ministry of silly hats

[mooglesorts]

hello all!

Guess who finally broke down and made a sorting hat chats blog! I’ve been getting into shc in earnest over the last few months, after dabbling in it on and off for most of my growing up; it’s been really helpful and a lot of fun, even though i’ve been shy about interacting with anyone off anon. so! i decided to take the next step and introduce myself to the community.

i go by moogle, i’m in my mid-20s, and i use he/she/they pronouns.

i’m a bird snake! modeling lion and badger primary, and modeling pretty much all the other secondaries to some degree lmao. (i tend to identify a lot more with my secondary than primary, tbh) (update: i am a double bird in fact apparently i will edit this to reflect that properly when I'm feeling less lazy lmao)

i generally use lion/badger/bird/snake terminology.

my main tumblr is @the-moogle-of-your-nightmares, and my sfw fandom tumblr is @angorwhosebabyisthis.

this blog is mainly for sharing anecdata about my own experiences, passing around discussion from/with other blogs, and sorting characters. while you’re welcome to weigh in on stuff i talk about, ask questions, or keep it in mind if it strikes a chord with you, i’m not really confident with sorting people directly. sorry! (if you’re in search of sortings, i recommend some other great blogs like @wisteria-lodge, @the-phoenix-heart, @awinterrain, and @paint-the-ravenclaw, to name a few.)

some of the media i’m into in particular are: tales of arcadia (trollhunters, 3 below, wizards), the dark crystal: age of resistance, scooby-doo: mystery incorporated, batman beyond, supernatural (sort of), 7 days: decide your story, cornelia funke’s dragon rider, and a wide scattershot of other things. if you’re into any of those, feel free to hit me up!

i may not be super active or get to everything right away, depending on time and energy levels, but you’re more than welcome to send me things or chime in.

this seems like a lovely community, and i’m looking forward to getting to know folks. see you around!

[mooglesorts]

i have not been active on this blog in a While and being very normal about my old hyperfixation lorien legacies, which has an absolute fuckload of characters to sort, has finally gotten me to crawl out of my hole.

[spoilers ahead for both lorien legacies and its sequel series!]

there is a LOT of ground to cover here, and i am mostly going to limit myself to sorting characters and themes from the first series, but my initial notes are:

probably one of the biggest overarching themes of the series is toxic birdsec, and the harm it can do to every aspect of a society or a person's life--on both a systematic level and an individual one--right down to their basic humanity. by extension it also goes into similarly fucked up lion and bird primary used as weapons and tools of abuse, and how they interplay with each other.

a large part of this stems from setrákus ra being The Worst Fucking Lion Bird Ever to Live, lmao. he's an interesting example of birdsec interplaying with cannibal badger, and also of a lion bird who's a cheetah in that he uses systems as tools to manipulate people instead of actually believing them. he hands out toxic systems like candy while peppering them with outright lies, and blithely admits that even the one that he's put centuries into building--mogadorian progress, and the great book--is at its heart just a ruse to run his cult on. the truth he pretends to worship and champion isn't external, objective truth--it's an extension of him. he is the ultimate truth. and the only truth he believes in is his cause, which is that he has the right and ability to own, make use of, and do whatever he sees fit with everything in existence. everyone and everything that could possibly be a shiny or a tool belongs to him.

one of the other overarching themes is toxic badger primary and secondary--cannibal badgering AHOY--as well as toxic lion primary, and it is a great deal less intentional than the bird cautionary tale part lmao

five is a bird snake with deeply toxic lion primary and bird secondary models, one of which he picked up after getting involved with a cult, and one of which he's had since his abusive birdsec guardian started amputating his masks by trying to apply actor bird to them. :') his brand of birdsplode and snakeburn make him horribly, horribly vulnerable to the cult, especially combined with focused, one-on-one gaslighting and manipulation from setrákus himself, and he has to burn his bird right to a crisp to break away from it. i am very biased and i have so much to say about my boy, but i plan to go in depth about this later

there are a LOT of lionsecs among the loric garde kids. the only surviving ones who aren't lionsecs are marina's badger and five's snake (the latter of which is heavily villainized, lol); number one is either a lionsec or a snakesec, maggie is either a birdsec or a badgersec, and we don't really see enough of hannu to be sure, but my guess is badgersec. in context, whatever these books are saying here i am not sure i like it lmao

this stands in contrast to the non-garde allies, minus adam, who end up being Part of the Gang. sam and lexa are birdsecs, and sarah and malcolm are both badgersecs.

