Chosen (Harry Potter Quest)

[X] Write-in: Put your envelope in your pocket then take Harry's letter from his hand to read it out loud

This sounds both "fun" (from an IC perspective) and practical.
 
Not sure about the house...I mean, Slytherin could also work - Dudley's ambitions were never mentioned, I think, but he surely doesn't want to be some nobody. And at least this Dudley's cunning should be on par with Crabb's and Goyle's, no? Also, there have been Muggle-born Slytherins, even if rarely.
But, yeah, I guess the only alternative should be Gryffindor - as long as the Hat doesn't go with "this house should help you improve in the characteristics that you lack", than Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff are on the table, and the latter would be my guess.
Anyway, that's gonna be a few chapters off, so, we'll see.


It seems like you've never talked to anyone who didn't realize that they were a bully. Many of the people who were popular and bullies at the same time genuinely think that they were just joking around. Or teaching lessons to dorks who couldn't take a joke.
Not sure where you're going with this, or where it even comes from?
My point was that the chapter makes Dudley come out as one of those types, and not the "haha, this boy is a caricature of a stupid, evil bully"-character that he so often is in HP-fics.
 
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Also, there have been Muggle-born Slytherins, even if rarely.
Is there more than one named one? It seems weird anyway. Why would Salazar have programmed that into the hat?

Though maybe his disdain for them has been exaggerated over the ages. His "anti-muggleborn" weapon was anything but that after all. A giant immortal serpent that only ever killed one or more students is really not the best that someone like Salazar could come up with. An immortal, magical and intelligent parseltongue speaking being on the other hand has some very clear uses for a wizard who cares about his descendants.

Not sure where you're going with this, or where it even comes from?
My point was that the chapter makes Dudley come out as one of those types, and not the "haha, this boy is a caricature of a stupid, evil bully"-character that he so often is in HP-fics.
My point was that a bully downplaying his bullying in his own mind doesn't necessarily mean that he is less of a bully than we previously thought. Everything we know from canon might still be true.

As for Dudley not being a caricature, yeah, lucky for us. This Quest would probably have become pretty tiring otherwise.

I say no on slytherin because they hate Mudbloods our parents are non magical muggles you really think we would survive there
Even if rare Slytherin mudbloods exist (probably only a handful a century at most), Dudley is not enough of an exemplar of all the other traits to make the cut. At least right now at his canon 11 year old self he is not exceptional as far as the traits of cunning, ambition, leadership or resourcefulness go. His leadership isn't bottom tier, what with his ability to be a ring leader to his group of friends, but otherwise? Especially when it comes to cunning or resourcefulness, he's quite bad. And we never ever saw any ambition of his mentioned in canon. Neither in the specific "this is what I want to achieve" sense, nor in the generic "I want to become someone of note or someone with means" sense.

Gryffindor won't be easy though. Harry might not be as merciful as in canon when he gets the upper hand over Dudley as an eleven year old Chosen One who is suddenly above him in the social structure.
 
[X] Write-in: Put your envelope in your pocket then take Harry's letter from his hand to read it out loud

To me, this one seems the most like the Dudley of the moment. Why eat just your cake slice when you can take someone elses too?
 
I say no on slytherin because they hate Mudbloods our parents are non magical muggles you really think we would survive there

I suppose it depends if this is going to be explicitly as written in the books Slytherin, which as I recall is basically a bunch of posh British asshole elitists; or fanon NotAllSlytherins!Slytherin/misunderstood!Slytherin. Or something in between, which is what I'm hoping for.
 
Is there more than one named one? It seems weird anyway. Why would Salazar have programmed that into the hat?

Though maybe his disdain for them has been exaggerated over the ages. His "anti-muggleborn" weapon was anything but that after all. A giant immortal serpent that only ever killed one or more students is really not the best that someone like Salazar could come up with. An immortal, magical and intelligent parseltongue speaking being on the other hand has some very clear uses for a wizard who cares about his descendants.
Yeah, no idea. Far as I know it's only like implied once by a Snatcher that there are in fact muggleborn in Slytherin...
Canon-Salazar doesn't make much sense to me, anyway, but as long as we don't get WoG for this quest, it's what we have to deal with - my current recommendation for a fanfiction that let's the history of the Wizarding World make more sense is Ouroboros on ff.net, by Novus Ars.

