Eventually you will run out of Harry Potter material to distract yourself from the call of House of Night.
You better hope not:
You can just tell he thought he was actually being very cool and progressive by having the Golliwog sleeping with two white women (while speaking entirely in gibberish). Presumably having him in a ménage a trois with Noddy and Big Ears would be a bit too progressive.
I feel like it says something Alan Moore is still a legend among the prog left despite not only being unapologetically fond of a racist doll, but also having an obvious fascination with rape that permeates his work, whereas Rowling is considered an untouchable for not thinking male rapists should go to man jail. To be clear, I love a lot of Alan Moore's work with all my heart, and as far as I know, he's never even been accused of real life perv shit, but there's a clear double standard, right?
That doesn't make any sense, at least in the book. I've never heard of any sort of spooky magic tradition associated with Scandinavia. No Dark Wizard is going to pick it over, say, Transylvania if that's an option. The movie actually fixes this by establishing that Durmstrang is also a dance school.
There is apparently an Eastern European magic school called Koldovstoretz.
The Sorting of the new students into Houses took place at the start of every school year, but by an unlucky combination of circumstances, Harry hadn’t been present at one since his own. He was quite looking forward to it. Just then, a highly excited, breathless voice called down the table.
So, fun fact about the first Sorting scene I just discovered. You might remember that in the films, Dean Thomas is played by Alfred Enoch, a black actor with a kind of amazing name. I kind of dimly remembered Dean also being explicitly black in the books, but it occured to me when he turned up at the World Cup that has yet to be actually be stated. Then I remembered that up until
Order of the Phoenix, all the books had been written before the first movie came out, so maybe Rowling made Dean black after that as a form of book-movie synergy, or as a nice gesture to a supporting actor? The answer is no. Dean was actually described as a black kid all the way back in the the Sorting scene in the first book... but only in the American edition. This wasn't inserted by some proto-woke minion at Scholastic worried that Hogwarts was too white, it was a line from Rowling's original manuscript that was cut from the British edition. Not because Bloomsbury thought the British public couldn't handle a black student or something, but because of length.
In short, we might not trust American children to buy and read a book with "Philosopher" in the title, but we will entrust them with the secret of Dean Thomas' true ethnicity. I kind of wish this carried over to the movies. In the American copies, Dean Thomas would be Alfred Enoch. In the international ones, he'd be neither white, nor black, nor any other colour. A humanoid mass of TV static.
Oh, that same line of description also established Dean has a very long neck, so adjust your mental model accordingly.
“Hiya, Harry!”
It was Colin Creevey, a third year to whom Harry was something of a hero.
“Hi, Colin,” said Harry warily.
“Harry, guess what? Guess what, Harry? My brother’s starting! My brother Dennis!”
So, does Colin's dad just have super-sperm, or was he cucked twice over by a wizard enacting karmic vengeance on milkmen everywhere?
“Er — good,” said Harry.
“He’s really excited!” said Colin, practically bouncing up and down in his seat. “I just hope he’s in Gryffindor! Keep your fingers crossed, eh, Harry?”
Man, imagine how Collin would fair if he idolised Zoey Redbird.
“Er — yeah, all right,” said Harry. He turned back to Hermione, Ron, and Nearly Headless Nick. “Brothers and sisters usually go in the same Houses, don’t they?” he said. He was judging by the Weasleys, all seven of whom had been put into Gryffindor.
“Oh no, not necessarily,” said Hermione. “Parvati Patil’s twin’s in Ravenclaw, and they’re identical. You’d think they’d be together, wouldn’t you?”
I bet they insisted otherwise.
“Where’s the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?” said Hermione, who was also looking up at the teachers.
They had never yet had a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher who had lasted more than three terms. Harry’s favorite by far had been Professor Lupin, who had resigned last year.
Because that's all there is to say about that.
“Maybe they couldn’t get anyone!” said Hermione, looking anxious.
Idea, get around the jinx by creating two new posts--"Magical Combat", maybe for older students, and something that covers the various magical pests that seem to dominate the curriculum for junior students. "Fucking with Magical Creatures" perhaps.
Rowling must've been feeling nostalgic, because the Hat gets to sing again:
A thousand years or more ago,
When I was newly sewn,
There lived four wizards of renown,
Whose names are still well known:
Bold Gryffindor, from wild moor,
Fair Ravenclaw, from glen,
Sweet Hufflepuff, from valley broad,
Shrewd Slytherin, from fen.
