SCROLL DOWN TO SKIP TO THE EXPLANATION
I thought about starting this off with some time-travel themed gimmick (eg: “This is message from [past/present/future] [me/you/Daniel Radcliffe] to [past/present/future] [me/you/Emma Watson]”), but then I realised time travel isn’t what this is about. This is about pretentious wankers who will go on and on about their position and why something should or shouldn’t have happened, and refuse to listen when they are presented with a perfectly logical counter-argument.
Example: (Let’s assume they’re both women, okay?)
Person 1: I’m a feminist and I think that men should be used as slave labour because women are clearly superior to them!
Person 2: what.
Person 1: Don’t you think we should use men as slaves? They’re so useless.
Person 2: You’re joking, right?
Person 1: Of course I’m not joking! Men are useless and their only purpose is to carry stuff around and help us reproduce, and soon we’ll have robots and artificial insemination to do that so until then they should be slave labour.
Person 2: Okay, Person 1? Men are not useless. Men are just as capable of intelligent, creative, and progressive thought as women are. Think about Socrates, who gave his own life to prove to Athenians that law must reflect reality–
Person 1: His wife came up with that whole scheme, and she would have gotten him out alive if he hadn’t decided to be a martyr.
Person 2: Socrates didn’t have a wife! And the whole point of his ‘martyrdom’ was that he could have gotten out of Athens, and that basically everyone who had the money to did, but Socrates stayed because to do so would undermine the law and people needed to start thinking about what consequences their laws and rulings would have!(1)
Person 1: See? The only thing he was good for was dying. Men suck.
Person 2: One, that is one of history’s greatest philosophers you are talking about, and two, why do you hate men?
Person 1: Because they suck. Are you anti-feminist or something?
Person 2: You are not a feminist. Feminism is about how men and women should be equals, not that men should be enslaved.
Person 1: Excuse me, I’m a feminist and I think men are useless and should be used as slaves. My god, you are such a simpering housewife. Did your husband define feminism for you?
Person 2: I don’t have a husband!
Person 1: So then you agree that men suck and we should enslave them?
Person 2: ARGH!!!!!!!!
Okay, maybe that was less of an example and more of a side rant about one of my greatest pet peeves. Hating men does not make you a feminist; it makes you a misandrist, and that is about twelve shades of not okay. Misandry and misogyny (hatred of men and women, respectively) are the exact same flipping thing, and being on the receiving end of one at some point does not excuse the other. As for “I’m a feminist and I hate men”, you can’t call yourself a feminist and build the definition around your own opinions any more than I can call myself a conservative Christian and expect people to believe me. I don’t believe in any god or deity, I don’t attend church or own a bible, nor have I ever attended church or even read a bible, I don’t pray, my political views are predominantly liberal (of the small L persuasion), I’m clearly neither conservative nor Christian. I can shout out that I am one over and over, even call up some friends to join me, but I still don’t hold the views that define that group of people. Here’s a dictionary definition of feminism:
feminism |ˈfeməˌnizəm|
noun
the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.
While my computer’s dictionary may not be the be all, end all of sources on feminism, that is the basic gist of feminist philosophy. We are equal to men, we should be treated equally, we should be treated fairly. Not “We should be treated like a superior species.” So if you are a person who is offended by some twit ranting about how all men suck and calling themselves a feminist, don’t hate on feminism, hate on the morons who give feminism a bad name.
(As a side note to this side note, not wearing “girly” clothes doesn’t necessarily make you a feminist either. Hell, Buffy Summers wears feminine clothes and styles and has supposedly ‘girly’ interests like fashion and hot male celebrities, but she’s still a brilliant feminist role model and a million times better than Bella Swan, despite the latter’s habitual ‘jeans-and-a-t-shirt’ (and about fifteen jackets) attire.)
Where was I? OH YEAH, TIME-TRAVEL IN HARRY POTTER. Oops.
So essentially, sometimes people just don’t get a thing, and you’re not sure if you’re not explaining it right or if they’re trolling or if they’re just that type of person who doesn’t want to listen. I frequently have this problem with people and the use of the Time-Turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, so I decided to write a detailed explanation of it here, and link it to people if they bring it up. So if you’re reading this, and you have such an argument/discussion, feel free to direct the person to this post and leave it up to them if they want to understand. I’ll even leave directions so they can skip my long rant about feminism vs. misandry.
EXPLANATION STARTS HERE
(If it wasn’t evident, spoilers for the Harry Potter series.)
The main problem some people have with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is that it introduces time-travel as an accessible source in the wizarding world, which seems to open a bazillion plot-holes in the series.
So let’s take a look at why it does not actually make Dumbledore a scumbag (That is what the hat means, okay?) and why the Ministry of Magic are not complete idiots for neglecting time-turners.
Reason One: Wizarding Time-Travel Is Linear
If you’re a Doctor Who fan, you’re likely to be familiar with the quote, “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... timey wimey... stuff.” But the thing is, HP time and the effects of time-travel therein is a strict progression of cause to effect. This means that whatever you do when you go back in time, you have already done it in your timeline and any effects it had have already shown up.
