A Few Notes on Hufflepuff House (Harry Potter)

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.