Why I’m Damn Proud To Be A Hufflepuff

This is not a plea for the Harry Potter fandom to stop making fun of Hufflepuff. This is not me, someone who has been sorted into Hufflepuff on all three of my Pottermore accounts, trying to cope with being forced into the lamest house and convince myself and anyone else who is stuck there with me that we can at least pretend it’s not so bad. This is a celebration of the badassery that truly imbibes Hufflepuff, a tribute to my fierce loyalty to this House, and, in all honesty, a giant middle finger raised high to everyone who writes us off, as if in a place as amazing as Hogwarts, there could really be an entire fourth of the school that’s just “not that special.”

Let’s start with their common room, because holy shit, if we had only been given descriptions of the common rooms and nothing else to help us decide which House to call home, I’m pretty sure Hufflepuff would be the top pick. Not only are we right next to the kitchen, which we all know means extra food from overly-friendly house elves whenever we want it, but also, the whole place just feels good. There’s the permanent warm sunshine, the honey-wood furniture, the hanging plants and cacti on the shelves that wave at you, the bookshelf-lined walls, the circular room that gives everyone a sense of togetherness instead of hiding in your own corner, the patchwork quilts in the dormitories, and the whole aura of a “badger’s den” that provides a safe comfort zone, an away-from-the-rest-of-the-castle kind of feel. If you ask me to pick between a dungeon, two rooms in cold, high castle towers, or this warm, plant-filled, treehouse-like den of sunshine to do my homework in at the end of every day and laze around in on the weekends, there’s no question that Hufflepuff is where I want to be.

Besides the common room, the people that make up Hufflepuff are the people that you want for friends. Remember what the Sorting Hat said about the founding members fighting over which type of students they wanted to teach – the smartest, the bravest, the most ambitious? And then Helga Hufflepuff is just standing there like “um, guys, these are eleven year old kids we’re talking about, remember? Are they even old enough to have a most prominent quality yet? Just give them to me, and I’ll teach all of them the same way, you self-obsessed crazies.” So what does that mean for modern Hogwarts? It means that the students who are sorted into Hufflepuff might be just as smart as Ravenclaw, brave as Gryffindor, or cunning as Slytherin, but they might also be a whole lot of other things too, and no matter what they are, they don’t parade those traits around like trophies, they just are.

Hufflepuffs are the chill, laid-back people who give everyone a fair chance and don’t spend all their time trying to one-up you. Their sense of equality and togetherness also makes them fiercely loyal to the ones they claim. You want a Hufflepuff backing you up in a tough spot. Which leads to another point – J.K. Rowling has said that Hufflepuff has produced by far the smallest number of Dark wizards, meaning that when you test a Hufflepuff’s character, they stay true. We don’t fold under pressure or make stupid decisions to impress people. In short, Hufflepuffs are the best kind of people, mostly because we don’t walk around proclaiming to be the best kind of people.

Lastly, being a Hufflepuff, to me, is just another sign of how much I love this brilliant, mesmerizing world. You can pretty fairly split the Harry Potter fandom into two groups. There are the people who like watching the movies every now and then, who maybe read the books at some point, and who genuinely enjoy the story of The Boy Who Lived. Then there are the people who have woven the threads of the Harry Potter universe into their very soul. They know the books by heart, they go to wizard rock shows, they own a copy of Percy Weasley’s official Ministry report on the need to regulate cauldron bottom thickness, they have all the merchandise and tattoos and header photos to prove their love, and when the time comes that they have kids of their own, they decorate the nursery with broomsticks, Quidditch posters, spellbooks, and hand-knit golden snitches. (Okay, I’m describing myself here, but I know I’m not the only one.)

To us, “Harry Potter” is an entire world that exists independently of Harry Potter’s actual life, a happy place to escape to, one that we spend just as much time in as the “real world.” And if you belong to the second group, the fact that Hufflepuff didn’t play a big role in Harry’s story doesn’t matter quite as much, because the wizarding world is so much more than what happened during those books. Being a Hufflepuff doesn’t mean you’re not as good, or that you’re the “leftovers,” or that nothing great will come from you. The only people who believe that are the people who heard Malfoy say he’d rather leave Hogwarts than be a Hufflepuff, but really, Hufflepuffs would rather him leave than be one of them as well.

I pride myself on working hard to get what I want, on not judging others before I really know them, and on being a very easy-going person. The fact that there is a Hogwarts house that perfectly matches who I am is the greatest piece of magical of all.  I am a Hufflepuff ride or die, for now and for always.