As a teen I, genuinely upset and ashamed, told a school therapist that i didn't get sorted into ravenclaw on pottermore and to this day i remember her giving me the most withering 'Grow up, you can't just be one thing' talk of all time. it truly snapped me out of the chokehold sorting narratives had me in
I've always thought of Hogwarts houses as sort of Millennial horoscopes. While I heartily agree with your sentiment that we shouldn't box anyone in, least of all children, we see it time and time again that people quite desperately want to categorise themselves as well as others. "It didn't work out because I'm an Aries/Hufflepuff and he's a Virgo/Ravenclaw..." I guess it's one way of making things simple in this mad world.
Loved this post! One author who I think does really well avoiding this is Dianna Wynne Jones. I still vividly remember the moment in The Lives of Christopher Chant when he realises how horrible he's been to everyone who lives in the castle. Thinking about it, that book also features an obsession with boarding school stories as a plot point.
Oh you're in for a treat! The one I mentioned is in a sort of loose series, best standalone to start with could be Howls moving castle (very different from the film) or Dark Lord of Derkholm also deals a lot with the idea of being forced into roles!
This is lovely and has so much great food for thought in it!! Forgive the novel here but there’s so much in this post I think is fantastic!
I’d also note that I think part of the temptation from authors with a big cast (i.e. school setting) is that groups like this functionally help readers remember characters when there are a lot to keep track of. Mentally, it takes less effort for them to go Hufflepuff—our year— versus remembering a bunch more discrete personalities, although maybe they should be able to! (I remember having this conversation in college at a very heavily Greek school with friends saying they wished they didn’t default by referring to someone by their org; the problem was just that it was such a quick path to remembering faces & names that saying “so-and-so in my history class, who’s in the outing club” didn’t quite jog it as effectively for many.) Such a tricky thing for every reason you name! Doing book edits now for a summer camp novel—cabin groups not at all based on anything—and an edit I frequently get is “Mention fewer kids. Too hard for reader to keep track.”
So it might in some cases be more functional for like—short-term memory than anything else versus trying to shortcut a character’s personality sketch, but we should definitely be thinking more of the end result messaging you identify here and whether it hurts more than it helps. (Looove reading about groupthink and how we bundle people, always.)
I’ve also thought a lot lately about how hard we’ve made it for people to “change their minds” and to re-sort them accordingly, which feels net-negative to the kind of change we want to see politically and otherwise. This is so well-written and thoughtful about all of that.
(I love the book ME, MYSELF, AND US which is all about the flaws of personality testing and grouping in things like Myers-Briggs and enneagram, which reminds me of your thoughts here on changeability too. I’m an identical twin, so questions of typecasting kids or contrasting “fixed” personalities are so important to me.)
Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment! I suppose all tropes are useful literary shorthand in their own sense, and, as you point out, with an expansive world (which is why this is so prolific in fantasy) it's necessary to collapse characters for the sake of simplicity (I suppose Tolkien did this with races of being). I do think the great challenge of writing good children's literature is balancing the need for simplicity in writing for kids (because to encumber them with all of the world's complexity is a bit much) without foregoing realism and nuance. I think all the best children's writing manages to strike this balance with skill.
Absolutely agree! Lots of writing just seems to be triaging and knowing that any priority will have a cost, so kidlit authors should really weigh the cost of categorization/perceived flattening as we’re seeing its effects.
Agreed, mostly. But while I won't claim that Skandar is wildly original, I did enjoy the fact that rather than living with the other kids who are sorted into the same house, they have to form quartets with one member from each element and learn to work together with people who are different from themselves. There is a rather direct passage pointing out what a terrible idea it would be to put all the air wielders together, and questions related to identity, groups, loyalty, and personal growth are central to the series. It read to me more as a thoughtful and critical response to HP than a simple derivative of it, though I found the magic system not as well thought-through as it could have been.
You do make a good point here that there seems to have been an attempt to address the issues in Skandar, but it does feel a bit 'have your cake and eat it' as an approach, right? Like kids still get to decide if they'd be a water wielder/fire wielder/etc. While they can dabble in other elements, they still have one innate predisposition.
I remember first coming across HP and this sorting hat and alarm bells started ringing in my head right away.
A hat that invades your mind and reads your private thoughts and wishes and then tells everyone in the assembled hall your pesonality type?
Chucking into an echo chamber of similar people?
What could possibly go wrong...
A Department manager at one company I worked got us all to take Personality tests once, with our getting the results that we could share if we wanted, and him and us, getting to see an anonomous version of the whole department scores.
He was delighted with the results because as he said - you're all different, I've got a team of people who are completely different to each other and not all the same.
