Fridge / Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Warning: Marked and Unmarked spoilers ahead. Read at your own discretion.

Fridge Brilliance

• A weasel is any member of the genus mustela of the family mustelidae. Domestic ferrets and stoats are two species that belong to this genus (mustela furo and mustela erminea respectively). Draco insultingly refers to the Weasleys as weasels, and got turned into a ferret. Sirius claims the Malfoys are indeed related to the Weasleys.
  • Know what else is a mustelid? The badger, the animal that represents Hufflepuff House, which Draco expressed contempt for during his first conversation with Harry. This makes being turned into a similar animal even more embarrassing for him.
• When Ron states that he is only interested in "pretty girls," no matter their personality, and then rejects Eloise Midgen as a date because her nose is very slightly off-centre, Hermione seems to be overreacting to his comments, but Hermione still has her buckteeth, so she is actually reacting to hearing the boy that she has a crush on state that he likely has no interest in her because she isn't 'pretty' by his standards.
  • This is also the unstated reason why she keeps her teeth fixed after the Yule Ball.
• When Snape tells Harry that he knows that he took boomslang skin and gillyweed from his private stores, Harry automatically thinks that he is thinking back to the Polyjuice from Chamber of Secrets. In fact, Snape was almost certainly thinking about the recent removals by Barty Crouch Jr., which Harry honestly had no knowledge about.
  • It's then mentioned that Snape's eyes are boring into Harry's. Given what we learn in the following book about Snape's Occlumency skills, it's possible that he's at least a basic Legilimens, and that he was using Legilimency on Harry to find out whether or not it actually was him!
• Why couldn't Parvati and Padma Patil, who are described in the book as "the two prettiest girls in the year", find dates before Harry and Ron asked them? It's very likely that Parvati was turning down guys that had asked her out so that Padma, who was bookish and probably shy, wouldn't be left alone.
• When Harry first opens the egg in the Gryffindor common room and everyone hears the screaming, Neville thinks it sounds like someone being tortured and that Harry might have to face the Cruciatus Curse during the second task. It's easy enough to connect this to his parents after we learn what Crouch Jr. and the Lestranges did to them. However, there's also a subtle Call-Back when Seamus interprets the screaming as a banshee — shown to be his Boggart in the previous book. In other words, both Neville and Seamus interpreted the egg's clue as something that they were personally afraid of.
• The idea that there's no loophole to get someone out of the tournament if they didn't enter themselves or got cold feet seems utterly ludicrous until you remember an important fact: It was Barty Crouch Sr. who said there was no loophole or escape clause. The same Crouch who is currently under the Imperius Curse, coerced into helping Voldemort's plan to abduct Harry using the tournament. There might well have been a way out, but the only person who was asked was working for the man who had Harry entered in the first place.
  • He is definitely acting very wearily, no doubt partially because he's trying to resist the Imperius Curse. This hoodwinking violates Crouch Sr's sense of right and wrong in every way possible and then some more, and he can't do a thing about it. Plus he knows that this has something to do with his son and Voldemort. He no doubt wants to leave Hogwarts as soon as possible because Voldemort wants him to leave Dumbledore's presence in order to avoid detection.
  • Crouch standing with "his face half-hidden in shadow" is obvious foreshadowing.
• Draco's "bouncing ferret" stage seems really over the top in a number of ways, but Barty Crouch Jr. chose an action that was in character both for himself and for the real Moody. The real Moody was an ex-Auror, so he has reason to dislike Lucius, a former Death Eater. Barty Crouch Jr. is a Death Eater who despises those like Lucius who abandoned Voldemort after the latter was defeated by Harry Potter.
  • Draco threatens to retaliate to Moody's punishment by alerting his father. Moody responds "Oh yeah? Well, I know your father of old, boy!" Barty Crouch Jr. and Lucius Malfoy were Death Eaters together.
