dekedangle_rpfanon | #26 — Vanek! with a Jurco

#26 — Vanek! with a Jurco

This is the twenty-sixth post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

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I don't really have strong feelings on Hogwarts sortings, but he did go to graduate school and write a thesis, didn't he? Managing that while also being a professional hockey player shows a certain dedication to learning. And I don't think he would say intelligence is his most-valued trait even if it is - loyalty sounds less conceited. So I could be sold on Ravenclaw easily as well.

ayrt

My strong Hogwarts feelings are usually about how x character would be exempt from the whole system, either because they're not from the U.K. or they're a mystical creature that would lurk in the Forbidden Forest instead, but I do feel that Slytherin is wrong for Ovi.

I didn't dismiss Ravenclaw because I don't think he's willing to learn or because I don't think he's smart, or because I don't know about his degree, etc., but because I was thinking of Ravenclaw as valuing book-learning and intelligence more than other things. I think Hogwarts sorting is supposed to be about what people value most, and the thing that comes across over and over again (at least for me) is that Ovi is pretty big on family and loyalty, etc. (I think "devotion" may have been the word he used in the interview I'm thinking of.)

Like I said, I've talked myself into being able to accept Ravenclaw for Ovi. I'm now at any house but Slytherin. If he has to go to Hogwarts at all..

I think its silly to invent an entirely new school with entirely different houses for the purposes of writing a HP AU.

NA

Aww, I think it'd be fun (and you wouldn't even have to invent a school, Durmstrang is supposed to be the Slavic school (in Scandinavia???) ... I'd rather invent one tho lol)

Durmstrang's whole situation is weird, but I think it would be a better fit for a hockey HP AU. It's actually in a region that a lot of hockey players come from, and we know it also accepts students from as far as Bulgaria, so it would make sense for Russian students to attend. (I can't remember if there were any non-Brits at Hogwarts at all, but that could be my memory.)

But since we know very little about Durmstrang, using it as a setting wouldn't be too different from inventing a school from whole cloth anyway.

NA

Yeah, I think inventing a school or playing with Durmstrang and/or Salem would be a lot of fun, but I also think worldbuilding is one of the best parts of fic. To the point that I tend to make pages upon pages of worldbuilding notes and then never write the actual fic, because I finished the fun part.

AYRT

Sure, it would be fun, but it would be a wizarding boarding school AU, not a HP AU, you know? Also, I think we know so little about Durmstrang, most of which is sort of uncomfortably stereotypical, that you'd be essentially just borrowing the name, but still inventing a school.

That said, you know there's that narrative of the Western Conference being hard-hitting possesion monsters and the Eastern Conference being speedy offensive dynamos and you it'd be interesting to break the divisions down into four houses and have a hockey wizard boarding school.

You'd still have the same system of magic, though. Owls, wands, potions, magical creatures, all that fun stuff from the HP verse. I wouldn't say Fantastic Beasts is a generic urban fantasy because it's not set at Hogwarts, for example.

AYRT

If you have all of that stuff the same, than again, I think you're just changing the names, and it's silly.

AYRT

*shrugs* You can also change the politics (different country), academic focus, most popular sport, attitudes towards magical creatures in that area of the world, attitudes towards and amount of mixing with muggles, etc. etc. I'm just saying that you can have a fic that's an HP AU without being a Hogwarts AU, and that such a fic wouldn't be a Hogwarts AU with the serial numbers filed off.

NA I'm curious as to how the current 4 divisions would map onto the HP houses. I have a feeling Gryffindor would be in the West and Slytherin would be in the East. Original 6 seems comparable to pureblood. The problem is no division seems particularly Hufflepuffy to me.

I don't think any of the divisions is significantly different in character from any of the others.

In reality, that's probably true. But they do have very different reps you could build around. I've noticed that even with old-timer talk about the Smythe division and so on.

NA

I feel like reputations for divisions change (not as fast as individual teams as rosters get blown up and shuffled, but still noticeable), but if we're going off the current rosters, maybe something like:

Central: Thunderdome
Metro: 5-way death match
Pacific: Flashy, young players with lots of skill and hockey sense
Atlantic: ...I guess we have history? I mean, Tampa Bay and Florida are doing good things, but they're definitely not a trend in this division.

So, for me, Pacific is Ravenclaw, Atlantic is Hufflepuff, and you can decide which of Central and Metro is Gryffindor and which is Slytherin. Of course there are going to be teams and players that don't fit, but then again, the Sorting Hat wasn't very precise in HP either.

