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.

Thoughts on the Obscurial in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

(There be spoilers ahead.)

While Fantastic Beasts is definitely branded as a movie where some of the aforementioned fantastic beasts slip the leash and cause problems in the city – and that is a major part of the plot – it’s no mere lighthearted romp.  In the midst of the frantic creature-collecting is a new look at an insidious piece of magic that, to me, is might be the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in the Potterverse (that title had previously belonged to the graveyard scene in The Goblet of Fire – even though the later books/films get way darker, that one is just terrible every time – but I think this trumps that.)

An Obscurus/Obscurial.  Technically speaking, we probably got our first glimpse of this with the description of Dumbledore’s sister Ariana in The Deathly Hallows, but here, we see it, learn its name, and understand how the phenomenon works.  And it’s horrible.  A holdover from the days when Muggles burned suspected witches/wizards, the American wizards assume that Obscurials aren’t a thing anymore.  Newt knows better; he’s traveled the world and seen things that many assume no longer exist.  And really, with the paranoia about Muggles (nope – still not gonna say No-Maj) that runs through the wizarding society in the U.S., that desperate urgency for complete and total secrecy, it’s only natural that you could find an Obscurial somewhere like New York.

When the barest suggestion of witchcraft is enough to make others persecute you, you may feel that your only option is to persecute yourself for what you can feel stirring inside of you.  You hate it and fear it the way you know they would, you call it evil and try to clamp it down.  You take the hate others would have for you if they knew, and you swallow it.  Magic is like a spark, and you let it burn inside you because you’re too afraid to let it out and risk having anyone see its light.  So the spark smolders in your gut, in your heart, and you hate everything you are, which only makes you hate them for making you hate yourself.  When the hate saturates your skin and floods your vision, that’s when you can’t hold the magic inside you anymore.  It explodes out, raging like a forest fire, burning everything around you.  Then, when the wave of your destruction has blasted through everything, it soaks back into you, and you’re left standing in the ruin of what you’ve done.  More fear, more hate, and the cycle continues again and again until it eats your heart and there’s nothing left of you.

I mean… holy crap.  That is some seriously dark stuff, but it’s fascinating writing, too.  The first thing that came to mind was internalized homophobia, the darkness that can fester inside a person when they’re taught to believe that what they are is evil or unclean, a self-loathing that can lash out at others as well as themselves when it can no longer be contained.  Given the somewhat-unsure nature of this new series, I have no idea where we’re heading in the coming movies, but if they explore this incredible idea further – or give us others with the same complexity – the series has a definite chance of surpassing Harry Potter in my estimation.  Nothing but the most sincere props to Ms. Rowling.

Favorite Characters: Newt Scamander (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them)

As I said in my review, I’m officially sold on whatever the new Fantastic Beasts series has in store for us, and our new (unlikely) hero Newt is a huge part of that.  When it comes to Harry Potter, I’ve always been more about the supporting characters, but while I enjoy pretty much all the new characters we got here to varying degrees, Newt is definitely the biggest draw for me (a few background spoilers.)

Newt is the third in-universe character Rowling has given us who loves magical creatures, and where his beasts are concerned, Newt seems to hit a sweet spot right between Hagrid and Charlie Weasley.  Like Hagrid, this magizoologist adores his beasts to distraction, naming them and happily telling the story behind each one to anyone who will listen.  But at the same time, he doesn’t subscribe to Hagrid’s “precious little monsters” attitude – this is not a guy who’d try to raise a dragon or a giant spider as a pet.  As much as he loves his creatures, he does get that they’re ultimately still wild animals and have to be treated with the appropriate respect and caution.  In that way, he has more of Charlie’s practicality.  Newt is incredibly well-versed on all his beasts and approaches each one with the right level of discretion.  It’s true that a few of them escape his case, but it’s because of an inadequate lock rather than any active recklessness or complacency on his part.  In terms of responsibility, he’s a lot closer to Charlie than Hagrid.  (Speaking of Hagrid, Hogwarts apparently has a history of expelling wizards because of problems that arise out of their fondness for magical creatures – Charlie’s lucky he made it to graduation!)

