Right. So, like I was saying a minute ago, we will be recording this, so if you don’t want your voice recorded, leave your questions until afterwards.

So, my name is Tuan Wadding Hayes, and I’ve been highly invested in this field since I became involved with it, about two years ago. In this presentation, I’ll be talking about what a hyperflexible mythology is and how they work, and I’ll be discussing some of the most famous examples of hyperflexible mythology. The ones I’ll be focusing on the most are:

● the Hogwarts Houses, from the Harry Potter series, introduced in 1997;

● the Elements, as they are portrayed in “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, introduced in 2005;

● the Types from the Pokemon franchise, introduced in 1996;

● the Job System from the Final Fantasy franchise, introduced in 1987;

● the “Mana Wheel” or “Color Pie”, from “Magic the Gathering”, introduced in 1993;

● the Classes and Aspects from “Homestuck”, introduced in 2009;

● and the Gems from “Steven Universe”, introduced in 2013.

I’ll also be touching on the MBTI “16 Personalities” system, developed in 1944 (3rd edition in 1998), and the Western Zodiac, which according to historian John P. Britton, was introduced “between −408 and −397 and probably within a very few years of −400.” (Britton, 2010. 618.)

Before I began the presentation, I included a promotion for the essayist whose work was the main inspiration for the presentation and this essay. Unfortunately the AO3 Terms of Service prevent me from doing so here, but she did provide me with one of my references.

Hogwarts houses were introduced in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone” in 1997. They divide the students of Hogwarts into four houses, by their most dominant personality trait: Gryffindor for bravery and chivalry, Hufflepuff for loyalty and patience, Ravenclaw for wit and wisdom, and Slytherin for cunning and ambition. (Rowling, 1997. 88.)

Figure 1: One of the many songs the Sorting Hat sings in the Harry Potter series.

At this point, I asked the audience what Hogwarts House they were in. The person I chose from the audience, AUDIENCE 1, happened to be a Hufflepuff. I asked him why he was a Hufflepuff, and his answer was “they were whimsical”. He had not taken a test to determine his house, such as the one that was available through “Pottermore”[1], and he had not read the books; his impressions of the house came from material introduced in later additions to the canon (the films). I will return to this idea in the next section of the presentation.

Hyperflexible Mythology

A hyperflexible mythology is a narrative device for character or setting exposition, most well-known for its use in Young Adult fiction. It introduces a system of archetypes within a story that divides a foundational aspect of that story into categories (which, for this essay, I’ll be calling “houses”, after the houses of Hogwarts). If the audience understands the symbolism the author gives to a house, then they will intuit the behaviour of something belonging to that house more efficiently than by exposition for each character individually. Consider this quote from “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”:

“You might belong in Gryffindor,/Where dwell the brave at heart,/Their daring, nerve and chivalry,/Set Gryffindors apart;” (Rowling, 1997. p. 88, para. 2, l. 13–16.)

This quote is taken from a song of the Sorting Hat, a sentient hat with the ability to judge the inner character of the person on whose head it sits. Its role in-universe is to sort children, at the age of eleven, into one of Hogwarts’ houses. The child would be told their dominant personality trait by the Sorting Hat, and would afterwards spend a majority of their time at school, between the ages of eleven and seventeen, with children who have been judged to have the same dominant personality trait.

The above audience member, after watching the Harry Potter films, took the impression “Hufflepuffs are whimsical.”. If he were to meet another Hufflepuff character, he would expect them to also be whimsical. The Hogwarts House hyperflexible mythology encourages the characters to use the device on each other in the same way as the audience uses it for the characters. This, and the popularity of the “Harry Potter” franchise, make it a perfect introduction to the device.

The narrative device is used in a similar manner, for example, in “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (an Earthbender can be expected to be a focused brawler who fights without theatrics or emotion, and to have the power to manipulate the Classical Element of Earth, based on how they are portrayed in the earliest episodes of the show), and in “Pokemon” (a Dragon-type Pokémon will be expected to be difficult to train but ultimately rewarding to use, based on the expectations set by the gameplay and story in the earliest games in the franchise). If you, as author, introduced a character that belongs to a house for which there has already been exposition, you will have a better idea of what your audience will expect from the character you are introducing, and how you want your story to use those expectations.

