[HPforGrownups] Re: Time turner theory

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 161982

Lana:
> Okay..  I really am trying to understand this.. LOL..
>
> Aside from the deep issues of looping, single timeline, etc...
>
> Please help me understand this..  Say the kids never went back in time at 
> all.
> What would have "saved" Buckbeak from being killed?  We know that they 
> took him and Sirius escaped on him.  But if the kids never went back, then 
> are you saying that Buckbeak still would not have died?

Magpie:
Just my view, but if the kids hadn't gone back in time something entirely 
different would have happened that we didn't see. The key is to remember 
we're not so much talking about the limits of time travel but the way JKR 
writes time travel.

The way I think of it, if you imagine time as a linear thing, so that Harry 
must do X before he does Y, then it works like this. Harry didn't go back in 
time (Y) until after the execution was scheduled (X).  So it's perfectly 
possible that Buckbeak could have been executed during that time.  However, 
Harry and Hermione then went back in time and interfered.  Once they went 
back in time they were existing in that past moment. So that's what Harry 
saw.

It really comes down to the writing more than anything about Time Travel. 
In Back to the Future, the writers show us the way things are, then Marty 
goes back and changes the past.  Once he changes the past, the future is 
affected.  So when Marty gets back to the present, his parents no longer 
remember the past as it "really" happened.  They remember the past where 
Marty appeared and changed things.  The "original" timeline was completely 
erased.

The same type thing could be happening in HP as well.  If something 
prevented Harry from going back in time Buckbeak would simply not have been 
saved.  He would have died in a totally different memory--no swish thunk, no 
yell from Hagrid at that exact moment.  The way JKR chooses to write her 
story, however, any alternative universe where Buckbeak actually died is 
lost to our heroes memory.  All he remembers is the version where Buckbeak 
was saved.  He was able to see what he hadn't yet done because of the Time 
Travel.

The trouble is, for me, when people use this as a reason why Harry can't 
Time Travel to do anything else, as if it's anything other than a literary 
reason.  For instance, we know Harry doesn't go back in time to stop Sirius 
from being killed.  We know it because Sirius died.  But that doesn't give 
Harry the character a reason he can't use a Time Turner and go back and save 
him. That would be circular logic, suggesting that he can't use the Time 
Turner only because it would change the Timeline, because any time travel 
changes the time line.  What is true is that we know Harry didn't Time 
Travel back to save Sirius, not that he can't.  If you say he can only Time 
Travel when he gets the signal that he did Time Travel (the signal being 
that he sees a version of the present where he's changed things) it's 
totally circular logic: he can't because he didn't, he didn't because he 
can't.   What the rule really is is that the author always writes the time 
travel in advance so the timeline is consistent. She always knows when time 
travel's going to happen and writes it in the first time.  Any alternative 
"before time travel" universes are unremembered by our narrator.

I just made that more complicated, didn't I?  Sorry.

-m