If you're wondering, Rowena and Helga are meant to be Scottish and Welsh respectively. Being the founder of Main Character House, Godric was of course English. Given Rowling clearly meant for the Hogwarts founders to represent the four nations (give or take) which comprise the modern United Kingdom, we can probably assume that "fen" means "Ireland." What a dude called Salazar Slytherin was doing in tenth century Ireland is beyond me; maybe he figured Shane Sharkey wasn't a great name for a dubious archmage.
They shared a wish, a hope, a dream,
They hatched a daring plan
To educate young sorcerers
Thus Hogwarts School began.
It's a shame Hogwarts wasn't founded in Classical Greece so Aristophanes could parody it in a play. The Spellery.
While still alive they did divide
Their favorites from the throng,
Yet how to pick the worthy ones
When they were dead and gone?
‘Twas Gryffindor who found the way,
He whipped me off his head
The founders put some brains in me
So I could choose instead!
Rowena and Helga:
Join us, Salazar.
Gordic: It's
bliiiiiiiissss.
“That’s not the song it sang when it Sorted us,” said Harry, clapping along with everyone else.
“Sings a different one every year,” said Ron. “It’s got to be a pretty boring life, hasn’t it, being a hat? I suppose it spends all year making up the next one.”
Something, something, AI alignment.
Tiny Dennis Creevey staggered forward, tripping over Hagrid’s moleskin, just as Hagrid himself sidled into the Hall through a door behind the teachers’ table. About twice as tall as a normal man, and at least three times as broad, Hagrid, with his long, wild, tangled black hair and beard, looked slightly alarming — a misleading impression, for Harry, Ron, and Hermione knew Hagrid to possess a very kind nature.
In a "High Functioning Lenny from
Of Mice and Men sense."
“GRYFFINDOR!” the hat shouted.
Hagrid clapped along with the Gryffindors as Dennis Creevey, beaming widely, took off the hat, placed it back on the stool, and hurried over to join his brother.
“Colin, I fell in!” he said shrilly, throwing himself into an empty seat. “It was brilliant! And something in the water grabbed me and pushed me back in the boat!”
“Cool!” said Colin, just as excitedly. “It was probably the giant squid, Dennis!”
“Wow!” said Dennis, as though nobody in their wildest dreams could hope for more than being thrown into a storm-tossed, fathoms-deep lake, and pushed out of it again by a giant sea monster.
I mean, that is a very Gryffindor sentiment. Also, I once googled Dennis to make sure I was getting his name on, and it seems like the fancasters are in agreement he would be the guy who's now married to Grimes. He was in
Love Actually, and appears to have been a changeling. Nearly Headless Nick turns up and tells the kids about the ruckus Peeves caused down in the kitchens earlier. Specifically, how he terrified the house-elves:
Clang.
Hermione had knocked over her golden goblet. Pumpkin juice spread steadily over the tablecloth, staining several feet of white linen orange, but Hermione paid no attention.
“There are house-elves here?” she said, staring, horror-struck, at Nearly Headless Nick. “Here at Hogwarts?”
“Certainly,” said Nearly Headless Nick, looking surprised at her reaction. “The largest number in any dwelling in Britain, I believe. Over a hundred.”
“I’ve never seen one!” said Hermione.
“Well, they hardly ever leave the kitchen by day, do they?” said Nearly Headless Nick. “They come out at night to do a bit of cleaning … see to the fires and so on. … I mean, you’re not supposed to see them, are you? That’s the mark of a good house-elf, isn’t it, that you don’t know it’s there?”
Much as Hermione's going to be the One Friend Who's Too Woke this year, I can't blame a thoughtful child raised in the Anglosphere for being alarmed her food was cooked by slaves who live downstairs. It's like a milder version of when the characters in
The Silver Chair find out the lamb they've been fed was sapient.
“But they get paid?” she said. “They get holidays, don’t they? And — and sick leave, and pensions, and everything?”
Nearly Headless Nick chortled so much that his ruff slipped and his head flopped off, dangling on the inch or so of ghostly skin and muscle that still attached it to his neck.
“Sick leave and pensions?” he said, pushing his head back onto his shoulders and securing it once more with his ruff. “House-elves don’t want sick leave and pensions!”
What does Hogwarts do with house-elves who get too old to work, though? We do see one form of house-elf "retirement" next book, but I can't see Dumbledore going in for that.
own upon it and pushed it away from her.
“Oh c’mon, ’Er-my-knee,” said Ron, accidentally spraying Harry with bits of Yorkshire pudding. “Oops — sorry, ’Arry —” He swallowed. “You won’t get them sick leave by starving yourself!”
“Slave labor,” said Hermione, breathing hard through her nose. “That’s what made this dinner. Slave labor.”
And she refused to eat another bite.
