The Sorting Hat Chats System - Elim Garak (Deep Space 9)
Right. This was supposed to be a DS9 sorting, and it got… a little out of hand.
I blame the very complex @sortinghatchats (not really.) Anyway, their system gets very deep very fast, so I recommend their breakdown of the basics, but basically, their character analysis system gives everyone TWO houses.
Your Primary house is your MOTIVATION. It’s why you do what you do
GRYFFINDOR: I do what I feel is right (MORAL)
RAVENCLAW: I do what I decide is correct (LOGICAL)
HUFFLEPUFF: I do what helps my community (PEOPLE MATTER)
SLYTHERIN: I do what helps me/my inner circle (FRIENDS MATTER)
Your Secondary house is your METHOD. It’s your toolbox, how you like to get stuff done;
GRYFFINDOR: Charge! React! Smash the system!
RAVENCLAW: Plan, make tools, gather information.
HUFFLEPUFF: Community-build, grind for points, call in favors
SLYTHERIN: Transform, adapt, find the loophole
So Hermione Granger would be a Gryffindor Primary / Ravenclaw Secondary. She fights for her moral cause by gathering knowledge and learning skills.
Now let’s talk about Elim Garak. What did I get myself into.
Elim Garak wants you to look at him and see a double Slytherin pretending to be a double Hufflepuff. And his Puff performance is really just the thinnest, most pathetic layer possible. Barely enough for plausible deniability. Lots of “Whhhaaa, lil’old ME? A poor simple TAILOR who wants NOTHING MORE than to make BEAUTIFUL CLOTHES for the people of this FINE STATION? That top secret security clearance code was… something I happened to OVERHEAR. While hemming PANTS.”
Yeah. You are supposed to dismiss that immediately, look beneath “plain, simple Garak” and see the Obsidian Order operative. You are supposed to look at Elim Garak and see a suave, dangerous chameleon who is always lying, always looking out for himself, very International-Man-of-Mystery, very classical Slytherin. (And kind of a flattering self-portrait, if we’re being honest.)
But that’s not real either.
When we see Garak’s real Slytherin Secondary - it’s terrifying. Because it’s subtle. When Garak is really lying, really manipulating, you won’t know it until long after the game is played. We see him maneuver Captain Sisko into assassinating an ambassador by feeding him just the right information at just the right time, ramping up the stakes, giving him space, playing into the sunk-cost fallacy, persuading Sisko to bend the rules just a little bit… and a little bit more…
Garak is a master at this. He gets Julian Bashir to run a dangerous errand in “The Wire” by deliberately pinging his hero tendencies - and dropping the name of the relevant system into the conversation, making it look like the natural slip-up of a sick, dying man. Julian goes after Tain for him, and goes after Dukat for him. Garak once deflected an attempt on his life by planting a second bomb himself.
He’s got one hell of a Ravenclaw secondary too. This is Garak the hacker, Garak the codebreaker, Garak who can re-wire a subspace transmitter under truly adverse conditions. But I think that his Ravenclaw is a tool that’s been trained into him - it’s not close to his identity, it’s not close to his heart. When Garak thinks “Ravenclaw Secondary” he thinks of the borderline omniscient Enabran Tain, and knows that his own Ravenclaw is only a pale imitation. Enabran Tain himself is a surprisingly straightforward Slytherin/Ravenclaw - but Garak’s got such a twisted, messy relationship with him that it’s spilled into the way he relates to Ravenclaw Secondaries in general.
But. Garak is not the Obsidian Order’s best assassin. He’s not their best spy. He’s not their best code-breaker. He is their best interrogator. So what does that mean???
Interrogation styles + Hogwarts Houses
I’ll admit this question lead me down a sort of research rabbit hole. I know all kinds of things about interrogators and interrogation techniques now, and it’ll probably screw up my algorithms for a little bit. But I’ll talk in terms of Hogwarts houses and fictional characters, because that’s the lens I’m looking though.
You can definitely interrogate with all the Secondaries. There’s the Gryffindor approach: just steamroll over your subject with conviction and energy. (Batman, Jack Bauer). There’s the Ravenclaw method: cold, controlled, omniscient, your subject is simply a puzzle, a Rubik’s Cube to be solved. (The Stazi ‘hero’ of The Lives of Others, most villainous interrogators.) There’s even the favored Slytherin approach, where you stage things so the subject doesn’t even know they’re being interrogated. (Gus Fring of Breaking Bad interrogating people under the guise of cooking with them, or explaining a job to them, or serving them food. Marina of The Magicians pretending to be an overwhelmed new recruit in order to vet Julia.)
But the more I read about the very best, most successful real-world interrogators, the more I read about sympathy, empathy, respect, compassion, friendliness. Good interrogators are easy to talk to. They want to understand where you’re coming from. They’ll give you coffee, or scotch. They’ll watch TV with you. “I totally get why you did it, hell, I would have done exactly the same thing in your situation. I want to help you out. You’re not really in trouble. I’m just confused - I think my boss got this one part wrong. Wait, before we get into that, a funny thing happened to me on the way to work.” The current thinking says that star interrogators are Hufflepuffs. Or at least Slytherin Secondaries who are really good at looking like Hufflepuffs. There aren’t too many straightforward fictional examples - Will Graham of Hannibal, maybe?
