Factions in Literature
And why Young People are so Driven to fit themselves in a Box
[In this Post, I use the word 'faction' to mean a party of people sharing distinguishing features, ideas or ethos. If you have a problem with this definition, please leave it in the comments section]
The other day I was talking to one of my friends about an online Harry Potter RPG I had gone on once and that she was a huge fan of. One of the first questions she asked me was "which House are you in?"
The other day I was talking to one of my friends about an online Harry Potter RPG I had gone on once and that she was a huge fan of. One of the first questions she asked me was "which House are you in?"
For those of you unaware of how Harry Potter works, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (which the protagonist frequencies) divides it's students into 4 groups called 'Gryffindor', 'Slytherin', 'Ravenclaw' and 'Hufflepuff'.
What house a student is in depends of what personality they have and is decided by a singing, mind reading 'Sorting Hat'. The RPG that my friend goes on unfortunately doesn't have a magical sorting hat and so a short quiz decided where everybody goes.
After telling my friend that the RPG's 'Hat Quiz' had put me 'Ravenclaw' (the house that most values being smart), I received open hostility from my friend who found it unacceptable that this personality quiz had placed me in anything other than Hufflepuff (the house of lovable and hard-working slip-ups,).
This got me thinking about the huge numbers of books that try to categorize people and if this is in anyway a reflection of our own society. And why, in an age where people are more and more celebrating individuality, do people take these things so seriously?
So first of all, let me explain to you that it isn't just Harry Potter that tries to fit people into a certain box, although you could say that they were one of the first and they helped make the idea popular with authors.
While many, many people have applied this idea to their own books, I'm going to be focusing mainly of three of the most popular examples with people aged between Middle School age and young adulthood, as this is the niche market usually targeted by the technique. Here they are!
While many, many people have applied this idea to their own books, I'm going to be focusing mainly of three of the most popular examples with people aged between Middle School age and young adulthood, as this is the niche market usually targeted by the technique. Here they are!
Harry Potter
So we've already talked about this a little bit already but I'm just going to go a bit more into detail about it. For all of JK Rowling's excellent values she teaches in her books, the way she separates people for their personalities is... unnerving. The Houses of Hogwarts separate people not just for teams in House Points (awarded or taken away for good or bad behavior), but also decide where students eat; where they sleep; their lesson time tables and teams for sports.
To quotes the Harry Potter Wikia,
There is no rule against students from different houses mingling, but in practice a good majority of social interactions occur within the same house.This is doubtless down to the lack of interaction between Houses. While the House system does provide a simple way for the school to be run, it does have some startling consequences. Severus Snape (An ex-pupil of Hogwarts), spent almost all his life in a desperate love for Lily Evans, who became Harry Potter's mother. The two of them might have eventually ended up together if they hadn't been placed in different houses (Severus in Slytherin and Lily in Gryffindor). However, while the two were friends for a lot of their time at Hogwarts, Lily ended up marrying James Potter, Severus's long time bully.
As well as this, ex-students of Hogwarts tend to carry prejudice against other houses well into their adult lives. Less than friendly rivalries are common. Rubeus Hagrid, was quoted on saying once;
There isn't a wizard that's gone bad that wasn't in SlytherinDespite the fact that Hagrid at the time thought that Sirius Black was an evil wizard, Hagrid seems to have prejudice ridden impression on Slytherin Students. In fact, when the Battle of Hogwarts happened, the entire House of Slytherin were taken down to the dungeons because of fear that they'd all join 'He Who Must Not Be Named'.
To be certain, a lot of evil wizards did come from Slytherin but if your going to teach 11-year-olds magic, that sort of suggests that you trust them enough not to try and kill you.
As for what would happen if you fit into more than one house? The Hat lets you choose, as it did for Harry and Neville.
The factions (here called Houses) that characters are divided into in the Harry Potter series are:
- Gryffindor - Where dwell the Brave at Heart
- Hufflepuff - Where they are Just and Loyal
- Ravenclaw - If You've a Ready Mind
- Slytherin - Those Cunning Folk use Any means to Achieve their Ends
[definitions provided by the 1991 Sorting Hat Song]
Part of the reason these books (and then the films) were so successful was simply that people (like my friend who criticized me for being 'in' Ravenclaw in the RPG) like to support their favorite house and simplify their personalities down into a one of 4 simple options.
