This is MJ, I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer.
You can find all my work at MJMUNOZ.COM
Welcome to Skimming Leaves.
This is a sub-episode, sub-series of Story of Everything, and in this episode I'm going
to be talking about Harry Potter Book 4, Goblet of Fire.
So to start it off, I'm going to give you some fun facts about the book, and then I
will hand things off to my past self to discuss my thoughts on the book right after finishing
it.
Like, minutes after I finished the book, I was sharing my thoughts on it, so you'll get
to hear that.
Excuse me.
So the book was published July 8, 2000.
Scholastic in the US and Bloomsbury, apparently which is a thing that publishes books in the
UK, published them simultaneously.
There was also a midnight release of the book in the year 2000, when it was released.
I believe I've mentioned this before, but I vaguely remember my sister going to a midnight
release.
It may have been for this book because this, you know, Book 4, was the first one to get
a midnight release, and then apparently 5, 6, and 7 all got midnight releases as well,
and yeah, I had no idea what this was, but obviously, you know, there's people outside
of America, and there are people who weren't me, I was like 13, you know, who had been
reading these books and other books at the time, and were excited about this thing.
So that's kind of crazy to think there was a midnight release, and it's burned in my
mind that my sister and her friend went to this store for the release of a book at midnight,
and I just thought, that's crazy, how do you do that?
And now it's interesting, all these years later, I'm finding out that it was a thing
that happened, and apparently it happened with Goblet of Fire, so that's kind of neat.
There's, according to, this is so funny, the word count is approximately 190,637, which
I don't know how you do that, and apparently the UK and American, or US versions of them
are different, the UK comes in at 636 pages, and the US is at 734, is that because the
font size is different, is it because the size of the books is different generally,
I know there's different cuts of paper from all around the world, if you've ever messed
around with a printer you'll see all these different sizes for printing out documents,
so maybe that's what that's about.
And I think, let me see, some of the Triwizard Tournament here, Flordy LeCour, Victor Crum,
Mad Eye Moody, these characters were introduced, as well as Barty Crouch Jr., although I thought
both Crouch's Jr. and Sr. were introduced here, but maybe that's a spoiler, I can't
remember now, so I won't dwell on it, don't think about the spoilers, and hmm, what else,
what else?
There's a bunch of romance in this book, which I will talk about later, and I guess that's
a fun fact, let me see, what else?
Yeah, I think that's about it for the fun facts that I'm going to share, because the
rest of these aren't as fun as they could be, and I don't want to bring you down, I
don't want to harsh your mellow, so anyway, this was a good book, and I enjoyed it a lot,
and there's lots I have to say about it, and I'll let you hear what all that is.
It has been moments since I have finished listening to the audiobook of J.K. Rowling's
Harry Potter and, hold on, it'll come to me, I'm not going to tell you which book number
it is, because it'll be funnier this way, oh, The Goblet of Fire, yes, so that's book
four, and I thought it was interesting, I was shocked by the fact that the first Harry
Potter book was seven hours long, and the fourth had exploded, bloomed, blossomed,
inflated like Aunt Margaret, to be a twenty hour long book, however, unlike Aunt Margaret,
every bit of it was welcome and enjoyable to experience, I don't know why I'm using
that metaphor, it's really weird, and I do apologize, but I can't go back now, so we're
just going to move forward, that's all we can do.
So I liked the book, I was shocked by it, there were a lot of interesting twists and
turns, and I don't want to spoil, so I'll just say it like this, the last hour or so,
which was I think the last two chapters, two plus, was interesting because it was basically
a, it was like a reverse heist, or it was like the bad guy had done a heist, basically,
and we got to unravel and see flowing backwards from the point at which the bad guy had achieved
victory, yeah, had achieved victory, how that all came together and all the work that went
into it, and it was really interesting for me, because I thought that the Prisoner of
Azkaban had a little bit of an aspect of it, not like a heist, but like a mystery, and
we really got to unravel that mystery in the end of the book, in the last leg of the book,
however much, whatever percentage that equates to, which I'm not going to guess.
In the bomb books, the Wizard of Oz, it's always like 75% through, there's a turn for
the positive, and then the heroes have a triumphant march or a triumphant campaign where they
just like are mowing through things for the last quarter of the book, and then it just
ends suddenly at like 99.9% of the book, it's like, and it's over.