The term “hyperflexible mythology” was coined on the 2nd of March, 2010, by Andrew Hussie, in his webcomic “Homestuck”. It was used in-universe by the character Terezi Pyrope, in a conversation between her and Rose Lalonde, about the nature of their setting, and the destinies it expects them to follow.

“That helped us realize the particular destinies the game put together for us/in the vocabulary of like/the hyper flexible mythology it tailors to each player group.” – Terezi Pyrope (Hussie, 2010. p. 1524, l. 76–78)

Within the narrative of Homestuck, characters discover what archetypes they belong to, and the functions those archetypes are expected to perform. Many plot points in Homestuck are built on the interactions between characters, based on the behaviour they themselves associate with their archetype. While they belong to different species, both Rose and Terezi belong to the “Seer” house of the “Class” hyperflexible mythology; at this point in the story, they have both become involved in a video game called SBURB, which has destroyed their worlds and trapped them inside their respective sessions of the game. The destiny a Seer is expected to follow is to collect information on how to play SBURB, during or after their session, and to compile and distribute that information for the benefit of others (usually leading to their own suffering as a result).

When a character becomes good enough at performing the roles of their Class, and after undergoing a great personal sacrifice, they gain a new outfit associated with both their Class, and their house in another of Homestuck’s hyperflexible mythologies – “Aspects”. Once a character obtains this outfit, it is very rare to see them in their old clothes, or a new set of clothes, while they are inside their session of SBURB; as with the Hogwarts Houses, an ideal session of SBURB encourages its characters to spend as much time surrounded by the houses of their hyperflexible mythologies as possible (although many characters of Homestuck often deliberately reject this, or are separated from their houses in another way: Dave Strider, as a member of the “Knight” Class, is expected to be a warrior and protector, but for many reasons rejects that role for as long as he can (Hussie, 2011. p. 3698, l. 55–69.)[2]).

Figure 2: Rose Lalonde, in the outfit of a "Seer of Light".

Sometimes, houses will be set up in opposition with each other; other times, as beneficial together. Homestuck’s “Aspect” hyperflexible mythology uses an “Aspect Wheel”, which guides the readers’ understanding of how the Aspects interact with one another: the further apart two Aspects are, the more their associated characters are contrasted.

Figure 3: The Aspect Wheel. From the top clockwise: Breath, Life, Light, Time, Heart, Rage, Blood, Doom, Void, Space, Mind, Hope.

It is crucial that each house has an easily-recognisable symbol, its own associated traits, actions and philosophies, and, if the story uses a visual medium, its own associated colour or style of clothing. This avoids confusion when many characters from different houses are in the same scene, and it makes it easier for the audience to absorb the amount of information you are presenting.

In the Aspect Wheel, “Light”, represented by a yellow sun, is opposed to “Void”, a set of six dark blue lines with nothing between them.

Figure 4: Roxy Lalonde, in the outfit of a Rogue of Void. Opposition between houses does not require opposition between characters.

Another work which uses a wheel to sort its houses is Magic: the Gathering, with its “Mana Wheel” or “Color Pie”. As with the Aspect Wheel, houses further away are opposed, and houses closer together are allied.

Figure 5: The Color Pie. From the top clockwise: White (W), Blue (U), Black (B), Red (R), Green (G).

Like Homestuck’s “Light”, “White” mana is represented by a sun.

The philosophy of the Light Aspect most cleanly matches that of Magic: the Gathering’s “Blue”.

What is “blue” the Colour Of?

