This is a gift for @facingthenorthwind as part of our December wishlist event - I hope you like it! I'm working on the others, too, but I'm not sure they'll get done.

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. Today, I'm sorting Jake from the Animorphs series, by K.A. Applegate.

Primary (the “why”)

Jake is a Gryffindor Primary.

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.

He does spend most of the series constantly re-examining his personal moral code, which would suggest a Ravenclaw primary. His personal loyalty to his brother and best friend contributes to his early commitment to the fight, which would point to a Slytherin primary. And, his broader loyalty to humanity - even human controllers - and his approach to the animorphs themselves tends to emphasize fairness, which is most typical of a Hufflepuff.

But even at the beginning, his why is based around his gut. His analysis tends to center around justifying what he already thinks is the right thing to do, not really interrogating it, and when push comes to shove, his personal loyalties completely break down; a Slytherin wouldn’t have been able to do what Jake did in the last couple books. And, while he’s invested in humanity, his focus isn’t necessarily around individual fairness - it’s around saving the species as a whole.

Most importantly, though: when Jake’s primary starts to fall apart as the trauma of the fight against the Yeerks continues, it’s very clear that he’s a stripped Gryffindor. His faith in his own moral compass is thrown off-kilter pretty early on, and as it continues to degrade, he starts to rely on Cassie to tell him what’s right and wrong. When her system breaks down, too, he keeps fighting, but he doesn’t really have a system he trusts or lives by, which is probably part of he makes the choices he does at the end of the war and why his life post-invasion is one of the bleakest.

The war damages Jake’s inner sense of who he is as a person, and that’s not something that ever really recovers.

Secondary (the “how”)

Jake is all Slytherin Secondary.

Slytherin Secondaries improvise. They are the most reactive secondary, finding their strength in responding quickly to whatever a situation throws at them. They improvise differently  than the Gryffindor Secondary, far more likely to try coming at situations from different angles than to try strong-arming.

Jake wants to have a plan going into missions, because going into a confrontation where they’re outnumbered 5-1 on a good day and might have to face the king of “look at me transform into my new favorite death!creature from the fourth planet of a dying star” without any semblance of a plan is suicide. However, his knack for  adapting when the plan goes wrong is clear in his results: he’s the leader, and he gets himself and his fellow Animorphs through three years of fighting without losing anyone. (More or less. Megamorphs and other deleted sequences don’t count.)

He’s not the only one in the Animorphs who can improvise on the go, but his improvisation is different than, say, his cousin Rachel’s; Jake will absolutely charge, but he won’t just hammer the door until he breaks it down - he’ll find another way to achieve his goal. He’s just as happy to win by tricking people as by beating them openly; as long as he’s winning, nothing else matters.

When he’s forced into impossible situations, Jake will go to some pretty dark places to achieve his goal, and they’re not the places a Gryffindor secondary would go. He’s the one who definitively ends the war between the Andalites and the Yeerks, and he saves the human race - but the cost is really, really high, and his means aren’t something that would probably even enter most people’s heads.

Tl;dr, Jake is a Gryffindor primary and a Slytherin secondary.

(Italicized quotes from sortinghatchats.)