sorting

The Sorting Hat Chats System – Elim Garak (Deep Space 9)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

wisteria-lodge:

Right. This was supposed to be a DS9 sorting, and it got… a little out of hand.

I blame the very complex @sortinghatchats (not really.) Anyway, their system gets very deep very fast, so I recommend their breakdown of the basics, but basically, their character analysis system gives everyone TWO houses.

Your Primary house is your MOTIVATION. It’s why you do what you do

  • GRYFFINDOR: I do what I feel is right (MORAL)
  • RAVENCLAW: I do what I decide is correct (LOGICAL)
  • HUFFLEPUFF: I do what helps my community (PEOPLE MATTER)
  • SLYTHERIN: I do what helps me/my inner circle (FRIENDS MATTER) 

Your Secondary house is your METHOD. It’s your toolbox, how you like to get stuff done; 

  • GRYFFINDOR: Charge! React! Smash the system!
  • RAVENCLAW: Plan, make tools, gather information.
  • HUFFLEPUFF: Community-build, grind for points, call in favors
  • SLYTHERIN: Transform, adapt, find the loophole

So Hermione Granger would be a Gryffindor Primary / Ravenclaw Secondary. She fights for her moral cause by gathering knowledge and learning skills. 

Now let’s talk about Elim Garak. What did I get myself into.

Elim Garak wants you to look at him and see a double Slytherin pretending to be a double Hufflepuff. And his Puff performance is really just the thinnest, most pathetic layer possible. Barely enough for plausible deniability. Lots of “Whhhaaa, lil’old ME? A poor simple TAILOR who wants NOTHING MORE than to make BEAUTIFUL CLOTHES for the people of this FINE STATION? That top secret security clearance code was… something I happened to OVERHEAR. While hemming PANTS.”

Yeah. You are supposed to dismiss that immediately, look beneath “plain, simple Garak” and see the Obsidian Order operative. You are supposed to look at Elim Garak and see a suave, dangerous chameleon who is always lying, always looking out for himself, very International-Man-of-Mystery, very classical Slytherin. (And kind of a flattering self-portrait, if we’re being honest.)

But that’s not real either. 

When we see Garak’s real Slytherin Secondary – it’s terrifying. Because it’s subtle. When Garak is really lying, really manipulating, you won’t know it until long after the game is played. We see him maneuver Captain Sisko into assassinating an ambassador by feeding him just the right information at just the right time, ramping up the stakes, giving him space, playing into the sunk-cost fallacy, persuading Sisko to bend the rules just a little bit… and a little bit more…

Garak is a master at this. He gets Julian Bashir to run a dangerous errand in “The Wire” by deliberately pinging his hero tendencies – and dropping the name of the relevant system into the conversation, making it look like the natural slip-up of a sick, dying man. Julian goes after Tain for him, and goes after Dukat for him. Garak once deflected an attempt on his life by planting a second bomb himself. 

He’s got one hell of a Ravenclaw secondary too. This is Garak the hacker, Garak the codebreaker, Garak who can re-wire a subspace transmitter under truly adverse conditions. But I think that his Ravenclaw is a tool that’s been trained into him – it’s not close to his identity, it’s not close to his heart. When Garak thinks “Ravenclaw Secondary” he thinks of the borderline omniscient Enabran Tain, and knows that his own Ravenclaw is only a pale imitation. Enabran Tain himself is a surprisingly straightforward Slytherin/Ravenclaw – but Garak’s got such a twisted, messy relationship with him that it’s spilled into the way he relates to Ravenclaw Secondaries in general. 

But. Garak is not the Obsidian Order’s best assassin. He’s not their best spy. He’s not their best code-breaker. He is their best interrogator. So what does that mean???

Interrogation styles + Hogwarts Houses

I’ll admit this question lead me down a sort of research rabbit hole. I know all kinds of things about interrogators and interrogation techniques now, and it’ll probably screw up my algorithms for a little bit. But I’ll talk in terms of Hogwarts houses and fictional characters, because that’s the lens I’m looking though. 

You can definitely interrogate with all the Secondaries. There’s the Gryffindor approach: just steamroll over your subject with conviction and energy. (Batman, Jack Bauer). There’s the Ravenclaw method: cold, controlled, omniscient, your subject is simply a puzzle, a Rubik’s Cube to be solved. (The Stazi ‘hero’ of The Lives of Others, most villainous interrogators.) There’s even the favored Slytherin approach, where you stage things so the subject doesn’t even know they’re being interrogated. (Gus Fring of Breaking Bad interrogating people under the guise of cooking with them, or explaining a job to them, or serving them food. Marina of The Magicians pretending to be an overwhelmed new recruit in order to vet Julia.) 