However that is not what happened here, and I do think it's, so touching back on bomb
briefly, all of the Wizard of Oz books, the 14 original Elfrick Bomb Wizard of Oz books,
that is, are about four hours long.
I think they're all 20 to 24 chapters.
I knew it better when I was, I went on a spurt, or on a marathon basically, where I was downing
those like every couple days, one of those a day basically, every day or so.
So I saw the formula and I understood it better, and I can't remember if it's 20 or 24 chapters,
but it's one of the two, or it's somewhere between them, and it's very consistent.
The chapters are pretty consistently about 10 minutes long.
In some books you have a five minute chapter and a 15 minute chapter, not necessarily back
to back, but somewhere in and around each other, and it all bounces out to about 10
minutes a chapter, and about, well no, because they're four hour books, how does that work?
I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe they're closer to 15 minute chapters, but regardless, we're talking about Harry
Potter here and Rowling's work, not Bomb's work, but I was really surprised, I don't
know if I mentioned this last time, that Rowling writes long chapters, a la Tolkien.
I don't like Tolkien's long chapters.
I kind of got spoiled entering into the British fantasy authors books by reading the Chronicles
of Narnia and enjoying how Lewis kept them consistent and paced a certain way, and then
I went to The Hobbit, or yeah, I think I went to The Hobbit and I said of the first chapter
to myself, this is a 45 minute long chapter, how is that possible?
But apparently it is, and it's something that other authors do.
Again, it's something Rowling does here, and it's interesting because while it all took
a long time, this is supposed to be encapsulating about a year, 10 months, of these characters'
lives.
So this is a 20 hour book, 10 months, that's two hours a month basically, that works.
Two hours a month, that's 30 minutes a week, that makes sense.
If you watch a TV show every week, that could be a 30 minute experience, approximately.
So it's very understandable, it makes sense, and there were how many?
There were 32, 33, maybe 34 chapters.
Again, that's fairly reasonable, but I was surprised by how long the book is, and again,
I'm trying not to go into too many details of the book, this is supposed to be casual
and kind of spoiler free, and put your appetite for the book, so I don't want to go into too
much of it, but I'm putting a button or a bow on that, I'm surprised how long the book
is.
The length of the book is enjoyable, and I don't think it overstays its welcome at all,
and actually towards, at like 70%, like 17 hours in, I was thinking, alright, this is
getting a little long, well there were two things actually, around 15 to 16 hours I thought,
how are they going to put two more tasks in here?
I won't hide the fact that the Goblet of Fire is about this, you know, a, something it's
about, part of what it's about is this Triwizard Tournament, where these other two wizarding
schools from somewhere in France and maybe somewhere in Germany, Bulgaria, Russia, I
don't know, they come along and they have some of their class, the fourth year, fifth
year, I don't know what, I think it's the fifth years, some of their fifth year class
at Hogwarts for most of the year, and during that time, there's a competition called the
Triwizard Tournament that features three tasks or deals, trials, however you want to call
it, that each of the wizards from the school is supposed to be conquering, and at the end
of it, whoever gets the most points will win the Triwizard Cup, win the Triwizard Tournament,
and there's prestige for the school and the student, and there's also money for the student.
However, what's strange about this year's Triwizard Tournament is that Harry is a fourth
year, he should be age restricted from getting in, and he actually is in the tournament as
a fourth champion, they're called champions, and he's not supposed to be there, and his
uncle or his father, his godfather is worried about him and thinks that he's putting his
life in danger and that somebody's trying to kill him through doing, by having him entered
into the Triwizard Tournament, and it's interesting because Harry's a little flippant, so I'll
talk about Harry for a little bit, it's interesting to me that he is a little flippant and cavalier
about the fact that death is on the line, and he makes the classic of underestimating
how serious that is for himself, I shouldn't laugh at my own jokes like that, he makes
the foolish mistake of underestimating how serious the stakes are, and he really doesn't
take things seriously.
