That's not even the toughest one though, lol. I think BP pretty much murdered GoF for everyone that day.

 

Call me ignorant and tell me what BP means.

 

BioPlague, who is now Merrill. Hasn't been around much lately though.

 

BP = British Petroleum

GoF = Goblet of Fire, slang for the Deep Horizon oil spill.

It still hurts us to talk about it so we here at DLP (Devoted Lifelong Pacifists) use slang where ever possible.

 

Well played, sir.

 

Technically a little late, but I felt the need to point this out.

It's not pre-destined. Predestination doesn't exist in Harry Potter. Dumbledore had a rant about this that people seem to keep forgetting about, where he explains exactly why prophecies aren't something you have to take seriously.

It's not predestination so much as it is that any time-traveling that 'will' take place is already happening right now. Or in other words, it's not like there's a world, and then somebody travels back and fixes that world into something different. We're already in the 'different' world. There was never a timeline 'split' in PoA. There was only a sequence of events wherein there was, at some point, multiple Harry Potters and Hermione Grangers because of time travel. It's not like horrible things happened and the second Harry wasn't there because Harry hadn't traveled back in time 'yet' to change those events. There is no 'yet' in this equation. The events were already changed by the presence of the second Harry as they occurred.

It's not predestination so much as it is an unusual quirk of logic that only comes up when time travel is involved, wherein we know somebody will use time travel because we already saw them use it.

 

Summary

Here is a summary of the thread so far. I've excluded those that were thoroughly shot down by others, or those that I didn't feel were plot holes at all (or I shot them down myself in my mind). I also discuss possible resolutions.

If I missed anything that wasn't resolved, please bring it up again.

Real Plot Holes

1. KGB: Hermione getting a time turner
   - Guinea pig? Seriously doubt this.
   - Schrodinger's theory on her meeting herself saying she had a time turner so therefore she gets one. But what starts this chain? Why doesn't everyone get one?
2. Garden: Secret Keeper's should be themselves. (See: Bill was his own secret keeper.)
3. James' and Lily's secret keeper. How did everyone (including muggles) find out the location when Peter was still alive and only really told Voldemort?
4. Merrill II: Mad-eye Moody should've just shoved a portkey into Harry's face in Hogsmeade. Voldemort was truly stupid to rely on Harry being amazing enough to be essentially guaranteed to win.
5. (Tibbers: Lily & James appearance order.)

Minor Plot-Holes or Character Stupidity

1. Anarchy: wand ownership.
   I've forgotten what this was about... <I will return to edit this when I wake up.>
2. Deplore: Using a muggle to handle certain admissions in GOF.
3. arkkitehti: Voldemort didn't finish killing Snape.
   - Voldemort started reading "How to be a super-villain" because he was getting tired of his rise to domination taking decades.
4. Castiel: Placing a taboo on the unforgivables.
   - It was Dark Magic? [Requires you to use your imagination.]
   - Liberty reasons. [Requires you to use your imagination.]
   - Voldemort invented it and/or required the resources of the ministry. [Requires you to...]

Dubious Plot Holes
Not really sure about these.

1. One armed boxer: Lupin's transformation requires moonlight - he can just stay inside.
   Or is it just a lack of clouds covering the moon? In which case, can't they magic some clouds up there?
2. yhtomitrebo: Lack of portkey usage in general (see also Mad-eye Moody in GOF above). (Requires unchecked claim: Usage was widespread in DH.)
3. The Trace by Taure: It is on the person & by proximity to person. Send owl for breaches of Statue only.
   (I was not quite satisfied.)
   - How do they distinguish between the two cases of Dobby's usage and Harry's accidental vs Aunt Marge?
   - Summon's not being sent again: It seems like poor management, to say the least, on the Ministry's part if they just ignore subsequent uses of magic.