Thank you! It is funny, isn’t it? As someone who works with kids full time I can’t imagine the chaos that would prevail if you put all the courageous bolshy kids in the same room all the time. Chaos!
Thanks for writing this article! I appreciate your background as a librarian and personal stories. I agree with you that the sorting trope is overused, and I wish more people would try to establish in-groups and out-groups without relying on the “this is how you are and will always be, you star-crossed human.” Undiscussed and internalized without feedback, these ideas can lead to serious self conception issues. For example, an insecure person worrying that they resemble one group when the book seems to value another group more highly.
I think, however, that a little bit of this sort of storyline is fun and could even be helpful, especially if children are reading through these stories with adults or in conversation. I work a lot with kids in non-school learning environments, and many seem to sort themselves into groups based on characteristics that they perceive as fundamental to who they are, even if those things might change in 3 to 5 years. Their object permanence about themselves needs more development, and I think sorting books properly discussed and titles that tell stories of identity change both matter to helping them figure out what it means to be a person. I think it takes work from the author, though, to make non didactic kids books, so I hope your essay gets in front of kidlit/YA creators!
Oh hey, a fellow school librarian is here with a take full of nuance and care! I really appreciate this piece, because I am simultaneously peak millennial cringe and LOVE to sort MYSELF, I also feel a profound ick about sorting OTHERS, and I suppose that's the narrative I'd bring, had I time to write a book.
as a child whose worth was judged very heavily on my (perceived) academic skill, my sharpest memory of period of time where you HAD to have an associated Group (tm) was of desperately trying to escape from people trying to assign me Smart Group and instead get over to Eats Cake Group. the whole thing was definitely a bit distressing even at the time tbh
This was such a satisfying read. You managed to take something that feels like harmless childhood fun and show the weird little psychological trapdoor underneath it
Very thoughtful, which we don't get enough of. One additional thought I had is about the problem of irony or what seems to be irony. Different readers see it, or don't see it, or imagine it where it isn't. At various times I've seen the sorting hat those ways. My 30-something kids are still pretty relaxed about it though (I think) perhaps because fiction does at least make you reflect, and should always include some fun.
The sorting hat is a weird kind of impossibility, right? Like it's almost impossible to imagine his existence outside of the few scenes he's in -- does he hibernate? does he live in the staff room and yap? is he kept in some kind of box? he's a very functional kind of character
this is such a good and interesting take! I definitely struggle with the whole malleable identity thing, and you make great points about how it’s reinforced in children’s lit. thanks for writing!
This was so interesting! I research girls’ school stories and because girls’ schools were typically tiny until the 1920s, houses turn up much much later for girls fiction than boys, there was mostly more interest in general ‘school spirit’. I’m now tempted to do an entire side quest working out how houses came about to become so important in children’s fiction (especially since I could not even tell you what house I was in at school, it had no impact on me whatsoever).
I’m inclined to think that if adult’s fiction could find as useful and convincing a mechanism to divide people into convenient groups as school houses and dystopian factions, they’d do it in a heartbeat. I find in adulthood people do cling onto sexualities, diagnoses, niche internet personalities as much as my schoolmates clung to their Hogwarts houses.
This sounds like interesting research! I wonder if there are any examples of books with strong house-based factionalism that AREN’T fantasies.
I do think adults go in for it, but it’s more of the enneagram/myers-briggs/horoscope kind of self-designation rather than through fandom like it is for kids. Basically the same thing masquerading as something more grown up isn’t it!
Oo this was a fantastic & really thoughtful article. I was very much an identity-collecting child, putting myself into neat little boxes as if that would allow me to finally understand myself (for me, I’d add Warrior cats and Percy Jackson to Harry Potter, Divergent, and your other examples). It bled into other aspects of my life too (me trying to figure out my queer identity led to trying on way too many ultra-specific labels and zero actual relationships). I’d love to see books subvert this needless stratification by personality traits, but I also wonder about the wider social implications and how sorting ourselves into groups is kind of inherent to human society?
Thank you for reading and for your comment! I think it definitely is inherent to human nature to create ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups - like a natural impulse to form tribes for safety, right? But I think in the same way that getting an email shouldn’t really make you feel like you’re being hunted for sport, we should probably challenge our natural instincts that are built for a bygone world
As a teen I, genuinely upset and ashamed, told a school therapist that i didn't get sorted into ravenclaw on pottermore and to this day i remember her giving me the most withering 'Grow up, you can't just be one thing' talk of all time. it truly snapped me out of the chokehold sorting narratives had me in
I've always thought of Hogwarts houses as sort of Millennial horoscopes. While I heartily agree with your sentiment that we shouldn't box anyone in, least of all children, we see it time and time again that people quite desperately want to categorise themselves as well as others. "It didn't work out because I'm an Aries/Hufflepuff and he's a Virgo/Ravenclaw..." I guess it's one way of making things simple in this mad world.
