Speed Run

And it's election night. I voted. I hope you voted, too. I'm shooting for being done in the next 30 minutes rather than staying up until midnight working on this thing. Let's see what we can do.

So, you know what? Let's talk about Harry Potter. That's right. Harry BadWordBadWord Potter. (Maybe I shouldn't have shot myself in the foot with the word count by not separating the one word into four. Yes, I've made up for it by doing this parenthetical, but at what cost? AT WHAT COST, MAN?)

Well, I won't be able to this anymore. That's certainly part of the cost.

I also have no idea if captions count whenever I run things through a word counter. Not a woder counter, silly fingers. I don't know what woder are, nor do I know why I would want to run captions through a contraption what counts these woder. Is woder a thing? Let's find out.

TO THE GOOGLE! No, not the Gödel. That would be ridiculous. He's dead.

Apparently this. Some sort of... caulking? Sealant? Paint?

Well then.

But back to Harry Potter, dear gentle readers. Harry freaking Potter. Let's talk about that. Because, man, Hufflepuff.

That's right. Hufflepuff. You know, the House that let in Robert freaking Pattinson before he was getting his heart broken by Kristen "The Vamp Whisperer" Stewart and before he was sparkling for teenage girls and older possibly sexually repressed women.

This is the yellow necktie of a killer, Bella.

Yeah. We're talking about that one. But before we get to that, let's go through the other houses, shall we?

Gryffindor: You've got Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger. Yes, there are others. And no, if you're name's not Neville Longbottom, you don't really matter. Sure, there are folks who pop in and out now and again, but they don't take the raging badassery that Neville has perfected to quite the same extreme. Yeah. That's right. Neville. NOT Harry, Ron, and Hermione, who dropped out of school to go take care of something an old man hinted at rather than learning things. No, Neville, who kept caring for his insane parents. Not his murdered parents, because that's not hard. You get three squares a day and shelter and you mope. No, your insane parents who see you and don't recognize you. Your insane parents who are still around and are the standard against which you're held by other relatives. Yes, I just shifted POV there. Want to make something of it? Regardless of Neville's inherent badassery and the grace by which he allows us to live, what's Gryffindor all about? Besides being the designated heroes of the book, they're the ones that are brave, daring, and apparently chivalrous (though from what we saw of Harry and Ron, that last part might be going down the toilets).

Then we've got Slytherin. Yeah, there's Malfoy and all sorts of other nasty types in there. You could make the case that they're products of their environment, but really? They knew what they were getting into. Throughout all the books, it seems like we meet ONE decent Slytherin, and that's Slughorn. He's barely even decent. He just sorta trundles along, trying to use people for fame, and if they can't give him that, they're not worth it. He's the one that REALLY sets up the whole evil plot of the books, because he tells Voldemort, "Oh toom tiddly toom, here's how you could be immortal! This is all theoretical, right? I mean, you're not being remotely sketchy and this couldn't have ANYTHING to do with the rash of student deaths around here. Poppycock!" About now, some of you might be all, "Oh, but what about Snape?" No. No. We are NOT making the argument that Snape was good all along. He had some moments of being pitiful, and some moments where he might have even aspired to goodness, but he was not GOOD. He was evil and self-serving the entire series. He doesn't want to get killed by Voldemort (and he kinda hates him, too), so he starts working for Dumbledore. HOWEVER, even that is just motivated by Snape being pissy that Voldemort killed the girl he had an unrequited crush on (and whom he, don't forget, called a racial slur without any real provocation. Maybe he didn't. I'm sorta blanking on that, but he did hang out with folks who would. Class act, Snape. Class. Freaking. Act.). So what are the good points about Slytherin? Well, they're ambitious, and apparently they're cunning. That's some pretty faint praise there. "Oh, yeah, he's a good guy- he doesn't let silly things like morality stop him from getting what he wants, and since I'm useful to him, he gives me some stuff too. Huzzah!"

Now, you might think that I'm about to lay down some praise on Ravenclaw, and boy, would you be wrong. Sure, they're not as bad as Slytherin, but let's look again. Who do we know from Ravenclaw? Luna Lovegood and Cho Chang. These are people who we KNOW are in Ravenclaw. Two more that you may not have known about? Quirrell and Lockheart. Class acts, the both of them. Luna, well, she's good people. She's a bit weird (seemingly for the sake of weirdness at times), but whatever. She's had a rough time of it, and we'll give her a bit of a pass. She's solid, and she helps her friends, and you'd think that if she had gotten with the whole Potter entourage earlier, she probably would have ended up in Gryffindor. But then we look at the other three. Well, Quirrell and Lockheart are obviously a bit off. Cho, well, you'd think she's good, what with being an early love interest. She's had a lot of crap to go through, and it sucks for her. Still, she tries to use Harry for some weird... thing about Cedric, and she sells out her fellow students to an obviously insane headmaster. Backbone, she kinda lacks. And, of course, Ravenclaw's all about wit and learning, as so many people just love to point out. (And look at how well it holds up in their students! Why, Lockheart, he just wanted to LEARN how those people caught monsters so he could, just by happenstance, write books and brainwash them into not remembering.)

