#i kinda based the editing around the luna one but it backfired | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

terapsina · 7 years

Text

Sorting 11 year olds in houses based on their strongest traits is a mess and here’s how I’d fix it.

This is something I remember thinking about quite a while back (like a few years back), but I don’t think I ever actually wrote it down so I felt like doing it now.

Right. So why do the kids get sorted by their strongest traits? Let’s take Harry for example, he’s already brave, do you think putting him in a different house would have suddenly made him less so? NO! Harry is brave to a point where he barely cares about his own well being. Why exactly was it healthy to actually encourage that characteristic in him?

How about the Ravenclaw kids? They’re put there because they’re driven by promise of knowledge. Would Cho or Luna have been any less curious and intelligent for being put in Hufflepuff?

Would Cedric be less loyal and hard working if he was a Slytherin?

Would Draco be less ambitious?

So back to my point, why sort by a personality trait that is already predominantly present in a kid? Wouldn’t it make more sense to sort by... not exactly their weakest trait, but by the trait that the young witch or wizard needs to nurture in themselves?

Lets go back to Harry. He was already brave as hell as an eleven year old kid, and he was loyal to Hagrid and Ron within like 10 minutes of meeting them. Neither did he need any lessons on hard work. What he did need was a bit more self worth and personal drive (basically the things the Dursleys had been trying to squash in him).

So wouldn’t it make more sense to place these kids in environments that would nourish the parts of them that hadn’t had a chance to develop yet? A school is supposed to teach kids and help them grow into well rounded, well adjusted adults. And that’s more likely to happen with as many different kinds of personalities around as possible.

Now I get how that could backfire, with mean kids naming the Gryffindor the house of cowards, and Ravenclaw the house of the stupid and so on and so forth. But honestly... mean kids are people and people can find anything to pick on someone about.

Now you might be asking how putting all the kids that need more ambition together would actually help them develop said ambition.

And you might be wondering about how sorting by the weakest trait is any better than sorting by strongest WHEN YOU SORT THEM WHEN THEY’RE ELEVEN-FREAKING-YEARS OLD.

And I can knock down both questions with one stone. It’s simple. Two sortings. First one when the kids start their 1′st year, when they gets sorted by the personality trait they need to work on. And then again when they start their 5′th year by the rules we’re all familiar with, in essence, by their strongest personality trait.

Ergo if there’s a kid that’s smart and clever and interested in finding out as much as possible about absolutely everything, but hasn’t needed to do a chore in their life and doesn’t really see the point of hard work, they’d be sorted in Hufflepuff when they’re 11. And spend four years in that house. But then they’d be 15 and get sorted again, and this time they’d be sorted Ravenclaw... or maybe they wouldn’t be, because in those four years this kid would have gown up a bit and their personality might have shifted and maybe the qualities of Hufflepuff WOULD be their strongest traits now. Or maybe they’d have grown more ambitious than they were and be sorted in Slytherin.

Basically you can see what I’m trying to get at here (in a manner that is rambly and convoluted and I’m so sorry).

And this would definitely help with inter-house unity too, because it’s not like best friends who spent their first four Hogwarts years together in Ravenclaw would stop being friends because one of them is now a Gryffindor and the other is Slytherin.

And seeing older kids actually spending time together and getting along would mean the younger kids wouldn’t avoid people from other houses like the plague either.

AND this would avoid any possibility of there being a house for ‘purebloods’. Hard for an elitist little brat to turn their nose up about the ‘lowly muggleborns’ when they share a dorm with two of them and the halfblood son of ‘those blood traitors’ too,

Oh and of course every teacher would be sorted again when they’d get hired (again by their strongest quality). And actually it should be a traditional for every new headmaster to be sorted again after that too (huh... but maybe by their weakest quality once more, I mean I’m absolutely thinking about Dumbledore here, but it seems prudent that the head of the school would publicly acknowledge their flaws. It even helps the first years: ‘see? even our headmaster has things he needs to work on in himself, you have nothing to be ashamed about.’).

So this is basically how I think the sorting system would make more sense (and be better for students too). It still probably wouldn’t be a perfect system, but I think it would kinda work.

edit: ALSO PART OF GRADUATION CEREMONY WOULD BE GETTING RESORTED FOR THE LAST TIME unless they become a teacher (ONLY THIS TIME ONLY THE PERSON UNDER THE HAT WOULD KNOW WHAT THE HAT TOLD THEM).

#hogwarts houses #hogwarts sorting #sorting system #hogwarts #hp #terapsina rambles #meta

20 notes · View notes