In Magic: the Gathering, “Blue” is the colour of knowledge, discovery, progress, and information. For characters of the “Blue” house, the world is an opportunity to learn, and an opportunity to learn is an opportunity to gain power. For a deck built around Blue cards, Magic: the Gathering becomes a game of board control and deck manipulation: Searching your own deck for the best cards, while making sure your opponent can’t play theirs; Using your cards’ abilities to prevent your opponent from using their own; Anticipating what your opponent might want to do, and planning your strategy around punishing that.

Figure 6: Two of Magic: The Gathering’s most famous “Blue” characters: Jace Beleren, and Teferi of Dominaria. Jace tends to benefit a playstyle based around preventing your opponent from using their resources, while Teferi tends to benefit a playstyle based around making your resources more useful, and your opponent’s less useful.

“Each color’s philosophy stems from how that color sees the world. Blue looks out and sees opportunity. To blue, the world is a collection of resources that allow an individual the ability to transform himself into whatever he wishes. Each person is born as a blank slate. The purpose of life is to learn what you want to be and how to achieve that goal.” – Mark Rosewater, “True Blue” (2003. para. 3.)

Of course, that wasn’t really the question. We’re not asking what “Blue”, one of the five houses of Magic: the Gathering’s hyperflexible mythology, is the colour of. We’re asking what “blue”, our real-life colour, is the colour of.

When an author needs to quickly establish what a character will be, one technique that is often used is colour-coding (designing their colour palette, based on what the audience might expect a character with that palette to do).

Figure 7: Cosmos and Chaos, from “Dissidia Final Fantasy” and “Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy”.

Hyperflexible mythology is the way an author colour-codes their characters; not by the audience’s expectations, but by the expectations the work itself asks the audience to consider. While the audience will enter the context of a work having some expectations for what “blue” signifies, it is the specific context by which the work uses “blue”, and the house(s) represented by “blue” and other colours, that separates the houses of a hyperflexible mythology from each other, and from the houses of other hyperflexible mythologies.

To summarise, while all of these characters have blue as part of their colour scheme (even if, in some cases, by association), what “blue” is supposed to signify to the audience differs between each hyperflexible mythology, and indeed between houses, depending on which “blue” is being used.

Hyperflexible Mythology and Fandoms

So, imagine you’re 13. You’re looking for somewhere to fit in, but none of the typical “cliques” of secondary school are really speaking to you. So what do you do? You look for cliques – for archetypes – from other places. You’ll look to your favourite book, or your favourite television show, and you’ll see a character or culture that you like or identify with, and emulate the behaviour of that character or culture; you’ll say “I’m a Gryffindor.”, “I’m an Earthbender.”, “I’m a Pisces.”. Or, you’ll look to your favourite game, and the lore associated with the deck or playstyle you most like to use; “I’m a Rakdos”, “I’m a White Mage.”, “I’m a Ghost-type Trainer.” When used in this way, the house names become shorthand for the personality and philosophy of those who use them. So, when someone says to you, “Hello, I’m a Gryffindor.”, what they’re actually saying is:

● I have read the Harry Potter series.

● I consider my reading of the Harry Potter series to be a significant part of my identity.

● I identify with the ideals of Gryffindor: either I believe that I am brave and chivalrous, or I want to become brave and chivalrous.

● I value the ideals of bravery and chivalry more than I value the ideals of ambition (Slytherin), loyalty (Hufflepuff) or wisdom (Ravenclaw).

“What these systems all share”, writes Sam Keeper, in her essay “Hyperflexible Mythology” (from the collection “A Bodyless and Timeless Persona”) “is a certain amount of arbitraryness and vagueness balanced by a named structure and a range of possible, tangible implementations of that structure. And they seem to share many of the same effects on fanfiction and fandom activities, making certain things possible that are not, perhaps, as easy to pull off with either more loosely or more rigidly defined structures.” (Keeper, 2016. para. 7.)

If I said to you, “Hufflepuff characters are all whimsical, and only whimsical.”, then they won’t be very interesting characters, and any fan-created Hufflepuff characters would be very restricted in what the audience would consider acceptable behaviour for their house. Similarly, if I said to you, “Hufflepuff can be whatever you want.”, then why be Hufflepuff over any other house? Why use hyperflexible mythology at all?