I'm not sure it maps by division, but if you go with your Original Six=Slytherin idea, I could see the teams breaking down something like this:

Slytherin: Rangers, Habs, Leafs, Hawks, Wings, Bruins

Hufflepuff: Jackets, Sharks, Cats, Canes, Sabres, Sens, Preds, Devils

Ravenclaw: Bolts, Wild, Nucks, Oilers, Isles, Pens, Caps, Avs

Gryffindor: Flyers, Ducks, Flames, Jets, Stars, Kings, Blues, Yotes

This feels pretty right to me. Especially since my team and the other teams I'll root for are all sorted into the same house.

Though, I think in the Chayka era at least, Yotes are Ravenclaw. And I'd switch Avs with Preds too.

AYRT

...you might not be able to tell this from the way the lists are laid out, but the Avs, Preds and Yotes were the three I was most undecided on (the Devils are only at the very end of the Hufflepuff list because I always forget about them when I'm listing teams, poor buggers), so I'm absolutely open to alternate interpretations on them! And I'd certainly entertain arguments about most of the others...

Re: Fic Discussion - aparecium by oops_ohdear

(Anonymous) - 2016-09-23 05:09 (UTC) - Expand

If we're moving Yotes to Ravenclaw, we should move someone to Gryffindor to keep the number balance. Wild?

I love this!

ayrt

It depends what you're doing and how much the 10-17 years matter for your AU. I think in some cases, you could totally have fun with new houses, or just say "This person is from this school in this country. Moving on ..." But I don't think it's wrong not to do that. I usually have these arguments in the context of random Sorting discussions.

AYRT

I haven't read the fic, so maybe those years aren't in play. I was just responding to your comment of "if he has to be in Hogwarts at all," and if the only issue is that Russian-born wizards don't go to Hogwarts, I think that's a case where you should just handwave.

It would be different if you were exploring the HP verse itself, and wanted to really think about how a Russian education system maps onto the narrative. I think there's a Steve Rogers fic that looks at how he'd be if he were Captain USSR instead, for example.

But if you're just writing the average AU, you're most likely going to be duplicating most of what Rowling did anyway with different names, and asking your readers to mentally translate all the time. "Oh, right, that's the one that's like Gryffindor."

ayrt

The fic does cover their Sorting, a little of their Hogwarts years, and then they're working as Aurors. The fact that they're Slytherins is important to both of them within the fic.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, in terms of ease of AU writing? Like I said, most of the time I give these arguments in the context of random Sorting conversations. Castiel a Gryffindor? Nope, Castiel's a monster in the forbidden forest. NEXT. Ovi's in Slytherin? Ovi wouldn't even go to Hogwarts. NEXT.

I do think you could easily write a Hogwarts AU or post-Hogwarts AU without sorting non-U.K. characters into Hogwarts houses, if you really wanted. The Goblet of Fire has students and professors visiting from different wizarding schools. You could have wizards moving to the U.K. and working as Aurors, since I don't recall anything about that being against the rules in the wizarding world. I'm not saying that's what everyone should be doing, since I think people write these things to replicate Hogwarts and the things they liked about Hogwarts, but it is a possibility.

I think if you're using "values book-learning the highest" as your criterion for Ravenclaw, it's hard to find fits within pro hockey. By nature of being a professional athlete, they've devoted their lives to something that's easier to finagle a fit for loyalty/bravery/ambition than learning. So I don't disagree with you, but I think that if House balance among hockey players is something I'm going for, my metric might shift to "values book-learning significantly more than the average hockey player seems to".

ayrt

At least a few other high-level Russian hockey players/Russian athletes have degrees (I think from the same school as Ovi, though not advanced ones). Kuznetsov is one for sure. I think it's possible that they value having a degree more than most North American players.

I think you could make a case for Ravenclaw for especially cerebral players -- ones known to spend a lot of time studying other hockey players, for example. Though like most of these things, if you're in the NHL, you probably have the ability to learn/study hockey, ambition, a strong work ethic, and courage (or at least the willingness to take a beating), etc.

da

Yeah, the particular school Ovi did his degree at has a lot of famous Russian athletes who did degrees there, although I'd think most of them are probably undergrad -- Kovalchuk, Kharlamov, Morozov, Pavel Bure, Irina Slutskaya, Maria Butyrskaya, Gordeeva and Grinkov... I'd imagine it's at least partially a cultural thing.

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