But this is how Garak interrogates. He prides himself on never touching his subjects - he doesn’t need to. All he needs is a tiny bit of Cardassian threat in the background. When he successfully breaks Odo, it’s because he comes at the situation as a friend. (And the way he justifies it as “just business” matches up with my research.) Garak is charming, and funny, and really good at understanding people. I also think his general look helps him interrogate. Most high-ranking Cardassians look like Dukat: dark hair, dark eyes, tall. It’s probably an “aristocratic” thing: our fascist space lizards definitely messed around with genetic augmentation / eugenics at some point. But compact little Garak? With his bright blue eyes? Lower class. (After all, his mom was a housekeeper.)
I bet Garak leveraged that vibe into approachable and trustworthy, used it to seem more on a level with his Bajoran detainees. Imagine what a relief Garak would be, after talking to Dukat for five hours.
So. Is Garak a Slytherin Secondary with a really good Hufflepuff model, or a Hufflepuff Secondary with a really good Slytherin model? I thought about that one for a while. And I’ve come down on the side of Hufflepuff.
It’s just. He keeps up that Hufflepuff outside the interrogation booth, when it isn’t useful. Garak creates communities, almost involuntarily, even when it’s a bad idea. (Getting close to Julian and Ziyal was risky.) It bothers Garak that his friendships are so real. He hates that the dirty looks the Bajorans give him bother him so much. He has a huge network of contacts, still. And his problem-solving fallback is not Slyth transformation, but Puff diligence. Stare at the detainee for four hours. Assassinate the politician by spending six months pruning bushes at the embassy. He’s “a very good tailor” after all. I can’t help but think that a more Slytherin Garak would have at least been tempted to make a quick buck doing odd jobs for Quark. Or apolitical Odo, who he clearly respects. But no - Garak sets himself up with a job that requires a down-to-earth Hufflepuff work ethic.
In “Purgatory’s Shadow” Garak thinks that his life is really, truly threatened. And he responds by asking for help. He does it in an absurdly underhanded Slytherin way, but. When he is in trouble, Garak phones a friend. Watch him. That is always his first instinct.
[The one Secondary Garak just absolutely does not understand is Gryffindor. He respects Gryffindor Secondaries, and he recognizes that people like Kira and Dax have them - and then he just gives those people a lot of space.]
Figuring out Garak’s primary was actually pretty easy. Because before he is anything else, Elim Garak is a Cardassian patriot. That motivation is so clear and so loud that it cuts though everything else no problem. He’d die for Cardassia. He’d let Julian die for Cardassia. He’d commit genocide for Cardassia. And if there was a single Gryffindor bone in Garak’s entire body, he would have felt at least a little guilty about that last one. But Garak seems to distrust the entire concept of morality, the way a lot of Loyalist Primaries do. “A real intelligence agent has no ego, no conscience, no remorse, only a sense of professionalism.” As far as I can figure out, that’s his credo.
But you know what Garak does feel guilty about doing?
Helping the Federation fight Cardassia.
Even though he knows “Cardassia” is a Dominion-controlled puppet state, even though he knows he’s doing what’s best for his planet in the long run, when he’s decrypting messages that help Federation ships kill Cardassian citizens, he gets debilitating panic attacks.
But Garak is not loyal to the Cardassian High Command. He’s not even loyal to the Obsidian Order, not really. He’s loyal to an ideal, to an almost poetic sense of what Cardassia really is, that has more to do with art and literature and tradition than it does with politics. And he is never able to shake this feeling, even though at a certain point I think he could have sold his soul to be a Slytherin Primary, loyal only to Enabran Tain.
Because if you want to talk about Garak, you have to talk about why he is living in exile. He gives Julian three different explanations: he got sloppy, he got lazy, and he sabotaged himself. I’m sure Garak has believed all of these himself, at one point or another. But I think he’s too much of a solid Hufflepuff Secondary to get sloppy or lazy, so I’m going to look at the last one. What happens when the *real* Cardassia shifts too far away from the *ideal* Cardassia that Garak is loyal to? When families like the Dukats gain too much power? I think Garak starts making mistakes, because he can’t reconcile that crack in his Primary. Just like when he makes mistakes later on, forced to fight his Cardassian countrymen.
Garak is a double Hufflepuff, loyal to a sort of ideal Cardassia. He can model one hell of a Ravenclaw secondary, and one hell of a Slytherin secondary, but in the end they are not as close to his soul - not as important to who he is as a person - as that Hufflepuff. But he’s still a spy. So he constructs a very careful performance that he wears… most of the time. And that performance is an exaggerated double Slytherin pretending to be an exaggerated double Hufflepuff.
So yeah. I am saying that Garak is a double Hufflepuff who pretends to be a double Hufflepuff. And I think that would make him smile.
JULIAN: Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren’t?
GARAK: My dear doctor, they’re all true.
GARAK: Especially the lies.
Also, thank you @featherquillpen for the charming episode write-ups. They were a source of inspiration.
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