we never prayed

my first answer is “bc only a ravenclaw would interrupt stoned making out to talk about the existential implications of the multiverse”

but my serious answer is that i guess i just don’t see him as having that driving ambitious and/or self-preserving streak that defines slytherin to me? like don’t get me wrong, obvs we see him engaging in behaviors that exhibit a sense of social savvy/cunning for self-preserving effects. the whole drama he causes with eva in s1 is the result of some equally skillful and blundered social manipulation, and the way he lets her assumption about who he really had feelings for build naturally into a cover for this thing he’s still struggling with is defs an act of immediate self-preservation. you could say the same about all the times in s3 where he lets emma’s and/or his friends’ assumptions about his sexual interests go unaltered. he’s good at reading social situations and playing to a) what he wants people to think about him, b) what he thinks other people want to think about him, or c) some combination of the two, and that’s a trait that (for the most part) allowed him to keep his secrets for as long as he needed until he could work through them and feel like he was ready to open up about them.

but for me, the thing that underrides all of those examples is that, while they’re behaviors he has engaged in, they’re also things that isak has said he doesn’t/didn’t like about himself. that period in his life from fall 2015 to fall 2016 when he was constantly playing this social manipulation game, when these traits of social savvy and self-protection were what he was relying on to get him through 90% of his social encounters—it was all a time during which isak has said he felt like he was fake. whether you read “fake” as meaning “not real in the image he was putting up” or as more internally-directed as “not true to himself” is a matter of interpretation. either way, to me, it indicates a discomfort on isak’s part with this person he felt he became when he lived by these rules. those actions were destructive in a lot of ways, both to his friendships and to his own sense of self, and it’s a time in his life he seems very glad to be growing out of.

all of which makes me look at a different angle of what those actions indicate about him: that he’s smart, that he’s intuitive, that he’s quick to learn and internalize new knowledge to integrate it into his own worldview. this last one esp becomes a key point in his growth as a character in s3, where we get these repeated moments of isak having something he doesn’t know/could know more about pointed out to him, and then the next time we see him, he has either already done the research to better inform his position or is in the process of doing that research. it’s his go-to solution for everything from not knowing about his crush’s favorite director or rap artist, to having more seriously fucked up with how he’s handled something, like his comments to eskild about gay stereotypes and pride. his response to every time he’s called out is consistently “listen, reflect, research, reflect some more, apply, change, repeat,” and that’s so ravenclaw to me? maybe not in the stereotypical sense of like, learning just for the sake of learning, but still in a sense of feeling grounded and in-control in the act of learning. knowledge can be power, but it can also be security. the more we know, about the world and about ourselves, the more equipped we are to handle whatever life throws at us, and i see a lot of that in how isak responds to conflicts in his life.

and then of course we can pull back to the surface and talk about his academic performance and the importance he seems to place on his own education, and the interest he seems to have in complex subjects just because (multiverse theory again lol). but for me all of that is surface. being traditionally booksmart or good at school doesn’t always automatically make someone a ravenclaw, just as having high-reaching social and career ambitions doesn’t always automatically make a slytherin. what matters most are the things you value, in yourself and in others, and how you use and reflect those values in the actions you take.