• Fridge Brilliance in a Tear Jerker way: At the end of the Triwizard Tournament, when Harry arrives back at Hogwarts with Cedric's body, the only thing the audience sees is that Harry acting distressed for someone who just won a tournament (in the film he even cries). It's very unlikely that someone besides Dumbledore would have heard him say that Voldemort's back over the noise, and then Crouch Jr. just barges through the crowd and whisks Harry off to his office before Harry can say much else or, you know, stop crying hysterically. The audience only sees Harry for a couple of seconds before they all start freaking out themselves. Considering the later two books where everyone insists that Harry's crazy for claiming that Voldemort's back, it makes a lot of sense.
• Moody is hired on only for a year and he makes it sound like he's not interested in staying longer. While Crouch Jr. is revealed to have a very private reason for leaving after the year, it sounds like Dumbledore is savvy enough to only hire a DADA teacher for a single year, which would prevent some other foul thing happening and forcing him away from the school. If that was Dumbledore's plan, he used it again in Half-Blood Prince, arranging a clean and painless death from Snape to avoid an excruciating death from either his cursed hand or another Death Eater.
• When Moody speaks about Karkaroff's past he says that a Death Eater never stops being a Death Eater. Barty Crouch Jr. never stopped being one and Karkaroff (and, as we later learn, Regulus) trying to stop led to their demise.
• Fred and George Weasley's bet on the end of the Quidditch World Cup is an excellent bit of foreshadowing towards their Hidden Depths later on. They manage to realise that Ireland has 7 Firebolts, the better equipment (hence them winning the game by scoring lots of Quaffle goals) and a better trio of Chasers, but that Bulgaria has the more skilled Seeker in Krum (hence Krum catching the Snitch).
  • Not just that, but they had a unique insight into the match given that they were players themselves and probably among the few people that weren't Quidditch pros that had flown alongside a Firebolt (i.e. Harry) and knew its capabilities.
• Why was Dobby's assistance to Harry more helpful than it was in the second book? Moody talked about Gillyweed knowing that Dobby was eavesdropping, because he knew Dobby was sympathetic to Harry.
  • Also, he's no longer struggling against the geas that Malfoy has him under. Now, his "owner" is Dumbledore, so he can fully act in a way beneficial to Harry without fighting himself.
• When Moody takes Harry up to his office after he tells Cedric about the dragons in the first task, he makes a point to mention that his Secrecy Sensor (which detects concealment and lies) was constantly going off because of too much interference from students lying about homework, and he had to disable his Sneakoscope (detects untrustworthiness) for the same reason. Of course, they were constantly going off because they were detecting lies, concealment, and untrustworthiness from Moody/Barty Crouch Jr. himself.
• After coming back from the Third Task, while being detained by Crouch Jr., Harry sees faces in the Foe Glass of the people coming to rescue him (being Crouch Jr.'s foes). Among the faces is Snape, giving the reader a subtle clue as to his true loyalty.
• In the film, Moody's demonstration of the Unforgivable Curses is to Imperius a spider into travelling around the classroom. Then he recalls it to his desk, uses the Cruciatus Curse on it in front of Neville, and then uses the Killing Curse to end it. His actions all take on a different meaning when you know the teacher Barty Crouch, Jr..
  • Lucius Malfoy claimed he was under the influence of the Imperius Curse to get out of being sent to Azkaban, so Crouch Jr. taunts Draco with the spell. Then specifically calls attention to the fact after that.
  • Crouch Jr. and the Lestranges drove Neville’s parents to insanity with the Cruciatus Curse, and so he toys with his mind by performing the exact same spell right in front of him
  • Then of course with Harry he resents the fact he survived and after killing the spider, calls Harry out specifically.
• When everyone's speculating as to how Harry's name got entered into the Goblet of Fire, Barty Crouch Jr. actually says what he did to pull it off. It’s a conclusion that the real Moody would have jumped to as well. Dumbledore too seems to think that the most practical possibility is an older person putting in Harry’s name. Everyone else thinks Moody is insane however and being like he normally does. It’s a masterful play by Crouch Jr. though.