speaking of adam, he is a lion snake with a cool, calculated double bird performance/model, who has been waiting all his life for a chance to go Absolutely Feral. there are a lot of ways in which he's a real shithead, which track given his life and circumstances up to then but are also real 😬 sometimes, but like, good for him. go ape shitt, kid

nine is an awful, AWFUL double lion who models/performs the worst parts of badger primary; he also uses lionsec stereotypes and methods to misdirect people, so that he can hurt, gaslight, prey on, and abuse them. it's genuinely interesting how he does it, and i could go on for a long time about it, but it's also Infuriating because the authors really want you to love him for being a ~charming jerk with a heart of gold,~ so that is for another post. in the sequel series he also picks up a nasty posthumous birdsec model from sandor to gleefully torture children with so lmfao

there seem to be a lot of birdsecs and badgersecs among the mentor cêpans, which tracks, because, well, mentors. interestingly, it seems to be a pattern so far that the birdsec mentors are either some of the most deeply abusive among them (see: rey, sandor, and ethan even though he's an unofficial cêpan), or the most decent parents of them under the circumstances (see: katarina).

john is a hognose (badgery snake) 'i live here' snake lion, and a VERY loud one. he's set on saving the world mainly a) in order to save his People, or b) because it's what they would want. he also believes STRONGLY in snake values as applied to other people, and absolutely cannot grok that anyone would feel differently--he holds back on killing a major enemy because he's worried about killing a friendly acquaintance's Person--and honestly he can be kind of a huge dick about it lmao. he burns HARD at the end of the first series when sarah dies; in the second, he copes by making an entire community into his circle and no longer gives a shit about the rest of the world outside it, including groups who are in similar if not worse circumstances than his community. Horrific War Crimes Ensue!

rex is an everyone double badger and i love him so much. i love him So Much. he is a wonderful example of how to write a morally dubious character whose dodgy qualities interest me instead of making me grit my teeth and Tolerate Them. his arc could have fixed So Much of the Ending's Bullshit and i will be forever mad that they dumped it in the trash

there is more, oh my god there's so much more, this series has SO many characters in it, but this is a start thank you for coming to my ted talk

[mooglesorts]

(hopefully the only post i will have to make about this, but antis you are not welcome here. my content is not for you, let alone talking about my Very Personal Experiences--often involving my trauma--and how the characters i sort relate to them, in ways that are revealing, therapeutic, and important to me. get off my blog. shoo.)

[wisteria-lodge]

How do you sort Eddie and Venom?

(I am just sorting the characters as they appear in Venom (2018)

Eddie Brock is a very loud Lion primary. Yes he's a white knight investigative reporter invested in bringing down corruption and protecting the little guy. He's a Paragon Lion with a very Badger felt morality. But he just kind of feels that Drake is bad news - "I don’t have a source persay, but I have a hunch." When Venom asks him how he can tell good or bad people apart he literally says, "Oh It’s super easy. You just kind of, intuit it." That is the most Lion thing I ever heard.

Also, I think a Badger primary would have felt at least a little bad about risking his girlfriend's job to get dirt on Drake.... but Eddie is a Lion on a mission, and the ends justify the means.

He is a Badger secondary though. Eddie Brock phones a friend. When he's out of work, he's going though all the contacts on his phone, and when he's got a "parasite" he goes to Anne and Dan for help. He has a relationship with his doorman, with the lady who owns the corner shop, the homeless woman on the corner. This is just how Eddie functions. It's probably what makes him a good reporter.

(This is also why the move from New York to San Francisco seems to be hitting him pretty hard. He had networks and people in New York, and here he's kind of on his own.)

Venom now. Venom is a very simple, very alien Bird primary. When we meet him, his* system is, uh. 'Eating people is good.' And that's it. But after he lives in Eddie's head for a while, his system changes to 'Eating people is good + Eddie's wellbeing is good.' This slots beautifully into Eddie's Lion primary and gets us 'Eating BAD people is good (and Eddie defines 'bad' for us.) Venom even gives us a little matter-of-fact Bird-style speech when he changes his way of thinking.

