Essay: The Anti-Player

Paradoxically, as a hero who constantly plays games and plays them well, sometimes the most interesting thing about Harry Potter is when he either refuses to play, or he plays, but he doesn’t play to win. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, when Harry returns to the Gryffindor common room after his name comes out of the Goblet, the celebration in his honor rivals the most raucous post-Quidditch party. Earlier in the book we only hear about Hogwarts students who are Quidditch players putting their name in the Goblet (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 17: The Goblet of Games), and Quidditch also unites the first people who congratulate Harry—Fred, George, Angelina and Katie—plus Lee Jordan, the Quidditch commentator.

In the case of the Goblet of Fire, Harry not only doesn’t play to win when it comes to being chosen as a Triwizard Champion—he isn’t playing this game at all, taking for granted that it is impossible for him to cross the age-line created by Dumbledore to keep anyone under seventeen from putting their name in the Goblet.

Harry sees Fred and George fail spectacularly at this game when their aging potion still gets them ejected from the zone around the Goblet, and they temporarily sprout white hair and beards, taking on the appearance of their archetype, the Wise Old Man (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 2: This Old Man). This also occurs in the previous book with Snape, who is an archetypal Crone (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 6: A Murder of Crones). Snape takes on the appearance of his archetype in Prisoner of Azkaban when Neville battles a boggart and it turns into Snape, first as he usually appears, then in clothing habitually worn by Neville’s grandmother—a literal and archetypal Crone.

In the fourth book of the Harry Potter series, despite the lack of literal Quidditch after the World Cup, brooms make frequent appearances in the narrative as metaphorical weapons. When Rita Skeeter pulls Harry aside for a private interview, the confrontational nature of this is highlighted by its taking place in a broom cupboard, a metaphorical armory. Brooms and flying come up again when Barty Crouch, Jr., disguised as Mad-Eye Moody, asks Harry what he’s best at in an attempt to guide him toward the solution to his problem of how to tackle the first task. Harry’s instinctive answer is Quidditch—a metaphorical war. Harry also compares his nerves before the first task of the Triwizard Tournament to the nerves he experiences before a Quidditch match. 

In the first task, the Champions must get past dragons. The Quidditch similarities are heightened because they’re each required to “catch” a golden egg, a virtual Golden Snitch. This egg specifically resembles the Snitch Harry inherits from Dumbledore because it opens to reveal a secret, but not just any secret: it is about retrieving the thing—or rather, person—the Champion will miss the most. When Harry finally opens the Snitch he caught in his first match, the Resurrection Stone brings him those he misses most to be his honor guard as he walks to his death: his parents and the parental figures of Sirius and Remus.

Each task (the Yule Ball is also a task, so there are really four) is aligned with one of the four alchemical elements of fire, air, water and earth, and each Champion is aligned with a Hogwarts house, which in turn are also each aligned with one of these four elements. As the Gryffindor Champion, from the house aligned with the element of fire, Harry “wins” at the task also aligned with this element. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 18: The Wide World.) He summons his broom and swoops down on the egg as he would a Golden Snitch during a Quidditch match, getting it from his dragon more quickly than the other champions. He often considers his broom to be a weapon, and the first task of the Tournament reinforces this.

When Harry is working out the clue to the task aligned with the element of water—the hostages in the lake—after holding the egg underwater to hear the clue, he has a dream in which the mermaid in the painting in the prefects’ bath holds his broom over his head, taunting him. In this dream, his weapon is withheld from him because he doesn’t have what he needs to accomplish this task.

Harry’s innate power-sharing, his anti-player instinct, initially comes to the surface when Hagrid shows him the dragons they’ll all be facing. Ever the fair-fighter, Harry knows Viktor and Fleur will learn about the dragons from their head teachers, so he must tell Cedric, to guarantee a level playing field for all of them. Harry wouldn’t mind winning the Tournament, but not unfairly, just as Cedric feels that he has an unfair advantage during the Quidditch match in the third book when Harry falls off his broom.

Harry, Ron and Hermione each react negatively to a Champion based upon romantic jealousy: Harry reacts negatively to Cho going to the Ball with Cedric; Ron reacts negatively to Hermione going to the Ball with Viktor; and Hermione reacts negatively when she hears that Ron has asked Fleur to the Ball and later when Fleur kisses Ron on the cheek after he helps get her little sister out of the lake.

