{"id":251948,"date":"2013-10-10T04:35:03","date_gmt":"2013-10-10T04:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/10\/10\/asphodel-and-wormwood-occupyvillengard-merindab-2\/"},"modified":"2013-10-10T04:35:03","modified_gmt":"2013-10-10T04:35:03","slug":"asphodel-and-wormwood-occupyvillengard-merindab-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/10\/10\/asphodel-and-wormwood-occupyvillengard-merindab-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Asphodel and Wormwood: occupyvillengard: merindab: I love tumblr. I\u2019m involved in a…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Asphodel and Wormwood: occupyvillengard: merindab: I love tumblr. I\u2019m involved in a…<\/a><\/p>\n

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professormcguire<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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occupyvillengard<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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occupyvillengard<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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merindab<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I love tumblr. I\u2019m involved in a discussion over which Harry Potter house Ianto Jones would belong in. I\u2019m leaning towards Slytherin myself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve been trying to work this one out myself – I think it\u2019s rare to come across someone who could fall neatly\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Everything you\u2019ve said makes sense and jives with canon, but I can\u2019t help but wonder – are their Slytherin qualities part of their natural temperaments, or learned behaviours because of their circumstances?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jury\u2019s still out on Ianto, I could still see that going either way for him. \u00a0But Jack\u2019s never been so much about \u2018by any means necessary\u2019 as \u2018because I have to and if I don\u2019t people will die and the world will end and I\u2019m shit out of luck\/hope\/better options\/time\u00a0to come up with them\u2019. \u00a0There seems to be an overriding duty to \u2018the greater good,\u2019 and I reckon that\u2019s a different kind of Gryffindor thing – that was a Dumbledore thing, for a while, wasn\u2019t it? \u00a0Never mind the fact that if Jack had the same unbending convictions as Gwen and Rose, planet Earth would be doomed and he knows it. \u00a0And 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.\u00a0\u00a0And you said yourself, Jack wants to be a Gryffindor. \u00a0He wouldn\u2019t be the first to make that choice over Slytherin – and it\u2019s our choices, not our abilities, etc.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Is Ianto naturally ambitious, ruthless, cunning, and selectively loyal? \u00a0I think so, yes. \u00a0A boy from the Cardiff estates doesn\u2019t make it all the way to Torchwood One in London without those qualities, and he doesn\u2019t keep his half-converted girlfriend in Torchwood Three\u2019s basement without them either. \u00a0It is about choices, it is exactly about Ianto\u2019s 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\u2019s death, to open the rift for a chance at getting Lisa back. \u00a0None of those choices had to do with saving the world, and a few of them actively endangered it. \u00a0All of them were in some fashion selfish choices. \u00a0Slytherin choices.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe greater good\u201d and what must be done to save planet Earth, they also often don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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). \u00a0He keeps his past hidden even when hiding it puts his team directly in danger (John Hart,\u00a0Exit Wounds<\/em>), 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\u00a0clearly\u00a0<\/em>keeping Torchwood a \u201csecret\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Jack is a Slytherin with a Gryffindor coat of paint, and his coat is perpetually wearing thin.<\/p>\n

(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. \u00a0The difference is that after Grindelwald, Dumbledore is almost never doing his manipulating for selfish reasons. \u00a0Often, Jack is.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asphodel and Wormwood: occupyvillengard: merindab: I love tumblr. I\u2019m involved in a… professormcguire: occupyvillengard: occupyvillengard: merindab: I love tumblr. I\u2019m involved in a discussion over which Harry Potter house Ianto Jones would belong in. I\u2019m leaning towards Slytherin myself. I\u2019ve been trying to work this one out myself – I think it\u2019s rare to come … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Asphodel and Wormwood: occupyvillengard: merindab: I love tumblr. I\u2019m involved in a…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251948"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}