• There are a bunch of problems with this. Deaths could have been prevented as well. Rowling just says "Doesn't work that way lol". Lesson here is, don't put time travelling into a non time travelling story

    The weirdest thing about time turners is the bootstrap paradoxes that happen in that book. Maybe you can’t actually change anything and fate is already written

    No, the weirdest thing about them is that every single one in existence was stored in one cabinet, which fell over, and somehow magically destroyed every single one beyond repair.

    JKR is a bad writer.

    It kinda pisses me off because just giving them a 24 hour limit for how far back you can go or smth fixes a lot of the problems they cause. But no, there needs to be a play explaining why changing historical events in the series is bad

    Even that is a bit much. Just have someone stay behind and, if someone dies, give them a call like "John Wizard died turn back time and do not let him leave his house today".

    That.. actually has the bones to be a really cool short story.

    One of the characters in Madoka Magica has this as part of their arc

    I actually have no idea what that show is, and also I learned today that reddit notifications don't respect spoiler tags.

    She had some good ideas, just no idea what to do with them.

    No she is not. Source: one of the best selling book series ever

    McDonald's is one of the best selling restaurants ever

    Doesn't mean its burgers are good

    This just in: IKEA makes the best furniture

    IKEA gives the best offer for furniture for its money/speed of acquisition my dude. otherwise it would not be so massive.

    So we agree that selling more of something doesn’t mean the product itself is the best, right?

    Bad writers don’t make billions selling books and stories. I wish I was that bad at writing

    Your criteria for quality writing is different than the audiences, which in this case, is tens of millions of people

    Seems to me that a good writer is someone who writes something that others enjoy reading 😬 But there’s no universal standard of what makes a good writer. I simply disagree that someone who has written something of the most successful books in history is a “bad” writer

    HP, by any measure, was a phenomenal success. If she were to start her bigotry and then release the books, nobody would give a shit about them.

    The time turner is a perfect example of her bad writing. Every time she came up with something, the fans would have questions, theories and so on, so she'd just write something in the next book to remove it entirely. For example, every time turner in existence breaking at the same time, because then it removes the "why didn't they just go back in time to save....".

    She's a bad writer.

    You seem to forget the books were started in the 90s. Her bigotry wasn’t as bigoted back then — the social norms were different.

    We could argue about what makes a good writer all day. My favourite author is Brandon Sanderson, other people think his writing is simplistic and bad.

    Being able to travel to the past is still a huge advantage, even if you only use it to change the future. The Licanius series by James Islington handes this topic really well.

    What’s funny is their main method of finding out information from the past is by using the Pensive, which uses actual memories. Human memory is very unreliable though. You literally have a thing in your hand that’ll let you watch the past objectively.

    No risk of meddling with the past in the pensieve though. Most people would do something stupid if they were able to easily travel back into the past to watch things.

    Wait how is actual human memory unreliable? Apart from someone forgetting or missing a few things during the actual event.

    Hmmm truly this is such a broad subject with so many ideas to explore I honestly couldnt think of a better way to guide you in the right direction than to just google “why is human memory unreliable” and click on the first reputable source that comes up. Because that can go off into dozens of different subjects of study.

    Humans are not only notoriously NOT good at remembering things, we are also not good at noticing things, not good at interpreting things, and very open to suggestion. This is why there are so many laws regarding police interview procedure. There are tons of examples of how easy it can be to implant a memory into a person who’s already stressed and unsure of the real events.

    Also our brains don’t handle memories in the best way. Essentially, every time you remember something, you are deleting that old copy of the memory and making a new one. And with those many deletions and recreations, details very easily get lost or changed.

    So it works like those “I asked AI to recreate this exact image 100 times “

    I would agree with most of the things, especially not good at remembering things but you're missing a lot of points.

    Having a memory and retrieving it are two points. It's just like in some cases of amnesia, people might forget who they are, and what they do, but they will still remember their skill set but that depends upon the type of amnesia and which brain regions are affected.

    Secondly interpretation is done by different brain regions and memory are mostly stored in different brain regions.

    And being in a police interview, adds a completely different view on to this and further complicates as different brain regions come into play like, you become anxious, hyper-aware and these things might lead one to not only interpret events differently but also recall them differently.

    I'll agree to the aspect of not noticing and missing key details but sub consciously we actually remember and notice more than we think we do.

    So I usually consider Pensive device as more of an organic CCTV thing. But I'm not like very well versed with how pensive is shown in HP media throughout. I just remember few scenes from it. And those scenes were important, so one is inclined to believe that person whose memory they are, they will remember them perfectly but again, having a memory and retrieving is quite different.

    This has gone longer than I expected, please don't think I'm a Rowling fan or something 😅😅 she's a despicable being.

    What a goated series. Epilogue was mindblowing.