Loved this post! One author who I think does really well avoiding this is Dianna Wynne Jones. I still vividly remember the moment in The Lives of Christopher Chant when he realises how horrible he's been to everyone who lives in the castle. Thinking about it, that book also features an obsession with boarding school stories as a plot point.
Dianna Wynne Jones is definitely a hole in my reading but this has definitely motivated me to bump her up my reading list!
Oh you're in for a treat! The one I mentioned is in a sort of loose series, best standalone to start with could be Howls moving castle (very different from the film) or Dark Lord of Derkholm also deals a lot with the idea of being forced into roles!
This is lovely and has so much great food for thought in it!! Forgive the novel here but there’s so much in this post I think is fantastic!
I’d also note that I think part of the temptation from authors with a big cast (i.e. school setting) is that groups like this functionally help readers remember characters when there are a lot to keep track of. Mentally, it takes less effort for them to go Hufflepuff—our year— versus remembering a bunch more discrete personalities, although maybe they should be able to! (I remember having this conversation in college at a very heavily Greek school with friends saying they wished they didn’t default by referring to someone by their org; the problem was just that it was such a quick path to remembering faces & names that saying “so-and-so in my history class, who’s in the outing club” didn’t quite jog it as effectively for many.) Such a tricky thing for every reason you name! Doing book edits now for a summer camp novel—cabin groups not at all based on anything—and an edit I frequently get is “Mention fewer kids. Too hard for reader to keep track.”
So it might in some cases be more functional for like—short-term memory than anything else versus trying to shortcut a character’s personality sketch, but we should definitely be thinking more of the end result messaging you identify here and whether it hurts more than it helps. (Looove reading about groupthink and how we bundle people, always.)
I’ve also thought a lot lately about how hard we’ve made it for people to “change their minds” and to re-sort them accordingly, which feels net-negative to the kind of change we want to see politically and otherwise. This is so well-written and thoughtful about all of that.
(I love the book ME, MYSELF, AND US which is all about the flaws of personality testing and grouping in things like Myers-Briggs and enneagram, which reminds me of your thoughts here on changeability too. I’m an identical twin, so questions of typecasting kids or contrasting “fixed” personalities are so important to me.)
Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment! I suppose all tropes are useful literary shorthand in their own sense, and, as you point out, with an expansive world (which is why this is so prolific in fantasy) it's necessary to collapse characters for the sake of simplicity (I suppose Tolkien did this with races of being). I do think the great challenge of writing good children's literature is balancing the need for simplicity in writing for kids (because to encumber them with all of the world's complexity is a bit much) without foregoing realism and nuance. I think all the best children's writing manages to strike this balance with skill.
Absolutely agree! Lots of writing just seems to be triaging and knowing that any priority will have a cost, so kidlit authors should really weigh the cost of categorization/perceived flattening as we’re seeing its effects.
Agreed, mostly. But while I won't claim that Skandar is wildly original, I did enjoy the fact that rather than living with the other kids who are sorted into the same house, they have to form quartets with one member from each element and learn to work together with people who are different from themselves. There is a rather direct passage pointing out what a terrible idea it would be to put all the air wielders together, and questions related to identity, groups, loyalty, and personal growth are central to the series. It read to me more as a thoughtful and critical response to HP than a simple derivative of it, though I found the magic system not as well thought-through as it could have been.
You do make a good point here that there seems to have been an attempt to address the issues in Skandar, but it does feel a bit 'have your cake and eat it' as an approach, right? Like kids still get to decide if they'd be a water wielder/fire wielder/etc. While they can dabble in other elements, they still have one innate predisposition.
Well written.
I remember first coming across HP and this sorting hat and alarm bells started ringing in my head right away.
A hat that invades your mind and reads your private thoughts and wishes and then tells everyone in the assembled hall your pesonality type?
Chucking into an echo chamber of similar people?
What could possibly go wrong...
A Department manager at one company I worked got us all to take Personality tests once, with our getting the results that we could share if we wanted, and him and us, getting to see an anonomous version of the whole department scores.
He was delighted with the results because as he said - you're all different, I've got a team of people who are completely different to each other and not all the same.
Thank you! It is funny, isn’t it? As someone who works with kids full time I can’t imagine the chaos that would prevail if you put all the courageous bolshy kids in the same room all the time. Chaos!