Part of that responsibility and respect means that, while Newt collects and keeps beasts, he’s not forcing them to adapt to suit his whims.  On the contrary – he may keep them in his magical suitcase of TARDIS dimensions, but he’s turned its extremely-roomy confines into a wildlife sanctuary with multiple habitats and climate zones.  Because his main concerns are their safety and comfort rather than his wants.  Many of his creatures are hunted and attacked by wizards who fear and don’t understand them, while others are exploited by wizards for profit.  Newt doesn’t just collect and study them.  He rescues them, halts their premature extinction, and protects them from anyone who would do them harm.

I love that.  Newt is such a gentle, unimpressive-on-the-surface character, but I love that his strength comes out when he’s defending creatures who are more vulnerable than he is.  Even though many of them are more physically imposing, he knows the threats visited upon them by greed, fear, or ignorance, and he’ll fight tooth and nail to keep anyone from hurting them.  It’s a philosophy that doesn’t only apply to his beasts, mind you, though he does reserve his fiercest devotion to fighting on their behalf.  I like the respectful caution and soft reassurance with which he approaches the Obscurial, trying to talk down and soothe this volatile magical force.  When the gang is in trouble with MACUSA, I like that he reasons on his own behalf but pleads on Tina’s, never getting visibly upset until she’s the one at risk.  And while it’s partly informed by his British (rather than American) attitudes, I like the quiet stand he takes against the U.S. wizarding world’s stance on Muggles.  When someone like Tina calls Jacob a No-Maj, there’s at minimum a mild slur in her tone, but when Newt calls him a Muggle, he’s simply stating it as fact and doesn’t imply that Jacob is less-than because he can’t do magic.  I don’t think I ever really got Hufflepuff until seeing Newt, but now I’m totally pro-Hufflepuff.  Badgers forever!

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016, PG-13)

First off, I can I say how interesting it was to go into a Potterverse movie and not know what was going to happen?  I always watch an original film differently than I do an adaptation, and it was neat to have that original-film experience within such a familiar adaptation setting.  Anyway, I expected to enjoy this movie, but I’m almost a little surprised at how much I loved it (premise spoilers.)

In 1926, the globetrotting wizard Newt Scamander arrives in New York City.  A dedicated magizoologist, Newt is passionate about finding and protecting magical creatures that are threatened by the wizarding community (either exploited due to opportunism or killed due to fear and/or ignorance.)  He’s out of his element among the U.S. wizarding society, which is marked by stringent secrecy from the fear left by the country’s lingering Puritan influences, and he doesn’t exactly endear himself to ex-Auror Tina when a few of the creatures he keeps in his magical suitcase give him the slip and go walkabout.  The city is at a tipping point, magically, and it’s of vital importance that Newt, Tina, and a few other new friends recover the creatures before they draw the attention of the Muggles (yeah, I know American wizards say “No-Maj,” but I don’t care – Muggles forever!)

It’s not a perfect movie.  You can tell the plot is still kind of getting warmed up, and there are a few expositional missteps.  It doesn’t feel like it’s quite decided yet how much it wants to stand on its own vs. being tied to established Potter lore – the references we get to the original series feel a little conspicuous.  Also, with the multicultural wizard presence in New York, it is disappointing to see only one PoC character of any significance.  However, it does lay some wonderful groundwork for the new chapter J.K. Rowling is building here.  I love getting a look at wizards in another country and wish we could’ve gotten more of that, and the movie does a bang-up job exploring its main themes (I’ll save more spoilery thoughts on this for another post.) 

We’re still getting to know the new characters, but I’m pretty much sold.  Eddie Redmayne’s Newt is especially great – for me, the scenes of him looking after his beasts would be enough to cover the cost of admission.  I also love the inclusion of Jacob (Dan Fogler of 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Tony glory!), a Muggle who gets caught up in all the magical goings-on.  It didn’t really strike me until I saw Newt’s disapproval of American wizards’ strict rules concerning fraternization with Muggles, but the original books really don’t have any positive Muggle characters with important roles, so it’s nice to see magical and non-magical cooperation here.  Sisters Tina and Queenie (played by Katherine Waterson and Alison Sudol, neither of whom I’m that familiar with) are portrayed with classic night-and-day contrast without pitting them against each other or setting one’s methods up as indisputably “better” than the other’s, which I appreciate.  The film also features Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower’s Ezra Miller doing some fine work.

Oh yeah, and beasts!  They truly are fantastic.  I love them and all their havoc-causing ways.

Warnings

Fantasy violence, scary images, smoking/drinking, and thematic elements.