Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Chapter 36 & Chapter 37 and Retrospective)
STATS
Title: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Series: Harry Potter (Book 4)
Author(s): JK Rowling
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy (Urban)
First Printing: 2000
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books
SPOILER WARNING
Heavy spoilers will be provided for the entire Harry Potter franchise. Heavy spoilers will also be provided for the entirety of both Fourth Wing and Iron Flame (but not Onyx Storm, which was released on January 21st). I will be confining the Fourth Wing and Iron Flame spoilers to the sections where I analyze the plot of Fourth Wing and compare it to Goblet of Fire. All spoilers shall otherwise be unmarked and can pop up at any time.
STORY
After hearing Barty Crouch, Jr.’s testimony, Dumbledore brings Harry up to his office so that he and Sirius can hear Harry’s explanation of events in the graveyard. He then takes Harry down to the hospital wing for a good night’s rest. That sleep is disrupted when Cornelius Fudge barges into the hospital wing, looking for Dumbledore. It is revealed that he had Barty Crouch, Jr. executed via the Dementor’s Kiss. He refuses to listen to Dumbledore's assertion that Voldemort has returned to power and leaves Hogwarts. Faced with Fudge’s obstinance, Dumbledore begins mobilizing the Order of the Phoenix.
Harry spends the last few days if the school term coping with the trauma of Voldemort’s resurrection and the suspicions of his fellow students. On the train home from Hogwarts, he learns of Rita Skeeter’s secret from Hermione and of Bagman's duplicity from Fred and George. He then gives Fred and George his Triwizard winnings.
ANALYSIS
Establishment
Rowling makes good use of these chapters to set up sequel hooks. Although not named, the rebirth of the Order of the Phoenix begins here, with Dumbledore recruiting the Weasleys, assigning Hagrid and Maxine to parley with the giants, and sending Sirius and Snape on their respective assignments. We also see Fudge’s refusal to accept Voldemort’s return and his intention to begin cracking down on Dumbledore.
One element of the sequel hooks that I do feel is rather weak is the recruitment of the Weasleys. It’s not that I don’t think it makes sense that they would join the Order or that Dumbledore would welcome their help. It’s just strange to me that Dumbledore would simply turn to Mrs. Weasley and say, “Hey, you totally want to join my subversive moment to stop the Dark Lord, right?”
“There is work to be done,” he said. “Molly . . . am I right in thinking that I can count on you and Arthur?”
We’re shown in the next book that the Weasleys weren't part of the previous Order, so where is Dumbledore coming from with this? Why does he trust them? It just feels incredibly convenient that Harry's best friend’s parents are Dumbledore’s immediate go-to for setting his plans into motion. It seems like there should at least have been a little more effort by Dumbledore to sell his position and a little less faith that the Weasleys would immediately be on board.
Payoff
Separate from any of the mysteries, Fudge’s refusal to accept Voldemort’s return pays off dialogue from earlier in the story, where he also refused to accept that there was anything sinister surrounding Mr. Crouch’s mysterious appearance and disappearance at Hogwarts. The fact he leverages the Skeeter article on Harry in the process also allows the Skeeter subplot to have a ripple effect into the next book.
Mysteries
Rita Skeeter
Hermione captures Skeeter in beetle form when the latter tries to listen in on the events in the hospital wing. Later, on the train, she reveals the trapped Skeeter and explains how she solved the mystery. This ties back to Malfoy’s behavior and the past instances of a beetle being referenced in the text.
Bagman, Fred & George
Fred and George resolve the Bagman red herring by explaining his money problems, his attempt to pay them off with leprechaun gold, and how they’d been unsuccessfully trying to get their money back from him all year. This puts a neat bow on a minor mystery while also leading to the payoff of Harry giving them the Triwizard money, allowing for the progression of their personal journey as entrepreneurs in the coming books.
Snape
Dumbledore’s intentions for Snape are not spelled out. Harry (and the audience) can correctly guess that he is being spent to spy on the Death Eaters based upon Snape’s history, but the truth is left up in the air.
