#sorting matters

I’m doing pretty well, all things considered, yes. I hope you are as well.

I’ve covered Slytherin!Harry before - it is by far one of the most well known tropes, possibly because it’s directly suggested by canon itself - you can find that over Here.

Unfortunately, regarding your question, I can’t really help. I’ve not read any fics where Harry is sorted Hufflepuff and while I have read one fic where Harry sorts Ravenclaw it is The Fic That Shall Not Be Named, which is a terrible piece of shit fic where Harry is effectively a self-insert. So I really don’t think that counts.

The thing is to come up with headcanons for Harry in a different house requires thinking about what would make him value the traits of those houses such that he would end up being sorted to them. 

Hufflepuff is relatively easier - if he was, perhaps, meeker or more scared due to treatment by the Dursleys then Gryffindor’s bravery would be daunting, he’d likely dislike and distrust Draco as a bullying figure enough to want to avoid him and so, regardless of prior interactions with Draco or Ron, end up going to Hufflepuff. However, in that case you have a much less proactive Harry, so a lot of aspects of canon would go drastically differently. Another option is if Harry is not the Boy-Who-Lived but Neville is, and Harry’s parents managed to avoid the fates of Neville’s parents in canon and lived on to have other children. Thus, while Harry may aim for Gryffindor like his parents, there’d be no real cost to ending up in another house and if he had younger siblings he might have a more nurturing spirit and a tendency towards kindness and a willingness to put the work in that’d head him towards Hufflepuff. 

This could also, in theory, be a reason for him to end up in Ravenclaw - if perhaps he was nurtured towards intelligence by living parents. We know from canon that Harry can be sharp-tongued at times, which is an aspect of wittiness, and we know too that Lily and James were extremely smart at school - Harry could well inherit that and go from there. However, I don’t know that he’d necessarily value intelligence and wit above bravery, which is what would be required to go to Ravenclaw over Gryffindor. Even in canon, Harry is smart, but he doesn’t value book smarts and wit over practical knowledge and avoiding trouble until trouble inevitably finds him at which point he’ll face it because what the hell else is he going to do?

I think, if you want headcanons for how life for Harry in a house other than Gryffindor or Slytherin would go, you’d want to first ask why he ends up in the house he does - what causes him to value those traits over Gryffindor or Slytherin - and how those aspects of his past then influence his future.

I mean, I... Don’t care about the next gen for the most part? 

They seem like a cute bunch of kids, great! But like, I don’t care. I feel bad about it, but I’m just not excited for Cursed Child or w/e at all. Idk man, I kind of want JKR to relinquish HP a little, and I get why she’s not doing that, but it’s all getting a little Tolkien over here, right? Right?

Leia Organa, surprise Head Girl, uncanny Quidditch ace, gifted with defensive charms and nifty with surprisingly violent hexes, has no time in her life for that one asshole in Hufflepuff who’s always hanging out her secret brother, Luke, who did not grow up as the adopted and adored daughter of Head of the DOMLE Breha Organa and her ferocious but jarringly jolly husband, Wizengamot judge Bail.

Leia did grow up as Breha and Bail’s little princess, though, and sometimes she feels a little guilty when she finds out the truth about her and Luke’s relationship and sees how sometimes Luke doesn’t have such easy access to, like, everything ever, the way she does, because Owen and Beru can’t always afford the best brooms or fancy new dress robes.

BUT THEN THERE’S LUKE’S DUMB FRIEND. MERLIN’S SAGGY LEFT TESTICLE. LEIA HATES LUKE’S DUMB FRIEND HAN SOLO.

(This is a lie, but no one calls her on it because it’s too funny to watch Leia and Han shout at one another in the halls. Leia thinks Han is too reckless, and doesn’t look after Luke properly. Luke needs looking after because he has the self-preservation instincts of an overripe melon, and Leia is all the way up in the Gryffindor Tower. The boys are both in Hufflepuff, though, and Han ought to know better than to let Luke try to fish his Charms notes out of the lake here just copy Leia’s.)

(Honestly.)