Hermione is Viktor’s hostage and Cho Chang is Cedric’s. Ron is Harry’s hostage, serving as a surrogate for his sister Ginny as the thing Harry would miss most now. Ginny later swaps places with Ron and becomes Harry’s “best source of comfort”. The other male Champions are each rescuing the girls they care most about while Harry rescues a stand-in for the girl he eventually cares about.

Fleur’s hostage is her sister, not a romantic partner or a surrogate for one. Gabrielle Delacour is also the only hostage to whom Harry has no emotional attachments, unlike Cho, the girl he fancies, and Ron and Hermione, his best friends. He still feels compelled to rescue her with the others, again sharing power, behaving as an anti-player, regardless of whether this will hurt his chances of success. Making sure the hostages are all safe is more important to him than winning. He’s convinced that the mock war has turned real, and when it’s revealed to the tournament judges that he attempted to save all four, he gets high marks for this. He’s the story’s chief “soldier” and player, yet he’s consistently depicted as an anti-warrior and anti-player who doesn’t strive for victory at any cost.

The choice of hostages is another way, besides the Yule Ball, that Rowling enmeshes romance into the competition; the game is one of both love and war. The “pairing” of each member of the Trio with a Champion of whom they are jealous points to this. We also get a Trio-and-Counter-Trio scenario that foreshadows the Trio-and-Counter-Trio in the next book. Here the Counter-Trio is Cedric, Viktor and Fleur; they are parallel to Neville, Ginny and Luna, the Counter-Trio that accompanies the Trio to the Ministry in Order of the Phoenix. They are also Harry’s, Ron’s and Hermione’s doppelgangers, respectively, in the fifth book (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 7: Fountain of Youth).

Cedric, the Champion Harry is jealous of, is equal to Neville, Harry’s doppelganger in the fifth book’s Counter-Trio. Cedric is a Hufflepuff and Professor Sprout, his head-of-house, is the Herbology teacher, the job Neville will eventually hold as an adult. Neville and Cedric also both embody the archetype of the Father (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 5: Our Father).

Viktor Krum, the Champion Ron is jealous of, fills the same role in his Counter-Trio as Ginny, Ron’s doppelganger, serves in hers, because in Order of the Phoenix, during her first match as a Seeker for Gryffindor, Ginny does exactly what Viktor Krum does in the World Cup final: she catches the Snitch knowing that doing so secures a victory for the other team, and she does this as an act of mercy, to end an excruciating game for her brother, Ron. When she does this, this marks her as another anti-player, like Harry and like Viktor. JK Rowling says that Ginny will become a professional Quidditch player later, like Viktor Krum. Ron and Viktor are also both Wise Old Men.

Fleur, the Champion Hermione is jealous of, fills the same role in her Counter-Trio as Luna Lovegood, Hermione’s doppelganger, does in hers. Luna is the “anti-Hermione”, a doppelganger with inverted versions of many of Hermione’s attributes. Luna is also fascinated by Ron for a little while in the fifth book, hanging on his every word and laughing uproariously at every little thing he says, plus displaying detailed knowledge of his limited dating history. There is also a superficial physical resemblance between Luna and Fleur, both blondes with light-colored eyes, and one is an actual Ravenclaw while the other is a virtual Ravenclaw, since the Beauxbatons students sit at the Ravenclaw table while they are at Hogwarts. And finally, Fleur, Hermione and Luna create yet another Maiden/Mother/Crone triad (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 3: Iron Maiden).

Ron treats the Yule Ball as a real—not metaphorical—war, saying that Hermione is “fraternizing with the enemy”, despite previously hero-worshipping Krum, including Ron buying a small replica of the Bulgarian Seeker at the Quidditch World Cup. This sounds like a kind of wizard “action-figure”—a toy, in other words. The figure is later found maimed in Ron’s dormitory. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to work like a voodoo doll and Viktor suffers no physical injury after Ron (presumably) vents his feelings on it.

The location of the final task is another sign of the Tournament being the metaphorical war replacing Quidditch in the fourth book, since it takes place in a maze on the Quidditch pitch. If Harry or other students really thought about it, they probably wouldn’t have decided that it was logical to have no Quidditch for an entire year, since there are only three Tournament tasks, four when you count the Yule Ball, and most students aren’t participating. There are usually six Quidditch matches over the course of about eight months.