My point was that a bully downplaying his bullying in his own mind doesn't necessarily mean that he is less of a bully than we previously thought. Everything we know from canon might still be true.
Yes, that's why I wrote "in Dudley's head he's all right" - I didn't comment on him being a bully, just wanted to provide further context for the wording of my write-in (the mentioned "casual arrogance").

And playing a caricature would get annoying pretty fast, I agree :D

Gryffindor won't be easy though. Harry might not be as merciful as in canon when he gets the upper hand over Dudley as an eleven year old Chosen One who is suddenly above him in the social structure.
Yeah, with some bad luck Harry might turn bully on Dudley - or, at least other people might, since Harry canonically detests his status...another thing we'll have to wait and see.

To me, this one seems the most like the Dudley of the moment. Why eat just your cake slice when you can take someone elses too?
I could see it, if Dudley were to just drop his own letter or something, but putting it in his pocket? Why? Dudders has no reason to - he's got no idea what those letters are about. So, just grabbing Harry's makes much more sense to me...
 
[X] Write-in: Open your own envelope and read it. It's probably better than Harry's, anyway.
 
[X] Write-in: Open your own envelope and read it. It's probably better than Harry's, anyway.

Also remember Harry's dad was a shitheel like Dudley and he was in Griffindor. On the other hand where would Harry go during sorting if he rejects Slytherin due to Draco being there and Griffindor dude to Dudley being there? Or how would Dudley fare in Slytherin? Always hilarious to find out.
 
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[X] Write-in: Open your own envelope and read it. It's probably better than Harry's, anyway.

Also remember Harry's dad was a shitheel like Dudley and he was in Griffindor. On the other hand where would Harry go during sorting if he rejects Slytherin due to Draco being there and Griffindor dude to Dudley being there? Or how would Dudkey farenin Slytherin? Always hilarious ro find out.

Harry rejecting Gryffindor if Dudley is sorted there is a very real possibility.

If Dudley somehow ended up being sorted into Slytherin I think Draco would very quickly put him in his place, and he'd be a social outcast. Draco might make him be another minion (quite literally like Crabbe and Goyle) and use him to get insult material on Harry.
 
Yeah, well, Dudley'll be sorted before Harry, sooo...the latter might end up in Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw. Which I'd find a pretty nice butterfly, to be honest.
 
I suppose it depends if this is going to be explicitly as written in the books Slytherin, which as I recall is basically a bunch of posh British asshole elitists; or fanon NotAllSlytherins!Slytherin/misunderstood!Slytherin. Or something in between, which is what I'm hoping for.
I hope that the QM, regardless of whatever fanon or headcanon he may rely on, finds a way to rationalize the setting enough to feel like an immersive world we can freely move in.

Like, even without relying on any NotAllSlytherins OC character, fact is that ~1 in 4 wizards who grew up in Magical Britain did in fact graduate from Slytherin. So the nicest Slytherins can't possibly be worse than the bottom ~25% of the population. And Magical Britain is still functional in some way or another despite being made up of ~25% Slytherins.

