#greymantleish

So-min: hhhhhh he’s my main protag and I can’t for the life of me decide? Short of like, definitely not Slytherin because he doesn’t really have any sort of ambition except keeping his few close people safe and even if he did he doesn’t go about it by scheming and manipulation, but I think he’s got a good mixture of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, with the definite potential for some Ravenclaw tendencies (which I think would have come out more when he was younger). If I had to make a conclusive decision though I would say Hufflepuff.

Ara: ....with the risk of spoilers for what happens in the rest of the fic/future, I would also say her character development is also taking her from her proto-Hufflepuff state to her future as more of a Gryffindor.

In-na: Hufflepuff. She is the embodiment of the term “shaped like a friend”. But also definitely has moments of Gryffindor recklessness.

Jae-gyu: Slytherin (the only easy one here tbh because I sort of had that in mind from her from the outset)

Joona: Gryffindor, but with some very Slytherin leanings, because I always sort of intended her to parallel/contrast with Jae-gyu and her arc.

Geon: Gryffindor. I think if circumstances were different he would have carried on going adventures his whole life, but then it was brought home to him that a better use of his power is to stay and protect his family. Also can be really hot-headed and does things without thinking them through.

Ki-nam: The other character that gave me trouble. Because I think when he underwent his Major Character Development at the age of like fifteen he deliberately disciplined himself into Slytherin-like thinking, like “how to get what I want out of any situation and any person”. So the immediate answer might be Slytherin, except that I think that style of thinking absolutely doesn’t come naturally to him? Like, his actions are very Slytherin but he has to make a conscious effort to do that, and to be charismatic, and to use people. But it was never his original MO, and he’s just got this constant struggle not to shoot himself in the foot because of how strongly he runs off emotion despite all his surface reasoning and convoluted attempts to justify himself, which is where he starts to unravel. He’s basically been living off a very thin layer of cold manipulation/public face masking a ton of bottled up anger and resentment for the last couple of decades. He’s also absolutely convinced that he’s in the right though - he basically founds a cult around the strength of that conviction - which is more of a Gryffindor trait? That conviction is definitely also something he acquired along the way though, when he learned to focus out the ghosts and listen to the voices of the gods, combined with the trauma of his father’s death and how much he resents his brother and sister, and everything to do with the dragons. But if we’re talking what he was originally, though, he was definitely a thoughtful, cerebral kid who lived inside his own head for a LONG time, and his immediate means towards manipulating people is like, information gathering about them, to get ammunition to use against them. He likes to know things just for the sake of it, because it makes him feel in control. The whole reason he was able to win so many people over to his side was because he had spent so many years quietly observing, taking in more than anyone thought he was. Also, because of his childhood being troubled by ghosts yelling in his head, he values mental clarity, even though his anger kind of bursts out of him sometimes. So I’m going to say Ravenclaw, but with a good dash of both Gryffindor and Slytherin.