One example of this is in the climax of Prisoner of Azkaban, where Harry is waiting for his dad to show up and produce the Patronus that saved him. When his father doesn’t turn up, Harry realises that it was himself from the future who cast the Patronus, and so he casts said Patronus and saves his past self. Another is when Hermione forgets to go to Charms because she's so tired, and can't go back and be at the lesson because Ron and Harry already told her that she wasn't there.
One quote seemingly defies this idea, when Hermione says, “Professor McGonagall told me what awful things have happened when wizards have meddled with time… loads of them have ended up killing their past or future selves by mistake!” In relation to what else we know about wizard time-travel, this could mean one of three things:
1) You can change time, but it makes the universe go into a violent seizure of not-niceness, in which one or both of your selves will end up dead.
2) People have assumed they could change time, but ended up getting killed or causing the event that made them go back in time. (For instance, say a wizard is poisoned with a slow-working poison and he thinks it was his wife. He goes back in time to kill her before she can kill him, but puts the poison in the wrong cup and winds up poisoning his past self.)
3) Professor McGonagall didn’t want to explain the entirety of time-travel theory to a curious thirteen-year-old lest she try to experiment with it, so she was just like, “Don’t mess with it or REALLY, REALLY BAD STUFF WILL HAPPEN.”
I favour the second option, which explains why the Ministry of Magic aren’t all like, “Let’s save some people!” because modern time-travel theory says that if the people are dead, they will stay dead and anyone sent back to save them will fail and possibly die themselves. That’s why Sirius or Lupin didn’t go back in time to warn James and Lily about Pettigrew, or to try and stop Voldemort, because they knew James and Lily were already dead and they couldn’t change that. (Also that would be bad because then Voldemort would still be terrorizing the wizarding community, JSYK.)
“But what about Buckbeak?!” I hear you cry. The thing is, Buckbeak was never dead, because Future-Harry and Future-Hermione came back to save him to save Sirius. And scumbag Dumbledore knows that Buckbeak lives because he walked out of Hagrid’s hut and saw that he had escaped. What he actually meant when he said, “If all goes well, you will be able to save more than one innocent life tonight” was “I hope your rescue of Sirius goes well, because I already know you’ve saved Buckbeak.” Essentially, you can only use time-travel to change the future, not the past.
So, let’s look at our list of things the time-turner could be used for. Due to the nature of linear time-travel, you could not use a Time-Turner to save the Potters, prevent escapes from Azkaban that you know happened, prevent Auror deaths of the same kind, or kill/arrest Tom Riddle. You can’t do most of the other suggestions either, because:
Reason Two: Wizards Can Only Travel Backwards In Time
How does a Time-Turner work? Well, say you are Hermione, and you need to get to Charms, Ancient Runes and Arithmancy at the same time. You head off to Arithmancy, sit through that hour or so and get House points for being brilliant, as you do. At the end of the class, you take out your Time-Turner and turn it once. You end up an hour back in time, and you head off to Ancient Runes, after which you repeat the process and go to Charms.
Notice what that does not involve? Going forwards in time. While there might have been Aurors who went back in time to witness whether Sirius Black blew up that street or not a couple of days after the incident, they would have been watching from afar so as not to get blown up, and they would have seen what the expected to see:
“Lily and James, Sirius! How could you?”
BOOM!
And if Sirius showed up twelve years later to have an actual trial (Barty Crouch Senior may not have been the raging psycho his son was, but he was still a douche) and look for what he was describing, who was going to volunteer twelve years of their life to go check out something that might not even be evident? Not to mention the risk of being killed trying to get close enough or ignoring the rules of time travel to attempt to stop Pettigrew. Time-Turners are probably only used in particular cases, as the time traveller cannot change anything and might have actually caused the problem, in which case everyone feels really bad for sending them back in the first place when they figure it out.
Reason Three: All the Time-Turners Are Destroyed In The Order of the Phoenix
So Time-Turners can’t help with the Pettigrew/Sirius confrontation, what else is left? Preventing Auror casualties wherein nobody found the body. We have no evidence to suggest that Aurors don’t use time-travel for this on occasion, so I’m thinking in particular of Mad-Eye Moody in book seven. Voldemort hits Moody with a curse that appears to be Avada Kedavra, and he falls off his broom and plunges to the ground below. If you were a die-hard Alastor Moody fan, you might think, “He could totally still be alive! It might be some other curse which emits a flash of green light! Quick, grab a Time-Turner and catch him with a Levitation Charm before he hits the ground!” Well, sorry Moody fans, you can’t. They were all destroyed during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries at the climax of book five, a fact which was confirmed at the start of book six. There’s a strong implication that the Ministry can’t just make more, or that even if they can it will take a very, very long time, long after the end of the Second Wizarding War.
In conclusion, we can say that the presence of the Time-Turner in Prisoner of Azkaban did not create massive plotholes, that the Ministry of Magic are not that idiotic, that Albus Dumbledore is not a hippogriff-saving scumbag, and that every painful, wrenching, tragic death in the Harry Potter series is permanent and indisputable.
God, that’s a depressing thought.
Stuff about Time-Travel in Harry Potter
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