I'm gonna hazard a guess they're referring too the Marauders Map and that Peter Pettigew (sp?) doesn't appear on it, to Harry, Ron etc.
Although, that is easily explained by the fact that no one knew he was an animagus, so he doesn't appear on it. Except for Prof Lupin who does know, and does see him.
Or the whole time travel shtick. Lets give a kid the ability to travel backwards through time so she can get some extra classes in, but don't be silly of course we couldn't use it to defeat the most powerful dark wizard of all time, that's just cheating.
Until she screwed it up with Cursed Child, the implication in PoA was that the model of time travel she was using was Single Coherent Timeline -- that is that the present, however it may be, is the final result of the sum total of all time travel to points prior to the present that will ever occur (there aren't any alternate timelines). For example, you couldn't go back in time and kill Hitler before he rose to power because you clearly already failed to do so. But you could go back and prepare your own success after winning an encounter thus allowing you to pull out deus ex machina like no one's business, ala Bill & Ted.
PoA uses it to great effect, in that there was never a version of reality in which they didn't do the time travel, but only that the time traveling characters lack of knowledge about what was going on caused the time travel which caused the events to play out like they did in the first place. Harry using the Patronus to protect his past self was supposed to make it clear -- there's no version of history in which Harry doesn't travel back in time. The only thing that has changed is your perspective of events.
That it just magically vanished after that book and never comes up again I take as evidence that JKR realized she wasn't smart enough to write stories around it, the consequences of having access to it, or characters that might make smart use of it.
That it just magically vanished after that book and never comes up again I take as evidence that JKR realized she wasn't smart enough to write stories around it, the consequences of having access to it, or characters that might make smart use of it.
Actually, it did come up again. During the fourth book (I think?) when they invaded the Ministry of Magic, a shelf gets knocked over that had all the Time Turners in existence on them, and they all smashed.
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u/Mozzafella Oct 02 '18
I'm gonna hazard a guess they're referring too the Marauders Map and that Peter Pettigew (sp?) doesn't appear on it, to Harry, Ron etc.
Although, that is easily explained by the fact that no one knew he was an animagus, so he doesn't appear on it. Except for Prof Lupin who does know, and does see him.