In the book GoF, don’t the characters have the same discussion this thread is as to why Krum caught the snitch even though his team was losing? IIRC, the feeling was that the Irish team was dominating the whole quaffle scoring so thoroughly, he did it to end the game with a non-embarrassing score - so the Irish team won by 10, instead of 20,000.
And I have no cite to back this up, but I’m utterly certain that when I saw the first movie in the theater, the announcer did say what Ludy and Montgomery0 are referring to - that catching the snitch gives you an automatic win. When they released the movie on DVD however, the audio was changed to the 150 points rule in the book.
After the first film, I found the quidditch match both repetitive and thought it added little to the story. Dropping the match altogether would not have altered my enjoyment of the following films
Yup. It’s clear in the book that Krum knew his team was never going to catch up, and wanted to end the game on his own terms.
And the scoring system for Quidditch makes perfectly good sense in a round-robin tournament, like the competition for the Hogwarts Quidditch cup. Every team plays every other team once, and what counts at the end are the total number of points each team has scored over the course of a year. It makes much less sense in an elimination tournament, like the Quidditch World Cup, but even so, I’d compare catching the Snitch to winning two games in a rubber of bridge – it comes with a huge point bonus and usually guarantees that your team comes out ahead, but not always. Sometimes the tiny little part scores matter.
Usually it’s catch the snitch, you win. The very rare exceptions don’t change how much the rules bother me. The problem is, it’s presented as a team sport, but it’s really not. Five of the six players on a team can be so much worse than the players on the other team that their opponents can outscore than 140 to 0…but as long as their seeker is better than the other team’s, they win. Basically, the only time you can win without catching the snitch is if your team outclasses the other team by so much that you ought to be playing in different leagues.
In any other sport, a close final score indicates a close, exciting match. In Quidditch, a close final score means one team was thoroughly whomping on the other team, but the other team got lucky and caught the snitch.
That doesn’t make any sense, if it is described correctly above (which is my recollection), then Bulgaria was not so far behind. They only needed to get one more goal to get the ten points and then catching the snitch would be a tie. Two more and they would’ve won.
Also don’t forget that if he or the Irish Seeker doesn’t catch it, the game can’t end–I think Oliver Wood talks about a game that went on for days in the first book, with the teams constantly bringing in replacements.
If Krum thought that the Irish team were going to beat Bulgaria anyways, he probably wanted to bring the match to an end as quickly and non-embarrassingly as possible.
The Quidditch helps establish Harry as a strong character who has skills besides magic, ie flying. It also serves as a unifying event for each house (and occasionally 3 houses vs Slytherin).
I think they go on too long. I do want to see Luna commentating, though. In the books, I think Ron’s “nerves” are too overdone.
That’s sort of my problem with it, the rules were so obviously designed so that Harry could be the focus of each match that it doesn’t really make sense to have any other postions on the team other then SnitchCatcher (or whatever Harry’s position is called).
Well of course, that’s what the books are about. The geeky guy who is really special and a great wizard and triumphs over his foes like all the kids who read it want to. He’s the hero.
I read that last word way too fast and snorted with laughter.
I don’t like any of the movies and I agree, quidditch is thoroughly broken. Remember Bob Newhart’s bit of Abner Doubleday trying to explain the rules of baseball (as a new game) to a game manufacturer? Explaing the rules of quidditch sounds something like that. (Try going to this link and going to about 7/8 of the way to the end. http://media.libsyn.com/media/behindthebricks/btb24.mp3)
The scoring makes no sense. If snitch catching was worth say, 5 goals instead of 15, it’d make a little more sense. It’s still weird that there are two entirely different ways of scoring, but at least the point disparity is closer to say the difference between a field goal and a touchdown or a single runner scoring versus a grand slam. More importantly, what’s with the rest of the rules? For that matter, what about simple things like physics? You would probably have nothing to work against when going to throw a quaffle or a bludger, so I’d imagine it’d be like throwing a football off your back foot or any other attempt at throwing with no plant or followthrough. Even if the broomstick gives some sort of magical resistance, won’t it be like trying to throw a ball from your knees? Plus, as soon as you throw it, it’s gonna start curving back down. So you have to get a ball through a vertically-mounted hoop with no power behind your throw, so you’ll have to get really freaking close to one of the hoops to get it through. The same would probably be true for the bludgers. Even if they are spelled to keep a level height above the ground, my points about getting any power behind the throw stand.
Other rules that make no sense: No substitution. A mostly-closed rule book (yeah, the NFL does this, but at least everyone knows what all the fouls are) with way way too many fouls. Even with all these fouls, and possible penalties, a single shot against a keeper makes little sense. It’s got the technical difficulty of a penalty shot or penalty kick but has a low point value. It’s like trying to make a free throw with defenders in the paint trying block the shot.
I like the Quidditch matches in both the books and the movies. I’m still a little bummed they truncated what we saw of the World Cup in the last movie, but I understand they needed to do some cutting to bring the movie in under five hours.
And the one time that happens it’s utterly senseless. Losing 160-0, Viktor Krum then catches the Snitch, thereby losing on purpose.
The logical thing to do would have been to try to prevent the opponent from catching it and see if his team could just get 20 points closer, which presumably they might have been able to do, being a World Cup finalist and all that.
That would actually make the sport a little interesting; if sometimes one Chaser had to prevent the Snitch from being caught, rather than catching it. The one chance she had to write that happening, she has Krum lose on purpose. s. Rowling isn’t much of a sports fan, I suspect.
