[HPforGrownups] Re: GoF: The Age Line

[heather the buzzard]

No: HPFGUIDX 132422

davenclaw wrote:

>I know that Moody/Crouch Jr. threw his name in.  But everyone is 
>running around worried about who might have wanted to put Harry in 
>danger, and speculating about Karkaroff and death eaters and 
>Voldemort and so on, when no one says "anyone of age could have put 
>it in" and interrogated all the 17 yr olds in the school with 
>veritaserum.
>
>But regardless, my further point is that it's a very weak spot in 
>the story - you have this Goblet, which doesn't care how old the 
>students are, you have the schools agreeing on an age limit, 
>Dumbledore puts in an age line preventing underagers from putting 
>their names in, but NOTHING to prevent an of-ager from putting 
>ANYONE's name in - and since the Goblet's choice creates a magical 
>pact, no one could do anything if an underager was put in there and 
>selected!  And yet when Harry's name comes out, everyone is 
>flabbergasted - did the trick the age line? Did he ask an older 
>student?  No... well then SOMEONE wants him DEAD and we better all 
>be careful!!!  No one speculates that it was just another student 
>playing a prank.  Bizarre.
>
heather now:

I think you have a very good point here. 

I'm going to fanwank that the Goblet normally 'recognizes' if the person 
submitting a name is the same person named on the paper.  If it were as 
simple as just getting an older student to put your name in, then yeah 
the Weasley twins (and others) would certainly have just got older 
students to put their names in.

So either the Goblet (heh, I originally mistyped "Boglet" and just found 
that really amusing) recognizes the identity of the person, or perhaps 
it doesn't allow the same person to submit a name twice (so no 
17-year-olds were available to put in younger kids' names since they 
wanted to put their own in).  If the former, then presumable while Moody 
was tricking the Goblet into accepting a 'fourth school' he was also 
tricking it into thinking he was the person named on his submission 
(heck, he knows about Polyjuice potion, maybe he even WAS Harry).  If 
the latter, then all Moody had to do was trick it about the school, as 
he said.

In either case, something didn't get mentioned in the canon descriptions 
of events, or else I'm missing something (which is still possible lol), 
but it's possible to explain it still, I think...

heather the buzzard