User blog:Trouble Cleft/How we Sort the Big Four in the Hogwarts AU

So I was just browsing around the Hogwarts AU page, and one of the newest coments had this question in it.

"I feel like there's something I'm not understanding here since all the characters are being sorted by their late teenager personalities instead of being sorted by their personalities when they're still youngins."

And beacuse I'm a HP dork, I decided to write a huge long annswer. (You can also find this on the Hogwarts AU page)

I would say its because the movies take place when the characters are older. Rapunzel is 18 in her movie, Jack is 17 (well, technically 317, but you get my point), Merida is 16 (I believe), and in the first movie Hiccup is 15, and in the second he is 20. Thats the ages we get to judge their character off of, because we don't have as much content from when they are around 10-12. We get to see Rapunzel and Merida as youngsters at the beginings of their movies, but that is only for about five minutes, and they seem to be between 5 and 8 years old in those scenes, not 11. Also, a lot of kids who get sorted into Gryffindor do brave things after they get out of school (ignore the golden trio for a moment), not while they were still in it, yet the sorting hat still places them in Gryffindor, just as students from Ravenclaw probably don't write their books while they are still in school. I kinda think the sorting hat can sense some of those deep down quality's and achievements before the person its sorting has discovered them, so that may be another reason (I may be wrong though, this is just my take on it). Also, if you think about it, the character traits that we tend to sort the Big Four on don't drastically change. Rapunzel doesn't become more or less compassionate and creative, even though she loses some of her naivety and innocence. Even though Merida learns to be more humble, she is still quite headstrong and fierce. Jack learns how to have responsiblity, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a fun loving guy (that is his center after all). Hiccup is a little different because he had two movies with a time skip, but you can see that even though he has grown up in the second movie, he is still a little awkward at times, seeing as he is more 'the pen is mightier than the sword' type of guy (though is flame sword is awesome), which doesn't really fit into viking culture. I hope this explains it, at least somewhat, but there are probably other reasons I didn't mention, this is only my thoughts on it, after all.