Another look at House criteria (was Re: the Sorting Hat)

[potioncat]

No: HPFGUIDX 127703



Potioncat sits down with her hot chocolate and gives her Time Turner 
a twist. After reading a few minutes, she comes upon a post from 
2002. Jodel wrote this about the sorting hat:
 
>JOdel: 
> Well, if nothing else it is one powerfully charmed object (leading 
me to suppose that Godric was probably the Hogwarts Charms Master in 
the early days). I suspect that when the Sorting Hat was first 
being "programed" each  of the founders put it on and thought about 
what qualities their ideal student would have. Which gifts they 
wanted to train and guide. Creating a template, as it were. And the 
Hat compares each of the students it sorts to find the closest match.
 
snip> 

> I suspect that a few of the more questionable placements which we 
have seen, (Crabbe and Goyle, Longbottom) have less to do with some 
hidden quality which they *have* than with the absence of some 
quality which the founder of the house to which they might appear to 
be more suited would have demanded. 
> 
> For example; Longbottom *appears* to be best suited for Hufflepuff. 
Why?  Because of Hufflepuff's reputation as being a "lot of duffers"? 
Probably. Longbottom certainly appears to be a full-scale duffer. But 
was Helga selecting for duffers? No. Helga was selecting for good 
little  "other-directed" worker bees who perform as a team and don't 
rock the boat.
 
> Just about every quality she placed a premium on (fairness, 
loyalty, kindness) was aimed at greasing the wheels of cooperation 
within a  self-defined group, topped off by the endurance necessary 
to get the job done. 
> 
> I don't really get the feeling that Neville, for all that he needs 
a lot of  one-on-one help from others in his classwork, is really all 
that much of a  team player. He's much too self-contained for Helga's 
taste. Any of the other  founders valued that quality more than she 
did. Neville's detachment isn't of  the intellectual order that 
Rowena favored either, and ghod knows he is too direct for Salizar. 
Godric would have taken him on, and gladly, self-sufficiency and 
straightforwardness are qualities he apreciated. There's no mystery 
at all in Neville's placement. He's a Gryffindor.


Potioncat:
I sort of like the idea that someone was sorted into Gryffindor 
because they weren't good enough for Hufflepuff. Sort of sets our 
paradigm on edge. "The absense of some quality which the founder of 
the House... would have demanded" is an interesting slant as well. 
Assuming, as hardly no does, that all Houses are equal, it's not only 
a case of fitting well here, but of not fitting well there.

We've played Which House any number of times. In some case we've seen 
whether we were any good at it. In other cases we've looked at 
characters already known for their Houses and asked "Why?" So here 
are two  queries:

1.What quality did characters lack that sorted them out of a House?
Why didn't Sirius or Percy go to Slytherin? Why wasn't Cedric in 
Gryffindor? Why wasn't_______ in __________?

2. Are Slytherin and Hufflepuff the two over-flow houses? (That is, 
not loyal, not brave, not clever, not ambitious...Pureblood to 
Slytherin, Muggleborn to Hufflepuff.)

Potioncat