[HPforGrownups] Re: Snape fulfilling his life debt

[Amanda Geist]

No: HPFGUIDX 42377

Theresnothingtoit originally asked:

> > Hello,
> > Does anyone here think Snape will finally be redeamed by fulfilling
> > his life debt to James by using the time turner.  It seems a highly
> > *bangy* device that has only been used once and I would like to see
> > Snape redeamed in a very physical way.
> > The story may be that James survived something in his past that it
> > was unknown how he did, Snape's task will be to go back in time to
> > save him.  And give up his own life in the process, perhaps.
> > Hmm, I wonder if that flimsy theory will float?
> > No can(n)on but I like it all the same.
> >
Grey Wolf responded:

> The trouble with Time-Turners is that only allow you, so far, to go
> *back* in time. Which means that if Snape, say in book five, used that
> method to fulfill his life debt, he *could* go back 15 or more years
> into the past, but than would have to *live* through those 15 years
> *again* to reach the moment in time when he used the Time-Turner. And
> during does years he would have to be extra-cautious to not meet
> himself. It's easy to manage in short spans of one or two hours, but
> the possibility of mangling history and the space-time continuum would
> be too big in bigger spans. And that's even without considering that
> the Time-Turner might not have enough power to go back so far in time.

Actually, it doesn't really matter if Snape goes back in time to fulfill the
debt. Whatever he did would already have happened in the past, and so no
wonderful *new* things would occur in the present.

We see this from what happened with Buckbeak. Even though Harry and
Hermione, at the time, had absolutely no idea that they would be going back
in time to save Buckbeak, it was *happening* right alongside them. Their
*current* selves had not gotten to the point where they knew what to do, but
their *future* selves were already right there doing it.

So if Snape uses the time turner to go back to any point at all, his
*future* self would have already done it. The effects would already be
there. If this does happen, his *current* self, once he figures out what his
role in the past is and what it's done, may recognize that he's discharged a
debt, but nothing in the timestream will change. It has already happened.

And Wolf's point took some working out, but he's right. From our limited
sample of Time-Turner, 1 each, the setting is how far back you want to go.
Hermione's is set for an hour per turn; we don't know if they all are. But
in any case, it allows you to go back and repeat the hour (or however many
you selected). It does *not* yank you back into your future time after a set
time--at least Hermione's doesn't. She simply lives that hour over--once she
passes the point of time again when she used the Turner to go back, there's
only one of her in the present and she can move forward.

So, even if Snape did fool with a time turner, unless it's an Acme Brand
Ultra Model that can both send him backwards *and* retrieve him, I doubt
he'd be able to go too far back to do stuff. Unless he never came
back.....ooooh, now *there's* a thought. Maybe he will go years into the
past, do whatever, and die there. Which would explain why there's only one
of him now. Ooooo.

Still, he can't change the past....because it is the past, whatever he went
back for is already done, whether his future self knows about it or not.
That's the way the timestream seems to work in JKR's world, at least judging
from how it worked with Buckbeak and the Patronus and all.

--Amanda