RWBY Hogwarts Sorting

[pterocardio]

crossposted from my tumblr for the sake of filling this void.

[WARNING: SPOILERS FOR ALL SEASONS AIRED]

This… ended up a lot longer than I imagined. Anyway, I started writing this a while back so here you go! A sorting post of RWBY using sortinghatchats' sorting system. I highly recommend you read their overview post here to make sense of this longass analysis.

But in case you go tl;dr on that your primary is why you do things, and your secondary is how you do it.

TEAM RWBY  ONLY

I. Ruby

Our very young Ruby Rose is a Gryffindor primary. In fact, hers is the classic case of a Gryffindor hero - she wants to be a huntress because she wants to like the great heroes in fairy tales. She doesn’t train to be a huntress because she values human life, she trains to be a huntress because she wants to save the day. And she sticks to this goal - she is adamant to the point of being comfortable in her ideals, never questioning the path she’s chosen even as it gets difficult to trek.

Her Gryffindor secondary is seen in the way she charges into a battle, much like her semblance which is speed, she is quick and impulsive. While she seems to have adopted a more strategic style of combat when taking on bigger foes with her team, when left with her own devices, she charges without a second thought. You see this in the way she tries to speed her way out of Torchwick’s hold, and in the way she tries to charge at Mercury in an attempt to escape. You even see this in the way she tries to convince Penny that it’s alright for the Atlasian guards to see her and Penny together, because she doesn’t understand why there’s a need for them to be dishonest.

She’s got a Ravenclaw secondary model, that really works well when she’s able to balance it with her Gryffindor Secondary. She has an extensive knowledge of weapons and she raves about them being extensions of a human. She uses her model to strategize group attacks. In ‘Players and Pieces’ when they take down the Nevermore, Ruby plans out their very first group attack and when she tells Weiss about her very flamboyant (and might I add, quite Gryffindor in nature) plan, Weiss comments, “of course you would come up with a plan like this.” Even when she’s planning, she doesn’t lose touch of her Gryffindor secondary for a single moment.

II. Weiss

Our dear snow princess is a Slytherin primary, which isn’t surprising considering how she was born into aristocracy. I know people will say that her leaving her family to train as a huntress doesn’t seem like Slytherin move, but Weiss’ loyalty is to the Schnee family name. Not necessarily to the members of the family itself (as you can see by the way she avoids her father), but much of Weiss’ motivations and actions are related to the Schnee family name and its preservation.

In ‘The Shining Beacon’, she gets furious over Ruby hitting her suitcases full of Schnee Dust by the Schnee Dust Company. In ‘The Stray’, when she fights with her teammate Blake over her views of the White Fang and Faunus, her defense is rooted in the violence the Schnee family name has received from the White Fang. When she and Blake make up in the episode after, Weiss decides she doesn’t need to hear Blake’s winded explanation about the White Fang because Blake’s part of her inner circle now and it doesn’t matter what crimes she’s committed in the past.

In ‘Mountain Glenn’, when team RWBY sans Ruby discuss why they actually became huntresses, Weiss says she knows that her family’s company has done terrible things and feels responsible to make up for it. She wants to make things right, not necessarily because it needs to be right but because it’s her family name who has done wrong. If she were a Gryffindor, she would’ve dropped her family name immediately.

She’s ambitious and wants to be the leader of the team right off the bat, she befriends Pyrrha with the idea of  “getting good grades and ruling the school.” I think it’s pretty safe to say that she’s Slytherin primary through and through.

Weiss’ secondary on the other hand is a nice Ravenclaw secondary. What’s interesting about RWBY is a lot of their semblances and combat styles reflect their personalities, and by extension, their houses. Weiss’ semblance are her glyphs which she can use as launchers, accelerators, etc. Her semblance allows her to plan out her moves during a fight just a little in advance.

Weiss is also a constant perfectionist. At the start of the series you hear her constantly reminding herself before combat, “You can do this Weiss, remember your training,” and proceeds to correct her posture down to the very last inch before striking. And before the Vytal Festival, she drags the team to the docks so she can spy on the competition and learn their skills beforehand. Weiss plans in a similar way Hermione’s Ravenclaw secondary does.