But the more I read about the very best, most successful real-world interrogators, the more I read about sympathy, empathy, respect, compassion, friendliness. Good interrogators are easy to talk to. They want to understand where you’re coming from. They’ll give you coffee, or scotch. They’ll watch TV with you. “I totally get why you did it, hell, I would have done exactly the same thing in your situation. I want to help you out. You’re not really in trouble. I’m just confused – I think my boss got this one part wrong. Wait, before we get into that, a funny thing happened to me on the way to work.” The current thinking says that star interrogators are Hufflepuffs. Or at least Slytherin Secondaries who are really good at looking like Hufflepuffs. There aren’t too many straightforward fictional examples – Will Graham of Hannibal, maybe? 

But this is how Garak interrogates. He prides himself on never touching his subjects – he doesn’t need to. All he needs is a tiny bit of Cardassian threat in the background. When he successfully breaks Odo, it’s because he comes at the situation as a friend. (And the way he justifies it as “just business” matches up with my research.) Garak is charming, and funny, and really good at understanding people. I also think his general look helps him interrogate. Most high-ranking Cardassians look like Dukat: dark hair, dark eyes, tall. It’s probably an “aristocratic” thing: our fascist space lizards definitely messed around with genetic augmentation / eugenics at some point. But compact little Garak? With his bright blue eyes? Lower class. (After all, his mom was a housekeeper.) 

I bet Garak leveraged that vibe into approachable and trustworthy, used it to seem more on a level with his Bajoran detainees. Imagine what a relief Garak would be, after talking to Dukat for five hours. 

So. Is Garak a Slytherin Secondary with a really good Hufflepuff model, or a Hufflepuff Secondary with a really good Slytherin model? I thought about that one for a while. And I’ve come down on the side of Hufflepuff. 

It’s just. He keeps up that Hufflepuff outside the interrogation booth, when it isn’t useful. Garak creates communities, almost involuntarily, even when it’s a bad idea. (Getting close to Julian and Ziyal was risky.) It bothers Garak that his friendships are so real. He hates that the dirty looks the Bajorans give him bother him so much. He has a huge network of contacts, still. And his problem-solving fallback is not Slyth transformation, but Puff diligence. Stare at the detainee for four hours. Assassinate the politician by spending six months pruning bushes at the embassy. He’s “a very good tailor” after all. I can’t help but think that a more Slytherin Garak would have at least been tempted to make a quick buck doing odd jobs for Quark. Or apolitical Odo, who he clearly respects. But no – Garak sets himself up with a job that requires a down-to-earth Hufflepuff work ethic.

In “Purgatory’s Shadow” Garak thinks that his life is really, truly threatened. And he responds by asking for help. He does it in an absurdly underhanded Slytherin way, but. When he is in trouble, Garak phones a friend. Watch him. That is always his first instinct.

[The one Secondary Garak just absolutely does not understand is Gryffindor. He respects Gryffindor Secondaries, and he recognizes that people like Kira and Dax have them – and then he just gives those people a lot of space.]

Figuring out Garak’s primary was actually pretty easy. Because before he is anything else, Elim Garak is a Cardassian patriot. That motivation is so clear and so loud that it cuts though everything else no problem. He’d die for Cardassia. He’d let Julian die for Cardassia. He’d commit genocide for Cardassia. And if there was a single Gryffindor bone in Garak’s entire body, he would have felt at least a little guilty about that last one. But Garak seems to distrust the entire concept of morality, the way a lot of Loyalist Primaries do. “A real intelligence agent has no ego, no conscience, no remorse, only a sense of professionalism.” As far as I can figure out, that’s his credo. 

But you know what Garak does feel guilty about doing?

Helping the Federation fight Cardassia. 

Even though he knows “Cardassia” is a Dominion-controlled puppet state, even though he knows he’s doing what’s best for his planet in the long run, when he’s decrypting messages that help Federation ships kill Cardassian citizens, he gets debilitating panic attacks. 

