Idyllshire: Expanded

[Shougun]

Harry Potter was one of my favourite uses of time travel for Fun With Stable Time Loops. I like how the second time around fitted into the first while totally changing their understanding of what happened.

All I thought was if children can do it, so easily... And for freaking "classes" lol, why not Voldemort, and with the might of the magic someone would have clearly used it to be on top.


Maybe how that specific section might work well for you but to me it just opened up way too many cans of sand worms. Way too easy, vague warning, given to kids, at first for a pretty LOL reason (here kid a super dangerous tool, go take some extra classes), etc.. big nope from me lol. Although I generally am not impressed with the use of time mechanics in stories, as they seemed they didn't need it and most usually just create more questions and problems that have no interesting solutions.



Not that I haven't been impressed or just went with it because because... But I've no eagerness to see someone leap into that . To me it usually just reads as a gimmick to make things superficially more convoluted or 'deeper' (but without actually obtaining value from that over just being extra to be extra). So it isn't a sin I guess (sometimes it's funny to see how wacky the rabbit hole can get), but as I said, I don't often cheer for the usage or find it added much value (I could have done without that whole bit in harry potter, giving children time turners... Yikes, to me. Just hand them the complete deathly hallows while we are at it, lol.)

[Iscah]

All I thought was if children can do it, so easily... And for freaking "classes" lol, why not Voldemort, and with the might of the magic someone would have clearly used it to be on top.

True; it's been years since I read it but I don't recall giving the wider picture any thought.

I guess you could rationalise it with the time-turners being very carefully kept and perhaps exceedingly hard to make, but... still.

Okay, revise my previous statement: despite the surrounding logic of why they were allowed to do it, the immediate sequence of events while time-travelling is clever and well-constructed. Dont make me look closer at it.

[tdb]

All I thought was if children can do it, so easily... And for freaking "classes" lol, why not Voldemort, and with the might of the magic someone would have clearly used it to be on top.

True; it's been years since I read it but I don't recall giving the wider picture any thought.

I guess you could rationalise it with the time-turners being very carefully kept and perhaps exceedingly hard to make, but... still.

I seem to recall Dumbledore warning them about catastrophic consequences if they messed up. But since everything went according to plan, we never found out what those consequences would be. Maybe you'd end up a ghost or something.

[Iscah]

I seem to recall Dumbledore warning them about catastrophic consequences if they messed up. But since everything went according to plan, we never found out what those consequences would be. Maybe you'd end up a ghost or something.

I've still got the book so I checked. No specified consequences, just "you know what is at stake - you must not be seen". (With the implication that Hermione had some kind of longer explanation of the rules in the past, but we don't get it.)

Of course it's more like "you must not be seen and recognised as being where you shouldn't be" because simply being seen - as it happens in the end - doesn't cause anything to happen at all. It's more about not creating a paradox by letting their past selves see something they didn't see the first time.

There are two different takes on that. One is that it's simply a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing and as long as you try to hide and go unseen, you'll be successful because these events already happened and you weren't seen. If you deliberately tried to break things, the universe might conspire against you and send some unexpected event to prevent you from successfully contacting your past self.

More likely, you simply do have to be careful and if you do create a paradox, the consequences could range from "we don't know but we don't want to take the risk" to "total collapse of the space-time continuum" or, as in FFXIV (or at least my take on it), causing a second timeline to split off the original and take you with it, never to return to the point you departed from. To an observer in the first timeline you would use your time-turner and that would be the last time they ever see you.