Of course, there is also the encroaching shadow of Lord Sidius, who wants to subjugate all of the world, magical and Muggle alike, under one empire, with him as Emperor. His lapdog/henchman-in-chief is the mysterious Lord Vader, who wears a deeply hooded cloak and a strange, obviously magical mask at all times, and is said to be on his second wand - the first, they say, broke under the duress of how many Unforgivable Curses he cast, or else it was taken from him in a duel against the man who left him in that mask.

Professors Yoda and Kenobi struggle to keep Hogwarts safe from Sidius and his increasingly powerful lobbies in the Ministry, and when Kenobi dies in a strange accident over the summer holidays before Leia, Luke, and Han begin seventh year, it’s left to the twins and their friend to save the day.

Ah, now, here is the thing: I disagree that she is a Hufflepuff. I think she’s a Slytherdore, both by legacy (Baratheon-Gryffindor/Lannister-Slytherin) and by nature (she is, after all, Cersei’s daughter - but also Tywin’s granddaughter).

I tend to think that she’d sort Gryffindor, sort of by choice? I think that she’d see the potential backlash of sorting Slytherin, esp. if certain other family members had already sorted that way - Joffrey, Lancel, other cousins - and so I think it would be in the back of her mind that Slytherin=Not Fun Right Now. 

(this is all in the context of Hogwesteros, I can’t do ASOIAF/HP without going Hogwesteros, soz not soz)

Speaking personally, I’m a Hufflepuff to the bone - I identify with Hufflepuff house, I form my strongest friendships with other Hufflepuffs as a general rule ( mermaidmanderly and e-ffuh holla), but sometimes, I get sorted Gryffindor for reasons unknown. I think it’s incidental enough that it means basically nothing, and it doesn’t trouble me overmuch, but, there are occasional moments of doubt when I wonder if I ought to maybe be a Ravenclaw. And they worry me, for a while, but I know that I’m a Hufflepuff, in the same way as I imagine that you know that you’re a Gryffindor. 

I think that it’s just one of those things - sortings are so vague, sometimes, so insubstantial in a way, that it can be hard to pin down why you know you belong in any one house, but you just do. And so, because you’ve nothing but a gut feeling, really, doubt is natural. But you always know, in the back of your mind.

i.

Zacharias is loved, and pampered, as far as such things can be said of cold, distant parents, and later, of a stepfather whose hands are heavy in response to snide comments. 

Justin is loved, truly and wholly, until love disappears from his world and pain enters it.

ii.

When Justin is seventeen, the camps are liberated, but he has been gone for some time already. He has learned to speak languages other than his own, and knows twenty-three ways to kill a man. Herr Rabe lost control of him, and as soon as Justin understood that, he broke as free as he could, given that the war still raged.

A world away, Zacharias breezes through his final year of high school, the war a series of radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines that don’t affect him overmuch.

Neither minds the other very much, yet.

iii.

Justin and Zacharias each become unwitting fathers at twenty-two.

This will change any things, including the world, deep into the future. For now, it changes just the lives of two young women, each remarkable simply for being, even if Justin and Zacharias take their leave far too easily. 

iv.

Zacharias is comfortable with his place in the world - with his gifts, he is aware of even the deepest secrets people hold in the darkest, cobwebbed vaults of their minds, and so he knows that he is not alone. He understands that he and Susanna, the sister who so scared their parents with her unchanged appearance, are not the only ones with talents, and that the world is not the place for them. Not yet.

Justin, alone but for his hope of vengeance, finds that Herr Rabe has become the French-sounding Mr. Rosier, and sets the metal in his mind like a tuning fork, seeking out the pitch of Rosier’s cruelty amidst the good of the world.

v.

There is a submarine, and to Justin, it is as if his faith in hope has been rewarded.

For Justin, it is a revelation, a miracle.

For Zacharias, it is terrifying, and he has never felt less worthy of the gifts he carries like sweets in his pocket, using them for his own amusement and pleasure without a thought for the dark cavities they may cause in his future.

vi.

Justin is wary of trusting governments, haunted by shadows in red armbands and tailored uniforms in a way that even Zacharias, who can see the shadows when they leak from Justin’s central vault into the atrium behind his eyes, does not understand. 

He stands by and grips metal railings that bend and twist with his throbbing heartbeat, and watches Zacharias smile in jubilation, just as Herr Rabe, Mr. Rosier, had when Justin thought his mind might fall apart.