Anything about Harry Potter that always annoyed you?

The thing is though, the presence of time travel blows away any other kind of magic seen in the series. It's hard to ignore the presence of time travel technology, especially when we're dealing with a situation that hands it out to thirteen year old girls for purposes of study. But everyone just ignores this insanely powerful weapon. Forget the Deathly Hallows, Time Turners are where it's at.

again, if no time loops are in place, it's not going to be used.

you can't just pick up a time turner and go baxk to kill harry in the past because he's clearly still alive.

edited 28th Jun '11 2:05:18 PM by annebeeche

See, my fanon involves the Time Turners themselves preserving that particular Idiot Ball because it's so much easier to keep time intact if there's less time travel occurring.

what use can the time turners be put to, anyhow/

you can't harm anyone because they remain unharmed in the present.

Sure you can harm someone, it's just that no one in this particular story was harmed that way (several people were helped).

But JKR doesn't even try to unpack the wild and woolly world of time travel. Better to not include it at all rather than to include it without thinking about it.

It could've done with an in-universe explaination, though. Even something as simple as Ron or Harry putting forward the idea of using them to stop bad things going down and Hermione or Dumbledore shooting it down.

Speaking about Hermione - if she's in more than one class at the same time, then logically there is more than one Hermione in the present. She pulls this trick more than once. What happened to all the Hermiones?

In every case, the past Hermione went back in time to become the present Hermione, I assume.

Here's something to think about.

Suppose you get a time-turner, and go a week into the past. Simple, right? Only not. You don't have to meet your past self - you can just spend the week chilling out, in hiding somewhere. Here's the point. If we're disallowing the possibility of paradoxes forming, congratulations - your past self now has, effectively, Plot Armor. Because he MUST be alive a week from now to use the time turner, it is impossible for him to be killed in that week. (Of course, you, the future self, can be killed, but that's a different matter.) Not only that; in total, your past self would be prevented from:

• Death;
• Any injuries which prevent the use of a Time-Turner (loss of limbs, etc)
• Possibly any injuries at all - if you're alive and uninjured a week in the future, then clearly you cannot be injured in the intervening period.
• At least, any injuries which cannot be recovered from in less than a week.

It depends on the precise mechanics of how the spell works, but I'm fairly confident you'd be able to flat-out No-Sell Avada Kedavra, with none of that 'power of love' bullshit required.

edited 29th Jun '11 4:34:31 AM by RiotousRascal

Isn't that true of all time travel that works with the stable time loop though? I know that at least applies with Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon is able to go back in time and save himself after being stabbed because he lived in the first place.

Only inasmuch as the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle is adhered to.

the bat pencil— simple. the normal hermione disappeared into the past with the time turner, and time travel hermione took her place when she passively returned to that point in time.

see the prisoner of azkaban film, which applies the time turner perfectly.

riotous rascal; there's no point in doing that because you survived to use the time turner in the first place. you are protecting yourself from your imagination only.

edited 29th Jun '11 6:20:34 AM by annebeeche

true, but it just feels like there should be some sort of bottleneck somewhere if there are several Hermiones in the same place in time at once. Although I do admit that anything involving time travel fries my brain up, so I do concede I'm probably just confusing myself.

Fuck it - Timey-Wimey Ball and leave it at that.

it's easier to understand if you draw it out on paper.

Take a look at this hastily made timeline. The black line is Hermione's course. You'll notice that at 3 PM, there are three Hermiones running around. The first Hermione went back in time to become the second Hermione, who then went back in time to become the third.

But see? Even though it would look like there are three different Hermiones at 3 PM, when you pull back, you can see that there is only one line, even if it zigzags. From Hermione's perspective, she's a single person who experienced four hours where everyone else had two.

edited 29th Jun '11 7:52:15 AM by Durazno

Ah ok. I get it now.

Evidently I'm not qualified to pilot my avatar

yes, and as you can see, you disappear when you use the time turner, so by the the time the second hermione disappears, only the third hermione is left.

Riotous Rascal: My theory on how Time-Turners work is that it's really, really hard for them to actually create or modify normal magical effects. They prevent paradoxes by effecting normal probability. So if you try to AK your past self, then, though possible that the spell would simply do nothing, it's far, far more likely that you would suddenly die before casting the spell at all. Also, you forgot that it's also impossible to be seen by your past self, unless you remember seeing your past self.

it's possible to see your past self without realizing it's your past self, like when harry thought he saw his dad but really saw himself.

Just the nature of magic in general. As has already been mentioned, for some reason the use of magic boils down to waving a stick and saying some Latinus Bullshittimus.

The limitations of magic seem horribly mechanical. For instance, in magic, it is impossible to create food, money and other things using a spell. Not just that there's a rule against doing so - the characters are actually unable to do so. That would suggest that magic itself has some kind of knowledge of economics. What the hell? Not to mention that the source of all their magical food is barely mentioned, and all wizards seem to avoid anything 'muggle'... are there wizard farms? Where??

Then one has to ask... what is a spell? It hits something and produces an unusual effect. The thing that is most jarring to me is... it can miss. It talks about 'dodging' spells in the book. What is a spell then? Is it like some kind of magic bullet produced by saying bullcrap? In my mind, surely a 'spell' cannot miss. That's surely the least magical thing ever. Bullets miss. Snowballs miss. Arcane power coming from the mind of some genetically endowed super-human? Meh.

Also, it feels like Pokemon in the way that this entire culture seems to get by doing absolutely nothing except talk about magic and do magicky things.

@Rascal, I know it was the last page when you mentioned time-loop computation, but still: DO NOT MESS WITH TIME.

DD's plan to give Harry the Info Dump: Riddle kills Snape with a slow death while Harry is in the basement and then Riddle leaves.

Riddle: Snape, I have to kill you, but for the sake of loyal service, I will make it quick and painless.

Riddle: Snape, I am going to watch you in pain and get my rocks off.

Riddle: Potter will be here in 10 minutes, so I will kill you now!

Riddle: Potter will be here in 10 minutes. Snape I want you to writhe about on the floor while I set up the ambush.

DD's plan would have collapsed if Riddle had not killed Snape in the exact time, place, manner etc.

Riddle was obeying DD's orders all along.

The plan would have also worked if Riddle just didn't kill Snape. His death wasn't exactly inside Dumbledoor's plan. So it's not that the plan was implausible, it's that the circumstances that made it work even when it went wrong were implausible.

Harry turns into a smug little prick as the books go on. I actually would've liked this fan theory on Cracked. The last person you expect, Neville, is the Chosen One while Harry was groomed as a decoy. Now that's a twist ending.

edited 6th Jul '11 3:28:15 PM by EnglishMajor

Okay, about Slytherin - it's not that we're evil per se, it's that we just don't care about moral scruples. If a Slytherin doesn't like you, he'll probably trick your best friend into turning you into a frog, just for shits and giggles.

I didn't like the fact that the most powerful wizard in history is defeated by the power of love, wtf. I mean, I kinda get the point, but he has horrible curses up the wazoo and Harry is a canonically suckass wizard.

I still love the series, but it has...problems.

I thought Harry was a canonically extremely powerful wizard. He was accomplished enough to produce a patronus, and to teach the DA.