However, the Tournament serves functionally as a replacement for Quidditch in the book’s plot, so whether this makes sense to the students isn’t a consideration for Rowling. Quidditch is the chief metaphorical war in which Harry usually fights. Two prominent mock-wars, both fought by Harry, would make the plot too crowded. It makes sense on a meta-level for him to be attacked during the final Tournament task, but this means that the Quidditch matches in which he might have played would also have had to be related to genuine war, and Rowling doesn’t seem to want the two activities competing. But even with two champions who are on their house teams, there’s still no really good reason for the rest of the school not to have a Quidditch season. Harry and Cedric could have been excluded from Quidditch for one year, to let them concentrate on the Tournament, and other students could have played their positions. But no—if Harry isn’t going to war during Quidditch, if it’s included just for sport, that doesn’t fit her pattern.

As the final task approaches, Rowling writes:

The start of the summer term would normally have meant that Harry was training hard for the last Quidditch match of the season. This year, however, it was the third and final task in the Triwizard Tournament for which he needed to prepare...

She links the year’s last match and the last task, a comparison heightened by the site of the task. The maze being grown on the pitch points to this task aligning with the element of earth, and the center of the maze is a metaphorical “home”, the champions’ goal. This was usual for a medieval labyrinth, which is shaped like a circle and cross gameboard, which in turn looks like a common symbol for the earth. On top of this, when Cedric—a Hufflepuff, the house aligned with the element of earth—and Harry take the Cup together, they’re transported to a graveyard.

Earth to earth; ashes to ashes; dust to dust.

Ludo Bagman shows the hedge maze to the Champions in its early stages and says that they’ll have to get past obstacles in the maze. This is followed by Viktor asking Harry about his relationship with Hermione, which Viktor is relieved to learn is platonic. Right afterward, Harry and Viktor see Barty Crouch, Sr., a virtual prisoner of war who has escaped his house, no longer under the Imperius Curse his son placed on him. But Crouch isn’t quite in full possession of his faculties when they meet him on the school grounds. By the time Harry fetches Dumbledore, Crouch is gone and Krum is on the ground, stunned. “Moody”—really Barty Crouch, Jr.—volunteers to find Crouch, Sr., his own father, so he can kill him before his father can talk.

Harry, Ron and Hermione are mystified about why Harry wasn’t attacked and Viktor was attacked. They have no explanation, just as there’s no explanation for Harry not being attacked earlier in the school year. But we do know why: this isn’t a game or even a game-like battle, the type of venue in which Harry must always be attacked. In addition to the feeble non-explanation for there being no Quidditch season at Hogwarts in Harry’s fourth year, the failure of Barty Crouch, Jr. to abduct Harry and take him to Voldemort on the first of September could be seen as a huge plot hole, since no reason is given in this or subsequent books for why Voldemort waited until June. However, the meta-reason is that this is the author’s modus operandi. Mock wars must morph into real wars. Another construct will not do.

Through his scar, Harry sees Voldemort torture Wormtail. When he goes to Dumbledore to talk about this, he finds Fudge and the fake-Moody with Dumbledore in the headmaster’s office. Dumbledore sees his guests out, and while Harry waits for Dumbledore to return, he enters the Pensieve belonging to the headmaster, a bowl of liquid memories that lets him see past events that Dumbledore has been mulling over. In more than one memory he sees an arena-like courtroom, a place of confrontation resembling a venue for games, foreshadowing his being in the same arena in the next book (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 22: The Phoenix Games).

However, Harry still has an arena to deal with in the present. One of the obstacles in the maze on the Quidditch pitch is a sphinx. In Greek mythology, Oedipus also met a sphinx and had to answer its riddle: “What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?” Oedipus gives the correct answer: “Man,” because a baby crawls on all fours, then learns to walk upright, and finally, must walk with the help of a stick as an elderly person (the third leg).

The riddle that the sphinx in the maze asks Harry to solve has “spider” for its answer, but the first part of the riddle produces the word “spy”. This is not long after Harry sees Dumbledore refer to Snape as a spy in the Pensieve. Soon afterward, Harry sees a giant spider, an acromantula, about to attack Cedric. Unlike the last time Harry went up against giant spiders, he’s not saved by the Ford Anglia, living wild in the forest as a woods-car, the savior that rescued Harry and Ron from the spiders in Chamber of Secrets (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina). Instead, when Cedric trips and drops his wand while the spider bears down on him, Harry distracts it by throwing spells at it, so it attacks Harry, lifting him into the air until he finds a spell that works on the spider—his signature move, Expelliarmus, the move of an anti-player—which makes the spider drop him.

