8:08am June 18, 2014

thoughts about hufflepuffs and slytherins and social justice

(disclaimer: this is written by s2, author of the last post. i can’t call myself “s” because someone in here has that intial already. i’ll give my name one of these days when i stop being shy. anyway, this post is my opinion and only mine, it doesn’t speak for the rest of the system.)

I have a weird fascination with people’s Harry Potter headcanons. I’ve never actually been in the fandom (it scares me) and I haven’t actually read the last book (I’m dyslexic so it’s kinda intimidating— and please nobody say anything about “but you’re a natural system, only DID systems have those kinds of differences,” because reality has a way of overspilling the divisions people create. I could write a whole bunch about the troubles we ran into in school when Julian and I were switching without knowing it because we were co-conscious, and I couldn’t read as well as she could, but that’s not the topic here… also, I regularly forget which are the American spellings and which are the British ones.)

Anyway, I’m fascinated by other people’s Harry Potter headcanons. I’ve felt this about several other canons, but I see it most in HP because the fandom is so large, I guess— that there’s actually way more depth in the canon than the creator actually realised and fans have taken this and explored it out in ways that the books didn’t, and all the possible things that could exist in that version of the world and how it would work. I’m always really interested to see what Houses people identify themselves with and why, and the subtle depths people find in what it means to be a member of each one (or a combination).

I’m interested in general by all the subtle depths people can find in what look like simple forms of identifying your general life philosophy, like AD&D alignments, even if I don’t believe they’re absolutes all the time. And of course the Houses are the same way. But I think fans have found more interesting meaning in them than the books have, and people’s headcanons are what form my concepts of what they are. And they’re one of the things I find useful in figuring out why I do the things I do, even if it’s always an oversimplification.

Most of my concepts of them come from stuff that youneedacat and feliscorvus have written and blogged, but even though we’re a mixed-House system overall in terms of philosophy, I see myself as the kind of person who would definitely be sorted into Hufflepuff right away, with no questions of “well, you might also do well in this one, it all depends where you want to go in life.” Not because I think it’s the “loser house,” but because I think it gets stereotyped that way due to the fact that its good traits are maybe subtler to must people in the dominant culture than courage, learning, or ambition are, and maybe more difficult to see the value in.

I think we also end up being underrepresented in a lot of things that many people seem to do because they think it makes them look good to others, like Tumblr social justice communities, because of the traits that get stereotyped as “loser” but are (imho) often the exact antidote that’s needed for the worst excesses of what some communities can do. I think there are two major ways Hufflepuffs can run into problems in social justice communities. One of them is that people can figure out how to trigger our no-holds-barred protect-the-vulnerable fighting mode, for all the wrong reasons, and use it for their own ends, and if we don’t think about it before acting, we *can* end up beating down on other people if we think it’s for justice and defending others, and then realise what we did and that we’ve been hurting people who are people just like us. The other one is what my problem tends to be.

Basically, I think one of the things some people see as a “loser” trait in Hufflepuffs— and in human beings in general in the culture we were raised in— is the desire to *genuinely* look at every single case and every single person individually and see who that person is and if they might be an exception to a generalisation, and if using the generalisation against them is unfair, and not join in with making generalising attacks “for justice” and acting like it’s okay if the exceptions are damaged by it because “there are so few of them.” We might be some of the first ones to speak out against MRA-type stuff, but we might also be the ones to say and really mean “not all men are like that” (um, speaking from a female perspective) if someone is throwing generalisations around, in defense of the ones we know and care about who aren’t like that, and might *genuinely* be hurt by people treating them as bulldozing tanks of privilege who need to have every attack in the book thrown at them. We’re often the ones willing to assume “innocent until proven guilty” about people who use a wrong gender pronoun or the “wrong” terminology, to consider factors like whether they might have been part of an older generation in which these terms were acceptable.

And in the SJ community, this is seen as a bad thing, a negative thing. It’s seen as wishy-washy, as being afraid to take a stand, even as being brainwashed by your own oppression. But the thing is, because it’s hard for most Hufflepuffs to *not* see everybody as an individual case, most of us *do* know the difference between someone being conditioned into defending their own oppression, and someone who just disagrees with the approach most of the community is taking, because we’ve seen both types happening. And we don’t want to just throw back insults in exchange for insults when we get accused of being bad at social justice, so we can end up not saying anything at all. So the things we’ve observed about people, even people who really are being awful, because we tried to give them a chance and understand them, get thrown out and dismissed as worthless. And sometimes it can take a lot of talking to convince us to come out of that silence.

