Time Turner

Sorry to drag up this old thread, but I didn't think there was a sense in starting a whole new one.

I find the timeturner problematic. It creates a whole lot of problems that cannot be easily explained away by JKR. I may have said this before, but I think this is one of the things she meant when she said there were things she did in the books that she would do differently if they could because they created problems.

I'm sure they were only little, throw-away things.
What problems do you see with the time-turner?

Unless of course he decides to go evil all of a sudden and does like Greyback did and just starts killing at will and then he would be part werewolf all the time. But considering the fact that Lupin is one of the greatest characters in the books he will never become evil (thank heavens for that). And as for time turners... it would be okay for them to make another appearance but if they were used all the time, then that would make for some pretty repetitive and boring story-telling. What does everybody else think about this?

Wel, if they were just little throw away things, I don't know why she would mention them, but that's beside the point I suppose.

Time turners give an immense amount of power to anyone who has one. People could wreak havoc with them, and i would be realistic to expect that serious damage has been caused by them, but we don't hear about any of the damage that they have caused. This is problematic from a storytelling standpoint because as a reader I don't buy it. It's a device that worked great for PoA, but it has these problems which is why I think she decided to destroy them in Order of the Phoenix. It was a way of not having to potentially deal with any of these issues.

Why should we believe that ALL of the time-turners in the world
were kept in one little cabinet?
That's even less realistic.

And no, I don't think you could do too much damage unless you spend some time thinking about it.
If you went back and changed things too much, you wouldn't know that you had done it, so you couldn't do it. It has to be a near-miss, and you have to think of going back to change something that never happened.
It's not a sport for the shallow-minded.

The Buckbeak story worked because they believed he died, when he never did.
Dumbledore was there and knew that Buckbeak survived, but he didn't tell.

I'm only saying I think JKR is doing that as her way of not having to deal with it anymore.

What you have described is some of the paradoxes that come with time-travel, which is what can make it problematic in storytelling if the storyteller isn't very careful. And this world has (or had) a bunch of time-turners, so it's not like they're a super limited thing, which makes it even more problem causing because they are readily available (well not quite, but not far from it relatively speaking).
If you can't go back in time and change something because it didn't happen therefore you would have never known to go back and change it, then nothing can be changed by time-turners at all. But that's obviously not the case in these stories as at one point someone says something to the effect of "Nasty things happen to wizards who mess with time."

because they had already gone back in time and changed it. But they had to actually go back and change it for it to work.