  • Not only that, but it averts any potential I Never Said It Was Poison slip-ups later on.
• Ron becoming an asshole towards Harry after Harry gets entered into the Triwizard tournament seems out of nowhere. He was kind of an asshole to Hermione during their first year, but he greatly softened up towards her after the troll fight. Ron's family winning the lottery a year ago, and being the brief center of attention after Sirius broke into Gryffindor Tower looking for Pettigrew may have given Ron a taste of fame that is toxic for him. It's really only after the lottery win that he started having month-long fights with his friends. First with Hermione in the previous book, now with Harry here, and then (while partially because Rowling allows herself to describe more of the daily goings-on at Hogwarts) really starts getting into more arguments with Hermione on a weekly basis, mostly because he's attracted to her.
  • It's also worth mentioning that he's turned 14 now. And 14-year olds generally take the "crazy teenager" aspects of 12-ish-year olds up to eleven.
  • Ron may also be letting out his resentments over always being second fiddle to Harry. Ron has always been sidelined in some way for the climaxes of the first three books. Furthermore, Ron really loves Quidditch, so it had to sting when Sirius bought Harry one of the best broomsticks in the world, and Sirius just came completely out of nowhere.
  • As noted above, Ron missed out on facing Quirrel in Book 1 and the basilisk and Riddle in Book 2, and while he stared down Sirius in Book 3, he was never actually in any danger there. He's never seen how terrifying this life-or-death stuff actually is, only Harry constantly walking into danger and coming back out unharmed and covered in glory. Harry actually lampshades this in the next book.
  • Furthermore, think about Ron's life for a minute. At home, he's the second-youngest of seven children, with Ginny being the only daughter and apple of her mother's eye. He's "Bill/Charlie/Percy/Fred and George's younger brother." In class, he's constantly overshadowed by the brightest witch of her age. And outside of class, he's overshadowed by being the Boy Who Lived's sidekick. With all of that put together, it's hardly unsurprising he gets insanely jealous.
  • Constantly being overshadowed by his friends and even his family it's understandable why he would be very insecure about who he is. His whole life he has dealt with thinking that he's never good enough. Ron was never a jerk, as he's known for being kind and loyal to people. But he's under a lot of stress from being around people who constantly dismiss him as a "nobody".
• At the Yule ball, Hermione is wearing a periwinkle blue dress, but the film had changed her dress into pink in order to stand out from the all blue-themed background and would not clash with Emma Watson's skin tone. Additionally, there is a variety of garden roses named "Gentle Hermione", whose color and petals resembles that of her ruffled dress. It's as if there's a sentiment where Hermione looks like a spring rose popping in a blanket of blue snow.
• The Great Hall's enchanted ceiling starts thundering and spewing lightning immediately when Mad-Eye Moody comes in despite there being rain and thunder all night, foreshadowing that Moody is a threat to Hogwarts and not who he seems, as he is actually Death Eater Barty Crouch Jr in disguise.
• In the film, Hermione is noticeably colder to Moody than she is toward other professors. Perhaps she's still bothered by Moody's treatment of Neville during the Unforgivable Curses class.
• During the pensieve trial one of the names Karkaroff tries to give is an Evan Rosier, who Moody admits to killing in a fierce duel. A few chapters earlier Sirius mentions Rosier as a member of Snape's social circle at Hogwarts. Perhaps Snape's uneasiness towards Moody is partially due to the fact that Moody is responsible for the death of one of Snape's few friends.
• After Voldemort's rebirth one Death Eater, Nott, tells Voldemort that he is the most faithful follower, despite avoiding Azkaban and never attempting to find and help his master. Two books later we learn that Nott was one of his earliest Death Eaters, possibly since their Hogwarts years. Perhaps Nott (naively) was hoping that his long history of servitude would earn him some preferential treatment, or at least leniency. This also explains why Voldemort was rather cold and dismissive towards him, seeing how even his old school friend (for lack of a better word) abandoned him when his body was destroyed.
