Expecto Patronum does help control the dementors but I do agree with your theory.

 

I dunno.. Polyjuice seems to risky.. What is the escape plan?

 

He's a half-giant...y'know: moderate spell resistance, giving them "a bit o' tha'! And tha', too!" and then run.

Or, since the person impersonating Hagrid is most likely 10x more intelligent than the real Hagrid, the usual Portkey escape has never failed. And s/he'd probably be better at performing magic than Hagrid, what with being educated and all.

 

As I see it, there are two main paths here.

A) It's part of the test. Someone is polyjuiced to look like Hagrid (since I won't believe it's him until the author explicitly states it,) and the Dementors are not actually freed. The "escape" is just to ramp up the difficulty of the test.

B) It's sabotage. Someone has been compelled (somehow) and polyjuiced into opening the cages. The immediate intent is to destroy the candidates. There are MAJOR knockon effects though. Every one of the Headmasters would be fired and probably jailed, as well as anyone even remotely involved in arranging this TriWiz. The brightest stars of the schools are worse than dead. Most parents pull their kids out the schools.
I'm not going further down that road.

Other possibilities:
Harry is more-or-less delirious from exposure and is hallucinating.

The Malfoys are stupidly vicious and are confident that they'll survive a MAJOR investigation.

One of the candidates is cheating (Which is starting to seem mandatory for this damn tournament.) He/She is ready to produce some dazzling display that will earn lots of points.


Edited to add:
Or the most likely scenario - JBern has come up with something completely different but logical and will blow our socks off.

 

And you need to see the worst case scenario:
With a dragon: Death or badly hurt
But with all the people there it was very controlled and the champion would "only" get hurt and that isn't too bad.
They can heal broken bones, burns and all this stuff in minutes/days,
look at you everyday Quidditch accidents.
With Dementors: You can loose your soul or high psychological damage
I don't know how good they are with psychological damage, but a lost soul is something even the greatest healer can't bring back.
The consequences are just too severe

It would be insane to make fighting them WITHOUT wands a part of the task...
but then again, wizards aren't know for their competence when it comes to logic and common sense.

 

Can't be polyjuice. If I remember right from Deathly Hallows when people are checking each other to see if anybody is an impostor after the chase scene, Remus doesn't check Hagrid because he says the polyjuice potion is intended for human use only. Hagrid's a half-giant, so it wouldn't work.

Course, Jbern could just ignore this if he wanted to.

 

No. I mean that someone is polyjuiced into looking like Hagrid. Or a glamour or illusion.

 

Yeah, but I took it both ways. Hagrid can't polyjuice into anybody else, and nobody could use polyjuice to look like him. It's like the cat thing with Hermione. He's not completely human, so it won't work.

Glamour, illusion, I can see those working.

 

I don't see why it couldn't work. Before DH, I assumed polyjuice worked for humaniods - I.e. Anything in canon that humans have porked and reproduced with wizards successfully. Giants,werewolves, veela, goblins (Flitwick?) have canon proven wizard offspring.

 

well, after DH it's sort of considered Canon. Anyway, i am very curious where this is going, but i ain't going to risk a guess, i am usually wrong in Jbern's stories

 

Its not Hagrid.
Well unless jbern doesnt do the accent.
But it sounds scripted. Cant picture him saying something quite like that.

 

You're right... I t sounds like an excuse for a Ministry campaign against Giants and half-breeds.

 

The Ministry kinda doesn't know he's a half-giant. My bet he's under Imperius. Simpliest plans work the best. Controlling him is like controlling animals, if jbern wants to be cruel, he'd even make it a weak compulsion charm, not an Imperius.

 

Magical creatures can be very hard to control, I expect, unlike normal animals (in fact I would reject the term animal, because Hagrid is no more an animal than any other wizard).

 

OK, I would change "animal" to "cattle". Frankly, these are the only words that came up when I think about Hagrid. Mellow-minded, lacks any kind of character, a sheep, stupid, a drunkard. In other words, the perfect character to use for tension relief, or any kind of humorous titbits. See how jbern uses Dobby in TML: Hagrid here is in the same role. Hack shares the same role, too, when he's not kicking arse.

 

Someone probably convinced Hagrid that doing this would impress Olympe.

That said, I've just come to the realization that Olympe could be all kinds of a beast in duels if she has any kind of offensive/defense output to go with her innate Giant spell resistance. She is a Headmistress of a top school. Granted, so is Karkaroff, and he's just a fodder Death Eater.

 

@Sol: We're back to the "Hagrid couldn't keep a secret if you nailed his mouth shut" argument.

 

Unless someone convinced him to do it as a spur of the moment thing just before the task?

 

Hagrid will not kill Harry for lulz or sex, however stupid he may be. Is that hard to understand?

Sorry, I think I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying hagrid being a giant meant he was as easy to control as an animal, because giants are magical creatures.

Anyways, I don't entirely agree on your descrition of Hagrid, because he does have a quite strong character moral sense, but I do think he would be easy to persuade generally (though not if he knew he were hurting Harry).

 

I just reread chapter and noticed other survival option nobody mentioned before.
Everyone assumed that trapped with dementors are champions, but there is possibility that trapped ones are: HJ, Fleur, Athena, Hagrid and two aurors.
In that case wandless summon wand from one auror + normal Patronus from wand.
If it is true then jbern must laught that nobody noticed this possibility.