I know HPMoR gets hated on around here (often enough for good reason), but I like its explanation for Slytherin House. To summarize as I understand it, the Sorting Hat doesn't force students into houses they don't want to go to, but at the same time tries to keep an even number of students in the four Houses if possible. It also balances what is good for the student currently under the Hat with what is good for all students in general.
Back in the day, Salazar was the only Founder who didn't want to teach muggleborn at Hogwarts. But keep in mind that all of the Founders were exceptional people and that their moral stances and opinions weren't really reflective of the average. Salazar's bigotry was much more mainstream and normal back then and in no way his defining or even an exceptional trait. Probably even the other Founders wanted to teach muggleborn out of the goodness of their hearts and not because they thought (let alone knew) that they were equal to trueborn wizards.
Over time though, as racism against muggleborn declined and became less and less widespread, more and more wizard families that clung to that bigotry (which morphed more and more into hatred as these things do when minorities move from being an "obviously inferior" curiosity to a politically significant demographic that can be blamed for things) aligned themselves with their image of Slytherin. And so on the flip side more and more young wizards came under the Hat with thoughts like "anything but Slytherin", even if they were otherwise cunning and ambitious and charismatic and pure blooded. And so, over the last century or so Slytherin had fewer and fewer wizards who would have been a good fit overall and more and more wizards who could have also fit somewhere else, but who stood out for either agreeing or not having a problem with anti-muggleborn bigotry, until it ended up in the sorry state of being Tom Riddle's prime recruiting ground and in the aftermath of that only became worse.

Yeah, well, Dudley'll be sorted before Harry, sooo...the latter might end up in Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw. Which I'd find a pretty nice butterfly, to be honest.
Harry's primary reasons for not wanting to go to Slytherin (if I remember correctly and am not confusing canon with fanon) was that he had two rather negative encounters with Draco Malfoy and Hermione's exposition on the four Houses. Both of those are things that could get butterflied away, and if Dudley becomes a Gryffindor on top of that, Slytherin does become a decent possibility.
I also vaguely remember that Hermione was a good fit for three of the Houses and chose Gryffindor in part due to her experience with Harry, Ron and Neville on the Hogwarts Express. And Granger and Potter both come before Weasley (a Gryffindor shoe-in). In other words, I think the whole event is ripe for being majorly influenced by butterflies.
 
Salazar Slytherin
A/N: I was thinking of doing excerpts like this during the classes but since there was some discussion about how I saw and plan to handle the House of Slytherin you get it now. Short of it is that it is not my intent to make the House of Slytherin where all the evil and bad people are. It is my firm belief that there are good and bad people in all four of the houses. To help illustrate this I thought it might be helpful to share how I see the Founder of Slytherin. I plan to do something similar for the other three founders as well before we get to choosing Dudley's House.

Hogwarts: A History
Page 36 - Salazar Slytherin



One of the four founders of Hogwarts back in 993 A.D. but there is much more to the man than just that he founded an academy that has managed to persevere all these years. Considered one of the most ambitious wizards of his day Salazar Slytherin was born the fourth son of the Slytherin family and eventually through a series of unfortunate events he found himself as the eldest member of his family at the age of 16. Salazar at that point had to throw himself on the good graces of several Noble Wizarding Houses in order to establish himself and not become the last of his line. Salazar built himself a reputation for honesty that followed him to end of his life and a reputation for secrets that can still be discovered in the halls of Hogwarts today for those in his house.

Salazar was a skilled hand with numbers and letters but perhaps even more so in cultivating the connections that would eventually lead the young wizard into the courts of Wizarding Government of his day. Salazar's ability as an administrator and his natural skill as a parseltongue had him gain power and prestige which led to his introduction to Lady Armist and their eventual marriage. It was when Salazar was in his sixties that there fierce debate in the halls of the lords about the current state of the witches and wizards of the day after Æthelred the Unready, the current king at the time believed that the magic users that were part of his court had not provided sufficient protection from the Danes in 991 A.D.

Æthelred wanted a standardization of education so that one wizard or even one Wizarding family would not be linchpin on which the scales of battle and even the fate of the nation would turn on. The creation of an academy. Only words that the young King could give because he could not afford to finance from the royal treasury. Much of it was emptied as tribute to cause a halt to the raids, temporary as that turned out to be before the Danes returned for even more.

As the debate on how to improve the quality of kingdom's wizards and witches went on, Salazar was well positioned in the halls of many Pure Blood Magical families, and at the time was considered for the role as High Lord of the Wizarding Government at that time. A position equal to the King of the Muggles at the time or perhaps even superior, depending on the king, when Salazar was approached by Godric Gryffindor and Helga Hufflepuff over turning Æthelred's idea of an Anglo-Saxon Academy into a reality.

