Asphodel and Wormwood: occupyvillengard: merindab: I love tumblr. I’m involved in a…
I love tumblr. I’m involved in a discussion over which Harry Potter house Ianto Jones would belong in. I’m leaning towards Slytherin myself.
I’ve been trying to work this one out myself – I think it’s rare to come across someone who could fall neatly…
Everything you’ve said makes sense and jives with canon, but I can’t help but wonder – are their Slytherin qualities part of their natural temperaments, or learned behaviours because of their circumstances?
Jury’s still out on Ianto, I could still see that going either way for him. But Jack’s never been so much about ‘by any means necessary’ as ‘because I have to and if I don’t people will die and the world will end and I’m shit out of luck/hope/better options/time to come up with them’. There seems to be an overriding duty to ‘the greater good,’ and I reckon that’s a different kind of Gryffindor thing – that was a Dumbledore thing, for a while, wasn’t it? Never mind the fact that if Jack had the same unbending convictions as Gwen and Rose, planet Earth would be doomed and he knows it. And sometimes his decisions are all the more awful as a result of his brashness and unwillingness to consider that he might be in the wrong – again, seems like a Gryffindor quality from my angle. And you said yourself, Jack wants to be a Gryffindor. He wouldn’t be the first to make that choice over Slytherin – and it’s our choices, not our abilities, etc.
Is Ianto naturally ambitious, ruthless, cunning, and selectively loyal? I think so, yes. A boy from the Cardiff estates doesn’t make it all the way to Torchwood One in London without those qualities, and he doesn’t keep his half-converted girlfriend in Torchwood Three’s basement without them either. It is about choices, it is exactly about Ianto’s choices: he chose to work for Torchwood, he chose to pull Lisa out of the wreckage instead of letting UNIT finish cleaning up, he chose to lie repeatedly to Jack, to continue working for Torchwood even after Lisa’s death, to open the rift for a chance at getting Lisa back. None of those choices had to do with saving the world, and a few of them actively endangered it. All of them were in some fashion selfish choices. Slytherin choices.
Jack is murkier, I will agree with you there, and there is no doubt in my mind that post-Doctor Jack would ask the Sorting Hat to place him in Gryffindor, but Jack can still be overwhelmingly ruthless, unethical, and selfish, and though his decisions often come down to “the greater good” and what must be done to save planet Earth, they also often don’t.
The manipulative things Jack does are not always about saving humanity (and even when they are, they could stand a good shot of ethics and still end up keeping the planet intact). He keeps his past hidden even when hiding it puts his team directly in danger (John Hart, Exit Wounds), he keeps his team isolated and small because he has such a desperate need to control his surroundings and those he loves, even though that understaffed isolation is mostly what gets them all killed, and clearly keeping Torchwood a “secret” is only at issue when he wants it to be, not because it serves any greater purpose, and even when retconning someone is the entirely wrong thing to do outside of that.
Jack is a Slytherin with a Gryffindor coat of paint, and his coat is perpetually wearing thin.
(Albus Dumbledore is a whole new post unto himself, but I will say that he strikes me as a bit more Slytherin than anyone would like to admit. The difference is that after Grindelwald, Dumbledore is almost never doing his manipulating for selfish reasons. Often, Jack is.)