Hogwarts Houses

I've been re-reading some of my favorite HP fanfics, and, after 17 years in the fandom, finally noticed something about the houses.

In the books, Harry's double classes are always Gryffindor/Slytherin or Gryffindor/Hufflepuff. They're no Gryffindor/Ravenclaw classes, except for the upper year electives which combine all of the houses. I'd always assumed this was to prevent Slytherin and Hufflepuff from being paired. Most of the bullying we see comes from Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle, and Pansy Parkinson, all of Slytherin. They like to target people like Neville, the Gryffindor-who-also-tends-Hufflepuff. Keeping the bullies away from the perceived-to-be-vulnerable Hufflepuffs makes perfect sense (and a lot of fanfic takes this dynamic as a given). From a story-telling perspective, the double classes we do see set up more interesting dynamics: Slytherins as Harry's antagonists, Hufflepuffs as foils or as people needing protection.  Moreover, with Hermione in all of Harry's classes, the Ravenclaws are largely redundant. 

The problem is that Hufflepuff's defining trait isn't weakness: it's hard work.

And Slytherin's isn't evil; it's ambition.

What if we have it backwards?  If the Hufflepuffs and Slytherins aren't being kept apart to protect the kids?  If it's to prevent them from cooperating?

Consider the other combinations: brave Gryffindor and ambitious Slytherin work together towards goals which may be dangerous or frightening: anything from an imperialist war to a civil rights movement. Pair Slytherin ambition with Ravenclaw intelligence and you could have all sorts of massive scientific or cultural endeavors (eradicating diseases, the space program...also nuclear arms races).

But if Hufflepuff and Slytherin start cooperating, ambition and hard work...

They could do just about anything.*  

Re-structure the government of magical Britain.  Achieve full civic equality for goblins and house elves. Abolish the Statute of Secrecy. Get the Americans to start playing Quidditch like normal wizards.

Really, the first thing any Slytherin worth the name should do is make friends in Hufflepuff--unless this Slytherin isn't very smart, in which case they should start by making friends in Ravenclaw, who will point out the obvious advantages to having friends in Hufflepuff.  Good friends. 

*I mean, any objective deserving the description of "ambition" will require some hard work. There is also the possibility of exploitation of the hard-working individuals by the ambitious ones, but that isn't an inevitable outcome.

Resolving Love Triangles in Fiction

[This is a snark piece I wrote the other year while making up D&D-style dice charts for getting around writer's block.]

Congratulations!  You have successfully lined up two possible love interests for your protagonist. Now, as you attempt to tie up all the loose plot threads (except for the one on which you're hanging the sequel), you need to decide how to resolve your protagonist's romantic affairs.

Flip a coin. Do you pair your main character with:

Heads: The expected love interest. (Team Edward!)

Or

Tails: The slightly-less-conventional love interest who adds CONFLICT and DRAMA to the story, by attracting the protagonist while having a different alignment/super power/social background/other complicating feature. (Team Jacob!)

Meh, let's make it really interesting.  Procure 1d10 (ie, a decahedral die, typically with faces labelled 1 through 10), and roll:

1) Conventional lost interest.

2) Less-conventional love interest.

3) Keep them both. (ie, the Mechanicsburg solution)

4) Neither! Team Bella! Team Things-over-there-need-to-be-shot-full-of-arrows!

5) Slash!*  The love interests pair up, sans protagonist.  Your fans were going to write this anyway, so you're saving them the trouble.

6) Curveball. Your protagonist hooks up with the antagonist, because Draco Malfoy is really the more interesting character...

7) Happily Never After.  Your character makes his/her decision (flip coin for #1 or #2), but the 'winning' love interest actually decides not to pursue the relationship.

8) Keep 'em all.  Add in every other named character the main character(s) have ever expressed interest in, or otherwise favorably interacted with. (See Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or any other works which contain multiple adult female characters)****

9) Multi-dimensional curve ball: your character isn't actually straight/cis/human/other assumptions made to this point, and all involved characters have to reconsider whether the situation works for them.  Roll again to resolve.

9') Roll 9 twice in a row, and your character become Captain Jack Harkness.  All pairings are now canonical.

10) Flip the coin: second place marries the protagonist's future child, who is conveniently just-like-mom. (Twilight, Anne McCaffery's Damia; see also TV Tropes "Squaring the Triangle"). Better yet, re-roll for another outcome.

*May or may not actually be "slash" depending on your definition thereof and the gender identities of the characters involved; my examples tend to be love triangles which a female-identified main character has two male-identified options, making this option "classic" M/M slash.

**Ok, so the examples in 8 are not so much triangle resolution, as a suggestion of a triangle, which soon began sharing one line segment with a pentagon, which itself shortly became a hexagon, which was subsequently cubed, and eventually led to two mutually exclusive sets, such that all members of set A ("intended to be sympathetic cis-male characters") have sex with all members of set B ("hot intended to be sympathetic cis-female characters") but with no other members of set A, and that all members of set B have sex with all members of set A, but only have platonic, non-jealous friendships with other members of set B.   But, hey, it's the twenty-first century.  Your polygon can be as slashy as you like.  And it can include non-binary identified characters. And none of them need be rape-apologist jerks.  The future's awesome like that.