This brings us to Hufflepuff. They... well, they kinda change throughout the books. You don't really see them much first book, and with a name like Hufflepuff, they can't really be that special. Second book, it looks like they're a bunch of jackasses, because the ones that we see are the ones that are really laying into Harry about maybe being some fraction evil (which oh wait, he was). That said, once they realize the truth, they seem pretty apologetic. Book 3 we see Cedric (pictured above), who is (as opposed to everyone else to whom I've applied the phrase) a real, non-sarcastic, class-act. He plays fair, he plays hard, and he works hard. "But Rob," you may protest, "he's hardly around. You're basing this on pretty thin evidence!" Well, sure. Let's say that I am. You know who else was a Hufflepuff. Friggin' Tonks.

Me-ow.

And what does she do throughout the books? She fights evil, she protects Harry and his friends, she tries to stay with her husband (who LEAVES HER WHEN SHE GETS PREGNANT. How 'bout that chivalry, Gryffindor?), and then dies fighting for what she believes in. That brings me to Hufflepuff's values. Summed up, they're loyalty and hard work.

Now, look back at the books. They all take place in England. The wizarding world is a big place, and people can and do teleport around.

So why doesn't Voldemort's schtick spread elsewhere?

Hufflepuffs.

Who, out of all these houses, is going to fight for something greater than themselves and their friends? Slytherins are in it for themselves, Ravenclaws might have a good snark or two, Gryffindors will support their friends and go in half-cocked, but Hufflepuffs? They're loyal. That's their thing. But loyal to what?

Who do you think handles the REALLY delicate stuff? Who could they trust to handle things that might be a bit harder and nastier but are clearly for some greater good?

Back to Hogwarts, there's an entire Forbidden Section in the library that gets used once or twice, but beyond that? They seem to have learned to stay away. These kids are only there through around age 17. Why would they even have that around kids when we never see any of our Gryffindor heroes actually check a book out from there (well, aside from Hermione and the polyjuice potion, which everyone can apparently do by book 7)? Because the only ones they could trust with that sort of thing are Hufflepuffs.

Yes, we see lots of Aurors, who seem to mostly be Gryffindors (and Tonks. Tonks, who can change how she looks.). A lot of those Aurors gets killed. A lot of them were brave and awesome, but they still died, and they died in relatively high profile incidents. I mean, if Harry Potter dies in the middle of London, and wizards find out? Oh, man, Voldemort, you just made a martyr. That's like rule one in evil school- DON'T MAKE A FREAKING MARTYR. Plus, Voldemort, while strong and crazy, is still crazy. There were some who took him seriously, and there were a lot of people who were scared of him, but the fact that he was crazy meant that there were plenty of folks who weren't going to sit there and take it anymore. More than that, he didn't care about the Muggle world, which, by word of Rowling, could ROYALLY trash his day. What happens when you get a threat that decides that, you know, Muggles have some pretty nifty methods of doing harm. Maybe add a little bit of magic, a reversed summoning charge or some such, and ta da! You've got a gun that will track whatever you point it at. Who do you think takes care of that? Gryffindors?

And then there's the whole section of "Too Classified for Any of You Lot To Know About" in the Ministry. Surely they're keeping that stuff around for a reason, but they'd need people who would know how to use it and would ONLY use it when absolutely necessary. Cedric and Tonks both got through some pretty serious scrapes, and you never really see them use much more than anyone else. It could be that they aren't as capable as the rest (or that their badassery happens offscreen, but we'll ignore that possibility, because ANYTHING could happen offscreen with individual characters)... or they could be holding back. After all, if you're in a brawl or in front of an audience (like both of these characters usually are), you're not going to use the super awesome forbidden technique, because SOMEONE will figure out how to replicate it. Yes, they both got taken down. They also both got taken down in fights where they were either (like Cedric) taken by surprise or (like Tonks) taken down in a big brawl with lots of bystanders and some pretty unsavory characters that really didn't need a chance to learn the REALLY dark business.

So, in conclusion (now that I've gone 25 minutes over where I wanted to be)...

Hufflepuffs: They will fuck you up.