As I said
back in my Favorite Characters post on Newt Scamander, Hufflepuff never really
clicked for me as a house until I saw Newt in action in Fantastic Beasts. I always
just kind of went with the way a lot of other characters perceive them in the
books, as the “…and the rest” of Hogwarts.
Griffyndors are brave, Ravenclaws are intelligent, Slytherins are
ambitious (and, it should be said, frequently obsessed with blood purity,) and
Hufflepuffs? They’re the also-rans, the
kids without one of those three traits to recommend them.
Then
along came Newt. Here’s a guy with
plenty of bravery (he rescues and keeps magical creatures that can cause quite
a bit of damage if not handled properly, not to mention he confronts an
Obscurial,) intelligence (he’s an expert on diverse magical creatures and has
studied them extensively,) and
ambition (hey, dude traveled around the world to study/rescue magical creatures
and is now aiming to publish a book about it.)
There’s nothing less-than or also-ran about Newt, not at all. And yet, he’s a Hufflepuff, from the house
that everyone from Draco Malfoy (unsurprising) to Hagrid (Hagrid, guys!) likes to make fun of. Why?
The
answer goes back to the origins of Hogwarts, its four founders, and its
houses. While the other three were
enumerating which traits they prized most in prospective students, Helga
Hufflepuff is the one who said, “I’ll teach the lot, and treat them just the
same.” Rathering than picking and
choosing who was most worthy of a Hogwarts education, Helga wanted the doors
open to all students and made sure to take under her wing those that the other
founders had less interest in. That,
more than anything else, becomes what fans typically identify as traits of the
badgers: Hufflepuffs are hard-working,
loyal, and accepting of others, and they don’t mind being thought of as the
“loser house,” because they don’t put that sort of stock in what people think
of them. We see it in Newt. He employs his bravery on behalf of others
(beast and human alike,) he uses his intelligence to study misunderstood creatures,
and his ambition is to convince the wizarding world at large to be as accepting
of magical creatures as he is. What’s
more, he’s kind to virtually everyone he meets, and he speaks out on what he
feels are America’s backwards ideas about limiting association with Muggles (he
himself doesn’t look down on Jacob at all for being a Muggle.)
That’s a
house ideal I can totally get behind.
While I haven’t done the Pottermore sorting hat thing, I’d like to hope
it would put me in Hufflepuff, and I proudly wear my replica of Newt’s
house-colors scarf (I hadn’t previously given too much thought about which
house I might belong to but just sort of assumed I’d default to Ravenclaw,
without much excitement in it.) A poke
through the fandom online will offer up lists of reasons why Hufflepuffs are
awesome or why Hufflepuffs make the best friends/lovers/give the best hugs/what
have you.
But
there’s something else here that’s intriguing to me. By definition, Hufflepuffs can’t all be hard-working, loyal, and
accepting, because that’s not who Helga set out to teach. She set out to teach everyone the other three founders didn’t want. That means, while I’m sure there are plenty
of lovely Newts sorted into Hufflepuff on any given year, there are others who
aren’t the least bit friendly or open-minded – they’re simply not deemed brave,
intelligent, or ambitious enough for one of the other houses. Or, here’s a thought, maybe they have the
ambition for Slytherin but are Muggle-born.
In that case, their personality traits won’t overcome the so-called
“defect” of their lack of blood purity, not in a house like Slytherin, so
they’ll be dropped into Hufflepuff instead.
So, we
essentially have two groups within the same house: kids who live
by the Hufflepuff ideal, and kids who are there because of it. So,
presumably, at least half the kids in Hufflepuff (and that’s a conservative
estimate, I’d say, since there are tons of kids who don’t fit into neat
personality boxes) don’t want to be there, kids who chafe at the jokes other
houses make and are probably annoyed with other students in their house being
so friendly and damned nice all the
time.
That’s a
really fascinating dynamic to me. Do the
group-two students take out their frustrations on the group-one kids? If they don’t follow the Hufflepuff ideal, do
they learn to adopt it, either by Professor Sprout’s insistence that they all
treat one another fairly, or simply by the group-one kids’ attitude starting,
in time, to rub off on them? For being
considered the “overlooked” house of Hogwarts, Hufflepuff offers a lot of
interesting notions to explore.
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