The fall from around twelve feet makes Harry’s previously-injured leg even worse, so after he and Cedric succeed in stunning the spider by aiming at its soft underbelly, he’s unable to run to the cup. He tells Cedric to take it, but Cedric tells Harry to take it, since he saved Cedric twice in the maze. They disagree and both refuse to take it: they are both being anti-players here, neither one jumping at the chance to win just because he can. Finally, Harry suggests that they take it together and this appeals to Cedric’s innate fairness and power-sharing. Because of Harry’s injured leg, as they walk to the cup, Cedric serves as a walking stick for Harry—just like in the riddle that Oedipus solved. However, the moment they take the cup together, they are plunged from metaphorical war, though a dangerous one, into a real war, and soon after they arrive in the graveyard in Little Hangleton, Cedric is dead.

Games don’t disappear once Harry is plunged into a real war: dueling with Voldemort. After Voldemort regains his body and gathers his Death Eaters, he prefers to confront Harry alone. The Death Eaters create a circle around them, an impromptu arena. A similar arena is created around them during their duel in the seventh book.

Harry is bound to a tombstone by Voldemort, a symbolic crucifixion. When he’s released, the battle with Voldemort takes on the characteristics of a game, not surprisingly. Rowling writes:

Voldemort raised his wand, but this time Harry was ready; with the reflexes born of his Quidditch training, he flung himself sideways onto the ground; he rolled behind the marble headstone of Voldemort’s father, and he heard it crack as the curse missed him.

“We are not playing hide-and-seek, Harry,” said Voldemort’s soft, cold voice...

Harry links his reflexes to Quidditch, the mock-war in which he is a stellar fighter, while Voldemort compares it to hide-and-seek, a children’s game Harry is reminded of in the seventh book when Voldemort is waiting for him in the forest. Harry-the-anti-player decides that he’s no longer playing games. He’ll stand and die like his father, the archetype that rules the fourth book. This foreshadows his decision to throw off his Invisibility Cloak in the last book, presenting himself to be killed, also the act of an anti-player.

What gives Harry a victory here is shared power: Fawkes’s power. Harry and Voldemort each have a feather from Fawkes the phoenix in their wands. As though the feathers miss being together, united, the spells they cast cause the wands to link. Their wands are yet another example in the series of metaphorical quantum entanglement, and the resulting cage of light resonates with phoenix song, giving Harry hope and evoking the god-figure, Dumbledore, Fawkes’s owner, just as Fawkes was Dumbledore’s agent, a symbolic Holy Spirit, in the Chamber of Secrets (see Quantum Harry, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina).

The wands link because no one disarms Harry. When he arrived in the graveyard, his scar hurt him and “his wand slipped from his fingers”. When Wormtail returns Harry’s wand he is still its master. Voldemort doesn’t think about the Wand Game rules—or games in general—so this is a missed opportunity. Harry’s will probably couldn’t have prevailed over Voldemort’s after their wands linked if he were not master of his wand. This incident also leads Harry’s wand to consider Voldemort an enemy, so it acts on its own against Voldemort in the final book, when Harry leaves Privet Drive. Once again, even though Harry didn’t sign up to play a game—as he didn’t sign up to be in the Tournament—he is playing one anyway.

The ghostly shades emerging from Voldemort’s wand are a reprise of the archetypal Wise Old Man (this time it’s Frank Bryce), the Father (James and Cedric, both archetypal Fathers) and the Mother (Lily), the archetypes that accompany Harry at significant times in his life (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 5: Our Father). These images distract Voldemort and the Death Eaters, foreshadowing Harry’s loved ones being an honor guard for him when he willingly walks to his death. The phenomenon with the phoenix-feather wands also foreshadows the Elder Wand’s refusal, entangled with Harry as it is, to act contrary to his will during their final duel, just as brother wands will refuse to fight each other. Harry will play the Wand Game with Voldemort twice more and win each time—the last time for good. But that last time he will once again triumph with his signature move: the Disarming Charm, the spell of an anti-player.