But this exists in other works of YA Fiction as well. In Twilight, the author divides fans into factions...
Twilight
Team Jacob or Team Edward? While I have never read Twilight myself, the figures speak for themselves that Stephenie Meyer knows how to write a successful book. In the most famous Undead Love Triangle of all time, fans to this day are divided between who would make a better boyfriend for Bella; Edward the Blood-Sucking Vampire, or Jacob the snarly Werewolf. Skillfully, the author of Twilight has managed to create an army to argue this debate outside of fiction which is unique for the authors that we're going to look at.Divergent
Thousands of years ago, a dude called Plato wrote a book on Philosophy which included how he would govern a city. Plato said that the people would be divided into a Military Section, a Scientific Section and An Artistic Section. In Veronica Roth's Divergent, Dystopian Chicago is split up into 5 'factions' based on your personality.
This is kind of like things are in Harry Potter with the Houses except that the divide is city-wide and the system has a bigger impact on the plot. One of the more major differences between Roth's 'Faction System' and Rowling's 'House System' is that Roth goes into a lot more detail about what it means to fit, at least partly, in several groups.
As mentioned above, The Sorting Hat in Harry Potter was unsure whether to put Harry in Gryffindor - for brave people - or Slytherin - for the sly and ambitious. Like Harry, Tris Prior (the main character n Divergent) was tested to be compatible with many different Factions. In the first book, Tris takes a test with several simulations to see how she would react and which faction she should try to make a life for herself in (a decision everyone in the city makes at age 16). However, Tris shows herself to be Smart, Brave and Selfless; qualities of three different factions.
In these books, having multiple character traits like this is called being 'Divergent'. In a society where people are made to fit their personalities to certain standards, Tris finds that being individual is akin to being doomed to die.
The Factions in Divergent are:
- Abegnation (For the Selfless)
- Amity (For the Peaceful)
- Candor (the Honest)
- Erudite (the Intelligent)
- Dauntless (The Brave)
My own obsessions with putting people in Factions - Experiment
Now I bet your wondering why I just dragged you through all of that. What possible benefit could that have had? Perhaps I can make things easier for you by conducting some quantitative desk research.
I wanted to get a statistic of how important classifying people into Literary Factions is to the general population. To test this, I wanted to see how common it was for fans to create quizzes about Harry Potter that divided people into Houses.
I chose to search for Harry Potter Tests because Harry Potter is one of the classic (and one of the most popular) examples where people are sorted into factions based on personality. I took the data on 16th October 2015.
Firstly, it made sense to test how common it is for Harry Potter Quizzes to be made. A quick search revealed that of the first 50 results on Google when I typed in 'Harry Potter Quiz', 98% of the websites that came up were Harry Potter quizzes. This showed that there is an abundance of Harry Potter-themed quizzes on the internet.
Then, I Googled 'Harry Potter Sorting Hat' to see how common it is for people to make quizzes that divide people into Houses, compared to pages simply about the Sorting Hat. Of the sites that came up , half of the results were quizzes designed so that Muggles can find out what house they would be in, within the first 50 results.
Finally, to prove that quizzes that try to classify people are abnormally large compared to all other types of Harry Potter quiz, I searched for 'Harry Potter Ordinary Wizarding Levels'. The Ordinary Wizarding Levels (O.W.L.s) are another test Harry Potter took while at Hogwarts. They are the magical equivalent of GCSEs. - Since so many quizzes existed trying to replicate the Sorting Hat (one example of a test Harry Potter did), I wanted to know how many quizzes tried to replicate this other test that Harry Potter did.
The results were that only 14 O.W.Ls quizzes (28%) appeared in the first 50 search results.
Here's a graph. RP stands for Results page! Surely you can now see by looking at how big the 'Sorting Hat' column is in comparison to the O.W.Ls column; how obsessed we are with putting people into categories or factions, and now, let us conclude and I'll answer all of the questions
If we think about the example further up the page of Twilight, whole debates are raged between fans of 'Team Edward' and 'Team Jacob'. But no-one forces fans to participate in that debate. Society doesn't.