    Judging by what I know about the series from these posts, I’m guessing the epilogue is at the beginning?

    No its at the end of the series. Its just really cool.

    From the original books, that would appear to be the case. Then she wrote a play and decided to throw out all the rules and invented new time turners that could go back further, also returned the user to the present after use, and completely changed reality around them.

    wasn't there some BS where like Nevil knocked over a bookshelf and destroyed every single time watch in the world?

    Yup, near the end of book 5.

    Wait... what?!???!

    In Order of the Phoenix when they’re at the ministry he knocks a box of time turners off a shelf and break them all, and apparently that box contained very time turners ever created lol

    they can't make more? and why would they all be there? that's an interesting writing choice.

    I know if I was the govt that had fate-altering devices, I would keep them all in the same room and under no protection that's for sure. And loan them to teenage nerds.

    Why can't they make that luck potion more than once? Why does most new magic turn up for the length of one book and then seemingly get forgotten about?

    The luck potion does have diminishing returns the more you use it. That coupled with being really hard to make.

    Still probably worth a try every now and then, they could rotate it amongst people

    I mean, to quote the IRA, "we only need to be lucky once." The entire long term goal of the protagonists is defeating an individual wizard.

    I think you'll find Thatcher was the Wicked Witch of the South. Not a wizard.

    Because Rowling wrote a fun magical thing for one book and then realized it broke the universe so she had to get rid of it.  

    It’s the same energy as people asking why the Fellowship didn’t ask the Eagles to take them to Mordor.  Even though the book tries to cover this, it still wasn’t enough.  When you introduce a Deus Ex Machina, people will always wonder why you aren’t using it all the time.

    Why didn’t they just steal a nuke and drop it on Voldemort.

    Or a hunting rifle.

    I don't think dropping a hunting rifle on Voldemort would necessarily kill him, unless they dropped it from a great height.

    JKR is a bad writer.

    Technically not every single one in the world, but nearly every one. Draco has one, and Theodore Nott was able to create one (although it has a five minute limit). Cursed Child (which is canon) is based around this.

    It's as simple as saying "the more you want to change time, the stronger the magic required. Life and death changes require unimaginable power. Going to multiple classes where most people don't even notice? That's not so hard."

    Life and death changes require unimaginable power.

    But they did use it to change life and death, specifically they did use it to save Buckbeak and then to save Harry

    From this we can understand that the life of Harry is as valuable as going to different classes

    But Buckbeak never actually died

    yes, because they saved him

    The key detail is that Buckbeack never actually dies. So they're not saving him, which sounds like semantics, except...

    It means that if someone has already died, you can't actually go back and save them. It's already too late.

    We get the logical conclusion of this with Harry, desperately wanting to see his dad again, waiting for his Patronus to show up, only to realise that he's already done that before, and needs to do it "again".

    (It's crazy magic. And narratively, it definitely opens some doors a bit toooo wide.
    But the key thing is that you can't do anything you haven't "already done," and the more you try to do retroactively, the greater the risk to yourself and others by thr very nature of the magic).

    IIRC that's a bootstrap paradox. Buckbeak never died because the original timeline already took into account Harry and Hermione traveling back from the future in order to save him. It's about maintaining the closed loop rather than changing historical events.

    The entirety of Harry Potter is the guise of a hard magic system you can go to a school to learn but the plot of a soft one where the protagonist knows so little that anything can be shoehorned in without explanation.

    Doesn’t the time turner in the book also reveal that it’s a “fate-based” timeline?

    Lesson here is, Harry Potter is extremely inconsistent, and the entire world stops making sense as soon as you ask more than two questions.

    PoA makes zero sense when you think about it. Sirius gets into Hogwarts and destroys the painting to the Gryffindor common room, and instead of asking for the time turner back to try to trap Sirius as he is doing it, Dumbledore does nothing.

    But like even time traveling stories usually have plot holes.

  • The movie operates under the “one timeline” theory of time travel. You can’t change the past because the present is already the result of whatever you do in the past.

      It’s like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure - the keys were missing in the past because future Ted had already gone back in time to steal them. 

    So if you tried to go back and kill Voldy, you’d fail because how he died is already determined. 

    Time turners were also incredibly rare and highly controlled/regulated.. before they all got accidently destroyed in the books. Their effects were highly studied to review what the outcomes would before it was given to her for this reason. They did just ignore the whole "she broke the law" portion though.

    Time turners were also incredibly rare and highly controlled/regulated

    ... And they just gave one to a schoolkid so she could catch up on classes.

    The books literally told us that time travel magic was one of the least known magic. Letting a straight A student explore and use one in a controlled environment is exactly how to properly observe and learn more about it safely.

