We discuss chapter 23 in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: The Yule Ball. We dive deep into the ball and its dance partners, the Christmas presents, and all the intrigues in this chapter.
In this episode:
- Harry canonically does homework
- Hermione invented Invisalign!
- Dobby loves a dramatic entrance
- The Dursleys put in effort to be nasty
- A good use of pink?!
- Draco and Ron have a lot in common
- Wizarding Heartstopper about Crabbe and Goyle
- The magical eye is overpowered
- Would Lucius Malfoy wear a tank top?
- Snaps for a sassy Ron Weasley
Resources: Malfoy by Irvin
Pub’s Jukebox: On Behalf of Neville by The Whomping Willows
I think Ron sort of subconsciously knows that he’s messing up this big event for himself (not to mention everyone else,) and a lot of time at the ball is spent feeling sorry for himself. That kind of self-pity just causes him to become more angry with himself and everyone else, which causes him to feel more sorry for himself, and so on, in an ongoing cycle. It’s like Phineas says: “You see, Dumbledore? Never try to understand the students. They hate it. They would much rather be tragically misunderstood, wallow in self-pity, stew in their own -” (OotP 823). Even though I was pretty young when I first read Order, I remember realizing what a powerful and poignant and true statement that is about human nature and psychology.
On a different note, and I hesitate to say this here because I’ve gotten so much flack from the fandom when I’ve brought it up elsewhere, but I really dislike Ron. I just don’t like him. He rarely thinks about anyone other than himself. He turns completely thoughtless, insensitive and unreasonable toward others on a whim. When he doesn’t get his way, he throws temper tantrums and makes the lives of everyone around him miserable. In short, he is insufferably selfish. He’s not always like that – he does have his moments. But if you look at his character throughout the whole series, analyzing everything he did and didn’t do, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
Oh, I’m going to regret writing that, aren’t I?
On a more pleasant note, in between releases I’ve been listening to old episodes so I can get caught up. I recently finished the thirty-fourth, during which I almost fell out of my seat after hearing Irvin make a reference to Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. To Irvin: that is one of my favorite fantasy series. It has some major flaws, but the series is an absolute MASTERCLASS in how to write good, compelling characters and develop them properly. Taran’s character arc has been consistently nominated as one of the best in all of literature. But it’s so underrated. When I ask people if they’ve read it, no one has. I’m like, “have you read these books? Why haven’t you read these books?!” I’m glad to hear that someone besides me actually knows what they are!
Welcome to the comments!
Me too! I was 11 when I first read Order, but even then, this line stuck out to me as a “wow, he nailed that one on the head!” (I fancy that as a teenager, I was at least self-aware about how ridiculous we teens were.)
Also, as a Ron-hater, you have found your people here! I’ve been getting hounded with torches and pitchforks since 2008 for stating that Ron is a little shit in one of my first MuggleNet essays. As you eloquently put it, he is insufferable – whiny and unkind – and his many good moments don’t outweigh that for me.
And I think most of our hosts similarly have little grace to extend to Ron, since every time I posit that he sucks, I never get the expected pushback on this pod 😀
Personally, I’m an appreciator of nuance, so, while I generally like characters like Ron (and Hagrid), I’m also happy to accept rightful critique of their failings.
Leave it to Matthew to provide an objective standpoint on every hot take! 🙂
And on the flip side, I flatter myself that I give Ron credit where he’s due, despite strongly disliking him. Like I said, he has very good moments (mostly in the first few books). It’s just that the sum total still results in me disliking him.
And btw, this conversation is a very good lead-in to our next episode 😉
As for Hagrid, well, that’s a special case for me. I reject all nuance!
Yes! To be clear, I wasn’t criticizing Jo’s writing – all in all, I think Ron is a remarkably realistic character. Maybe that’s why I dislike him!
Re: Chronicles of Prydain – YES, THEY ARE THE BEST! It was one of my favorite series as a kid, pre-Potter; I must’ve reread it a zillion times. I’ve actually long meant to do a reread as an adult, since I don’t think I’ve revisited the series since my teens, but it definitely stayed with me and I remember so many of the signature plot points.
I am shocked that there are literate people in the world who haven’t read it, and have been trying to foist it on everyone for ages. But there is a glimmer of hope – when Patrick was in treatment, we sent him a care package with books, and I sent The Book of Three – he replied that of course he’s already read and loved that series.
Props to you! Time is the ultimate critic of quality, so at least we can rest in the fact that Prydain will withstand its test! Hope Patrick’s doing better.
I noticed on your website that you are working on a new Death Eater book. Aside from some subtle clues you’ve dropped around here, could I be so bold as to hope for more details?
Yes, Patrick is on the mend, which we’re all grateful for!