We can look to real-world examples of how people use systems like hyperflexible mythology. These are (the pop-culture use of) the horoscopes, the “16 Personalities” system, the Enneagrams, the Japanese system of Blood Type personalities. When someone says to you, “I’m a Leo.”, they aren’t telling you, “I was born in July or August.”, but “I believe I’m a natural leader, as do others who subscribe to this system.” When someone says to you, “I’m an INTJ, an Architect.”, they aren’t telling you, “I’m a professional architect.”, but “I try to make decisions based on logical analysis, and I am very ambitious.”

Of course, we can also look to examples of how members of fandoms use the hyperflexible mythologies that they know to shape their own identities, or to signal to others that they are part of the fandom that accompanies a given hyperflexible mythology.

Let’s take a look at an example of how hyperflexible mythologies might be used in fandom spaces, outside of the context of their original work:

Figure 8: An example of how a fan might use hyperflexible mythologies as a system of personal identifiers. As of the 3rd February, 2020, this Tumblr account does not exist.

This is “iamatumblraccount”. She’s 19, and she’s in a lot of fandoms. She is, from left to right:

● A Slytherin (Harry Potter)

● A Waterbender (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

● A Scorpio (Western Zodiac)

● An ENTJ (MBTI’s “Commander” Personality Type – she thinks she’s the next Bill Gates.)

● A Knight of Light (Homestuck)

● A Blue Mage (Final Fantasy)

and

● A Lapis Lazuli (Steven Universe)

She also favours Water-type Pokemon, and plays mainly Dimir decks in Magic: the Gathering.

If you know what all of those terms refer to, you’ll have a very good idea of what to expect from an interaction with this tumblr account, because she’s signalling, with these identifiers, what kind of interactions she’s looking for on this website, and the kind of role she would like to play in those interactions.

At this point, I would like to say that, like all shorthand, house names and hyperflexible mythologies are not infallible signifiers. What exactly is being signalled by the use of a house’s name depends on the person using the signal. When “iamatumblraccount” says that she is a Slytherin, what exactly is being signified by Slytherin’s use? Does she consider herself ambitious, and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve her goals? Does she like the characters in the Slytherin house, and want to be their friend (or more)? Does she simply like snakes, and the colour green? Only “iamatumblraccount” knows for sure, unless she tells whoever finds her page exactly what she is signalling. Without that confirmation, those who come across the page will likely draw their own conclusions about what she is signalling, based on what they believe “Slytherin” to be a signal for.

What complicates this further is that, in fandom spaces, it is common (and occasionally encouraged by the author(s)) to re-interpret the potential powersets, philosophies and behaviour of characters – even entire houses – for reasons as varied as “this character/house is under-utilised or has potential that canon hasn’t acted on”, “the canon interpretation of this powerset/philosophy makes no sense within the rules the canon has established”, or “this is based on assumptions of the author(s), which I know to be false”. These re-interpretation can even influence how later additions to canon or canon-adjacent material uses the characters and houses.[3][4]

Ultimately, while the use of hyperflexible mythologies can be useful shorthand outside of the context of their associated works, there are as many interpretations of the hyperflexible mythology as there are fans of the work. This is something you will have to expect, if you are going to use an existing hyperflexible mythology, or create a new one, for your own work.

Building Complexity

Once you’ve established a baseline for your hyperflexible mythology’s houses, you can have the characters in those houses interact with each other, coming into conflict or forming alliances with each other.

● An Airbender meets two Waterbenders, who need his help to fight a Firebender.

● A Warrior, Black Mage, White Mage and Thief are brought together to defeat Chaos.

This is an simple way to fold further exposition about your houses’ philosophies and powersets into character interaction, or fight scenes.

Once you establish how each house would interact with each other house, another, more advanced way of building complexity is to take the traits of each house and build on them.

