Harry Potter and Its House System

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This week I both re-read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and read for the first time the short Prequel snippet provided to us (which only increased my frustration out Rowling as a Prequel is the only thing I ever asked for out of her - I couldn't care less about any of the other spinoffs produced). I admit, I've been a fan of Harry Potter since I saw the first film when I was four years old with my father, so it would be easy for me to talk about many different things. However, I'm going to focus on the house system inside of Hogwarts. It's not something I thought very much about prior to it being brought up in class, which is why I find it so interesting now. It does indeed seem to be just an easy way to establish very base character traits within characters without actually having to state those character traits, which I find to be very smart, considering you still have a vast variety of characters amongst each house so it doesn't feel as cheap as it would if otherwise. I find it funny that something as seemingly simple as that has become so ingrained and important to many of the Harry Potter fanbase (hello, I'm a Slytherin!) that some of them will even get into fights about it. I know that I myself, while I don't get so crazy about it as other people (it's just a story, relax people), find it incredibly frustrating the way that Slytherin house was written to just be this big bad evil house in the books, yet outside of the books Rowling goes out of her way to specify otherwise and explain that just because you're in Slytherin doesn't make you a bad person. Why then did you write in the final novel that during the big fight scene Slytherin house was just sent to the dungeons and not one single student stood up and decided they wanted to fight alongside everyone else, huh J.K.? Not one single student? I personally find that to be one of the laziest pieces of writing I've ever read - and I say that as a fan. So, as you can see, it's very amusing to me that I and many others can take the house thing so much to heart yet it was probably just a simple writing tactic to help with characterization.

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