And yet he has a point. Why is Harry so foolish as to let it come down to a shoot-out to reach the final decision, anyway?

And while we're on the topic, this trials thing doesn't seem very consistent. Katie Bell got onto the team the same year Harry did, presumably, when she was in her second year, but there was no mention of trials then.

Well, it's not as if we know many Gryffindors outside Harry's year, so it makes sense. What I do find dubious is that Harry himself barely knows who Cormac is - what, it was too hard to learn the names of the ten to twenty people in the year above him in Gryffindor? I can accept from personal HS experience that he knows rather few of the people in the years *below* him, but surely he should know most of those in the year immediately above his.

Certainly. You seem a bit mixed up with the timeline. The Gaunt scene must have been, hm, in the twenties or thirties - the Brideshead Revisited era, say. Within a year or two, Merope gives birth to Voldemort, who enters the orphanage not long after when she dies. He goes to Hogwarts roughly at the time of WW2, and then a few years after the war, he kills his father and his grandparents, disappears for a few decades and then returns for his big reign of terror.

It's still weird, because there were moments earlier in the series where he did seem aware.

While we're on the topic, though, the thing with Lavender Brown really doesn't make boys, and Ron in particular, look good. He is interested in her for apparently no better reason than that she shows interest in him. Then again, in his defense, it's the first time a girl really does that, and his self-esteem in such matters has never been too high, as we see in his exaggerated reactions to Ginny's love-life.