Super-Houses

One way to do this might be to combine two or more houses into a new “super-house”. The super-house might be as simple as a house which possesses the traits of all its base houses, or as complex as an entirely new series of houses, which build on the rules established by the first series.

The mechanics of Pokemon allow for Pokemon to belong to either one or two types, but very few Pokemon are restricted to using only the abilities of their type(s).

Figure 9: This Vaporeon - a Water type - also has access to abilities from the Ice and Ghost types, and more.

In Magic: The Gathering, characters can be summoned by, and attuned to, more than one colour of mana: the clearest example being the Guilds of Ravnica, whose ten guilds’ relationships to their two colours change the relationship to both: the blue-black guild (“Dimir”) plays completely differently to the blue-red guild (“Izzet”).

These four super-houses have completely different playstyles and lore to each other, and to the other six two-Mana super-houses.[5]

Sub-Houses

Another way is to take one of your houses and allow some traits to diverge from each other, into sub-houses.

In Avatar: The Last Airbender, characters are always discovering new things that element bending can do:

● by innovation;

Figure 10: Toph discovers Metalbending.

● or by the parallel development of multiple cultures from each element.

Figure 11: Waterbenders living at the poles develop differently to those living in the swamps. Earthbenders living in the mountains and plains develop differently to those living in the deserts.

Trans-/Extra-House Development

A third way is to have a character change their house entirely (Trans-House), or even abandon the hyperflexible mythology altogether (Extra-House).

The first can be seen many Final Fantasy games, where characters can change their house under special circumstances:

Figure 12: In Final Fantasy IV, Jobs are fixed, but the protagonist, Cecil Harvey, undergoes trans-house development, changing from Dark Knight to Paladin as part of the story.

Figure 13: In Final Fantasy V, characters can freely change between any Job and back (provided the Job has been unlocked first).

The second can be seen in Steven Universe, in which many Gems develop away from the original function of their house and become their own people (sometimes through the use of super-houses).

Crossovers

So, you have your hyperflexible mythology, and its houses. You’ve built up some complexity between and inside your houses. Once you and your fans know how your houses interact with each other and with themselves, you and your fans will be able to understand how your hyperflexible mythology will interact with the characters and houses of another hyperflexible mythology. At that point, both you and your fans can ask: “If a character from one story was put into another story, how well do they follow that story’s hyperflexible mythology?” If you understand both hyperflexible mythologies well enough, you can make statements about characters in such a situation with which the majority of both of the fandoms will agree.

What Hogwarts House would Tony Stark be sorted into? Or, the rest of the Avengers?

Figure 14: Tony Stark, as portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I opened this question to the audience. AUDIENCE 2 answered that it depended on whether you liked the character or not. She said Slytherin, but perhaps Gryffindor (“He’ll just go straight into action.”). She could argue for Ravenclaw, because of the level of intelligence, but said “No.” to Hufflepuff. I also asked what Final Fantasy Job Steven Universe might be. However, nobody in the audience had watched Steven Universe, or played a Final Fantasy game. Instead, I have provided my own interpretation, for your consideration.

Figure 15: Steven Universe, from Steven Universe, and five of the Jobs from the Final Fantasy series.

“How do these roles and their narrative import weigh upon the relationships, positively or negatively? How do people collaborate across different mindsets and skillsets to find some sort of unity? And, all that important character stuff aside, how do they translate to badass powers used to punch Kaiju in the face?” (Keeper, 2016. para. 25)

At this point AUDIENCE 2 made an observation that, going back to the example of the Avengers, Steve Rogers is absolutely a Gryffindor, but with Tony Stark, she could see him as more than one of the houses in Harry Potter’s hyperflexible mythology.

How to Build a Hyperflexible Mythology

Now we know what hyperflexible mythology is, how it works, how to make it as complex as we need it to be, and how to have it interact with other hyperflexible mythologies? So how do we make our own? Here are five basic steps you can use to build your own hyperflexible mythology.