I do enjoy that this comes back, because I ended up telling my eldest about this, I said
I can't believe what an idiot Harry is, although I kind of, I don't understand the concept
of the idiot protagonist or the idiot hero, yeah whatever, I'm not into this anymore,
this is part of my past life, but Ash from the Evil Dead series, or the Army of Darkness
is where I was introduced to him, and that's the most benign, and that's where this really
comes to the fore, he's an idiot, but he's really good at killing these deadites, these
monsters that he has to fight, and that kind of makes up for it, you kind of enjoy seeing
him get kicked around and beat around though, and then ultimately having a victory, not
because you're cheering for him, but because it's fun to watch him get kicked around, which
is weird, and that's mostly I think Sam Raimi's, that's from him, and anyway, that's kind of
odd, but I enjoy Jokasatsu, I enjoy Power Rangers, there's a lot of idiot Red Rangers,
especially in Super Sentai I would say, they're like dumbly optimistic in the American versions,
the Power Rangers versions I would say, or they just don't make sense, but everybody
goes along with them, like that guy's the leader, even though Black Ranger, or Blue
Ranger, or whoever should be the leader instead, but in Super Sentai they're almost literally
idiot protagonists, and in other Japanese media, in the Shonen manga, or Shonen manga
and anime, you also have an idiot protagonist, hero, who for some reason, even though he
doesn't try hard enough, he doesn't work at it hard enough, he doesn't study, he doesn't
whatever, the power of friendship and his tenacity and optimism make him so that he's
more powerful than the Dark Lord who spent decades honing his craft and his evil and
sacrificing everything, and then this guy comes along and is able to fumble through
things because he's got a good attitude, he's able to overcome all challenges, and it doesn't
make any sense, it strains credulity, and there's a little bit of that with Harry, so
it's a little odd, but after a certain point he does start taking things more seriously,
coming up to the third trial really, he takes things seriously, but it's funny because even
the villain who I explained, we get this reverse heist explanation from this villain, he explains,
yeah, I was worried about you, that you're such an idiot Harry, that you were going to
spoil all my plans, so I had to do all these things to orchestrate you coming out on top
of this trial, and I thought that was delightful and hilarious, and yeah, I really dug it.
It is interesting though that he did have that turnaround towards the third one, so
there is this maturity going with Harry, even though he was in a weird place for a lot of
this book, and I guess he's fourteen years old, to me that's no excuse, but then again,
I was more of a Hermione than a Ron or a Harry at fourteen, even though I was not Hermione,
so yeah, that's kind of interesting.
Okay because I don't want these to be too long, I think I'm just going to touch on three
more things, romance, Hermione, and media, so hopefully I remember those quite well,
romance, Hermione, and media, romance, Hermione, and media.
Okay, here we go, so on the subject of romance, I do not appreciate the fact that this wizarding
world full of all sorts of supernatural, ridiculous things has to include romance for children.
I am not naive to the fact that kids like each other and quote unquote date and definitely
fall in love at young tender ages.
I have anecdotal experience and I have eyewitness experience as well, so yeah, there's no doubt
that that does happen.
However, I do not need it in my fiction, and I think my children certainly do not need
it in their fiction, and I think you can easily go by for three books without mentioning anything
like that, and if you can do it for three, you can certainly do it for four.
So I'm a little disappointed or irritated or frustrated with the nascent romances that
Rowling put into this book for whatever strange reason, and I'm not casting aspersions or
saying she's doing anything ridiculous or out of the norm for your standard modern day
author, I'll just call it that.
I think people would excuse me of being a little more prosaic if I'm using that word
properly, and I'm definitely more traditional, and therefore that's not necessary in this
kind of thing.
And besides, the fans are going to do that for you, so you don't have to worry about
it.
I was impressed, in fact, last book, that there was never really hints at a romance
between Hermione and either Ron or Harry, and when they got into their fight, Ron and
Harry in...
Oh, I guess that's this book.
Whoops!
Spoilers!
Well, they end up having a confrontation and spending time apart from each other, Ron
and Harry, in this book, and I'm happy that it wasn't over Hermione.
There is not a love triangle or any weird sort of romance thing going on between the
three of them, which I think is wonderful.
So it's commendable in some ways, but not so commendable in other ways, and I don't
think Rowling dwelled on it overly long, as some children's authors are willing and excited
to do, which seems really weird to me, but anyway, I don't want to go on with that for
too much longer.
Hagrid has a romantic interest in the book.
It doesn't go...
Like most things for Hagrid, it does not go how he planned, and that's kind of funny and
kind of interesting, but it's also understandable.
We also get to see Hagrid get drunk in one of these books.
I think it was in the last book, and actually, I thought he should have gotten drunk in Azkaban,
but I think he got drunk in Chamber of Secrets.
Anyway, regardless, the kids see him drunk, and it's not a big deal.
I'm okay with that.
That makes a little more sense to me than...
It makes more sense to me to have an adult romance and an adult getting drunk in a children's
book than it does to have an adult romance witnessed by these kids, and then also have
kid romances in the same book.