One of the few joys of teenage-hood is that you find yourself. It can be frustrating to not be taken seriously but you reach a stage were you are opinionated and mature and on a solitary quest to find out who you are. Everyone your age on Earth is undergoing the same quest but in completely different ways. This subconscious urge to discover yourself is, I think the reason that people put themselves into boxes or take part in the Edward-Jacob arguments.
However, we have a paradox. At my age, the teenage; you want to find out who you, to be similar to those you aspire to be similar to, but you don't want to be like all the others. That is why Harry, the Hero of Harry Potter, is not totally belonging in Gryffindor. It is why Divergent, a book about not fitting in to your society, Tris manages to feel at home in Dauntless but doesn't fit the way everyone else does.
Within the faction of Dauntless, their are groups of people like Four and groups of people like Eric. Factions within factions are a relief for teenagers because they are a way to fit in without loosing indeviduallity.
The world wants to fit everyone into a box. That's human nature for you. But if you find the right box, their is no reason you can't fit in it. Just remember that an individual can be anything they want to be and you don't have to pick a side in anything unless you want to.
I've been the Inkling!
You've Been Incredible!
Thank you for Reading!
By the Inkling
I wanted to get a statistic of how important classifying people into Literary Factions is to the general population. To test this, I wanted to see how common it was for fans to create quizzes about Harry Potter that divided people into Houses.
I chose to search for Harry Potter Tests because Harry Potter is one of the classic (and one of the most popular) examples where people are sorted into factions based on personality. I took the data on 16th October 2015.
Firstly, it made sense to test how common it is for Harry Potter Quizzes to be made. A quick search revealed that of the first 50 results on Google when I typed in 'Harry Potter Quiz', 98% of the websites that came up were Harry Potter quizzes. This showed that there is an abundance of Harry Potter-themed quizzes on the internet.
Then, I Googled 'Harry Potter Sorting Hat' to see how common it is for people to make quizzes that divide people into Houses, compared to pages simply about the Sorting Hat. Of the sites that came up , half of the results were quizzes designed so that Muggles can find out what house they would be in, within the first 50 results.
Finally, to prove that quizzes that try to classify people are abnormally large compared to all other types of Harry Potter quiz, I searched for 'Harry Potter Ordinary Wizarding Levels'. The Ordinary Wizarding Levels (O.W.L.s) are another test Harry Potter took while at Hogwarts. They are the magical equivalent of GCSEs. - Since so many quizzes existed trying to replicate the Sorting Hat (one example of a test Harry Potter did), I wanted to know how many quizzes tried to replicate this other test that Harry Potter did.
The results were that only 14 O.W.Ls quizzes (28%) appeared in the first 50 search results.
Here's a graph. RP stands for Results page! Surely you can now see by looking at how big the 'Sorting Hat' column is in comparison to the O.W.Ls column; how obsessed we are with putting people into categories or factions, and now, let us conclude and I'll answer all of the questions
Conclusion
Why do we feel the need to classify ourselves into factions? Why do we read books that encourage us to do so?If we think about the example further up the page of Twilight, whole debates are raged between fans of 'Team Edward' and 'Team Jacob'. But no-one forces fans to participate in that debate. Society doesn't.
One of the few joys of teenage-hood is that you find yourself. It can be frustrating to not be taken seriously but you reach a stage were you are opinionated and mature and on a solitary quest to find out who you are. Everyone your age on Earth is undergoing the same quest but in completely different ways. This subconscious urge to discover yourself is, I think the reason that people put themselves into boxes or take part in the Edward-Jacob arguments.
However, we have a paradox. At my age, the teenage; you want to find out who you, to be similar to those you aspire to be similar to, but you don't want to be like all the others. That is why Harry, the Hero of Harry Potter, is not totally belonging in Gryffindor. It is why Divergent, a book about not fitting in to your society, Tris manages to feel at home in Dauntless but doesn't fit the way everyone else does.
Within the faction of Dauntless, their are groups of people like Four and groups of people like Eric. Factions within factions are a relief for teenagers because they are a way to fit in without loosing indeviduallity.
The world wants to fit everyone into a box. That's human nature for you. But if you find the right box, their is no reason you can't fit in it. Just remember that an individual can be anything they want to be and you don't have to pick a side in anything unless you want to.
I've been the Inkling!
You've Been Incredible!
Thank you for Reading!
By the Inkling