1. Take something from the world around you. It can be a school system (like the Hogwarts Houses), a type of science that’s fallen out of popular use (like the Zodiacs), or a set of character archetypes that already exist in pop culture (like the MBTI 16 Personality system). This grounds your mythology in something your audience will already be familiar with, giving them a common point from which they can begin to understand your system.

If you could build a hyperflexible mythology, what would you want it to be based on?

AUDIENCE 2: Irish mythology. Maybe the Tuatha Dé Danann, who come from four different magical cities, which you can kind of relate to the elements, or the quarters (North, South, East, West), and they have their own separate treasure, so I would go with that, because it’s something I’m familiar with.

AUDIENCE 3: The Five Sacred Trees. [6]

2. How do the characters interact with your hyperflexible mythology? Is it a skill set? A function they have to perform? Is it assigned or given at birth, or taken on later in their life? Do the characters want to be in the house they’re in (and if they don’t, why not?). Also, does the hyperflexible mythology interact with your characters in return (is your hyperflexible mythology sentient, or even a character of the story itself?) The way your characters interact with any of the systems you establish for your world can be the most interesting part of the story.

With the four cities example, of course the city you’re born in is going to be assigned at birth. Whether your character wants to continue living in the city they were born in is up to them. With the five sacred trees, perhaps there’s a function associated with the tree a character is born under, which they have to perform.

3. What are the “houses” of your hyperflexible mythology? How many are there, and on what basis are they divided?

The four cities are divided by…geography?

AUDIENCE 2: Yeah, and also each city’s treasure has an associated element. The Stone, for Earth. Fire, the Spear is forged in fire. So, each of them has properties you’d immediately associate with [the treasure and its city.] But the only reason you’d associate them with those properties is because of what you’re talking about in the first place, the hyperflexible mythology.

It’s nature or nurture isn’t it?

With the five trees, it might depend on the climate in which they grew.

AUDIENCE 2: Well, it would probably depend on the tree type, what the lore of the tree type was. 4. How complex do you want your hyperflexible mythology to be? Do you want the houses to be able to combine with each other? Do you want the hyperflexible mythology to be combinable with other hyperflexible mythologies in your universe?

If there was some kind of disagreement between the people of one city, and they broke away from each other, so there were now five cities. Or, if two of the trees cross-bred with each other, so there were six trees; or, if one of the trees died, so there were four trees.

For combinable hyperflexible mythologies, I’d like to bring in Homestuck again, because Homestuck’s hyperflexible mythology is less like one system, and more like four hyperflexible mythologies wearing a trenchcoat. But you can have more than one of these systems in your work, which can, within your fandom, give them more variations with which to self-identify.

5. Finally, what does the presence of your hyperflexible mythology tell the reader about your world? If the reader took it, and used it in their real-world interactions, what would you expect that to look like?

Why are trees the central hyperflexible mythology of your work. Why are these four cities so fundamental to your story?

AUDIENCE 4: Well, I wonder if you control it. Say, you create your world, or your houses, for whatever you’re creating, and the fans make of that what they wish. Like, in the Harry Potter books, what exists in the books has been expanded upon by fans. Maybe they changed it, I don’t know, but they’ve certainly added to it.

And, you know, it is the Internet Age. Your fandoms are going to do that. In fact…they’re going to take some parts of your story and change it, to better suit what they’re looking for in the story.

AUDIENCE 2: I mean, that happens with everything, in every system. Like, even if you take a system like astrology. You have Jungian astrology; there’s people mixing the field of, let’s say, Jungian psychology, with astrology and what the planetary information is supposed to be with the Zodiac Sign information...

That would bring us back to “iamatumblraccount”. She’s combining the houses that she identifies with from different hyperflexible mythologies, and is using that combination as her online…

AUDIENCE 4: Identity.

Identity, thank you.

