[HPforGrownups] Re: Time-turning (Was: World Building And The Potterverse)

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 167411

From: sistermagpie <belviso at attglobal.net>
>other kinds of Time Travel in story. The only difference between PoA 
>and, say, Back to the Future, seems to me to be that in Back to the 
>Future the writer has Marty McFly experience time in a linear way 
>(as we all do), and then go back and change it, and then return to 
>the future with his same experiences so that he remembers the way 
>time originally spooled out before he made the decision to go back 
>in time. It had to have spooled out that way the first time since he 
>hadn't yet done it, based on how we experience time.

The basic unaswered question in open time loops is how they started in the first place. Now, for example, in Back to the Future, Marty does not belong in his family at first; it is only when he changes the past that his family appears to be the kind of family he came from. Therefore, one might assume that he didn't change time, but that some, previously unknown event had changed it, and he corrected it. 

Now, we can speculate in PoA how the time loop initiated. One way, for example, is for, in the pre-loop time, Harry somehow managed to create the Patronus on his own. Note that he DOES violate the rule of time travel by appearing to himself and visibly acting, albeit not clearly. Therefore, that makes it the likely candidate for the paradoxical moment. 

Bart