This is like an inversion of the trope where eating fairy food causes you to waste away. And Hermione should chill out, in Current Year UK, you can take turns doing intermittent fasting and call it a hunger strike!
“Treacle tart, Hermione!” said Ron, deliberately wafting its smell toward her. “Spotted dick, look! Chocolate gateau!”
But Hermione gave him a look so reminiscent of Professor McGonagall that he gave up.
Notice Ron is actually worried about his friend not eating.
“So!” said Dumbledore, smiling around at them all. “Now that we are all fed and watered,” (“Hmph!” said Hermione) “I must once more ask for your attention, while I give out a few notices.
“Mr. Filch, the caretaker, has asked me to tell you that the list of objects forbidden inside the castle has this year been extended to include Screaming Yo-yos, Fanged Frisbees, and Ever-Bashing Boomerangs.
Do you think some Aboriginal pointing bones actually work on people not immersed in the memeplex in this universe?
The corners of Dumbledore’s mouth twitched. He continued, “As ever, I would like to remind you all that the forest on the grounds is out-of-bounds to students, as is the village of Hogsmeade to all below third year.
"I didn't mention Hogsmeade in book one because shut up."
“It is also my painful duty to inform you that the Inter-House Quidditch Cup will not take place this year.”
“What?” Harry gasped. He looked around at Fred and George, his fellow members of the Quidditch team. They were mouthing soundlessly at Dumbledore, apparently too appalled to speak.
Dumbledore is a great man. He starts to explain he's cancelled Quidditch in favour of something a little less retarded before being interrupted by a late arrival:
A man stood in the doorway, leaning upon a long staff, shrouded in a black traveling cloak. Every head in the Great Hall swiveled toward the stranger, suddenly brightly illuminated by a fork of lightning that flashed across the ceiling. He lowered his hood, shook out a long mane of grizzled, dark gray hair, then began to walk up toward the teachers’ table.
A dull clunk echoed through the Hall on his every other step. He reached the end of the top table, turned right, and limped heavily toward Dumbledore. Another flash of lightning crossed the ceiling. Hermione gasped.
The lightning had thrown the man’s face into sharp relief, and it was a face unlike any Harry had ever seen. It looked as though it had been carved out of weathered wood by someone who had only the vaguest idea of what human faces are supposed to look like, and was none too skilled with a chisel. Every inch of skin seemed to be scarred. The mouth
looked like a diagonal gash, and a large chunk of the nose was missing. But it was the man’s eyes that made him frightening.
One of them was small, dark, and beady. The other was large, round as a coin, and a vivid, electric blue. The blue eye was moving ceaselessly, without blinking, and was rolling up, down, and from side to side, quite independently of the normal eye — and then it rolled right over, pointing into the back of the man’s head, so that all they could see was whiteness.
I'm just old enough to have briefly had a discman before an iPod. I got into music quite late in childhood, so I didn't get much use out of it, but I do have the distinct memory of listening to this precise scene in my grandmother's house. This was of course before the film, so I remember picturing Moody basically looking like a non undead Crypt Keeper, but as crap as
The Goblet of Fire movie is, the casting remained (mostly) impeccable, with Brendan Gleeson perfectly embodying Mad-Eye.
Mad-Eye Moody is of course here to teach home-ec. Nah, he's this year's DADA professor. Anyway, what did we replace Quidditch with? Is it nothing? I'd be down for some nothing.
“The Triwizard Tournament was first established some seven hundred years ago as a friendly competition between the three largest European schools of wizardry: Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and Durmstrang. A champion was selected to represent each school, and the three champions competed in three magical tasks. The schools took it in turns to host the tournament once every five years, and it was generally agreed to be a most excellent way of establishing ties between young witches and wizards of different nationalities — until, that is, the death toll mounted so high that the tournament was discontinued.”
“Death toll?” Hermione whispered, looking alarmed. But her anxiety did not seem to be shared by the majority of students in the Hall; many of them were whispering excitedly to one another, and Harry himself was far more interested in hearing about the tournament than in worrying about deaths that had happened hundreds of years ago.
You ever notice people in
Harry Potter tend to treat events that happened before their great-great-grandparents were conceived as more immediate than stuff that happened ten years earlier? Like, Ron can rattle off the name and year of anti-dragon legislation, but doesn't know what the Dark Mark was.
“There have been several attempts over the centuries to reinstate the tournament,” Dumbledore continued, “none of which has been very successful. However, our own departments of International Magical Cooperation and Magical Games and Sports have decided the time is ripe for another attempt. We have worked hard over the summer to ensure that this time, no champion will find himself or herself in mortal danger.
