Let us consider everything about Peter Pettigrew, a man who played a crucial part in both wizarding wars, was an unregistered Animagus and controversially a Gryffindor during his time at Hogwarts.

The controversy I refer to is that Wormtail is shown to be a cowardly man whose story can be summed up as the following:

During his time at Hogwarts he was sorted into Gryffindor, he hero worshipped fellow students James, Sirius and Lupin with whom he formed a group called the Marauders and became an unregistered animagus, upon his graduation he joined the Order of the phoenix and begun the fight against the death eaters, in the final year of the first wizarding war he became a spy for Voldemort and sold out James and Lily leading to the three’s death, went into hiding for 12 years as a rat in the Weasley household until his detection in 1994, spent a year nursing Voldemort back to health, spent the remaining three years of his life serving Voldemort until his death which was caused when his silver hand strangled him for saving the life of Harry Potter.

Let’s break all this down and see just how this man was sorted into Gryffindor house and see if the sorting hat was correct to place him there. I believe his life was defined by 4 major choices.

The first choice was not made by him but by the Sorting Hat. It is known that Peter Pettigrew was a Hatstall, a term applied to any student that the Sorting hat takes longer than 5 minutes to sort into a house. The Sorting Hat debated between putting him into Gryffindor or Slytherin, and I believe this is because the hat takes your choice into consideration and Peter at age 12 wanted to be a brave hero, which presented the hat with a dilemma. Does the ambition to be a good man make Peter value ambition or chivalry more, furthermore we can see through various actions he takes in school that his desire to be a kind man to his friend lupin and become an unregistered animagus shows that he is both daring and chivalrous, gryffindor traits and cunning in the sense, a slytherin trait. The Sorting Hat ultimately decides to place him within Gryffindor because Pettigrews desire to become a brave hero shows he values the traits of Gryffindor and it's there that he will excel if he truly values these traits.

From there he befriends James Potter, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin 3 fellow Gryffindors who sharply show off the major traits of Gryffindor. Lupin represented the bravery to face up to your demons and face great adversary, Sirius Black represented the daring it took to follow your own beliefs even if your whole family tells you otherwise and disowns you for it and James Potter represents the nerve of Gryffindor as a very proud man who shows of his skill and talents and is very sure of himself to a reckless degree. These are three people Pettigrew desires to be like and learn from to such a degree that his head of house, McGonagall, thought it was “hero worship”. He did not worship them as heroes but sought to learn from them because he represented the chivalry of Gryffindor, holding yourself to an ideal and fighting to become it. This is shown when he is the only Marauder not to bully Snape, not because he is too cowardly to do it as is popular opinion but because he doesn't think it right to bully people however he won't stand up to his friends because he sadly is a little bit of a coward. This doesn't make him less a Gryffindor just because he isn’t brave; it just shows that he has a very strong defining trait and the less are not so high for him. This sense of chivalry is shown when he goes on to become an unregistered animagus with his friends to help Lupin with his transformation, which is a very kind act to do for someone you haven't known very long.

The second choice is also the first major one he makes and it's when he decides to join the order of the phoenix. There was no pressure for him to join and no one forced him into joining, he chose to join because he thought it was what heroes do. His belief in chivalry made him get way over his head at a young age because he was reckless about it. He didn’t consider the full consequences of being in a war and that proved his undoing. He rushed off to a war because he thought it was what good people do and so he wanted to do his part.

Two years later he made his third choice and his third choice undid him. He joined the Death Eaters as a spy, he did so out of fear for his life. We see that from his time at Hogwarts he is not an overly brave person and the horror and impact of 2 years of war changed him from someone who believed in doing the right thing to someone who was terrified because he knew he was not a particularly brave or powerful wizard. He knew he was in way over his head and it terrified him because he believed they would lose. He lost his sense of idealism because it was broken out of him. He went from being a moderate student outshone by his friends, to a young man in a war dodging death at every turn. Out of fear for his own life he turned traitor and it cost the lives of his two best friends and led to the incarceration of his third friend. The war turned Peter Pettigrew from Peter the young boy who wanted to be a brave hero to Wormtail, a shameful coward who was broken by his fear and failings.

For 12 years he neither looked for Voldemort, nor tried to kill Harry as revenge. This shows he wasn't evil and he believed Voldemort to be dead and this spark of his fueled his fear of consequence his chivalry meant he would take no action against Harry despite him being classed as the enemy and kept him hidden for years until his discovery in 1994 . From there he feared the order tracking him down and so he turned back to his old master where he effectively started the second wizarding war.

Four years after this moment he makes his final choice. With Harry Potter trapped at Malfoy manor and his master fast approaching, he goes down to investigate a disturbance and is forced to hold Harry at wand point until he is reminded of the life debt he owed to Harry. This triggered one of the only true moments of bravery Pettigrew knew, joining the war could count but it was more reckless because he was clueless to what awaited him whereas he knew that repaying the debt to Harry would likely result in his death because he had seen the consequences of betraying Voldemort first hand. He lowered his wand because his guilty conscience over betraying his ideals and the desire to finally be the hero his fear suppressed in him sparked him to bravely defy his fear. This led to his death at the trap Voldemort had laid in Wormtail, he could not bear a servant indebted to his enemy and deep down he knew Wormtail could overcome his fear and become the hero he wanted to be because of the debt he owed Harry that his own morals obliged him to repay.

He died as Pettigrew, the man he always wanted to be, someone who would die doing the right thing after being trapped as Wormtail for 16 years. Proving that he was always meant to be in Gryffindor, like Sirius says we are not either good people or bad people, it's the part we choose to act on that matters. In a moment of weakness he made the wrong choice and it shattered the cracking parts of Peter Pettigrew that had been cracking during the first war and turned him into Wormtail but in the end he chose to make the right choice and it showed that in the end he was deserving of his place in Gryffindor