What was it that Snape had done on Dumbledore’s orders, the night that Voldemort had returned? And why . . . why . . . was Dumbledore so convinced that Snape was truly on their side? He had been their spy, Dumbledore had said so in the Pensieve. Snape had turned spy against Voldemort, “at great personal risk.” Was that the job he had taken up again? Had he made contact with the Death Eaters, perhaps? Pretended that he had never really gone over to Dumbledore, that he had been, like Voldemort himself, biding his time?
Harry’s musings were ended by Professor Dumbledore, who stood up at the staff table.
Harry (and the audience) doesn’t know what Snape is doing or whether Snape can truly be trusted. It’s a mystery that will ripple forward and have significant impact on the future books.
I also want to call attention to how Rowling changes the subject. She doesn’t answer these questions, nor does she bury them in nosie. She acknowledges that Harry’s train of thought was interrupted. There is no impression that the matter has been settled. The audience knows that this is an unresolved issue.
COMPARISON TO FOURTH WING (Chapter 39)
Back in the Fourth Wing review, I went on in great length about why neither the reveal of the reborn Aretian rebellion nor the twist of Brennan bring alive make any sense. You are welcome to refer back to the post for this particular chapter for the full notes. For now, I just want to wrap up by touching upon two things that I didn’t cover there, since that was a general review rather than one exploring mysteries and twists.
First, both the Aretia rebellion and Brennan being alive retcon things Yarros went out of her way to establish. She needed the world to work a specific way for her book to work up until this point; now, in the interest of creating sequel bait, she tells us the world simply works another way. It’s unearned. It’s lazy. It’s dishonest. It could have been redeemed if Yarros were at least willing to acknowledge that Violet was wrong about how the world worked, but much like with the reveal of the venin and the smuggling operation, she is avoiding the slightest stain on her self-insert Mary Sue by blaming others characters for lying to Violet.
Second, Yarros goes out of her way to validate Violet’s intelligence as she draws (and wildly jumps to) conclusions. For example, this is Violet figuring out they are in Aretia.
“Where. Are. We?” She bites out every word, her eyes narrowing on me. “Say it.”
“The way you’re looking at me says you already know.” There’s no way this brilliant woman doesn’t recognize that temple.
“This looks like Aretia.” She gestures to the window. “There’s only one temple with those particular columns. I’ve seen the drawings.”
“Yes.” Brilliant. Fucking. Woman.
This is desperate and pathetic. Violet has not earned this, despite having a full book to do so. The bar here is so low that, by Yarros’s logic, every person who every watched the 1969 Planet of the Apes film is brilliant because they recognized the Statue of Liberty and understood the film’s twist from that. If the idea is that Violet is recognizing some obscure architectural detail, then at the absolute best, Yarros is making up some minor detail so that Violet can identify it based on specialist knowledge that she was not previously established to have. This is in no way comparable to, say, Hermione’s brilliance in solving the Skeeter mystery by using available information that the audience also has access to.
Then there is Violet figuring out how the rebel children’s relics work.
“Rebuilt or never burned?” She turns her back on me.
“In the process of rebuilding.”
“Why haven’t I read about this?”
I start to tell her, but she holds up a hand and I wait. It only takes her a minute to work it out, too.
She points to my rebellion relic and says, “Melgren can’t see the outcome when more than three of you are together. That’s why you’re not allowed to assemble.”
I can’t help it. I smile. This brilliant fucking woman is mine.
Back in the Fourth Wing review, I expressed “full confidence that Yarros conceived [Melgren’s blind spot] from the beginning.”. However, that was before I properly analyzed Iron Flame or did the analysis for this series. I now understand that I was wrong.