  • Alternatively, this might not be the same Nott - assuming he's the father of Theodore Nott, Harry's classmate, and that he didn't wait until his fifties or sixties to have a child (which is a possibility, especially in the wizarding world - see the age of Harry's grandparents when they had James), he might be the 'son of the original Nott, and thus be claiming to be Voldemort's most faithful follower because he was brought up in a Death Eater household before such things were common, and joined Voldemort while still very young himself.
• If Voldemort's Killing Curse had connected with Harry, the events of Book 7, Chapter 35 would have been initiated, because Voldemort "killed" Harry with Avada Kedavra with Harry's mother's protection in his blood. Voldemort's soul fragment would have been destroyed. Had Harry survived (and somehow returned to Hogwarts): there would no longer be a connection between him and Voldemort, making plot points of Books 5 and 7 entirely different; for starters, he never goes to the Department of Mysteries, Sirius probably doesn't die, and he never has to sacrifice himself for Hogwarts.
• Overlaps with Fridge Horror — it's mentioned that Sirius is reduced at one point to living off rats while on the run in dog form. While on one level, ew, consider for a second who gave Sirius, Harry, and the others the slip last year and what Animagus form he took. Even for a dog, there are probably easier ways to get food (and Sirius admits to playing the part of a lovable stray to do just that). Could Sirius have been venting some frustrations? Or, better/worse yet, hoping if he killed enough rats, he'd stumble upon one in particular...?
• The Dark Mark is a snake slithering out of the mouth of a skull. It is a Call-Back to the events of Chamber of Secrets, where Tom Riddle's memory summons the basilisk by making it crawl out of the mouth of Salazar Slytherin's stone statue.
  • It's very likely that this is where Voldemort, who had a thing for iconography and symbolism, got the idea for the design of the Dark Mark in the first place.
• When Dumbledore reveals to Harry what happened to Neville's parents, his voice is noted to have "a bitterness Harry had never heard there before," though it makes sense at the time considering how horrifying the Longbottoms' fate was. Then Book 7 comes around, and we learn exactly why a person being tortured until they lost their sanity would be particularly upsetting to Dumbledore.

Fridge Horror

• All of the interactions between Neville and Mad-Eye Moody take on a different light when you read knowing that he's actually Barty Crouch Jr. Neville had tea with one of the Death Eaters who tortured his parents into permanent insanity, and he had no idea. Considering how eager he is in the fifth book to have a go at duelling/killing Bellatrix Lestrange, how would he have reacted if he'd have known the truth about Crouch Jr.? Especially when you realise that Crouch Jr.'s demonstration of the Unforgivable Curses was probably some deliberate, rather twisted attempt at Evil Gloating; he knew that Neville would react in the way that he did, so making him watch the spider being tortured was probably his way of displaying how it happened to Neville's parents. It also gave Crouch an excuse to get Neville alone and plant the idea to give Harry Gillyweed for the second task.
• We've seen that medical magic can achieve amazing cures that aren't possible for Muggle science, from re-growing absent bones overnight to flawlessly re-attaching splinched body parts. Nevertheless, Mad-Eye Moody (and we're talking about the real one) became crippled and horribly scarred over the course of his Auror career. So what sort of over-the-top destructive forces caused so much damage to his face and leg that even St. Mungo's couldn't repair? Or was he injured so badly that he couldn't even make it to a hospital for treatment, and had to lie there in agony for weeks while his burns healed non-magically?
  • It's stated sufficiently advanced dark magic leaves permanent injuries, and also heavily implied that the only way to avoid them when they can be avoided is to get the necessary medical attention immediately. Presumably Moody had to extricate himself from whoever was attacking him at the time (he 'credits' the facial mess to Evan Rosier. What happened to his other leg is anyone's guess.)