Eddie tries to form an authentic relationship with everyone he meets, up to and absolutely including Venom (even when he thinks Venom is slowly killing him.) This is what encourages Venom to form a symbiotic relationship with and then value Eddie. But the villain Drake sees people as ants. And when he gets his own symbiote in his head, that symbiote sees people (including Drake) as ants as well. Subtle little moral lesson there.

And... Venom's an incredibly direct Lion secondary. Literally just fling yourself bodily at the problem, planning is for the weak.

tl;dr

EDDIE BROCK - Lion primary (Paragon Lion, Badger-style morality)/ Badger secondary

VENOM - Bird primary whose system changes from 'eating people is good' to 'eating people and also Eddie Brock is good' / Lion secondary

*Venom is a alien from a species without a concept of gender, but I feel like he would just use Eddie's pronouns when referring to himself, so I'm using he/him instead of they/them. And it/is is just rude :)

[mooglesorts]

hey there--most of what i know of venom beyond the third raimi movie is by osmosis, and i know you mean well, but i feel like it's important to point out that it's really not cool to denounce the use of it/its pronouns without confirmation or context cues that they're not what the character themself prefers.

it's a loaded set of pronouns for sure, and personally it makes me screamingly uncomfortable when people erase those context cues when they're present; but there are people--a lot of them, a number of whom i know personally--who get misgendered constantly, even by otherwise trans-friendly people, who refuse to use their pronouns because it's 'rude' and 'dehumanizing' and it makes them uncomfortable. if venom doesn't canonically use it/its, and your headcanon is that they* would find it rude, that's valid; but it hurts it/its people to perpetuate the idea that their pronouns are inherently degrading, and therefore optional or to be actively avoided for their own good.

*(use of they is intended to be encompassing, not specific, given that there are different headcanons for venom's pronouns at play and i don't want to misgender encompassing-them in one or the other.)

[wisteria-lodge]

that was a specific joke about the film, where venom objects to being called "the parasite" and "it," but I totally see how it could be taken out of context, I'll take it out of the parent post.

[mooglesorts]

thank you; that context is really good to have--even while trying to google it i couldn't find anything that indicated one way or another, and if a character actively rejects a set of pronouns i very much would rather know--and it's appreciated that you're willing to clarify to include it.

(god, i really do need to watch venom.)

[wisteria-lodge]

How do you sort Eddie and Venom?

(I am just sorting the characters as they appear in Venom (2018)

Eddie Brock is a very loud Lion primary. Yes he's a white knight investigative reporter invested in bringing down corruption and protecting the little guy. He's a Paragon Lion with a very Badger felt morality. But he just kind of feels that Drake is bad news - "I don’t have a source persay, but I have a hunch." When Venom asks him how he can tell good or bad people apart he literally says, "Oh It’s super easy. You just kind of, intuit it." That is the most Lion thing I ever heard.

Also, I think a Badger primary would have felt at least a little bad about risking his girlfriend's job to get dirt on Drake.... but Eddie is a Lion on a mission, and the ends justify the means.

He is a Badger secondary though. Eddie Brock phones a friend. When he's out of work, he's going though all the contacts on his phone, and when he's got a "parasite" he goes to Anne and Dan for help. He has a relationship with his doorman, with the lady who owns the corner shop, the homeless woman on the corner. This is just how Eddie functions. It's probably what makes him a good reporter.

(This is also why the move from New York to San Francisco seems to be hitting him pretty hard. He had networks and people in New York, and here he's kind of on his own.)

Venom now. Venom is a very simple, very alien Bird primary. When we meet him, his* system is, uh. 'Eating people is good.' And that's it. But after he lives in Eddie's head for a while, his system changes to 'Eating people is good + Eddie's wellbeing is good.' This slots beautifully into Eddie's Lion primary and gets us 'Eating BAD people is good (and Eddie defines 'bad' for us.) Venom even gives us a little matter-of-fact Bird-style speech when he changes his way of thinking.

Eddie tries to form an authentic relationship with everyone he meets, up to and absolutely including Venom (even when he thinks Venom is slowly killing him.) This is what encourages Venom to form a symbiotic relationship with and then value Eddie. But the villain Drake sees people as ants. And when he gets his own symbiote in his head, that symbiote sees people (including Drake) as ants as well. Subtle little moral lesson there.