In previous essays on this blog, I've written about how the seven obstacles to the Philosopher's Stone align with the seven books in the series, so far covering the first three obstacles and books. The first obstacle Harry encounters is a three-headed Cerberus-like dog that is guardian of an underworld, evoking the symbolic death that is necessary before achieving immortality through the Philosopher’s Stone. The second obstacle is Devil’s Snare, a deadly plant that evokes the snakes, literal and figurative, of the second book. It also requires sunlight, which is how Harry conquers the Basilisk—through his statement of faith in Dumbledore, which brings Fawkes the Phoenix to him (phoenixes being entangled with fire and with the sun), bearing the Sorting Hat with the sword of Gryffindor. The third obstacle, the flying keys, is like practice for a Seeker, and this obstacle aligns with the one book built around literal Quidditch (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 10: All’s Fair in War and Quidditch and Episode 11: Wargames). It also involves a quest for a key that recalls Harry freeing Sirius and Buckbeak.

The fourth obstacle to the Philosopher’s Stone is the life-sized chess game, a literal game and a literal battle, rather than a battle that resembles a game. This involves all three of the friends in the Trio, though Ron decides on the moves for Harry’s side. He sacrifices himself to achieve victory—another anti-player move—but since Harry and Hermione are also players, they’re all potentially in danger. No one is safe.

Professor McGonagall provides this obstacle; she teaches Transfiguration, a theological term referring to a manifestation of God. In the chess game, Harry is in the role of a bishop, a link between heaven and earth, as Jesus is considered to be at the moment of his Transfiguration. McGonagall is also the only female character embodying the Father archetype, which rules the book that is built around the Triwizard Tournament, a life-sized board game (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode17: The Goblet of Games). This is foreshadowed by the first book’s life-sized chess game.

The chess game parallels the Tournament in many ways. Harry is equal to himself, for obvious reasons. That he goes to a place of death—a graveyard—but returns, is reflected in his role as a bishop, a position of heavenly, not earthly power, a Liminal Being who crosses thresholds, who can cross over into the world of death and return (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 8: Have You Tried Not Being Liminal?).

This is where the earlier comparison of the two Counter-Trios, from the fourth and fifth books, comes in handy again. Neville, a combination of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, is not technically in the chess game, but he and Cedric correspond to each other in the two Counter-Trios, since Cedric is a Hufflepuff while Neville is a pseudo-Hufflepuff. They also embody the same archetype: the Father. When Hermione puts a full-body bind on Neville—an interesting choice of spell—this makes him similar to a corpse with rigor mortis, while Cedric becomes a literal corpse. Cedric is also the one who does not survive the Tournament, while in the first book, Neville, his representative, doesn’t even get started. He stays in the Gryffindor common room, immobile, while Harry, Ron and Hermione go to protect the Philosopher’s Stone. There’s also a parallel between Neville and Cedric at the ends of the first and fourth books, when Dumbledore toasts to each of them during the Leaving Feast, though he is rewarding Neville for standing up to his friends—as Dumbledore stood up to Grindelwald—and he is memorializing Cedric.

Hermione is at a disadvantage at chess, just as Fleur does not perform impressively in the Tournament despite being her school’s champion. In the Counter-Trio of the fourth book, Hermione’s doppelganger is Fleur, while Luna is her doppelganger in the fifth book’s Counter-Trio. Luna’s link to chess is that in the seventh book, Ron calls the Lovegood house a “rook”—another name for the castle in chess. This is the role that Hermione plays during the chess game.

Ron is again linked to Viktor Krum, both of them archetypal Wise Old Men. In the fourth book, Viktor makes a sacrifice in the Quidditch World Cup that helps others. Ginny is Viktor’s equal in the fifth book’s Counter-Trio and Ron’s doppelganger, and she makes the same sort of sacrifice that Viktor does in the World Cup the first time she plays Seeker in place of Harry. She makes this sacrifice largely for Ron’s benefit. Thus, Ron’s sacrifice in the chess game foreshadows Viktor’s World Cup choice and Ginny’s later choice.

In other words, in the chess game that foreshadows the World Cup and the Tournament with the labyrinthine maze whose center must be reached, as if the champions are on a giant Ludo or Parcheesi board, both of which are based on an ancient game board that looks like a symbol for the earth (or the world), Ron’s sacrifice helps Harry to move forward, making the chess game a clever summation of the fourth book, in which the Triwizard Tournament is a life-sized circle-and-cross game instead of a chess game. In this chess game, at the beginning of the series, Harry sees an example of the type of sacrifice Viktor makes at the World Cup, and the type of sacrifice Ginny, his partner and equal, will also make before Harry, the anti-player, makes the ultimate sacrifice, laying down his life to defeat Voldemort.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 19: Not Playing to Win. Copyright 2017-2018 by Quantum Harry Productions and B.L. Purdom. See other posts on this blog for direct links to all episodes of Quantum Harry.

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