Yarros made this up on the spot to explain how her omniscient antagonist wouldn't spot something as glaringly obvious as the Aretia rebels, doubled back to foreshadow this development with as little impact on the narrative as possible, and is now validating herself (via Violet) so as to deceive the audience into thinking this was some master stroke. That’s why the existence of this blind spot and the fact the rider leadership know about it open so many plot holes. It simply was not a part of the story until Yarros wrote this chapter. That’s also why the Codex Addendums 5.2 & 5.3 don't instantly get the rebel children executed in Chapter 4 of Iron Flame. Yarros was so committed to not letting her foreshadowing impact the story that she hoped we’d ignore the obvious plot hole created by said foreshadowing.
RETROSPECTIVE
And so, after another 6-month journey, we have reached the end of two books. One, written for children, is a masterpiece of mystery and twists, foreshadowing and questions, misleads and answers that, while surprising at times, are the most logical and narratively satisfying ones the audience could have been given. The other, written for adults, is a meandering narrative where nothing is earned, mysteries are actively cauterized, and setups are as minimal and lazy as possible.
As stated back at the start, I do not feel that Goblet of Fire is a perfect book. I accept that my own enjoyment of this book keeps me from objectively assessing those flaws, yet I do hear and understand the issues people have with things like pacing and characterization. Rowling's constant pursuit of new magic to add whimsy to her story also produces a setting that’s certainly no stranger to a virus warhead or two.
That being said, the way Rowling juggles the many mysteries of this book holds up in spite of those flaws. Yarros could learn a thing or two from following Rowling’s example. I don't even think she would have needed to change the overall trajectory of her story that much (with one exception). She just needed to make the effort to do better setups that more properly mesh with the rest of the narrative.
The Venin Conspiracy
Throughout the book, Yarros toys with venin lore, but it is always intrusive. Yarros tries to mask it through character interactions, which is good, but those interactions never feel natural. The lore has no relevance outside of those interactions, until suddenly it is what the story is all about.
I think the moment that really illustrates this problem comes in Chapter 36, when Violet first sees a wyvern.
The dragon shrieks again, spewing a streak of blue fire down the mountainside, setting some of the smaller trees on fire before it reaches the plains where Resson stands. Blue. Fire.
No. No. No. “Wyvern.” My heart launches into my throat. “Xaden, it has two legs, not four. It’s not a dragon. It’s a wyvern.” Maybe if I say it a few more times, I’ll believe what I’m seeing.
Holy. Shit. Is this what leadership has been redacting?
They’re supposed to be myth, not flesh-and-blood beings. But then again, so are venin.
As I reread this, I was thinking: why does this revelation, specifically, affect her? She just learned and accepted that the venin were real. What makes the wyverns different, given that they come from the same stories?
This is a big reason why I kept pushing the idea of Violet’s identity being molded around folklore specifically. Rather than making her an expert in everything, Yarros should have made Violet an expert in these stories. She should have had these stories be what defined Violet’s perspective throughout the book, rather than merely having the information be crowbarred into a few conversations. Violet could still believe that they were just myths. If anything, the fact that her identity is molded around these stories, despite her firmly believing them to be mere myths, would hit that much harder when the truth is revealed, as we would fully appreciate how her personal paradigm is being upset. This would even give weight to the idea that Xaden had lied to and betrayed her by withholding the truth. He would have had the power to address a fundamental disconnect between her perspective and reality, yet chose to let her persist as she was. (I think this is what Yarros was playing at in the existing book, but it doesn't work because we don't understand the foundation that was broken and don’t get acknowledgement that Violet’s worldview was ever flawed.)
Rebel Smuggling
Yarros went out of her way to destroy this twist.
The scenes that reference the activities of the rebel children could have been enough. With the exception of Violet asking Xaden about Athebyne in Chapter 31, the moments where it comes up feel natural. The problem is that, every single time it’s brought up, Yarros goes out of her way to kill any mystery. She clearly did not want the setup to her twist to distract from her meandering school drama or the mounting sexual tension. Violet accepted every explanation presented to her, and since she is right every other time she jumps to conclusions, the audience has no reason to question her acceptance this time. As a result, what could have been a payoff instead becomes a retcon that the audience was not prepared for.