And... Venom's an incredibly direct Lion secondary. Literally just fling yourself bodily at the problem, planning is for the weak.

tl;dr

EDDIE BROCK - Lion primary (Paragon Lion, Badger-style morality)/ Badger secondary

VENOM - Bird primary whose system changes from 'eating people is good' to 'eating people and also Eddie Brock is good' / Lion secondary

*Venom is a alien from a species without a concept of gender, but I feel like he would just use Eddie's pronouns when referring to himself, so I'm using he/him instead of they/them. And it/is is just rude :)

[mooglesorts]

hey there--most of what i know of venom beyond the third raimi movie is by osmosis, and i know you mean well, but i feel like it's important to point out that it's really not cool to denounce the use of it/its pronouns without confirmation or context cues that they're not what the character themself prefers.

it's a loaded set of pronouns for sure, and personally it makes me screamingly uncomfortable when people erase those context cues when they're present; but there are people--a lot of them, a number of whom i know personally--who get misgendered constantly, even by otherwise trans-friendly people, who refuse to use their pronouns because it's 'rude' and 'dehumanizing' and it makes them uncomfortable. if venom doesn't canonically use it/its, and your headcanon is that they* would find it rude, that's valid; but it hurts it/its people to perpetuate the idea that their pronouns are inherently degrading, and therefore optional or to be actively avoided for their own good.

*(use of they is intended to be encompassing, not specific, given that there are different headcanons for venom's pronouns at play and i don't want to misgender encompassing-them in one or the other.)

[bakwaaas]

@fairycosmos / Comic by @shhhitsfine / Comic by @incendavery

[mooglesorts]

rusty lake is just 'can somebody go check on the idealists, please,' the canon

[mooglesorts]

i should really talk about my boy percival on here sometime because. i love him. and he is VERY shc-relevant. and also i love him

[mooglesorts]

hello! i am not dead! life has been a chaotic clusterfuck lately, issues with my hands have made it harder to engage in long in-depth posts, and i've been questioning my secondary for a while and wanted to come to my conclusions before contributing any more potentially faulty information about snakes.

if you could not immediately tell from that sentence: i am a double bird! an absolute foghorn of a loud double bird! i am very happy to have it figured out and accepted it, even if i am a little embarrassed about it still. bird snakes you rock, and snakesec has served me well while i wasn't ready to start unburning. i'm glad to be back, and as my Actual Self this time. \o/

[wisteria-lodge]

Now I'm curious about the "X coded Y girl" system lmao. How would you describe each of the options? The "Y girl" part seems easy enough, but what makes a person Dean/Sam/Cas coded?

Dean = Daddy issues

Sam = Authority issues

Cas = Religion issues

:D

No, but really. This is a baby system, and what I would want to do is sit down a lot of people and go right. Of these three options, which character do you identify the most with and and why? Surface similarities, deep metaphysical stuff. Anything. And then you'd start seeing commonalities.

I think that probably it's going to end up relating back to 'core wounds' - this idea that everyone has a central lack, or central fear, a negative self narrative that they need to grapple with.

With Dean, he fears that he is useless, stupid, lesser, doesn't deserve things.

Sam fears that he is fundamentally broken, a liability, a timebomb, weak.

Cas fears that he will never belong, that he is lost, will never be safe.

(and I would throw in Crowley too, because he thinks he fundamentally can’t be loved, and that one's important.)

[mooglesorts]

me posting here for the first time in weeks: is moreau residentevil a double badger, snake badger, double snake, or badger snake

[prokopetz]

I admire professional linguists for their ability to devise brain-fuckingly complicated definitions for seemingly simple categories, then spend the next several decades arguing with each other about whether the things those categories describe actually exist.

[elfwreck]

It comes from the surreal recursiveness of using the materials you’re studying to study those materials.

Linguists and quantum physicists have an uneasy feeling that they may be just making it all up out of nothing, and the way to distance yourself from that feeling is to argue vehemently about the proper description of a category that everyone agrees fits the model perfectly, but nobody is quite sure if the model belongs in the real world.

