I just went and looked up the exact wording in OotP. A missed Stupefy hits a glass cabinet, which falls to the floor, which shatters all the Time-Turners inside (causing some weird stable time loop thing). If the shell can withstand being dropped on the ground, it’s a useful improvement.
I always thought of that as more of a retcon than a plot point, JKR telling us “Yeah, ok, in retrospect the time turners were a bad idea, but I’d like to write the rest of the series without having to incorporate or work around them so just roll with it, ok?”
A better patch would be to say time turners only work in Hogwarts as an additional class attendence spell built into the general spells of the school (which canonically does weird things to space anyway).
Yeah, that’s obviously the motivation, as is evident from the fact that Time-Turners essentially don’t appear outside of one scene in PoA. That doesn’t affect the point of their canonical fragility, though.
1) I was wondering whether the implied mockery of canon was reasonable. Apparently it is.
2) Huh, I never noticed that detail reading through. Not sure a protective shell would help with that sort of destruction, though.
I just went and looked up the exact wording in OotP. A missed Stupefy hits a glass cabinet, which falls to the floor, which shatters all the Time-Turners inside (causing some weird stable time loop thing). If the shell can withstand being dropped on the ground, it’s a useful improvement.
I always thought of that as more of a retcon than a plot point, JKR telling us “Yeah, ok, in retrospect the time turners were a bad idea, but I’d like to write the rest of the series without having to incorporate or work around them so just roll with it, ok?”
A better patch would be to say time turners only work in Hogwarts as an additional class attendence spell built into the general spells of the school (which canonically does weird things to space anyway).
Yeah, that’s obviously the motivation, as is evident from the fact that Time-Turners essentially don’t appear outside of one scene in PoA. That doesn’t affect the point of their canonical fragility, though.
Oh lord. Okay, you win.