Just some food for thought.

[rogueslayer452]

I always found it interesting that Harry Potter fans are well aware how flawed, archaic and damaging the Hogwarts Housing system is, as there's been plenty of discussions/essays/metas about how no House defines who you are, and yet for some reason the fandom itself becomes so intensely focused about which House they belong to. We take it so seriously that it actually becomes part of critical debate when deciding which fictional character from other fandoms gets sorted into which House, even more so then for ourselves.

It's similar to horoscopes, in a way. Most people know horoscopes are bullshit because the descriptions are so incredibly generic it could mean anything for anyone regardless what sign you looked at, and yet whenever we come across them we cannot help ourselves from looking at the description for our particular sign and when we see something that we personally agree and associate with, there's a little sense of validation and being like, "yeah, that is so me."

Just a random observation that I found fascinating, is all.

Comments

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

I have conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I kinda see it as being one of those things that, despite the many mature themes in the HP books, definitely keeps them in the middle grade category. (Don't get me wrong, I love them, but there's a lot of "oh right, this is for kids" reminders.)

However, I do also think it can be seen as more complicated than it first appears - the problem is the books don't delve into that much. Gryffindors tend to choose a "knight" and follow him or her and that legion. This is usually a desirable trait as it means you're generally selfless, so you get "good" out of it. But Peter and Percy's knights and legions were the worst. The reasons people follow their "legions" don't have to be good. Slytherins, meanwhile, tend to think of themselves and have a narrow list of priorities when it comes to other people. But this doesn't have to make you a bad person - but if you're mostly looking out for yourself and one other person, it might make you do bad things. And so forth. That's what I get out of the books, anyway - not sure it really could be applied to RL.

We do sometimes look for things that aren't there, true. Especially when you notice that sometimes traits will actually be the same thing, but with different wording, or they'll be quite generic once you take away certain wording.