The True Born SlytherClaw

I remember the first time my mom read me Harry Potter and the Philosophers stone as one of the most beautiful moments of my childhood.  We were lying down on my bunk bed, I was wearing Winnie-the-Pooh pyjamas and as soon as we got to the Chapter about how evil the Dursleys were I began to sob.  What can you expect from me, I was seven!

Since that very moment Harry Potter has been part of my identity.  Harry’s journeys are as real to me as any I have gone through myself. I know this might sound crazy, but I also know that there are people who feel the same, so we can all be crazy together.  However as the fandom progressed, as everyone at school and among my friends read the books we all began identifying with smaller aspects.  We all loved the Harry Potter books, but there were the Draco fans, there were the Hermione fans, there were the people that lived for the Quidditch matches, and those that loved the magical creature.  Me, what I most identified with was Ravenclaw House.

At first like any other kid (and Harry himself) I thought: I’m not good enough to get into these houses.  I’m not clever, I’m not hard working, I’m not smart and I sure as hell am not brave.  But then something wonderful happened, at some point in the books someone said that to be a Ravenclaw you don’t necessarily have to be brilliant, you can just cherish knowledge above everything else.  It’s not necessarily about being smart, Hermione is smart, it’s about caring for information, for history, for logic more than for adventure, or gratification.  That was the moment I realized that I was a Ravenclaw.

For years I never once doubted it.  If it ever came up in conversation, I would say it off-hand, of course I’m a Ravenclaw! And it made sense to me. I love reading.  I love History, philosophy, mythology.  What could be more ravenclaw than this? And then Pottermore came around…. and J.K herself decided that I wasn’t a Ravenclaw at all.  I was a Slytherin.

I remember the moment of shock. Of utter, utter surprise.  I always considered Slytherin my back up house, and some of my favoured characters (like Bellatrix) are Slytherins but I just never expected it of myself.  Am I villainous? Am I uncaring? Am I selfish? I know none of those are the official traits of Slytherins but they are the ones that showed up the most.  But reflecting on my personality I couldn’t see myself as any of them.

For a while there I was a closet Slytherin.  I didn’t admit it to myself.  I said J.K was wrong (which in my mind is kind of like damning god must be to an Evangelist).  I pushed it out of my mind. I was a Ravenclaw.  I was a Ravenclaw!!!! For now and forever. J.K and Pottermore had made some kind of mistake.

But then I really started thinking about it.  I know I’m not selfish, and I really don’t think I am villainous, but I can be pretty sneaky, and as much I say I’m not, I am ambitious.  I hate being ambitious more than anything in the world. Being ambitious but not having any courage is just about the worst combination of character traits in my eyes.  It means that I have all this longing to do things, but none of the guts to pull through with it.  It’s a miserable position really.  But I try.

My ambitions comes through in my fiction writing. In my ideas of the future. In my crazy plans that will never come to.  It comes through when I purchase twenty books in a month and honestly expect myself to read them all. It comes through when I meticulously research obscure material for my classes to enhance my required readings. The truth is that I am only ambitious about one thing: Knowledge.

And that’s what makes me the perfect Slytherclaw.