GoF: The Age Line

davenclaw daveshardell at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 11 14:26:45 UTC 2005


No: HPFGUIDX 132428

heather:
> 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...
 

As far as I can tell, the only "explanation" seems to be Moody's 
assertion that a powerful Confundus charm would have been necessary
to trick the GoF into thinking there were four schools, which would
seem to rule out any students (but they don't even speculate further
as to whether any 17 yr olds could have performed such a charm).  I 
guess since no one challenges this, we'll have to take his word and 
conclude that the GoF is originally "designed" (or "charmed") to 
only consider applicants from three schools.  But one wonders why he
couldn't simply trick it into making Harry the one-and-only Hogwarts
champion.  Maybe it was easier to trick it into thinking there were 
4 schools, and since Harry was the only applicant from School #4, he 
was chosen - which actually doesn't say much for Harry, does it!  
LOL...

... still, it doesn't explain why we never even see an underager 
attempt to have an older student put his name in.  Either JKR didn't 
think about that, or simply didn't want us to think about that.  
Sort of like how it should have been obvious that Voldemort was 
Slytherin's heir, but she mislead us into focusing on Harry and 
Malfoy.

I wonder how JKR imagined that the GoF would make its decision... 
how does it obtain knowledge of the students by their name, and upon
what does it base the decision to choose one student over another?

The GoF is an interesting plot device in that it saves a lot of time 
selecting a "school champion" via competition of some kind - 
instead, throw your names in the Goblet, the Goblet chooses the 
winner, let's move on.

- davenclaw








More information about the HPforGrownups archive