but more on that in a bit), but even by 11, I was starting to get a little bit tired of that particular classification. Even though it was the way that I was going to relate to the world around, because I hadn't figured out anything else, I was beginning to feel like I was getting typecast, and that wasn't a good thing.

How might that translate into knowledge and confidence? It could be any of the possibilities of knoweldge and confidence together, depending on whose knowledge and confidence we're talking about. If we're talking about my confidence that everyone else knows what's going on and their confidence in me, and my lack of any other mode of relating to them, then yes, of course I have knowledge and confidence in my house (and it's not going to be Slytherin, which seems to be a particular fate of those who could have been Ravenclaws). Because there's no reason for me to do otherwise.

But by that point, too, I'd also been going to school with the same people for years as we shuttled up from classroom to classroom. There was an introduction of newer children into the grouping about this time who came from public school education (because Catholic education, you see), and that's when I first started getting some of the sense of being the weird kid. I mean, more so than the hints I was regularly getting about that from the cub scout troop that would blossom beautifully into Boy Scouts and joining the public schooling system myself. Children aren't kind to each other for a multitude of reasons, but the interactions I was having at this point would reinforce the idea of "well, id I'm brainy and anti-social, then I can avoid having to deal with the people who aren't being kind to me and, so long as I don't mess anything up, I'll be fine." Does it qualify as knowledge and confidence if you're charting the path for yourself for reasons utterly unrelated to the possible House you'll be going in to (and, as is pointed out in the comments thread of melannen's post, Ravenclaw are not always kind to even their own house, so the Hat might stall a bit on "Well, we could put this person in the house that will develop their brains, but at the cost of making them into an insufferable know-it-all with zero social skills." Incidentally, "social and emotional development" was the reason that I didn't get promoted up a grade or two, in addition to "would then be in the same grade as a sibling." Because, you see, sensitive children who cry at small things might not be ready to go up into an environment where they're always going to be a curiosity.) and are entirely doing this based on what everyone else expects you to do? Do you go with it because you don't have a different plan in life (which, at that time, I don't) or does the Hat see that you're on autopilot and start talking to you about what you really want and feel about the whole process? The problem being that we only see one Hat situation. We hear about others, but we don't get to see them go through the same process and know their situation well enough to make judgments about what the hat does or doesn't take into account. How much the Hat is its own entity and how much of it is what the child brings to it.

So, depending on where the knowledge and confidence come from, and what day it is, and what sort of terrible social or school trauma I'd suffered recently, I could go from "I know what house, and I know I'm right" (because that's the only house choice that would get me through all of this unscathed and without giving someone the opportunity to make fun of me for occasionally being wrong) to "I know what house, but I hope I'm wrong" (because I know what's expected of me, but I'm fucking tired of being seen one-dimensionally and want to go somewhere else), to "I don't know what house, but I'm sure I'll excel" (because while the defining traits of my life aren't yet set in stone, I'm going to kick the schoolwork's ass and take names) to "I don't know what house, and I really hope I'll get along with everyone" (because things aren't set in stone, and a lot of people seem to make fun of me when I'm wrong on something I'm normally pretty smart about, so maybe I should just hide myself entirely, maybe make a friend, and then just keep my head down and try to survive socially while doing well at my studies.) At 11, I went with the last one - because I could do the schoolwork easily, but the social bits were regularly a problem and source of pain for me. Because Tall Poppy Syndrome. And also because I had a common reaction to Tall Poppy Syndrome, which was to essentially go "Oh, gods, I'm above all of this crap and I don't want to get involved with anyone who thinks this is important and can I just get through and on to college where I don't have to hang out with anyone I don't want to, and where there's a higher probability of people who like the same things I do?"

Funny enough that I end up in Hufflepuff house, the house that values community and friendship, when I'm not all that good at making friends. For people who have met me, that might seem strange, as I have a finely-honed sense of being able to talk at length about things, make myself look silly in intentional and unintentional ways, and otherwise be a perfectly good conversationalist, interested person in topics, and all of that. So long, that is, as I have a hook to work with. An icebreaker, a shared interest, being at a topically themed space, a question. Any of those things are present and I can perform beautifully. (The specialty of the profession I picked has a fair amount of performance involved, so there's been plenty of practice.) But if you put me in a situation with people I don't know, without a hook in hand that will seem to start conversations, I'll be a wallflower. Or something that I'm not sure I'll be able to do competently, but that's more trauma-of-childhood related and I have to convince myself that Nelson Muntz isn't going to be right there when I fail to laugh at me when I fail the first time or first few times. If it looks like the place that I'm at already has established orders and pairings and things and they don't explicitly make themselves welcoming or otherwise have someone to draw people in, I'm not going to go up to them necessarily and ask to join in, because it's entirely possible they didn't want to have anyone else in heir circle. ("What are you waiting for, Silver, an invitation?" "Yes.") So, that fits melannen's description of Hufflepuff: being a person who's unsure of their place in the world and valuing a community around them as a thing that helps them find that place or otherwise anchor themselves. The community of Hufflepuff are the people, we're told, who build the staircase going down a cliff so that everyone else can get down it safely. And, at least according to the canon, Hufflepuffs don't have to be Always On like the other three houses seem to be.

It's a nice House for a person who gets way more extroverted at work than they might actually be at rest, who likes the conversations you can have with friends that aren't about who's right, but finding the ways to relate and encouraging each other in their endeavours. Sometimes (okay, often) with food and drink and a house involved so that everyone is at the table or the bar and participating and feeling at ease. But I might not have gotten there at 11, because there were a lot of factors involved in what I was like at 11 and how much of outside influences and thinking on my ideas the Hat would have accepted or interrogated.

Sorting is like a lot of things - something to hang your hat on as a part of your identity, in the same way that people in the United States often hang a large part of their identity on what they do for work, whether that work is inside or outside of the home, and what sort of religious affiliations they have, if they have any. Very rarely do people in the States seem to concentrate on the fact that capitalism is telling them that only those who go it alone achieve greatness (while downplaying hard the fact that most of those sole geniuses have teams upon teams of people that help implement their ideas or helped them develop the idea that became their signature knowledge) and that religion is often telling them (assuming they haven't altered or doctored their religious writings, e.g. TurboJesus) that only fools attempt to go it alone through the journey of life, and that those who achieve and value others, or hold back on their own enlightenment so that others can achieve it, are the people who should be remembered, treasured, and venerated. House affiliation, whatever it may be, is just a facet of someone's identity, and we can blame Rowling for presenting caricatures of each of the Houses to suit her plot requirements, rather than taking the time to flesh them out into such a way that the story she wanted to tell could have plausibly been achieved through friends in each House, heeding the warnings seeded by the Sorting Hat, rather than having a small group of people from a single House do all the heavy lifting on the saving the world bit, because it was narratively easier to have everyone clustered together.

And it's still fascinating to see that, all these years on, something that wouldn't have been very controversial at all in the world it was conceived in continues to evoke discussions of its implications in ours.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

html is broked

[silveradept]

Fixed nao. Less full of emphasis in unwanted places.

[wohali]

I still have not read these books, and have only channel-flipped (virtually) through the first couple of movies. The persistence of these themes suggests I really should read them at some point.

[silveradept]

There's also a lot of terrible things that have come to light with an author invested in messing with their canon after the books are done, but also that there's a lot of children behaving terribly without serious consequence, and adults behaving terribly to children, and adults behaving terribly. A lot of the things that get talked about in that universe as themes might be in defiance of the author but solidly supported by the canon.