What the Hell is a Hufflepuff?
The Hogwarts founders, explained
Hogwarts has four founders, the creators of the only magical boarding school in Britain. Each one has their own house, named after them, and each house has their own certain virtue that they wanted to see in their students. As one of my favorite tweets aptly puts it: “As we all know, there are only four types of kids- brave, evil, smart, and miscellaneous.” And thus Hogwarts and the four houses were born.
Godric Gryffindor
Godric Gryffindor is the guy in your MFA who explains your own work to you. He only wants brave kids, but not the kind of brave where a kid tells you their pronouns and expects you to respect them. The kind of brave where a kid says, “I heard there were werewolves in the Forbidden Forest, let’s check it out after hours.” He has a magic sword that appears to those who are worthy and in need, but of course, he’s bougie enough that its hilt is encrusted with rubies. I’m sure at staff meetings Godric would get off topic, waving his sword around, recounting about how he slayed a dragon with it while Rowena Ravenclaw played with her diadem and said, “Really? Can you shut the fuck up now?” under her breath.
Rowena Ravenclaw
Rowena Ravenclaw has seen some shit, and she doesn’t get enough credit for it. First of all, she’s the smartest person in the room, but she’s smart enough not to make a big deal out of it. She’s the quiet kind of smart. The smart kids that she wants are humble, but she also wants them to be logical, which is something that is tragically lost to wizardkind by the time that Harry gets to Hogwarts. It’s not talked about enough that she was in love with the Bloody Baron and that he killed her, and in her grief, she was tricked by Voldemort. She’s also managed to live at Hogwarts with the man who killed her for almost 1,000 years. Give the woman some props and be glad that she hasn’t created a curse to wipe men from the planet.
Helga Hufflepuff
In another life, Helga Hufflepuff would be the patron saint of gay kids. While the other three founders were off arguing about what kinds of kids they wanted and how pure of blood they wanted them to be (so racist!) she shrugged and said, “Gimme all the rest and I’ll teach those little nerds.” All the kids that don’t fit, all the kids that everyone else makes fun of, she’ll take them. The Hufflepuff common room is the only common room that we don’t get to see, but it’s underneath the kitchens and I’m sure that it’s super comfy and cozy, and that all the older kids smoke weed. I’m sure that Helga smoked some herself. “Pass me another blunt when you’re done arguing about your racist shit, guys, I already told you I’d teach any kid that comes through these doors.”
Salazar Slytherin
THIS RACIST DUDE ONLY WANTED PUREBLOODS AND WHEN THE OTHER FOUNDERS SAID NO HE PUT A GIANT SNAKE IN THE PLUMBING TO KILL THE KIDS HE DIDN’T LIKE, SO BASICALLY FUCK THIS DUDE.
In all fairness, Slytherins do get a bad rap. The virtue of Slytherin is ambition, and there is nothing wrong with ambition. The problem with Slytherin, particularly because it was founded by a racist piece of shit, is that the moral surrounding ambition are blurred, and thus many of the worst Slytherins that we know about are morally corrupt and do whatever they need to do to get what they want. This makes them low-key sociopaths. But I’d like to think that 90% of Slytherins are just ambitious hardworking kids who sit around in the creepy common room and go, “Dude, do we have any famous people who like, weren’t Death Eaters?”
What astounds me is that these four were best friends, particularly Gryffindor and Slytherin. (We all know that Slytherins and Hufflepuffs make the best friends, actually.) I mean, I’m not here to say that people who aren’t alike can’t be friends, but I just really have a hard time imagining them enjoying each other’s company while they were creating Hogwarts, and then after they had finished. What also astounds me is how well Hufflepuff managed to put up with with all of their racism! She’s clearly the only one who doesn’t care what kinds of students Hogwarts has, understanding that they all need to be taught and they all need to be taught right. The others remind me of Community (which I have never seen) and that blonde woman is like, “I can excuse the racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty.” Eventually, after years of bickering and not getting on, Slytherin leaves (after making the plumbing racist) and everything goes back to normal and everyone is happy again. I would love to know what the straw that broke the camel’s back was. What exactly did he do that was more racist than all the other racist shit that finally made everyone say, “Hold up there, dude. We can’t tolerate this.” And like the Confederacy, when he lost, he ran away, but not without leaving hundreds of years of division and racism behind. Just look at Voldemort’s grandfather, Marvolo Gaunt.
If I don’t quit while I’m ahead, this is going to turn into a long essay about how Harry Potter is racist accidentally while also being racist on purpose to show us how not to be racist. I’ll just leave you with a final reminder: Rowena Ravenclaw deserves your awe, Godric Gryffindor would have asked you to smile, Helga Hufflepuff definitely grew her own weed in the greenhouses, and Salazar Slytherin is more racist than you thought he was when you first read the books.