Re: the test of time, I agree that it proves Prydain will endure among those who read classic fantasy, but I admit to being perpetually baffled by how few people do. Same goes for other seminal children’s fantasies like Chrestomanci or Wizard of Oz. I also think it’s getting worse, because of the sheer volume of children’s books being published. In the 90s, before HP came along and showed that there was real money to be made in kids books, there was nowhere near as robust an ecosystem of kids fantasy, so there were a lot more older books on the shelves – Narnia, Wrinkle in Time, Beverly Cleary, etc.
It’s why I fervently wish Disney would produce a proper Prydain adaptation for Disney+. Not because I think a screen adaptation is the end-all-be-all for a book, but because it reaches such a wider audience and helps books endure.
Agree, agree! (Although Wizard of Oz is a piece of hot garbage.) Honestly though, Disney’s “adaptation” (*cough, cough*) of the Black Cauldron might well have killed the franchise rather than nurtured it. I’m so past Disney these days – it seems like they instantaneously ruin every franchise they get their hands on.
Hater gonna hate.
I enjoy Disney’s Black Cauldron as a completely separate thing (and am grateful it led me to the books). I only say Disney adaptation because I’m like 98% certain I read they still have the rights… obviously, after the way they butchered Percy Jackson, I’d rather someone (anyone) else adapt it. I’d root for Netflix to do it, but then we’d never get five seasons. (Me, still bitter about Lockwood & Co? Naaaaah.)
Anyway, my point is that a screen adaptation, even a bad one, keeps an intellectual property in pop culture far more effectively than anything else. Even the HP movies, awful as they are, probably do serve some purpose to keep HP at the fore of people’s minds.
“My point is that a screen adaptation, even a bad one, keeps an intellectual property in pop culture far more effectively than anything else.”
That may be true in most cases (i. e., Amazon’s The Rings of Power), but I think Prydain is an exception due to the relative obscurity of the books. With HP, the books were already quite popular by the time the films began to release. You and I may see a bad adaptation of an obscure book series and want to read it to compare them, but that’s probably not true for the average Joe. For me, Black Cauldron was a nightmarish exhibit in “and then” storytelling with poorly done characters and borderline unbearable dialogue. And honestly, the plot varied so greatly from the novels that you can hardly tell one is based off the other.
But I definitely agree, we need a new adaptation of Prydain! I do think Netflix would be the company most likely to retain the basic essence and themes present in Alexander’s novels.
Re: Death Eater book
If you’ve listened to the Death Eater episodes on Alohomora years ago, or read my series of essays on the topic (LINK), you’ll have a decent idea of my starting point. Basically, if one follows the Death Eater names that Jo drops throughout the last four books, you can extrapolate a lot about who they are and their roles in the organization. Same goes for timing, considering the Death Eaters that are part of a family dynasty, or who recruited whom, etc. So that’s the bulk of it: what can we glean about characters like Dolohov, Avery, Travers, etc?
The other part, and this is what I’m a bit stuck on, is deep dives into the key Death Eater characters like Crouch Jr., Pettigrew, Regulus, and Bellatrix. (Bellatrix is the biggest struggle for me… she’s so very much “what you see is what you get,” I don’t really have much insight to offer.)
*If* I get off my butt and back to writing the book, which I fully intend to after the holidays, I hope it’ll come out in two years. The first draft is about 3/4 done, but there’s gonna be a LOT of editing to do. So… fingers crossed for fall 2027!
And thank you very much for your interest! This book isn’t as obvious a sell as a mono-character treatise like Dumbledore or Malfoy, so any sign of interest is very encouraging!
Those are exceptionally interesting and well-written. One of the biggest parts of understanding the politics of any situation is understanding how each faction functions on a regular basis, so I applaud your effort to explore that in the HP series. I wouldn’t worry about interest . . . it certainly helps that you already have two books published that did, if I’m correct, reasonably well.
IfWhen you finish it, you can most certainly count on a sale to me!Upon reading Snape and subsequently Dumbledore, I was starving for more. I recall having the thought, wouldn’t it be awesome if someone wrote a character analysis of Grindelwald? Grindelwald has always fascinated me as a character, especially with the Fantastic Beasts movies recently coming out and giving us insight into the political landscape that developed during his reign of terror. It’s fascinating to investigate his relationships, motives, and ultimate redemption (which the HP films completely butchered). After realizing that no one was ever going to write that book, I decided to make a tentative attempt at doing it myself. I have plenty to work with – I’ve written a lot of essays and stuff on GG since 2023, none of which I’ve ever bothered to put online. I wanted to look at the experiences, relationships and circumstances that shaped him into who he was, how his radical ideologies revolutionized that era’s schools of thought, and the impact he left on Wizarding culture. I wanted to examine how Albus Dumbledore was influenced by their short time together and the role Grindelwald played in the history of the Deathly Hallows. And I wanted to theorize about the part of his life which we canonically know almost nothing about; from the rise of the second Muggle World War to his defeat at Dumbledore’s hands in 1945.