But Garak is not loyal to the Cardassian High Command. He’s not even loyal to the Obsidian Order, not really. He’s loyal to an ideal, to an almost poetic sense of what Cardassia really is, that has more to do with art and literature and tradition than it does with politics. And he is never able to shake this feeling, even though at a certain point I think he could have sold his soul to be a Slytherin Primary, loyal only to Enabran Tain. 

Because if you want to talk about Garak, you have to talk about why he is living in exile. He gives Julian three different explanations: he got sloppy, he got lazy, and he sabotaged himself. I’m sure Garak has believed all of these himself, at one point or another. But I think he’s too much of a solid Hufflepuff Secondary to get sloppy or lazy, so I’m going to look at the last one. What happens when the *real* Cardassia shifts too far away from the *ideal* Cardassia that Garak is loyal to? When families like the Dukats gain too much power? I think Garak starts making mistakes, because he can’t reconcile that crack in his Primary. Just like when he makes mistakes later on, forced to fight his Cardassian countrymen. 

tl;dr

Garak is a double Hufflepuff, loyal to a sort of ideal Cardassia. He can model one hell of a Ravenclaw secondary, and one hell of a Slytherin secondary, but in the end they are not as close to his soul – not as important to who he is as a person – as that Hufflepuff. But he’s still a spy. So he constructs a very careful performance that he wears… most of the time. And that performance is an exaggerated double Slytherin pretending to be an exaggerated double Hufflepuff. 

So yeah. I am saying that Garak is a double Hufflepuff who pretends to be a double Hufflepuff. And I think that would make him smile. 

JULIAN: Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren’t? 

GARAK: My dear doctor, they’re all true. 

JULIAN: Even the lies? 

GARAK: Especially the lies. 

Also, thank you @featherquillpen for the charming episode write-ups. They were a source of inspiration. 

Tags:

#Star Trek #DS9 #meta #interesting #sorting #long post

“The Basics”

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sortinghatchats:

The basic structure of the @sortinghatchats system is that you aren’t just sorted into one House, but into two tiers of Houses: Primary and Secondary. Your Primary House defines WHY you do things. Your Secondary defines HOW. To build this system, we’ve drawn on the Sorting Hat’s songs, general HP canon, extracanonical data (ex. interviews with JKR)… and then extrapolated.

People are complex– for joy or for utility, due to social pressure or careless recreation, people often use the reasoning or methods of Houses that aren’t their Primary or Secondary. We call this “modelling” or “performing” a house and we will explain it in greater detail later. These additional layers help us capture some complexities in characters that we couldn’t get using Primary and Secondary alone. People can vary hugely in how they embody their Houses; in this system, Aang, the heroic pacifist protagonist from Avatar the Last Airbender, shares most of his Houses with HP’s Lord Voldemort.

The way you decide which Houses are yours is not necessarily by looking at what you do, but at what would make you proudest and most content if you were strong enough to do it. Your sorting is what you want to be and what you believe you should do, whether or not you actually live up to it. That’s how people like Peter Pettigrew can end up in Gryffindor.

PRIMARIES

Your Primary is your why. It’s your motivations, your values, and the way you frame the world around you. It’s how and what you prioritize, and what you weigh most heavily when making your decisions. People often also assume that others share those priorities. A common response to our system is “but you must oversort into Gryffindor/Slytherin/Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff–everyone has that type of morality, deep down!”

Gryffindor Primaries trust their moral intuitions and have a need and a drive to live by them. They feel what’s right in their gut, and that matters and guides them. If they don’t listen to and act on that, it feels immoral.

We call Gryffindor morality “felt” but that doesn’t mean they’re all impetuous, emotional hellions. Gryffindors can still be intelligent, deliberate creatures who weigh their decisions and moralities carefully. Reasoning, intellectualizing and debate can be support for a Gryffindor’s felt morality– but those things can never make a fully satisfying morality in themselves. Some things are just wrong, no matter what pretty words you use to explain them.

Ravenclaw Primaries have a constructed system that they test their decisions against before they feel comfortable calling something right. This system might be constructed by them, or it might have been taught to them as children, or it might have been discovered by them some point later in life. But it gives them a way to frame the world and a confidence in their ability to interact with it morally.

Ravenclaws do not lack an intuitive sense of morality or gut feeling about things, but they distrust those instincts and have a need to ignore or to dig down deep and dissect those internal moral impulses. Living within their built moral system is as important to a Ravenclaw as to a Gryffindor; it’s the source of the morality that differs between them–what they trust.