It was considered quite the surprise when Salazar agreed to take part in the effort and abandon his role in the government for the standardization of magical education. How altruistic his true motives were for doing so is a subject of historical debate and opinion that shifts with the centuries. Those circles that try to study the man that created one of the foundational pillars of the Wizarding World are often restricted to his public statements to try and glean the thinking behind the man and coming to sometimes diverse and contradictory conclusions.

Salazar's role in the Founding of Hogwarts was to convince the wizards and witches in that part of the world to break with tradition of having the families in charge of the education of their own children. That those families could receive a qualitatively better education at the new school. The Founders believed that with the Pure Blood Families support that it would provide Hogwarts with both the political protection and fill the school with students from families that could cover the first few years of tuition before the school showed itself enough of a success to get the support of the government to fill its halls. This would also cover the losses they were incurring from teaching children from non-magical homes.

It is said at the time that Salazar was the biggest opponent to letting muggleborns into the school. Indeed that this argument eventually led to his leaving the school after spending over a decade working with the other founders. While many words have been written and spoken as to the why of his position perhaps the kindest interpretation and summation of over a decades worth of opinions gathered from the founder is that very few of the muggleborn he found worth investing his time in.

Purebloods would provide access to ancient tomes of knowledge, forgotten caches of magic, and the connections to the government that were lacking when he taught the children of Muggleborn families. That the ambition of muggleborns in his day were limited to only trying to achieve the same level as their Pureblood born peers and rarely to surpass them. Points that all three of the other Founders regularly disagreed with but their arguments did little to change Salazar's mind on the matter.

At the age of seventy-four, Salazar chose to retire from the school and spent his remaining years in seclusion. Salazar had apparently grown tired of the ideological conflict that existed between the founders and in the spirit of harmony, or perhaps because the others forced him out, he left the school that he had helped found.

Salazar appeared before the public eye only once after his departure from Hogwarts and that was during the funeral for Godric Gryffindor. It was said that Salazar gave a stirring eulogy for the man that he had come to blows with regularly in the past and Salazar felt all the poorer in having outlived his friend. Salazar is believed to have died at some point after as he did not make similar appearances at Helga Hufflepuff's or Rowena Ravenclaw's funerals in the years that followed. The exact date or cause of his death remains a historical mystery.
 
[X] Write-in: Open your own envelope and read it. It's probably better than Harry's, anyway.

This is how Dudley would obviously think. It's only going to change when his parents freak out now that their kid is a wizard. Either the Dursleys do a 180 and praise Dudley for being special, or Dudley suddenly realizes that his parents are jerks.

I want to see either happen, because this will affect Harry, and Dudley's relationship with Harry, in interesting ways.
 
Interesting interpretation

At the age of seventy-four, Salazar chose to retire from the school and spent his remaining years in seclusion.
This is the only one that seemed weird to me. Don't wizards often live close to one and a half centuries? Salazar here was in the equivalent of his late forties. Too early to spend "remaining years" on anything, especially as an ambitious wizard who reached the very top of the conventional hierarchy and chose to abandon that for a great project that ended in partial failure.

Also, what happened to his wife?
 
[X] Write-in: Open your own envelope and read it. It's probably better than Harry's, anyway.

For me it was between this and taking Harry's letter to read aloud.
 
[X] Have Dad check the envelope for letter bombs

[X] Write-in: Open your own envelope and read it. It's probably better than Harry's, anyway.
 
Vote closed
Scheduled vote count started by LordPanther14 on May 10, 2021 at 8:48 AM, finished with 44 posts and 23 votes.
 
Wtf. We could have had a Tom Riddle quest as per the QM. Instead we have somehow got a Dudley Quest. :o

Oh well. This could be fun I suppose. Admittedly, I have never seen a quest with Dudley as the main character. So this could turn out to be interesting.
 
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