[applesaps]

hey, shc community! i was wondering if other improvisational secondaries relate to the whole

1) going ahead of the instructions when assembling/making something

2) realizing you’ve royally messed up

3) dramatically facepalming while mourning your project

4) having to recover and fix what you can from the mess you’ve made

5) it all surprisingly (sometimes) turning out pretty okay - but still not as good as if you just followed the instructions... but ugh instructions lol

sorry if the formatting is a bit wonky, using mobile :)

[fleethall-deactivated20251104]

my brain is just yeehaws now

[mooglesorts]

@wisteria-lodge

[coffeepeople]

One time a friend told me that if she wanted to have a chill night she would come to me and ask for tea and a book to read. I didn’t like tea at the time, but I always made sure my cupboards had them in case she needed a quiet night. One time I told my boss that I loved oranges, but couldn’t peel them because of my nails. For a year he made sure to peel me one at least once a week. Once my friends gave me a made up superlative of “most likely to have a pen they could borrow” and ever since I’ve made sure I always carry a pen with me. A long time ago, my high school librarian told me that no one would care what my grade in my sophomore chemistry class was if I’m bringing them doughnuts and asking them about their day.

[coffeepeople]

Sometimes friendship is about carrying pens and peeling oranges. But the point is, surrounding yourself with people who you want to do the little things for. The point of it all is bringing in the doughnuts because you’ve found the people who deserve the doughnuts.

[coffeepeople]

And I’m so fucking lucky, and I don’t always say it or even think it. Because I have friends who send me letters and who told me when the cafeteria at work had chopped tomatoes and who want to watch Scream with me and it just hits me sometimes that this world can do the ugliest things to people, but as long as I still have a friend who will point out dogs on the sidewalks to me then I have something amazing to live for. And as long as I have pals who I want to make peppermint bark for, then I have a reason to keep pushing this world to be better.

[magpie-of-a-birb]

HEY, GUYS, REMEMBER HOW @wisteria-lodge ASKED WHAT SORTINGS EVERYONE IN THE SHC COMMUNITY HAD?

I DECIDED TO MAKE A QUIZ SO THAT WE CAN EASILY COMPILE AND ANALYZE THAT DATA

HERE IT IS!

(Also posting the link in case it's easier for some)

Collecting data on people in the shc community to see if there are any patterns, quiz made by a ravenclaw/bird secondary

Tagging some peeps I know would be interested in order to get the ball rolling. Yall feel free to tag others, if so inclined

@mooglesorts @dragonsaredorks @paint-the-ravenclaw @the-phoenix-heart @aythnic @aubade-things

[wisteria-lodge]

I think it'd be really interesting to know what all the major players in the sorting hat chats fandom are sorted as. Kinda see how that affects sortings and what people are drawn to shc.

I would also love to know this. I’m a Lion primary who models Snake / Badger secondary who likes both the Bookkeeper and Courtier skillsets. I have an analytical Bird secondary model I use as a toy, and occasionally as backup. And an Actor Bird model I use to mask because... neurodivergent. But it’s absolutely exhausting to keep up and I hate having to use it. One of the things I’m most proud of is the way I’ve built my life so I don’t actually *have* to, almost at all.

@sortinghatchats @paint-the-ravenclaw @magpie-of-a-birb @missbrunettebarbie @mooglesorts @swearingintengwar @the-phoenix-heart @awinterrain  @misku-nimfa  @persefoneshalott  @air-in-words @dealltheknives  @blueorangedisaster @thecottageinthedark  @ornamental-coral  @connecting-the-mothership @justbecauseyoubelievesomething @nectargrapes @dragonsaredorks @laufire @livrelady @fromthemouthofkings  @hillofwater  @nia-nia-on-the-wall... and everyone else who else sees this! these are the guys who have been writing meta recently / linked me their character sortings and seems enough to start with!

Actually, also @ameliahcrowley ~ you write intelligently mostly in comments, but you’ve been there since the beginning, I see you. And @pearlsthatwerehiseyes, you don’t comment much but everything you *do* say is so complete and excellent. Also your handle is classy.  

[mooglesorts]

bird snake here! i model just about everything pretty hard except snake primary (which, i used to model that really hard too, but it was super unhealthy for me and is therefore in time out). lion secondary slightly less than the others for now, just because it drowned out the others so much for a long time, and i've been giving it a rest to explore them.

another great shc blog i recommend is @nounsnlies! they're a cool fellow bird snake with a lot of great insights, and their stuff has helped me a lot with articulating things about my own sorting. :D

thank you for the tag, i'm flattered ;u;