Hogwarts' Great Hall was more than just a place where teachers and students ate their daily meals, held opening and end-of-term feasts, celebrated major holidays, and gathered for school-wide meetings. It was also an important place for students to hang out.
Of course, it was only one of many places where students could spend their time.
The lakeside, the common rooms of the various Houses, the Room of Requirement, balconies, corridors, the Quidditch Pitch, the lawns outside the castle, and Hogsmeade on weekends were all important student haunts.
However, during free periods on weekdays, students from the different Houses who didn't want to trek back to their own common rooms generally preferred to come to the Great Hall.
It was spacious enough that even students from all four Houses, with their differing ideals, could spend time there without feeling crowded.
More importantly, it was also a place where students from different Houses could socialize!
After all, students from different Houses couldn't exactly visit one another's common rooms to spend time together—especially boys and girls. So meeting here under the pretense of studying or doing homework was always a good choice.
Of course, some students really did come to do their homework. For example, Ron Weasley and Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, who had been in the spotlight lately?
Unlike the older boys and girls, or groups of boys and girls, who gathered to joke around or even flirt, Ron and Harry were genuinely focused on studying and doing their homework.
They had no choice!
Their second class that afternoon was coming up, and they still had a good few lines left to write!
Fortunately, a mere few lines of homework weren't much trouble for them. Granger, the girl in their year who was top of the class, hadn't lent