“The heads of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang will be arriving with their short-listed contenders in October, and the selection of the three champions will take place at Halloween. An impartial judge will decide which students are most worthy to compete for the Triwizard Cup, the glory of their school, and a thousand Galleons personal prize money.”
Oh, in case you remember the film more, in the book, the delegations don't arrive during the feast, so I can wait to tell you why the film handles them dumbly.
“I’m going for it!” Fred Weasley hissed down the table, his face lit with enthusiasm at the prospect of such glory and riches. He was not the only person who seemed to be visualizing himself as the Hogwarts champion. At every House table, Harry could see people either gazing raptly at Dumbledore, or else whispering fervently to their neighbors. But then Dumbledore spoke again, and the Hall quieted once more.
I can believe the Triwizard Tournament living on in legend, but legends need to be repeated to carry on, nobody's ever mentioned it before, and Fred and George are reacting like they remember the last one.
“Eager though I know all of you will be to bring the Triwizard Cup to Hogwarts,” he said, “the heads of the participating schools, along with the Ministry of Magic, have agreed to impose an age restriction on contenders this year. Only students who are of age — that is to say, seventeen years or older — will be allowed to put forward their names for consideration. This” — Dumbledore raised his voice slightly, for several people had made noises of outrage at these words, and the Weasley twins were suddenly looking furious — “is a measure we feel is necessary, given that the tournament tasks will still be difficult and dangerous, whatever precautions we take, and it is highly unlikely that students below sixth and seventh year will be able to cope with them. I will personally be ensuring that no underage student hoodwinks our impartial judge into making them Hogwarts champion.” His light blue eyes twinkled as they flickered over Fred’s and George’s mutinous faces. “I therefore beg you not to waste your time submitting yourself if you are under seventeen.
"Plus, we all know it's going to be fucking Harry, don't we?"
Imagine if it wasn't, and this entire book was just Harry going about his year, occasionally taking a moment to cheer on Cedric, until his tragic and inexplicable death.
“They can’t do that!” said George Weasley, who had not joined the crowd moving toward the door, but was standing up and glaring at Dumbledore. “We’re seventeen in April, why can’t we have a shot?”
“They’re not stopping me entering,” said Fred stubbornly, also scowling at the top table. “The champions’ll get to do all sorts of stuff you’d never be allowed to do normally.
Did I miss the part where Dumbledore said the champions would be exempt from the laws of man, magi, and God? Is this
The Long Walk, and the winner gets a wish?
“Who’s this impartial judge who’s going to decide who the champions are?” said Harry.
“Dunno,” said Fred, “but it’s them we’ll have to fool. I reckon a couple of drops of Aging Potion might do it, George. …”
“Dumbledore knows you’re not of age, though,” said Ron.
“Yeah, but he’s not the one who decides who the champion is, is he?” said Fred shrewdly. “Sounds to me like once this judge knows who wants to enter, he’ll choose the best from each school and never mind how old they are. Dumbledore’s trying to stop us giving our names.”
I like how the twins have decided the judge must be some kind of inhuman paperclip optimiser whose sole concern is picking who'll represent the school, with no allowances for reason or logic. I mean, they're right, but it's an odd assumption.
“People have died, though!” said Hermione in a worried voice as they walked through a door concealed behind a tapestry and started up another, narrower staircase.
“Yeah,” said Fred airily, “but that was years ago, wasn’t it?
Death was abolished in 1978.
Anyway, where’s the fun without a bit of risk? Hey, Ron, what if we find out how to get ’round Dumbledore? Fancy entering?”
“What d’you reckon?” Ron asked Harry. “Be cool to enter, wouldn’t it? But I s’pose they might want someone older. … Dunno if we’ve learned enough. …”
Harry: I have one combat spell and I'm sticking to it.
“I definitely haven’t,” came Neville’s gloomy voice from behind Fred and George.
“I expect my gran’d want me to try, though. She’s always going on about how I should be upholding the family honor. I’ll just have to — oops. …”
Neville’s foot had sunk right through a step halfway up the staircase. There were many of these trick stairs at Hogwarts; it was second nature to most of the older students to jump this particular step, but Neville’s memory was notoriously poor.
Fuck it, Neville should become champion, and Harry has to be Robin Shou in
Beverly Hills Ninja.
The portrait swung forward to reveal a hole in the wall through which they all climbed. A crackling fire warmed the circular common room, which was full of squashy armchairs and tables. Hermione cast the merrily dancing flames a dark look, and Harry distinctly heard her mutter “Slave labor,” before bidding them good night and disappearing through the doorway to the girls’ dormitory.
It's going to be really annoying for Hermione when she tries to hold meetings about house-elf abolitionism and people keep hijacking them to talk about wizards renouncing all magic.