III. Blake

Blake’s a Stripped Gryffindor primary. In fact, Blake’s primary had already started stripping long before the series started.

In Black and White, Blake explains that when the new administration of the White Fang had started organizing attacks, Blake realized that although they were being treated as equals it wasn’t out of respect but out of fear. Being a Gryffindor primary, she had an idealistic vision of achieving equality without causing more violence, and upon seeing that violent methods could ironically give them a better position in society, her purpose for fighting and her moral compass end up clashing with each other. She decides that her vision doesn’t involve inflicting violence upon others and leaves the White Fang (or more accurately, runs away from the White Fang.)

Blake even details that her semblance mirrors how she always runs away from conflict and judging by her recent visit to her family, she probably ran away from them too. This is extremely common for Stripped Gryffindors because even though Blake knows what the “right thing to do is”, she’s not sure if she can keep doing the right thing anymore, even if she wants to. When she doesn’t run away and feels the need to charge, like in Welcome to Beacon and Extracurricular, she is visibly out of control. She doesn’t eat, sleep, or try to socialize with any of her members because all she can think of is that she should be doing something about it, even though she knows she can’t.

As for her secondary, I’m sorry to say that I haven’t pinned this down yet. I’m thinking she’s likely to be an improvisational house which would either make her Slytherin or Gryffindor. I’m a bit more inclined to believe she’s Slytherin secondary. Do message me if you have any ideas?

IV. Yang

Finally! The last member of Team Ruby. Yang Xiao Long, like Weiss Schnee, is a Slytherin primary. I knew right off the bat Yang was a loyalist house. I originally sorted her as Hufflepuff primary because of her sociability, the instances she’s shown compassion towards the Faunus, and her willingness to give Blake the benefit of the doubt when they found out she was from the White Fang. But upon looking closely at her character, it’s pretty easy to see that Yang really only cares about a few things: her hair, her sister and family, and her team. These are things she considers hers, which is classic Slytherin.

Unlike Weiss who is visibly selective of people she befriends, Yang is generally friendly to everyone, as seen in ‘Shining Beacon Pt. 2’. However, this doesn’t mean that Yang doesn’t have an inner circle. Yang simply doesn’t treat anyone any nicer or meaner compared to how fiercely caring she is of her sister Ruby, exhibiting lots of patience to help her - patience which at that point of the series did not extend to Blake just yet as seen when Yang tells Ruby to leave because Blake is a “lost cause”. As the series progresses however, we see Yang expanding her inner circle to include her teammates, with Yang going as far as sharing her personal story about her quest to find her mother to calm Blake down.

Yang isn’t necessarily as ambitious as Weiss career-wise, but she is just as competitive over things she has interest in. She gets pissed over losing at a board game, she jokingly insults her uncle when she beats him at video games. She’s confident of her looks and skills and is not afraid to boast.

Yang’s secondary is obviously Gryffindor. She’s brazen and outspoken and appears to enjoy thrill-seeking. I’m thinking she probably resembles the Weasley twins when it comes to surface level personality.

Much like the rest of team RWBY (sans Blake) her combat style resembles her secondary house. Yang charges through everything. Her father points out in ‘Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back’ that in combat, she’s extremely predictable. This is because her secondary is inherently not a situational one like the Slytherin secondary. She doesn’t adapt, she charges head first. Her semblance is also plenty inspirational in nature. Being able to draw strength from every hit she gets is a pretty good metaphor for how Gryffindors often take hits they don’t even need to take to win a battle because they’re charging without thinking, but winning after looking badly beaten gives hope to the “underdogs.”

In ‘Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back’ Yang starts to show signs of building what might be a Slytherin or Ravenclaw secondary model/performance, so that’ll be something to look forward to!

SEMI-FINAL SORTINGS:

1. Ruby Rose: Gryffindor Primary, Gryffindor Secondary with Ravenclaw Secondary Model.
2. Weiss Schnee: Slytherin Primary, Ravenclaw Secondary
3. Blake Belladonna: Gryffindor Primary, undecided secondary (most likely Slytherin or Gryffindor)
4. Yang Xiao Long: Slytherin Primary, Gryffindor Secondary

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