    I know people think of time travel as this big canon-breaking plot device, but Closed loop/Fixed Timeline time travel is the least dangerous kind of time travel because it doesn't let anyone change anything that already happened.

    "We don't really know much about this green glowing rocks we dug up, better give it to some 13 yo girl so she can play with them and we can see how safe it is" lmao

    Giving unknown, rare, powerful things to kids to play

    You might want to pick a different example because we absolutely did give radioactive materials to everyone and they did all sorts of terribly unsafe things with them.

    This guy probably didn't know of the infamous radioactive toys in the 50s.

    But it's still not "exactly how we are supposed to observe" nowadays

    Not the same. I believe kids call this false equivalence and Appeal to Extremes fallacy.

    Not worthy of a counterargument.

    Nah messing with time changing magic that you don’t know about is pretty fucking extreme.

    Who said they dont know about it? People who haven't read the books fascinate me. How can you be so confident in giving opinions when you know nothing about the material.

    No, that is a terrible way of trying to properly observe and learn more about it safely.

    This is true, but also missing the point. In Bill and Ted the keys are only missing because the time machine exists, the presence of time travel alters events, its just that the events are always that way.

    If time turners didn't exist Hermione wouldn't be able to attend multiple classes, this is different from the world in which time turners do exist.

    So the only reason Voldemort ever rose to power in the first place is that for some reason Hermione wouldn't attempt to kill him in the past.

    I feel like they would still be pretty useful. You could bring twice* the amount of soldiers to a battle by just using a time turner.

    *Except for the ones who died the first time around.

    You could, but it wouldn’t matter. The outcome of the battle wouldn’t change, because time turners don’t actually change the past.  

    The only real value would be info gathering - go back and learn things you need to know in the present. 

    The outcome would change, you would just know it after the first time through.

    You can't change the past with a time turner, but you can change the future by planning to use a time turner.

    The same way Hermione was able to take twice as many classes you would be able to kill twice as many combatants and therefore win the battle.

    That’s not how they work. It’s closed loop time travel. You would kill exactly the same number of people because the extra troops were already there the first time  

    Alternative 1. You plan to not use the time turner you have some number of troops.

    Alternative 2 you plan to use time turners, Twice the number of troops show up. The battle only happens in one way but this time you have an advantage.

    I'm not talking about going back to change how many troops you had after the battle is done. I'm talking about planning to use the time turners so that you always had twice the number of troops.

    Ah - I see what you mean. You decide in the present that at some point in the future you will send troops back, so the troops suddenly appear in the present. 

    [deleted]

    Because she was always fated to take multiple classes using the time turner.

    [deleted]

    [deleted]

    There's only one timeline, bro. It didn't happen because it didn't happen. It's how Rowling was able to weasel out of using the Time Turners ever again, because they don't work like that (until they do in Cursed Child, but that play didn't happen).

    I think their point is, people not even trying seems to cement the timeline as it is. It didn't happen because Hermione knows not to try (but if she were a person who might try, maybe it would have happened)

    Not with the way the timeline works in this universe. If Hermione knows how the time turner works, then she knows that if she were to try to use it to kill baby Voldemort, she would fail, and also that perhaps many people have tried or will try, but that they cannot succeed, because Voldemort is still here. Even if she doesn't understand that aspect of time travel, she probably knows enough to know that she doesn't know what it might take to kill Voldemort, even as a baby, and that if it were easy enough that a 13 year old third year witch could do it, someone probably would have already done it.

  • Didn’t they write a whole play about why that would be a bad idea?

    Yes. And it was an uncontroversial piece of excellent content where Harry's underage son definitely didn't make out with Hermione on stage.

    Wait what 

    Cursed Child is a hell of a drug

    I know very little about Harry Potter besides the movies but somehow I remember hearing his son was dating Draco's son in that play

    I mean, the text says they're best friends, but the fandom says otherwise. Plus Draco's son is a Gryffindor.

    Other way around, they were both in Slytherin

    And thanks to Rowling is canon too

    Isn't she basically his "aunt"?

    Hello stepwizard

    "Stepwizard, help! I've been Petrificus Totalused!"

    I've played these games before

    That was so gross. And then the whole "I'm way too old to pass as a student at Hogwarts, but I'm gonna be your love interest little underaged boy! Aww"

  • The answer is dumb enough that it is still a shitty movie detail

    Neville knocked over a cabinet and broke it

    Only the Ministry regulated ones got destroyed. We know some time turners outside Ministry control were still out there.

    Also the information that "all time turners got destroyed after that 'incident'" came from the Ministry itself, specifically, Department of Mysteries, they'd hardly let anyone know if there's indeed some surviving time turners. They're known to be one of the most secretive departments for a reason.

    Tbf the one Hermione was using being destroyed is enough to prevent its use against Voldemort.