Before we finish…

I’d like to offer some personal words of caution. If your fans do subscribe to the hyperflexible mythologies you create (and many of them will), it’s very easy for them to become lost in its symbolism. I found, quite a few times, I would become quite invested in a book, or a show, for a while, and then I would see its symbolism everywhere. Like a Tetris effect. So, if you do intend for your hyperflexible mythologies to be used in the ways I’ve described, by your fandom or just within the work itself, then I recommend you have some measures in place to remind your audience that it was a system you created as a tool for exposition and a system of personal identifiers. In the words of Dave Strider: “rose we don’t have ****** “arcs” we are just human beings” (Hussie, 2015. p. 7507, l. 28.)

AUDIENCE 2: I’d argue a lot of human beings do have arcs. We just don’t see them until years later.

Well, we can agree to disagree there.

AUDIENCE 2: [laughs] Actually, something struck me when you were talking about that before. It’s the instant recognition of something. Because I didn’t know what the term meant until you explained it to me, and the first thing I thought of when you were explaining it was: We’d been at home recently, watching original Star Trek, and we’d recently watched the episode called “Catspaw”, if anyone knows it. Basically, they go into this planet, this reality, it’s all illusion. The first thing you see is three kind of witchy characters. And it’s like, immediately you think “Macbeth”, the three witches, and the three witches, even though they had a prophecy to Macbeth, they couldn’t be trusted, the prophecy is not all that it seems. So you knew from that first minute that the world they were going into was not going to be all that it seemed.

AUDIENCE 4: That’s if you know “Macbeth”.

Yeah, if a character didn’t know “Macbeth”, they wouldn’t make that connection. It’s what you’re training yourself, and what the author is training you, to recognise in the story. Maybe they’re training you, by accident, to recognise certain things in another story.

So, thanks for coming. I’ve been Tuan Wadding Hayes.

Right, so, does anyone want their question recorded?

AUDIENCE 5: Would the main divider, symbolically, be colour, or would there be any other system to view society from? Like, for example, with the Hogwarts system, the animals associated with them?

Well, animals themselves, also can be a hyperflexible mythology, can be that system…look at…um…

AUDIENCE 4: “Game of Thrones”.

Game of Thrones, yes. You know, there’s a lot of symbolism behind the animals – the creatures – that would be on the house crests of those…uh…of those houses.

AUDIENCE 4: The banner.

The banners.[7] Uh, yeah, you can draw from any of these systems. There’s no shortage of these systems; it’s not just horoscopes or enneagrams, or blood types. There’s a lot of ways you can look at these systems.

AUDIENCE 4: The Veronica Roth series. In the first one, you know, the teenagers, they all get to decide what career they’re going to take. And most of them follow in the path of their parents. Which is what lots of people did years ago, anyway; your dad was a blocklayer, you were a blocklayer. And then, of course, you had the rebels, and they decide to join a different career path. The “Divergent” series, that’s what I was trying to think of.

I’d always meant to read those.

AUDIENCE 4: There you go. That’s one on your list.

AUDIENCE 2: Clothing, I suppose, as well, people say about clothing, whether it’s uniforms, whatever; even if you think…back to when I was a teenager, you had the metal-ers, and you had your hippies, and your punks, and your goths. So you knew what someone was, because they signalled it with how they dressed.

A member of House Goth.

Right.

---

[1] A website that housed lore for the Harry Potter series, much of which was not available through the books or films. The website which would replace it, www.wizardingworld.com, was brought online on the 24th of March, 2018. Pottermore was closed on the 2nd of October, 2019.

[2] https://www.homestuck.com/story/3698

[3] https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/why-hogwarts-needs-slytherin-house.

[4] https://mspaintadventures.fandom.com/wiki/Pesterquest.

[5] Larger version of this image available here: https://i.imgur.com/TVkgBQ6.jpg

[6] Eó Mugna, a yew from Kildare; Bile Tortan, an ash from Meath; Eó Ruis, a yew from Carlow; Craeb Daithí, an ash from Westmeath, and Craeb Uisnig, an ash from Uisneach. https://stairnaheireann.net/2017/01/12/celtic-mythology-five-sacred-guardian-trees-of-ireland/.

[7] I have neither read nor watched the Game of Thrones series.