I don't know if that makes sense to you, but I'm drawing a parallel and saying, this makes
sense and this is good and acceptable, whereas this other thing doesn't make as much sense
to me and is less acceptable, or at least objectionable.
So again, that's my opinion.
You don't have to have my opinion, you don't have to agree, but I think the book would
have worked just fine without those undertones, and maybe even the accusations made around
that subject would have been fine to have if it wasn't directly explored through the
characters' perspectives.
I'd be okay with that.
That is all I want to say about that subject, which was romance.
Then I think it was Hermione, then media.
So in regards to Hermione, I let it slip that Ron and Harry get into a fight, and just as
in Prisoner of Azkaban, where Hermione is taken out of...
Wait, was that Azkaban?
No, it was the other one.
Ah!
Anyway.
Ron is taken out of play, as I say, all day, for some time, and that leaves Harry and Hermione
to spend a lot of time together and to explore different aspects of their relationship as
friends, and I thought it was lovely.
I enjoyed seeing more of their interactions, and it was interesting to kind of separate
Harry and Ron so that we could see different dynamics come to the fore, and I just thought
it made it more interesting that there was that conflict, and then it resulted in the
shifting of the dynamics, which was the same thing I thought when Hermione was taken out
of play previously, so that was cool.
On the other side of that, I do like how the whole issue was resolved with Harry and Ron,
even if I thought their fight was a little silly.
I liked the fight, but it was a little silly, and the resolution to it was basically spot-on.
I think it was excellently done, so I liked that.
And talking about media, it's interesting that for some reason a Wizarding World journalist
comes into the story and causes a lot of damage, and even newspapers are used to convey useful
and cogent and clear information to different people, like Harry's godfather.
Somebody else, maybe even Arthur Weasley, no, he doesn't directly do it, but somebody
else is said to have seen the Muggle newspapers, how they are picking up on some things in
the Wizarding World relating to Voldemort.
I like that.
I think it's interesting that the media is brought in as another aspect, even though
I think today it's definitely overdone and over-saturated, and I hope it doesn't continue
too much throughout the other books.
It makes sense for this one now, I guess.
I can concede it for this book, but if it carries on as a huge aspect of it, I'm going
to be a little irritated or less than thrilled about it, but that's okay.
There's a reporter, Rita Skeeter, who is a particularly acrimonious media woman, and
she's basically a liar and libeler, because when you say that a newspaperman is doing slander,
he can simply respond to you that he objects to that, because in print it's libel.
But anyway, she's a libelous, lying, scandal-monger, and an awful character, and I really dislike
her.
She plays an interesting role in the book, but it also is like a weird role, and I don't
quite...
Maybe this is Rowling setting up something for future books that she wants to do, and
I can't remember specifically all the stuff, because it was such a big book, that she tied
in from Azkaban to Goblet of Fire, but I know there was stuff.
So yeah, that was really interesting.
It's interesting that Rowling, maybe inadvertently in the story, tells you to question and be
careful, be wary of the media, because sometimes they spread lies and say things just for their
own benefit, and then as time has gone on, she's been slandered in the media, or libeled
in the media, and I just kind of find that interesting.
But she does offer truths about that, but I know, it's interesting, there's a more nuanced
conversation that needs to be had, but the character was very unlikable, very dislikeable,
bordering on hateable.
And I don't know, some of the stuff in the book could be considered fluff, but it's brought
on by Rita Skeeter, or Skeeter, whatever.
And I don't know, it might branch off into something that's more profound in the following
books, but I don't know, it was just interesting.
It was a really interesting side thing that was in there for some reason, and that was
doing something there, and I didn't understand it, and I could see the utility in it, and
it was enjoyable in some ways, and very unenjoyable in others, but I just kind of wondered what
it was all about.
So I'm going to stop there, I'm not going to say too much more about it, or the rest
of the book.
I liked the book, I thought it was very interesting, I liked that the stakes had been ratcheted
up, and I'm actually going to go right into the next book, which I think is very long,
and I don't have much more time until I have to return it to the cloud library that I'm
borrowing it from.
So yeah, that's all I have to say for now, and I will let Future Me wrap this up, as
well as put an intro on it for this issue of skimming leaves that this will be found
in.
So until next time folks, take care, this is MJ signing out.
I hope you enjoyed that.
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There you can find all of my analysis, art, and fiction.
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