Hufflepuff Primaries value people–all people. They value community, they bond to groups (rather than solely individuals), and they make their decisions off of who is in the most need and who is the most vulnerable and who they can help. They value fairness because every person is a person and feel best when they give everyone that fair chance. Even directly wronged, a Hufflepuff will often give someone a second (or fifth) chance.

This doesn’t mean all Hufflepuffs are inherently tolerant human beings, any more than all Gryffindors are inherently good, moral creatures. Hufflepuffs tend to believe that all people deserve some type of kindness, decency, or consideration from them–but they can define “person” however they want, excluding individuals or even whole groups.

Slytherin Primaries are fiercely loyal to the people they care for most. Slytherin is the place where “you’ll make your real friends”– they prioritize individual loyalties and find their moral core in protecting and caring for the people they are closest to.

Slytherin’s reputation for ambition comes from the visibility of this promotion of the self and their important people– ambition is something you can find in all four Houses; Slytherin’s is just the one that looks most obviously selfish.

Because their morality system of “me and mine first” is fairly narrow in scope, Slytherins often construct a secondary morality system to deal with situations that are not addressed by their loyalty system.

SECONDARIES

Your Secondary is your how. It’s how you approach the world as a person interacting with it, and how you make your way. It’s how you problem-solve. It’s not necessarily what you’re best at, or even what’s the most useful to you, but about what skills and methods you value as being intrinsic to you. Do you improvise, do you plan? Do you work on something a little bit every day? Do you charge into the fray and tell people exactly what’s on your mind? What do you do? How would you describe the way you meet the world?

Note: the term “Secondary” is not meant to imply that how you do things is any less important than why (the Primary House). It’s simply the way our terminology fell out and we’re too lazy to change it. The importance of motivations v. methods is a personal sliding scale– it’s perfectly valid for a person to identify with their Secondary House over their Primary. (When drawing from canonical sources, we assumed each character likely was in a House that matched to either their Primary or their Secondary. For instance, Harry is in Gryffindor for his heroic Gryffindor Primary, but Ginny Weasley is there for her brash and bold Gryffindor Secondary.)

Gryffindor Secondaries charge. They meet the world head-on and challenge it to do its worst. Gryffindor Secondaries are honest, brash, and bold in pursuit of things they care about. Known for their bravery, it is almost a moral matter to stay true to themselves in any situation that they’re in.

Ravenclaw Secondaries plan. They collect information, they strategize. They have tools. They run hypotheticals and try to plan ahead for things that might come up. They build things (of varying degrees of practicality and actual usefulness) that they can use later– whether that’s an emergency supply pack, a vast knowledge of Renaissance artistic techniques and supplies, or a series of lists and contingency plans. They feel less at home in improvisation and more comfortable planning ahead and taking the time to be prepared.

Hufflepuff Secondaries toil. Their strength comes from their consistency and the integrity of their method. They’re our hard workers. They build habits and systems for themselves and accomplish things by keeping at them. They have a steadiness that can make them the lynchpin (though not usually the leader) of a community. While stereotyped as liking people and being kind (and this version is perhaps a common reality), a Hufflepuff secondary can also easily be a caustic, introverted misanthrope who runs on hard work alone.

Slytherin Secondaries improvise. They are the most adaptive secondary, finding their strength in responding quickly to whatever a situation throws at them. They improvise differently than the Gryffindor Secondary, far more likely to try coming at situations from different angles than to try strong-arming them. They might describe themselves as having different “faces” for different people and different situations, dropping them and being just themselves only when they’re relaxing or feel safe.

But the Journey Continues…

These four basic Primary and Secondary houses are summarized starting places that we use as a basis for further discussion. What are some ways this gets complicated?

Keep reading

So, apparently the conversations my mother and I have about the nature of morality, in which we are very obviously coming from incompatible viewpoints and have a lot of trouble understanding each other, are exactly what you would expect from conversations about the nature of morality between a burned Ravenclaw and an unburned Gryffindor.

(”You just feel what’s right? How is that enough for you? How is anything enough for you? Doesn’t it bother you that your opponents’ arguments for their position are exactly as good as yours (given their starting assumptions, which you have no more proof for or against than you do your own)? For that matter, doesn’t it bother you that other people’s feelings say to do the opposite thing? What makes your feelings better than theirs?”)

Tags:

#sorting #interesting idea #(for the record I’m the Ravenclaw in this interaction) #(Mom answered ‘my feelings are better because they’re mine’) #(which makes no sense to me at all)