    The film also demonstrates how you can’t actually change the past with the time turner, all the other stuff still happens

    1. Voldemort had Horcruxes. There’s no way she could’ve killed him

    2. Has anybody seen Back to the Future? Every little thing is the start of a huge butterfly effect. And while Voldemort caused so much death and hate, characters wouldn’t have existed because of the war. Arthur and Molly got together primarily because of the First Wizarding War and the uncertainty that they might die tomorrow. So in a way, Voldemort’s terror was pivotal to Ron and his siblings’ existence.

  • They didn't knew where is voldys house (literally)

    If so, harry wouldn't be so popular, maybe his friends would be different and he would have a better life.

  • You cant change the past, that was the whole sub-plot of the time turner

  • It would be impossible, history can't be changed in the Harry Potter universe, everything is a closed loop like the TV show Dark or LOST.

    (Yes, in The Cursed Child they do change history but that only happened because they were using a special time-turner. Yes I hate myself for knowing this.)

  • I think there’s a limit isn’t there? For how far you can go back

    There was, but they were still too powerful an artifact to have in the series so in book five Longbottom knocks over a box or cabinet in the Ministry of Magic and destroys all the Time Turners in existence.

    She later retconned that fact in Cursed Child though and it turns out there were more Time Turners that could go as far back as one likes.

    Pretty convenient that they were all stored in one place and destroyed just from being knocked over.

  • is she stupid

    JKR? Yes.

  • it’s hard for a dumb author to write smart characters

    That's not how time travel works.

    this is the funniest comment I’ve read today

    You're hilarious too, dont worry. Not many people are smart enough to know how time travel works. It's not for everyone.

    My guy, time travel doesn't work at all. It's not real

  • uj/ I actually think the books handled it well???

    It is set in stone that Voldemort survived up to the present day, so even if you can travel back in time there will always be something preventing the death. But not in a magical plot armor way, just that the series of events already played out, and the outcome is known.

    rj/ how many turns to 20th of April 1889?

  • Oh shit is it 1997 again?

  • First of all, time travel is stupid. Secondly good of the realm over the individual.

  • She only had it the one year, and she wasn't using it to cheat, she used it to take more classes per day than was possible

  • Wouldn’t she be stuck in the past and have to live for 13 years as an orphan in order to do this? Assuming she’s even capable of killing Voldemort as he famously made himself immortal by making like seven phylacteries (horcruxes)

  • The book explained that it’s very complicated and dangerous magic. Many wizards and witches ended up killing themself(or St MonMungo-ed).

  • I wouldn’t say she was cheating, I think it’s a smart idea to take many classes you couldn’t by normal means

  • The problem is that JKR starts at a conclusion (that Harry saves himself with his patronus) and then worked backwards to achieve that result. "Ok, I need some way for Harry to go back in time...I know, there is some sort of magic hourglass that allows for such time travel. But how did it get into their hands? I know, Hermione uses it to attend more classes" and then having written that book, she realized she had written herself into a corner so thereafter goes "Ok, I need some way for them to never be actual to use the time turner again...I know, they are all stored on one shelf and that shelf gets knocked over"

    And then for the play, she wrote "Ok, I need a way to bring back and bunch of random ass characters that died in the books. I know, they rebuild the time turners and make them more powerful".

  • Why would you ever give it to anyone? Especially a teenager.

    Enabling a student to attend extra classes is definitely the most mundane use of time travel.

  • Shit source material, shit results.

  • [deleted]

    Where did you get any of that info from? Cause as far as I can tell you just made that all up.

  • There was a 5 hour limit on which they could back. Not including the super time turner from the play which wasnt an official one but was tampered with? Or built by someone? Its been many years since I saw the play i cant remember

  • Yes she is

  • How It Should Have Ended did this. The time turner works by each turn being one hour back. To kill Voldemort as a kid you need to turn it for a very long time.

  • Cuz Rowling is a grifter 🤷‍♂️

  • She's supposed to be the smart one, too 🤣🤣🤣

  • No. Rowling and get whole universe is

  • Even if we ignore this obvious idiot plot hole, was it necessary to gaslight injured Ron Wesley?

  • She did what the script told her to do. Scriptwriters allow characters to do only what serves their story.

    Same reason the Jedi are able to speed run in episode 1 only. Not before and not after.

    Why didn't the scriptwriters just tell her to kill voldemort? Are they stupid?

    They didn't want it to end too quickly The longer they stretch it out, the more money they all make. If people in horror movies made sensible decisions the movie would be over in 5 minutes. No one would die and the protagonists would be mildly inconvenienced. There is actual logic and there is movie logic. The two have nothing to do with one another.

    You do realize it's a movie right?

    Right?

    Movie? What the fuck are you talking about

    As I suspected.