• Mad-Eye Moody got his nickname from the eye. It's a magical eye that can turn in every direction at will and bypass any mundane means of concealment (seeing through walls and the back of Moody's own head), and many magical ones too (even powerful ones, being able to see through Harry's invisibility cloak). Alastor being paranoid (properly, it turns out), it's fairly easy to understand his choice, and since he was a former Auror with a strong moral code, it's relatively safe in his hands. But the one we see in the book is Barty Crouch Jr. impersonating him, so Barty Crouch Jr. spent a whole year inside Hogwarts, the one place that proved able to keep Voldemort out and home to his greatest enemy, and with the most powerful spying device shown in the series).
  • Also, can Moody even sleep with that thing? Is he stuck closing one eye while another darts around the room all night?
    • In the films, it's an eyepatch, so if he really wants to sleep, he can take it off. Even disregarding that, Moody is definitely the sort of person who could sleep with one eye open. He may even prefer it, given his paranoia.
• The book gets a lot of gags out of Dudley's weight and being forced to diet at the start of the book, but the physical state that Dudley's gotten to is still deeply unsettling. Even though Harry's probably exaggerating when he imagines Dudley as being the size of a young killer whale, or having become wider than he was tall, the fact remains that Dudley is obese, probably morbidly, and his parents are only enabling him. If Dudley hadn't gone on a diet, what would have happened to him?
• One of the damaging lies that Rita Skeeter notes in her first atrocious article about Harry is that he has a romance with Hermione. Now consider that Ron had temporarily been on bad terms with Harry in this book due to envy of all the attention that he was constantly getting, and him believing that Harry lied to him about putting his name in the Goblet of Fire. So this article seemed to further convince Ron that Harry loved the spotlight. But in addition, this same article might have planted the first seed of doubt to Ron that Hermione might have always preferred Harry over him, which is not true, but for Ron who has always put himself down would seem that way, and considering that she bickers with the former boy more than she does with the latter boy. And to make matters worse, later in the book, Ron finds out that Hermione is going out with Viktor Krum. He used to practically worship Viktor, but now, he immediately despises him for the rest of the series, something which Hermione is quick to notice.
• In the book, the scene where Mad-Eye Moody turns Malfoy into a ferret and begins bouncing him around the corridor seems funny when you read knowing he's Barty Crouch Jr. Not to mention, he's openly torturing a student, even if that student is Malfoy. The text also mentions that Malfoy is squealing as Crouch Jr. throws him around, and ferrets only make sounds if they're in serious pain. If Professor McGonagall hadn't shown up, Crouch Jr. could've easily broken Malfoy's ribs, or worse, all because of his hatred for Malfoy's father.
• Harry's name was entered into the Tri-Wizard Tournament against his knowledge or will. He wasn't allowed to withdraw or forfeit, he was forced to compete for real. It was perfectly legal by wizarding law for his mortal enemy to sign his name onto a binding contract, with no apparent means of getting out of it. Harry should be thankful that Voldemort didn't have the forethought to stick Harry's name on a contract making Harry Voldemort's slave or something.
• During the First Wizarding War, Barty Crouch Sr. sentenced many people to Azkaban without trial, including Sirius. It is likely Sirius wasn't the only one who was falsely accused and imprisoned because of him. There could still be innocent people there, suffering in a Hellhole Prison for something they never did because of an overzealous prosecutor...or they could have died of the sheer psychological hell inflicted by dementors without ever being able to clear their names.

Fridge Logic

• The second task has Harry and the champions swimming down to the bottom of the Hogwarts lake, and the third has them navigating a monster-infested hedge maze. Why on Earth would you decide that two out of your three spectator events would happen in enclosed spaces where the spectators can't actually see anything? You'd think some kind of spell would be "filming" the champions for the audience's benefit, but no such spell is ever brought up, forcing the reader to conclude that the cheering throngs in the stands just sat there bored in front of an empty lake/ a bunch of hedges for over an hour.