This is the twist that would require the most change for Yarros to earn. At a bare minimum, Violet would need to not accept the explanations given to her at face value. She (and the audience) would need to still be left with unanswered questions, and those unanswered questions would need to be kept in focus. Ideally, this should result in new scenes where Violet tries to investigate the mystery. She could still be surprised by the final reveal, but at least this way, it would be a payoff rather than a retcon. (Also, ideally, such a payoff should acknowledge Violet's failure to figure things out, rather than projecting her failure on others.)
The Rebel Leadership Are Shady
As with the venin, the idea that the rebel leadership might be hiding something feels tacked on. Most cases of them “redacting” information are either explained away (again, without ever acknowledging that Violet was wrong to accept those explanations), or based on nothing (such as when Violet assumes Battle Brief is getting redacted despite having no alternative information source to point to this possibility). When it does get engagement, it always feels like it belongs in another story, and then it is swiftly forgotten when Yarros shifts back to the story she wanted to tell.
This is a problem that can’t really be fixed without first correcting the issues with the venin and the rebel smuggling. Once we better understand the true stakes, the idea that the rider leadership is hiding those true stakes will finally have weight. From there, it would be the same fix as the rebel smuggling: questions would need to be asked, not answered, and allowed to remain in focus in some form or another until the end.
Romance Subplot
This isn’t strictly an issue of the intertwining mysteries, but since Yarros uses the reveal of the mysteries to inject conflict into what was previously just a predictable creep of sexual tension, I feel it’s something to address in closing.
Let’s set aside for a moment the following two issues:
As covered back in the Fourth Wing review, this “betrayal” is not Xaden’s fault. It is Violet’s. Xaden responsibly kept her at arm’s length to avoid this mess. She pushed and pushed and pushed for a relationship despite that fact, and then she squandered time that could have been spent asking questions on gratifying her sexual urges.
It’s transparently clear that Yarros is laying all the blame on other characters for lying to Violet so as to avoid acknowledging that Violet was wrong about the answers to the mysteries.
We are meant to be invested in this drama between the two characters because Xaden supposedly violated Violet’s trust by not handing her the correct answers to the mysteries. However, this doesn’t really work because of the way those mysteries were handled.
What Has Violet Lost
This an extension of the issue I mentioned earlier with regard to Violet having that extra moment of shock over the wyverns. We don’t understand what the truth of the venin and wyverns means to Violet; we don’t understand how she really feels about the rider leadership; we don’t even feel the emotions that should exist behind her accusing Xaden of being a traitor for smuggling weapons to the fliers. Yarros simply didn’t take the time to explore these issues as elements of Violet’s character. They are just things operating in the background while Violet wandered through a power fantasy. This conflict therefore feels every bit as tacked on as the setup for it was.
I think a good analogy here would be a religious one. Imagine if the Tyrrish practiced a different religion from the rest of Navarre and that the previous rebellion had been based upon these religious difference (which, incidentally, would have made calling the rebellion “the apostacy” make more sense). In this scenario, the big reveal is that the religion of the Tyrrish (gods, doctrines, rituals) was the objectively correct one, and the reveal of the venin, the smuggling operation, and the rider leadership’s corruption were all replaced by the one revelation that Violet has been believing the wrong thing for her entire life. The obvious problem here is that the book, as it currently stands, does not really explore Violet’s religious worldview. All we really understand about religion in Navarre at all is that there’s a pantheon of gods and that the god of the dead requires the cremation of the dead and their possessions. Trying to then frame Xaden as betraying Violet for not challenging her religious beliefs would feel exactly as hollow as the existing twists do. We don’t understand what the reversal really means for Violet.
Simply put, for us to really feel Violet’s sense of betrayal, we need to understand what she believed before and how significantly it differs from reality, from which we can then understand Xaden’s “betrayal” in terms of the ignorance he allowed her to live in.
