Analyzing Plot Twists: Simplify, Simplify!

[jekatiska]

No: HPFGUIDX 103892

> Tara wrote: 

I think most stuff is really just what it appears to be: James, Lily,
and Sirius are really dead; Petunia and Dudley are really Muggles;
Harry and Hermione are not related; everybody else is pretty much who
they appear to be; and so on. Maybe we invent these notions because
we'd like certain facts to be changed (Harry's parents not to be
really dead, for a start).> 

> vmonte wrote:

I agree that Lily and James are dead. But I also think that there is
one important thing that is being forgotten in all the time-travel
posts (including mine). It's that whether you believe in a time-travel
which is fixed, or not, you still cannot force people to behave the
way you would like them to. People have free-will. If Harry's parents
believed that the only way they could save Harry was for themselves
to die, then they would choose to die, no matter what the
interference.> 

Jekatiska comments:

Thank you, Tara, I couldn't agree more. Although it's fun to come up
with weird, elaborate plot lines sometimes, they are highly unlikely
to end up in the books, and so we should stick to the _likely_ stories
when trying to predict what's going to happen. The dead are and will
stay dead. As for time travel, as we have seen, there is not much one
can do in the past. Hermione said in the chapter where they used the
time-turner with Harry: "We are breaking one of the most important
wizarding laws. No one is supposed to change time." (I don't have my
book here so I can't check the exact wording or the page) I think this
states it quite plainly: there's nothing we can do about what's gone.
And anyway, I don't think it would be possible to use a time-turner to
travel back many years. Would the time-traveller have to live all that
time twice?