Photo courtesy of flickr.com
Your hands tremble as you type your new username. You are nervous. Nervous like an 11-year-old wizard and not a college student ignoring lecture. You scroll through your options, careful in choosing. It feels as though J.K. Rowling herself asks “Dawn or Dusk?”
This is it. You cross your fingers, hoping for Gryffindor. You wait for the page to load. And then,
“Hufflepuff?” you scoff.
One by one, the Harry Potter generation logged onto Pottermore to receive our official Hogwarts sorting. Countless fans were dismayed by the results, including celebrities.
In 2015, Tom Felton, who portrays Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter series, was shocked to find himself sorted into Gryffindor.
For similar quizzes, no one would have cared. We would have shrugged and moved on. This was different in some way that made sense to us all. We evaluated, dug deeper into ourselves and society to justify our results. The more we thought, the more we realized the array of bravery, intelligence, kindness, and ambition. The pieces of each inside us all. Besides, Hermione was the brightest witch of her age, and she was not a Ravenclaw.
Hermione was not Ravenclaw. For many of us, this is the first realization. Then we remember. Peter Pettigrew was not brave. Regulus Black sacrificed his life to save those of others. Realizations such as these changed the way we read and watched the fandom. By creating Pottermore, J.K. Rowling brought to life the stereotypes we had not realized we blindly believed.
So why do we care so much about our Hogwarts house? Maybe because the characters care. Maybe because we want to keep alive an important memory from our childhood. Maybe just because it is fun.