I like sorting characters from other fandoms - a lot. I’ve been debating doing these in blog posts rather than in various threads, and… well, now I am.

I use the sortinghatchats system - +here’s (M to be safe) a link to their ‘basics’ post. To briefly summarize, though, they sort everyone on two different (and equally important) aspects of their personality: the first (your “primary” house) is why you do things, where the second (your “secondary” house) is how you do things.

And now I’m going to sort Buffy Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Primary (the “why”)

At first glance, Buffy looks like a bit of a Hufflepuff primary. From sortinghatchats:

Hufflepuff Primaries value people. They value community, bond to groups, and they make their decisions off of who is in the most need and who is the most vulnerable and who they can help. They value fairness because every person is a person and feel best when they give everyone a fair chance.

Buffy doesn’t always have the luxury of putting individuals first - she’s often grappling with an impending apocalypse - but each person she’s too late to save takes its toll on her, and you can see that as it weighs down on her throughout the seasons. She also does end up finding a community-of-sorts in the Scoobies, which is a vital (if occasionally contentious) part of her life and survival throughout the series.

Ultimately, though, Hufflepuff isn’t quite right. Buffy isn’t “loyal before she’s right” - when she thinks that she’s right, she’s willing to tear down everything and everyone that gets in the way, regardless of her attachment to them. And, apart from that very small group of friends, Buffy often seems actively uncomfortable with the concept of being part of a broader community - she rebels against the Council on multiple occasions, she doesn’t last long in the Initiative, and while she takes on the potentials in season seven, she’s clearly not particularly comfortable with that aspect of it. Buffy can train them; she can’t bond with them.

That’s because Buffy is, at her core, a Gryffindor primary. From sortinghatchats again:

Gryffindor Primaries trust their moral intuitions. They feel what’s right in their gut, and that matters and guides them. If they don’t listen to and act on that, it feels immoral.

Her decisions are guided by what her gut says is right and wrong. Her moral compass evolves over time - there are decisions she makes earlier in the series that are clearly very different from decisions she’d make later on - but it’s always her guiding force - and no matter what trauma she faces, it tends to remain steady, and no matter how much she loves someone, it doesn’t override her sense of right and wrong.

 She’s devastated about killing Angel at the end of season two and struggles with it throughout the third season, but she never regrets it. She’s haunted by it because it hurt her, not because she questions that it was the right thing to do. In ‘Sleeper’ in season 7, she says: “I killed Angel. Do you even remember that? I would've given up everything I had to be with - I loved him more than I will ever love anything in this life and I put a sword through his heart because I had to.”

In ‘Lies My Parents Told Me’ (also season 7), she refuses to give ground when Giles and Wood want to kill Spike, to the extent that she was far more concerned about Spike’s well-being than Wood’s. There are a lot of layers to Buffy’s relationship with Spike, but ultimately, I take her at her word: she believes that keeping Spike around is the right thing to do. Now he has a soul, and she’s willing to forgive him because she thinks that now he has the capacity to move past his selfishness.

If there’s one thing that Buffy struggles to forgive, it’s selfishness. She’s more angry at Giles for leaving her in season six than she was with him for poisoning her in season three, and she can’t live with herself when she feels like she’s being selfish. In season one’s ‘Prophecy Girl,’ she briefly quits when she hears that she’s prophecized to die - but she clearly feels guilty about it, and when she talks to Willow after the murders on the school campus, she changes her mind. She’s sixteen, and she willingly walks to her death.

She’s got a reputation as being fairly straight-laced, but I think a lot of that is about not wanting to be selfish - and on the occasions where she’s not sure what right and wrong are, she tends to collapse into despair, even (especially?) when she’s the only one aware of her lapse. In season 5’s ‘The Weight of the World,’ she short-circuits into an endless loop when Dawn is taken by Glory because she’d had one moment of wishing that the fight with Glory was over and Dawn was dead, because she was so overwhelmed and so tired. For Buffy, this lapse into selfishness was overwhelming and self-defining. Even her depression in season six ties into this - part of it is clearly being yanked out of heaven, but I think that part of it is that she’s grappling with the consequences of doing something that she comes to see as selfish. She robbed the world of a slayer and comes back to a hellish nightmare because she couldn’t deal with losing her sister. She felt like she was doing the right thing in the moment - but she’s less convinced of that when she comes back, and it’s really only after she finds her purpose again that she gets back to herself.

