Let's look at most tournaments that people are familiar with. Whether it's a chess, football, basketball, or poker, tournaments generally follow a basic principle, which is to start with a bunch of players, and narrow it down to one winner who is deemed the best of the initial group. In general, players or teams are eliminated over the course of the tournament, either dropping out when they can no longer proceed, or losing a contest or match and being eliminated.
Let's take "March Madness" as a great example - 64 teams (or 68 depending on where you start in the process) play in a single elimination tournament. The teams are paired up, and the winner proceeds while the loser is out. Repeat with 32, 16, 8, 4, and 2 teams. Super easy.
In other tournaments, contestants accrue points as they proceed through a series of different contests, and no one is 'eliminated' per se, they just become incapable of winning as the series continues. You see this with diving tournaments, as an example. But even these tournaments start with a lot of people or groups, and the field of likely winners is narrowed with each dive. Often, there are levels that divers progress through - so after five or six dives, the top ten divers move on, for example.
The Tri-Wizard Tournament is more like the 'point accrual' tournament than the 'bracket' tournament, but is less interesting that either. Imagine if you were excited to dig in to March Madness, and instead of getting to watch 64 teams narrow down to one, you skipped all the earlier games and upsets as some all powerful cup belched out the "final four" teams before any games were played, based on it's own internal algorithms. Lame. Or if hundreds of divers were ready for a competition, and the four who actually got to dive were chosen by a process that is completely secret to everyone, but which everyone just needs to trust as fair. Also lame.
In the Tri-Wizard Tournament, 3 (or 4) wizards compete, but not against each other. They compete with a course. They get points depending on how well they do, or how much they are Harry Potter. They steal an egg from a dragon, and get points for how fast they did it. All of them manage to steal their eggs, but I'm guessing that even if they didn't steal the egg they'd still proceed. Next, they get a clue from the egg about the next contest, which involves swimming underwater. They show up and have an hour to find something under the lake. One person drops out, one person wins the contest, one gets second, and one gets more points by being Harry Potter.
Whew! Now they all have points. The girl is in last place. They all get to enter the maze that constantly shifts and moves and drives people crazy. Having lots of points lets you enter early, having less points means you have to wait.
Okay, but the maze shifts around, so having a time advantage isn't necessarily going to help. Having a shifting maze means you have to also get lucky. The girl drops out, again. I wonder if Rowling just doesn't think girls can kick ass. One boy goes crazy. The other two, from Hogwarts, win together. If not for the whole Voldemort ending, if I were a member of the other schools, I'd be pretty concerned that the host school got two students instead of one, and those students won the tournament together.
Now, forget for a moment that the other plot of HP4 is that Voldemort needs to get Harry away from Hogwarts so he can become human again, and once his servant is installed at Hogwarts that could pretty much happen at any point at all, so there's no need for this big production of getting Harry into the tournament and helping him win it... Forget all that. Let's just assume that having a tournament is a major and necessary plot point.
Here's how I would approach the Tri-Wizard Tournament, if I were a writer who wanted to make that part of my book interesting.
Start with a high number of contestants. Everyone is eligible unless they fail certain pre-requisites, like they're in detention or something like that. Potentially, that's hundreds of students. Great! Now you start to narrow the field through a wizarding decathalon of sorts. Ten or twelve tasks that everyone is ranked and scored on. At the end of the decathalon you have the top wizards and witches move on. Let's say you are able to narrow the field to 32 students, with the top 8 from each school and 8 wildcards from the remaining top scorers.
Now for wizard dueling. Every wizard duels four or five other wizards, and is scored like in a karate or judo tournament - not just on ultimate victory, but on execution of spells, creativity, finesse, etc. Some contests wouldn't result in a win by "KO" but would still have a win by decision.
This narrows the field down to the top 4 students from each school, plus 4 wildcards. Now the contests get tough and deadly. Now they have to steal from dragons, fight trolls, breathe underwater, and get creative in their problem solving. Each contest has half the kids moving on, and it gets harder and harder as it goes on, until it's down to the top witch or wizard from each school, and the wildcard, the otherwise top score from the remaining students.
Now lets back up to the 'story' of this tournament. Yes, it's called Harry Potter and the Flaming Dr. Pepper, so we know he'll be in the tournament and working his way up the ranks. But I think all the usual suspects should be involved as well. I'd love to see some of the older Weasleys make a deep run, for example. If this is my version of the world, then we'd already have at least one person from each of the four houses, with Harry in Slytherin, Ron in Gryffindor, Hermione in Ravenclaw, and Neville in Hufflepuff, but even in the normal HP universe, having kids from every house competing and winning and proving themselves in a different context would be a great opportunity to introduce some interesting people and also help build new relationships as competitors come to grudgingly respect each other, etc. On top of that, you've got two other schools, one apparently all dudes, and the other all ladies. What's up with that? Are there no guy wizards in France? Are there no lady witches in Bulgaria or wherever Durmstrang is? Anyway, it would be nice if both the schools had more than just one or two characters that got to participate in the story and the tournament.
For some reason, Harry needs to win some ultimately meaningless contest in order for Voldemort to feel like it's time to destroy him. I'd toss that out, and have Harry get spirited away during the final 8 contest. The Final Four continue with a desperate search happening behind the scenes, Cedric, also eliminated, follows Harry's footsteps and finds himself in the midst of Voldemort's party, and gets murdered. Harry makes it back in time to ruin the final victory celebration, dropping into the middle of it all with Cedric's body and the story of Voldemort's return.
Overall, the big "Plot" of book four stays the same with this new treatment, but a better tournament structure creates dozens of opportunities for interesting storytelling that fleshes out the characters through their interactions with new people, both in friendships and in competition.
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