Rapunzel is pansexual and she beats turfs to death with her frying pan sorry I don’t make the rules.
I have a dilemma.
Do people generally know who the big 4 are?? Hiccup from HTTYD, Jack Frost from RotG, Merida from Brave and Rapunzel from Tangled?? yeah, those ones.
I’m not deep in that fandom, never have been, but I’ve enjoyed some of the fanmade works centered around them.
One of the most popular things for this group, I’ve found (and this is aside from rad music video edits and Friends dubs) is Hogwarts AUs. SO MANY HOGWARTS AUS. Like, I was looking for this one specific fanfic that I’d read a long time ago, and it was only after I remembered that I had commented on it that I was actually able to find it.
Now, this post is mostly about Sorting the Four.
Classically, we have Merida as a Gryff (which seems obvious, right? Her movie was called Brave, after all), Jack as a Slytherin, and Hiccup and Rapunzel often switching between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw (I always used to think of Punzie as a Puff and Hiccup as a Raven, but never fear, I shall soon tell you what I currently think).
Now, keep in mind, I literally was just going about my day today, being lazy as all hell, when my brain suddenly shouted “SORT THE BIG FOUR! GO!” and I was like “aH whaT” and this is the result. This is from having too much time on my hands and not enough motivation to do productive things I actually want to get done, so! Without further ado… the BIg Four sorted into Hogwarts Houses!
Merida: oh yeah, haha, this is obvious right? Slytherin! …okay now hear me out. Yes, her movie is literally called Brave. Yes, her hair is red. Yes, Gryff is all about nerve and daring and would be a perfect fit. BUT NO. See, in my mind, Gryffindor was always more about chivalry and Arthurian-knight values than it was about being brave. And, heck, Merida never really does anything to draw attention to herself until she finds herself in a situation where there are obstacles to getting what she wants: freedom. Merida’s goals in life are, pretty much, to stay single and let her hair flow in the wind as she rides through the glen (thank you, King Fergus, for summing it up perfectly). She doesn’t care much about her princess lessons, but she’s clearly put in the work to hone her skills as a horsewoman and an archer, and a CLIMBER LIKE HOLY SH*T SHE DID THAT— ahem. Her ambitions, you might say, are to be a free, skilled individual who doesn’t need to rely on anyone else. And she’s damn clever, too! Working around the rules of the contest to shoot for her own hand, and then searching for a solution to nip her problem right in the bud by addressing the source of the problem: her mother. (This explanation is getting very long… and I haven’t even included her and her brothers’ schemes for getting themselves treats from the kitchen!) In short: Merida displays the ambition, pride, self-preservation, and cunning so valued by House Slytherin.
Rapunzel: Now, this one took me a while to warm up to, but it was only while I was rewatching the bit for ‘When Will My Life Begin’ that it really clicked. Rapunzel is, without a doubt, a Ravenclaw. Of course, Hufflepuff is the next most popular opinion, but there’s never really anything in the movie (I haven’t yet watched the series) that makes me think she’s a Puff. BUT! The thing Ravenclaws value most is creativity, and she certainly displays plenty of that! Covering the walls of her tower in gorgeous paintings, learning—no, teaching herself—to cook, bake, sew, dance, play chess, and a host of other hobbies just to keep herself busy up there. She connects with the group of girls in the city when they teach her to braid her hair and decorate it with flowers; she’s clever enough to figure out herself that she’s the missing princess; and hey, speaking of cleverness, the stuff she does with her hair? SO clever! This girl would absolutely adore Ravenclaw tower, and would probably be the one to reach out to her fellow creatives and really make connections within her House.
Hiccup: Okay, I’ll admit, this one was a little difficult. My first thought has always been Ravenclaw, with his ingenuity, as well as his constant study of dragons, but also his hard work and how much he CARES about dragons made him a good candidate for Hufflepuff……. but he was also the first Viking ever to do something as stupid and reckless and wonderful as ride a dragon. That’s right, folks, I present to you a Gryffindor Hiccup! The whole first movie he’s trying to prove himself, to do something so daring as to bring down the most feared dragon Vikings know about, and to do it despite his tiny stature! And then to prove to his kinsmen that the dragons aren’t so bad, and even need to be saved. And the second movie he gives little heed to the warnings that Drago is a madman, because he’s convinced people before! How hard can some maniac in a dragonskin be? (Very hard, is the answer he found, but he didn’t give up trying to save his home, did he?) In conclusion, Hiccup, of all the four, shows the most genuine nerve, daring, and even chivalry that House Gryffindor so cherishes.
Jack: Now I know what you’re thinking: either I’m gonna break the mold and double up on Houses and make it all messy, or I’m going to try and shove Jack in a House where he doesn’t belong. On the contrary, this is going to be very neat and tidy, and Jack will get the House he deserves! And no, I’m not inventing a House to put Jack in. Yes, Jack Frost belongs in Hufflepuff, and I’m about to tell you why. Near the end of Rise of the Guardians, we learn that Jack is the Guardian of Fun. The way he figures this out is by working hard (winkwinknudgenudge) to get the kids to believe in the Guardians again, by making them laugh. Before that, he was always working to make the children laugh, even though they couldn’t see him, even though they didn’t believe—he just wanted to make them laugh! He waited for years to be recognized, but never once was he bitter about being invisible. Sad, sure, but he never turned on humanity. His dedication to those kids, the patience he had with humanity as a whole, and his overall belief in fun would earn him a solid place in House Hufflepuff. (Also he would totally be the one to ferry food from the kitchens to his friends in the other Houses.)
I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:
Why are dogs dogs?
I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.
Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense
Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.
The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”
The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”
The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”
These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive.
So why is dog-sorting intuitive?Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.
To process Things - whether animals, words, situations or experiences - our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before - whether first-hand or through a story - then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.
If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.
This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)
In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!
On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as
* pointy
* Specific!! Squawking noise!!
* The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye
* Patriotism?!?
* CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BADThen the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)
So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as
* four legs
* Meat Eater
* Soft friend
* Doggo-ness????
* Walkies
* An Snout,
* BORK BORKAnything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.
And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.
Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.
So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,
* Mop?? (Unlikely - seems to be self-propelled.)
* Alien? (Unlikely - no real alien ever experienced.)
* Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.)
* Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!)
* Very fluffy cat? (Maybe - but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!)
* Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type)
* Robotic toy? (Unlikely - too complex and convincing.)
* alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a …
* DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space!
* Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game.
* Best doggo.
* PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!
This is sooo CUTE!
I love this!
@elodieunderglass thank you for teaching me a New Thing™️
You’re very welcome!
Technically the cognitive process of quantifying Doggo-ness is called a schema. But I wrote it a while ago, on mobile, at about 4 am, while nursing a newborn baby with the other arm, and I’m frankly astonished that I was able to continue a single train of thought for that long, let alone remembering Actual Names For Things (That Have Names.) I strongly encourage you to learn more about schemata if you are interested in this sort of thing!
“Nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.”— Steve Maraboli