I haven’t been working on it for long, but I’m pleased with my progress. I’m around 11,000 words in, which isn’t much at all (I recall school papers I wrote that came close to that!), but at least I have a very, very basic outline from which to work. I don’t have a lot of time to work on it, though. I haven’t worked on it at all for the past few weeks due to a family matter that came up, and the editing is slow. I’m constantly revising and refining everything I’ve written down to the tiniest details, and I often wonder why I bother to work on it at all. Just the other day I lost several hundred words because an appendix I originally included felt to me too tonally inconsistent with the rest of the book. It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever get it published (and if I do, it will be several years in the future), but working on it has been a good experience for me, if for no other reason than having given me something productive to do. In any case, my efforts are in large part inspired by the work that you put into the fandom.
Sorry for rambling on about this! My point was to encourage you, however much I meandered around in the process. . . .
It’s a testament to how busy I’ve been that I wasn’t anticipating Malfoy‘s release, so I got a pleasant little surprise on one of my regular Books-A-Million excursions. I got another pleasant surprise when I learned that Grace was writing Voldemort. Very much looking forward to that! Aaanyway. . . .
Keep on writing, and I’ll keep on reading! Thanks for all the hard work you do to keep the fandom alive!
Aw, thank you so much for the encouragement! It’s always a big motivator to know people actually want to read what you’re writing. (And today I finished decorating for the holidays, so that’s one big procrastinating task that I can’t use as an excuse anymore.)
For the record, after Snape and Dumbledore, my publisher was also starving for more. So if you really wanted to make something of your Grindelwald analysis, I’m reasonably confident you’d have an interested publisher!
My one pro tip for writing stuff like this (or books in general) – get stuff written down before revising. It’s so easy to get bogged down in revising the first 11,000 words over and over again, so you have eight drafts of Chapter 1 but never actually finish the manuscript. It’s also much easier to revise once you have the full text, and can work on corralling it into a book-like form. It’s why when I work on my fiction novels, I handwrite them, so I literally can’t go back and keep editing.
Anyway, I’m deeply flattered to have inspired such a passion project! And I look forward to reading it one day.
That’s good to know – in the unlikely event that I ever get it completed, hopefully Media Labs will be willing to take a chance on me the way they did three other authors.
That’s a very important tip you make, and one I’m extremely grateful for. I figured out really quick how easy it is to get bogged down in editing whenever I was first threading my essays together and trying to make them cohesive.
Right now I know pretty much everything I want in my book and how it should fit together. So I have a substantial outline to work with, all messily compiled into a draft on Microsoft Word. Parts of it are extremely well-developed, but then there’s also giant chunks of illegible text that no one can understand but me. I’m slowly working on expanding these notes and working them into the larger book.
In reciprocation of your earlier comment, it’s quite encouraging to hear interest in what I’m working on. (In my case, from someone with much more experience!) I’ve written parts of books before, but this is the first thing I’m taking somewhat seriously, as I might actually consider getting it published someday.
Important disclaimer: I am not a dentist, just a curious person who has had braces, and is a persistent enough googler to get past the AI nonsense.
There are specialised retainers that do more than just hold teeth in place, and are specifically designed for minor corrections while the patient is growing, which seem like exactly the sort of thing Hermione would be given to correct her buck teeth (but as discussed, probably got “forgotten” at home when she left for Hogwarts). They’re known (in the UK at least) as “functional braces” or “orthopaedic braces”.
A couple of relevant points:
Buck teeth are commonly an issue of alignment, not size – shrinking them won’t solve the problem of them sticking out.I’m surprised Hermione (nor the hosts) mentioned the stupidity of Draco’s insult: molars are your back teeth. Hermione’s incisors were supersized and corrected.
Well, this host, at least, has no idea which teeth are which! So I just learned something, thanks!
Honestly I think the simple explanation is that Hermione had been sitting on the “twitchy little ferret, aren’t you?” for a while and was so eager to spring it on Malfoy that she forgot to point out his factual inaccuracy.
On the topic of alternate Dark Mark locations… that would be another good reason to not put your wand in your back pocket. No-one wants to buttdial Voldemort.
That is easily the funniest thing I’ve heard this week!
BAHAHAHA, you made me burst out laughing in a coffee shop, and now I’m being looked at like a crazy person.
I’m honestly a little surprised we haven’t gotten a Blibbering Humdingers song on this topic yet!
To loosely quote Cormoran Strike, the Death Eaters need to have enough sense to not advertise their Nazi-like tendencies on their forehead. I do not have any tattoos, but I would suspect that a tattoo on your inner forearm is a rather tactful spot. It can be covered by clothing or makeup in the real world and the Death Eaters cover theirs with robes. As a disclaimer, I do not support Death Eaters and what they represent–I am just adding to the discourse!
Eh… maybe they’re less fond of t-shirts and short-sleeved robes than I am, but I would not find it a tactful spot at all!