This is also one of the reasons, btw, that I kind of perseverate on people’s headcanons about Hufflepuff-Slytherin friendships. Because I think they’re actually some of the most important and powerful ones that can exist, when they do form. I’m kind of biased because my best friend in-system is way on the Slytherin end of the Slytherpuff spectrum, I guess, but the fact that the friendship even exists in the first place is proof for me that it works. (I don’t think she’s ever posted here— Hufflepuffs tend to stay out of giving their opinions on some things because we’re afraid of having our opinions misinterpreted as some kind of wishy-washy “why can’t we all just get along” thing and Slytherins tend to stay out of it because they want other people to prove that they’re worthy of hearing their opinions, before they give them. Which I don’t see as a bad thing, btw. “Worthy” isn’t the right word, it’s something else that English doesn’t express well, but it’s not always bad.)

And Slytherins can also have trouble with Tumblr social justice approaches for reasons that Hufflepuffs can sometimes relate to better, even if they’re very different from our own reasons. Like the fact that (basing this on the ones I know) they tend to be contemptuous of ideas like “hating on the cishet white males is courageous because they’re our oppressors, it doesn’t hurt them at all because they’re not systematically oppressed, saying you don’t have to hate them is wimpy and wishy-washy.” Partly because it actually is often as difficult to make a Slytherin REALLY hate you as it is to gain their lasting trust, and so they don’t actually just throw it around like candy on Halloween. It’s something that they store and keep very carefully if you happen to provoke it in them, and you might never even know it until they tell you in no unspecific terms that they will never work together with you and why.

Another reason I think Slytherins often stay out of online social justice communities together with Hufflepuffs, is because Hufflepuffs tend to believe in looking at everyone carefully to see if they’re really an exception to a certain generalisation, and Slytherins tend to assume they’re exceptions to a lot of generalisations anyway. Which a lot of people do, but I think Slytherins are more inclined to feel that way than other Houses. Which can be a bad thing, and part of the negative side of the whole House in general, but honestly I think the negative side is exaggerated, based on the ones I know? It seems to me like they’re more likely to be RIGHT about being exceptions to various generalisations, too, including the ones about their own House. XD Anyway, I think Hufflepuffs tend to be interested in people who don’t behave in the “expected” way, when it comes to things like People With X Type Of Privilege Who Actually *Get* It About Oppression. Instead of seeing them as statistical anomalies, we want to know *why* they get it when so many other people don’t, and value their getting it rather than slapping them down for “cookie wanting”— that’s like having something precious handed it to you and spitting on it and throwing it in the trash. And Slytherins also tend to take an interest in people who are somewhat anomalous in Getting It, although their interest is… more political, I guess you could say.

And I also relate to this cartoon a lot and it’s one of the main reasons I don’t see Slytherins as necessarily evil. It seems like one of their core qualities is just having the ability to see how networks of people and power form, and the various ways you can affect those networks, and what you choose to do with that ability is entirely up to you. Often they have a clearer view of what’s going on, power-wise, from the sidelines than the people in the thick of it do. To me, they’re the friends who steer me out of bad situations by being able to see those things. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s not that Hufflepuffs don’t have a hardcore protection instinct, it’s just that people who know how to trigger it in us can sometimes use it to manipulate us, to make us attack other people for their own ends. Sometimes those people are Slytherins and sometimes not, but Slytherins are also the ones who seem to be the most likely to be able to spot from the outside when it’s happening, and step in and steer you away from the manipulator and tell you what’s going on; the ones who can spot predators, liars, and shady people before anyone else does. Ravenclaws can often deduce that kind of stuff too by looking at all the facts and drawing conclusions, but for Slytherins it seems to work in a more “sensing” kind of way. That’s who my Slytherin friends are to me.

So… yeah, I think Hufflepuffs are often the people most likely to be snarked out of various communities because our views are misinterpreted as “you think we can all just get along by deciding not to hate each other, isn’t that cute, but that’s not how the real world works.” When without second chances and willingness to look at every person’s individual circumstances, a lot of those communities can disintegrate into unproductive hate-based closeness, which isn’t real closeness at all. And Slytherins can often be the friends who take us aside because they have no use or respect for communities focused around hate-based closeness and tell us why our experiences and opinions are valuable and necessary too, and that the people who snark us away are throwing away something they really need, and get us to respect ourselves and trust our perceptions again. We look for exceptions to rules and the good ones *know* they’re exceptions to rules, in a positive way.

Anyway, just wanted to write down some of my thoughts and observations on that because I know some other people who read this are interested in this subject too.