And, while her depression in season 6 exists independent of Spike and is a major contributing factor in their relationship in the first place, she’s also wrecked with guilt about their relationship - and it’s not a coincidence that her depression starts to alleviate shortly after she ends things with him, despite ‘Seeing Red,’ Tara being murdered, and Willow turning evil, committing murder, and trying to destroy the world. In ‘Dead Things,’ she beats him bloody and tells him, “There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside! You can't feel anything real!” (She was clearly talking to herself as much as him, but it pretty clearly applied to both of them.) When she ends it with him in ‘As You Were,’ though, what she says is very different - and seems much closer to the truth. “I can't love you. I'm just ... being weak, and selfish... and it's killing me.” While part of her self-loathing is that she thinks that having sex with Spike is wrong because he doesn’t have a soul, part of it is that she’s using him - and that’s wrong.

Buffy is all about right and wrong. She’s a Gryffindor primary through and through.

Secondary (the “how”)

Buffy is a Gryffindor secondary too. From sortinghatchats again:

Gryffindor Secondaries charge. They meet the world head-on and challenge it to do its worst. Gryffindor Secondaries are honest, brash, and bold in pursuit of things they care about. Known for their bravery, it is almost a moral matter to stay true to themselves in any situation that they’re in.

 While she’s certainly resourceful, she’s also all about addressing her problem in the most straightforward way possible. In season 2’s ‘When She Was Bad,’ Giles buries the Master in consecrated earth; when Buffy has nightmares about the Master coming back, she takes a sledgehammer to his bones. When Lily/Anne comes to her because Ricky is missing in Season 3’s ‘Anne,’ Buffy breaks into the offices to find information and even comments that she

“sucks at undercover.” In season 4’s ‘Something Blue,’ she tells Willow while they’re patrolling, “part of me believes that real love and passion have to go hand in hand with pain and fighting.”

Her friends can see this tendency, too. Early on, it takes the form of jokes - in season 2’s ‘Inca Mummy Girl,’ Buffy protests that she doesn’t “always use violence!” Xander’s response? “The important thing is you believe that.” The implications start to get darker as the series progresses, though, including in season 6’s ‘Grave,’ when Willow is about to destroy the world. She sinks Buffy and Dawn into the earth and conjures monsters for Buffy to fight, because she thinks that Buffy “should go out fighting.” Willow’s speaking from experience here, too - Buffy’s devastated to the point of catatonia in ‘The Weight of the World’ because she feels that her moment of selfishness killed her sister - and because she was sure that Glory would beat her. If Buffy doesn’t see a way to address the problem head on, she shuts down.

On the rare occasions that she tries to dissemble or change her tone, she does a poor job of it - it doesn’t come naturally, and more importantly, it feels wrong. Buffy is at her best when she’s attacking everything the world throws at her, not trying to hide who she is because her classmates or family can’t know the truth.

She’s also a born leader. That’s not just a Slayer thing - characters throughout the series explicitly remark on how unusual it is to have a Slayer with such a big group of people who both know her secret and actively support her. While some of them do either have or develop connections to that world independently of her, most of them join the Scoobies because they want to, not because they have to.

And, while her relationships with both Angel and Spike range from a little warped to downright toxic depending on the season, that tendency is true of them as well; she pulls Angel out of the depression he’d been in since getting his soul back, and love for her causes an unsouled Spike to turn his back on his sire after more than a century of devotion, not break under torture to protect her sister, and ultimately even seek out a way to win his soul back. Buffy inspires people without really meaning to, and they’ll follow her into hell because of it - literally, in the case of Spike, Faith, and the potentials.

Summary

Buffy is a Gryffindor primary who will do what’s right even when she knows that it will destroy her afterward, and she uses her Gryffindor secondary to face the problems head-on and to lead a consistent core group of people through fire and back.