I suspect that this is part of the reason why Yarros made a half-hearted attempt to pivot in Iron Flame, making Violet’s trust issue about the Brennan secret specifically before making it about Xaden not making a love declaration (despite the multiple love declarations he made or tried to make). The death of a family member is something the audience can easily understand on at least a conceptual level. We can therefore also get a sense of what it would really mean for Violet’s perception of the world if that brother were suddenly revealed to be alive.
She Didn’t Care Until This Point
Furthermore, there’s the issue of Violet not engaging with the mysteries. She either brushed things off and forgot about them or else rationalized answers based upon the available information without putting much effort into requesting more information. She did not care about the questions until she realized she had the wrong answers.
Again, to go back to my religion analogy, if Violet is incredibly casual or transactional in her faith and doesn’t have any interest in understanding the deeper mysteries of the divine, can she really blame Xaden for not converting her? She didn’t care about these things before. How was he to know that she’d be upset about not being in the gods’ good books?
For this betrayal to really make sense, Violet needed to be chasing these mysteries. She needed to be engaging with the questions. Most important of all, Xaden needed to know that she was engaging with the questions and yet choose to withhold the answers from her.
This is where having Violet actively investigate the rebel children would have really paid off. Xaden would know Violet was nosing about his business. He could outright lie to her about what the rebel children were doing in an attempt to dissuade her. That way, when Violet discovered the truth, her outrage would not only be earned by effort on her part but stoked by Xaden’s decision.
I think where this is even more evident, though, is in the Brennan twist. In the existing book, Violet accepts his death as an absolute, then blames Xaden for not telling her the truth (despite the fact that he couldn’t tell her the truth without exposing everything else, something she will later claim to completely understand while still being mad at him for not telling her about Brennan). For this to have any real weight, Violet should have been using her connection to Tairn to actively explore the circumstances of her brother’s death, since (according to the narrative as it stands at the end of Iron Flame), his rider died trying to save Brennan. Xaden could then learn about her exploration through the mated bond, perhaps even leveraging his connect to Sgaeyl to keep Tairn from sharing too much information. Xaden would know that this is a secret Violet is trying to uncover, and he’d have the power to reveal the truth to her, yet he would hinder her. That would have been a good foundation for a betrayal.
The School Year
This one is pretty straightforward. Yarros could have done a lot to address the meandering nature of the narrative by simply telling the audience upfront what the milestones of the school year would be. She told us about Threshing from the start. If she could have at least explained what Squad Battle and War Games were, as well as when these things would take place, then we’d have something to look forward to whenever the plot slowed down. The moments where the plot seemed to spin its wheels would be understood as merely being brief diversions among critical milestones.
Final Thoughts
Goblet of Fire and Fourth Wing are story with very different priorities. Nevertheless, Yarros chose to frame the main plot around the big twists at the end. If she was going to do that, she needed to build towards it. Slapping in foreshadowing with no impact on the broader narrative doesn’t feel earned. It makes it seem like the whole story is being made up as she goes along and then being edited as lazily as possible. At that point, why bother with the big twists at all? She could and should have just written a low-stakes Romance centered around the school year. At least then, there would be far less for her to set up.
STORM ON THE HORIZON
Despite this post coming a full two months after the release of Onyx Storm, everything preceding this point was written a full month before the release of Onyx Storm. All elements discussed were presented in the context of just Fourth Wing and Iron Flame.
This part is being written after Onyx Storm is finished and its analysis well underway.
Rather than rehashing my closing from last week, I will say that Yarros does a better job of setups and payoffs in Onyx Storm than in Fourth Wing or Iron Flame. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that her handling of twists is great. There are still moments that come out of nowhere and lots of second-draft foreshadowing (which will be called “aftshadowing” going forward). Still, it’s clear that she did a far better job of editing her work to properly set up twists. There are moments of foreshadowing that impact the narrative around them, and at least one mystery enters and then exits a scene in a manner that leaves the question open to the audience.
Buckle into your Special Snowflake dragon saddles, everyone. Next time, we return to the grim hellscape that is the Empyrean. I hope to see you all then. Have a good week.