Thanks for writing this article! I appreciate your background as a librarian and personal stories. I agree with you that the sorting trope is overused, and I wish more people would try to establish in-groups and out-groups without relying on the “this is how you are and will always be, you star-crossed human.” Undiscussed and internalized without feedback, these ideas can lead to serious self conception issues. For example, an insecure person worrying that they resemble one group when the book seems to value another group more highly.
I think, however, that a little bit of this sort of storyline is fun and could even be helpful, especially if children are reading through these stories with adults or in conversation. I work a lot with kids in non-school learning environments, and many seem to sort themselves into groups based on characteristics that they perceive as fundamental to who they are, even if those things might change in 3 to 5 years. Their object permanence about themselves needs more development, and I think sorting books properly discussed and titles that tell stories of identity change both matter to helping them figure out what it means to be a person. I think it takes work from the author, though, to make non didactic kids books, so I hope your essay gets in front of kidlit/YA creators!
Oh hey, a fellow school librarian is here with a take full of nuance and care! I really appreciate this piece, because I am simultaneously peak millennial cringe and LOVE to sort MYSELF, I also feel a profound ick about sorting OTHERS, and I suppose that's the narrative I'd bring, had I time to write a book.
as a child whose worth was judged very heavily on my (perceived) academic skill, my sharpest memory of period of time where you HAD to have an associated Group (tm) was of desperately trying to escape from people trying to assign me Smart Group and instead get over to Eats Cake Group. the whole thing was definitely a bit distressing even at the time tbh
I go back to that 30 Rock moment often!!
This was such a satisfying read. You managed to take something that feels like harmless childhood fun and show the weird little psychological trapdoor underneath it
Very thoughtful, which we don't get enough of. One additional thought I had is about the problem of irony or what seems to be irony. Different readers see it, or don't see it, or imagine it where it isn't. At various times I've seen the sorting hat those ways. My 30-something kids are still pretty relaxed about it though (I think) perhaps because fiction does at least make you reflect, and should always include some fun.
The sorting hat is a weird kind of impossibility, right? Like it's almost impossible to imagine his existence outside of the few scenes he's in -- does he hibernate? does he live in the staff room and yap? is he kept in some kind of box? he's a very functional kind of character
does he hibernate? does he live in the staff room and yap? is he kept in some kind of box?
For some reason this bit made me think of Tom Lehrer’s Whatever Became of Hubert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW4ZaQmnxNc).
this is such a good and interesting take! I definitely struggle with the whole malleable identity thing, and you make great points about how it’s reinforced in children’s lit. thanks for writing!
This was so interesting! I research girls’ school stories and because girls’ schools were typically tiny until the 1920s, houses turn up much much later for girls fiction than boys, there was mostly more interest in general ‘school spirit’. I’m now tempted to do an entire side quest working out how houses came about to become so important in children’s fiction (especially since I could not even tell you what house I was in at school, it had no impact on me whatsoever).
I’m inclined to think that if adult’s fiction could find as useful and convincing a mechanism to divide people into convenient groups as school houses and dystopian factions, they’d do it in a heartbeat. I find in adulthood people do cling onto sexualities, diagnoses, niche internet personalities as much as my schoolmates clung to their Hogwarts houses.
This sounds like interesting research! I wonder if there are any examples of books with strong house-based factionalism that AREN’T fantasies.
I do think adults go in for it, but it’s more of the enneagram/myers-briggs/horoscope kind of self-designation rather than through fandom like it is for kids. Basically the same thing masquerading as something more grown up isn’t it!
you ever read scumble?
great tween series about not turning out to be the type of kid you thought youd be when you were younger
This sounds interesting! Looks like it didn’t get a huge UK release at any point but i’ll keep my eyes peeled for it! Thanks!
Oo this was a fantastic & really thoughtful article. I was very much an identity-collecting child, putting myself into neat little boxes as if that would allow me to finally understand myself (for me, I’d add Warrior cats and Percy Jackson to Harry Potter, Divergent, and your other examples). It bled into other aspects of my life too (me trying to figure out my queer identity led to trying on way too many ultra-specific labels and zero actual relationships). I’d love to see books subvert this needless stratification by personality traits, but I also wonder about the wider social implications and how sorting ourselves into groups is kind of inherent to human society?
Thank you for reading and for your comment! I think it definitely is inherent to human nature to create ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups - like a natural impulse to form tribes for safety, right? But I think in the same way that getting an email shouldn’t really make you feel like you’re being hunted for sport, we should probably challenge our natural instincts that are built for a bygone world