The Sorting Hat is the true Mastermind in Harry Potter
I’m increasingly of the opinion that all the events in the Harry Potter books that had their root in someone who went to Hogwarts were in some way orchestrated by the Sorting Hat.
The Sorting Hat had access to the minds and potential of every single Hogwarts student ever. In fact it directed their potential, due to the segregated nature of the Hogwarts House system. Everyone just TRUSTED it to make the right decision. I mean, yeah, new students would sit there arguing with it, but once it has made a decision that’s it. I’ve not yet come across any JKR tidbit citing that there has ever been anyone who switched from one house to another. And all of those students, ALL the students, had their future at Hogwarts heavily influenced by the declaration of that one enchanted object.
Which is basically an AI computer, but in magical terms.
And I’ve seen discussions online that get closer and closer to “the house divides are extremely nebulous and unfair and sketchy” (and some that go straight to “the house divides are wrong and evil”), but many seem to tend towards trying to “fix” book-canon, to take what was in the books and expand upon the very limiting parameters to make it seem like the system ISN’T wrong and broken.
Especially when it comes to Slytherin, and to do with making Slytherin house not “the evil one” of the four.
But you know, it’s a fact in the books that most of the Death Eaters and other really bad wizards (not all, but many) that went to Hogwarts went through Slytherin in the books. And nominally, people get put in Slytherin because they are cunning and ambitious. But the way in which this is determined is not simply “this hat is charmed to measure your cunning and ambition levels” or whatever.
That hat’s alive, pretty much. Its consciousness is modelled after the fashion of humans, only it has been in the castle almost since the castle was there and has seen the passing through of countless witches and wizards. It has the absolute trust of everyone in the castle, and there’s nothing to suggest in the books that there was anyone else in charge of it.
Who’s to say it isn’t just putting people in whatever house it damn well chooses? Who’s to say it didn’t just decide one year that it was bored and started carefully plotting how best to place people to cause maximum havoc in the wizarding world?
Take the brothers Sirius and Regulus, for example. Both, at the end of the day, turned out to be honourable and principled individuals who made bad choices and were punished for those choices. However, since one was put in Slytherin and the other in Gryffindor, one ended up a Death Eater and the other removed himself from a toxic family environment and surrounded himself with caring loving people. This says nothing about either brother in terms of how “good” or “bad” they are, because both ultimately put a lot of work in to defeat Voldemort. What it does indicate, however, is how the environment in which they were placed in their formative years affected the vector their life took them on.
The Sorting Hat, in other words, took pity on Sirius in a way that it didn’t with Regulus. But both suffered. Sirius got to go on to be part of a loving family of friends and make an innocent mistake that brought about the first death of Voldemort, where Regulus worked behind Voldemort’s back to try to eliminate a horcrux.
The Sorting Hat also equipped Harry Potter with the friends he needed to become the hero of the story. Harry Potter was seemingly given a choice between Slytherin and Gryffindor, and maybe the Sorting Hat relented, or maybe it never had any intention of placing him in Slytherin in the first place. All the pieces fell into place though. Harry and Ron and Hermione could have ended up in three separate houses, Neville might never even have been featured in the story if he’d been put into Hufflepuff (arguably the least well-represented of the four houses).
But it shoved Sirius and James and Lupin and Peter together. Even though Peter Pettigrew turned out to be cowardly and completely UN-Gryffindor-like, and Sirius came from one of the worst of the pure-blood families. And it shoved Harry’s friends together. It pitted Draco and Harry on opposite sides of an imaginary line. It consigned Regulus Black to an abusive environment and an unsung death.
The Sorting defines people. It determines entire lives.
The rise of Voldemort only happened because the system was already broken and all the wrong people were placed (by the Sorting Hat) into Slytherin along with Tom Riddle, which fed into his already-troubled personality. He was placed in an environment where the upper-class pure-blood prejudices of the wizarding world were at their worst and his penchant for cruelty and an indifference towards those deemed lesser were allowed to flourish.
Also an atmosphere that encourages cunning and ambition and loyalty. NOT because people in Slytherin are inherently cunning, or ambitious, or loyal, but because Slytherin House is KNOWN for those traits and thus it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. But that’s also the best environment for starting some sort of pureblood power-cult. At least half the students there are already steeped in pureblood propaganda ANYWAY so all it took was someone to exploit that a bit further. (Also, since it seems that many marriages in the wizarding world up to Potter’s era fall within house divides, those students are steeped in pureblood pride because their parents were put in the same house. By the Sorting Hat.)
The Sorting Hat had to know this. It’s taken a look inside all the heads of the students, it lives (as of Potter’s era) in the headmaster’s office, it has access to everthing anyone says there. It knew what it was doing and it could have put Tom in any other house without it being questioned. It wasn’t like his parentage was common knowledge, which would be used as a judgment by other people as to whether he was put in the “right” house or not, so no suspicions would have been raised.
Putting Tom in another house could have made all the difference, some other house that hadn’t become a festering pool of prejudice and bigotry already. He might still have ended up as a thoroughly bad person, but without the cult of dark magic to back him up.
The Sorting Hat CREATED Lord Voldemort, and it ultimately brought about and ended the darkest hour of Hogwarts history, destroying much of the castle in the process and killing hundreds.
And for what? The greater good? Did it want to end the segregation of pupils based on arbitrary and malleable character traits? Did it just want to watch the world burn?
Dumbledore has nothing on the Sorting Hat.
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