The role of Mad-Eye Moody interests me. We all got to know Mad-Eye pretty well in The Goblet of Fire, only to find out that it wasn't Mad-Eye at all that we were getting to know but, instead, that it was Barty Crouch Jr in disguise.
This created an interesting situation at the beginning of the fifth novel. Harry, Hermione and Ron spent the entire previous year at Hogwarts with a man they believed was the famed ex-Auror. They grew to know "him" fairly well and even to develop something of a relationship with him.
The real Mad-Eye, meanwhile, was stuck in a box for that entire year. He doesn't know these kids. He barely even meets them at the end of the book.
Then begins The Order of the Phoenix. Mad-Eye is a part of the Order and so interacts with the many characters at Grimmauld Place, including Harry, Hermione and Ron. I would have expected there to be some kind of strangeness, some awkwardness between the real Auror and our dynamic trio when they meet up again in this fifth book.
After all, the young people must feel they know Mad-Eye pretty well; he, on the other hand, has never really met them. It would be a very strange situation for all of them.
Yet J.K. doesn't address the strangeness at all. In fact, she continues to write the real Mad-Eye exactly as she wrote the fake Mad-Eye, and she appears to let the relationship between Harry and the Auror pick up exactly where it left off the year before.
I think J.K. slipped a bit here. I think she worked so hard to develop both the character of Mad-Eye and his relationship with Harry in The Goblet of Fire that, in writing the following novels, she forgot that it wasn't the real Mad-Eye at all in the fourth book. It never occurred to her that she should have them "start over" as strangers in The Order of the Phoenix.
She wrote their relationship so well in the fourth novel that she fooled herself into thinking that they actually knew each other.
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