Comments

1. Republic21: Lily's sacrifice vs Harry's 'sacrifice'
   Taure: You have to be offered the choice to live, and refuse to take that choice. I think this resolves it, but I like Wordhammer's so much more...
   Wordhammer: Magical contract idea where Voldemort unknowingly agrees a contract with by/with DEATH where he will not kill/harm another if he takes someone else's life. I like this idea more than Taure's, but it doesn't work at all with Lily's case!
   I still think in both cases, this kind of protection should occur more often.
2. Why aren't Time Turner's used more often?
   Because Bad Things Happen. For example, if you planned to come back in time to help yourself at this moment in time, the reason why you didn't come back was because you died. As in, unless you changed your mind, you actually died and now you know you did (have fun with that). But, there's the chance you wouldn't have died if you hadn't planned to come back in time to help yourself. ie. Leave the time line alone and the time line leaves you alone. This is my preferred theory.
   But let's just dump this into Time Turner's don't follow logic even with a self-consistent time line.
3. Sree: Choosing Sirius as a secret keeper.
   - I don't believe this is stupidity on James' or Lily's part.
4. (Someone Leaving Harry with Dursley's for final summer
   - No one mentioned this, but Dumbledore would have done it so that Snape gains Voldemort's trust.
5. Taure: Ministry can remotely drop all magical protections.
   Me: WTF is this?!
6. (Someone General point of general underutilization of powerful magic.
7. Afrojack's comment on the trace being oppressive combined with without being able to remove it without serious inconvenience. cf. Mobile Phones.
8. I liked Wordhammer's explanation of the first night of Voldemort's downfall.

So overall we managed to come up with five serious plot holes a few other minor ones. The fifth plot hole you can just ignore, but the other four are quite annoying.

 

Well, someone mentioned that Sirius may not have been able to summon Peter in PoA because he, even as a rat, counts as human and may therefore be unsummonable.

But there are two problems with this.

1. We assume Harry to have more knowledge of magic than we do because most of his learning happens off-screen. He tries to summon Hagrid in DH - who lives despite a fall from great heights. He must have thought it would work - and maybe it did.

Furthermore, he summons a toad in OotP, so we know it can be used on animals.

2. The Animagus transformation is considered Transfiguration, perhaps the pinnacle of Transfiguration, which we know is the ability, at its greatest extent, to permanently and utterly change the physical being of one object to another. But magic leaves traces, so it is possible to identify the difference between something that began as what it is, and something that was Transfigured into what it is: this is presumably what makes it susceptible to Untransfiguration.

Assuming Peter mastered this with his friends as JKR said he did, he should, for all intents, purposes, and realities, have been a rat, fully summonable and identifiable as a human only in the traces of Transfiguration magic that remain.

Hence, Sirius, a fully trained a apparently remarkably talented wizard, should have been able to summon him as easy as 1, 2, 3.

 

A real plothole requires an actual contradiction of facts or events. Just assuming that a void of knowledge contains a contradiction is not, in fact, a plothole.

Also, it would probably help if you remembered the facts. There is no mention of Sirius having a wand at all until book 5, which makes perfect sense, because he's a fucking fugitive that's on the run from literally everybody. He trashed the Fat Lady with a knife, for fuck's sake, not spells. That's kind of freaking important and memorable, seeing how it's literally just about the only time a wizard uses something that isn't a wand as a weapon besides Harry and Neville swinging the Sword of Gryffindor, and that one time Bellatrix had a knife. And hey, imagine that, she only pulled it because she didn't have her wand. Are you saying it's a plot hole that Sirius was incapable of fanonical wandless magic? Do think they don't take away your wands when they toss you in Azkaban? Are you under the impression that he'd had a wand all along but never deigned to use it even when it probably would have let him get to Peter in book 4? You think he was giving himself a handicap for funsies by maining a dagger? Because wizards are just so well known for their perchance of carrying around melee weapons and disregarding magic in favor of close-quarters combat?

Don't get so caught up trying to find meaningless contradictions in our lack of knowledge of background events that you start forgetting the things we were flat-out told were true. That mentality is why half the fuckers on this site still believe Dumbledore thinks prophecies are important.

 

When Harry tried summoning Hagrid in book 7, he wasn't thinking rationally. Desperate people do stuff that they have learnt shouldn't work. Even if summoning did work on humans, Hagrid is half-giant. Stunners didn't work on him, so it would have failed either way. That scene does not indicate anything about the summoning charm working on people.

 

I also don't see how Hermione getting a time turner is a plothole?

McGonagall decides to give her one, end of problem.

 

Correction: the Potter's house wasn't under the secret keeping charm, the Potters themselves were. There's a passage to the effect of "Voldemort could press his nose up (lol) against the Potter's glass windows and not see them in the house" in one of the books, which if given as true means that the house wasn't under the charm, but either the knowledge of that being where the Potters lived or the actual fact of living there was secret.

 

I know Sirius didn't have a wand, but that only begs the question as to why he didn't steal one earlier, if he was willing to take Ron's, and had a chance to do so when he snuck into Gryffindor Tower, or why they needed to time-travel at all when Dumbledore could've presumably solved the entire problem with a Summoning charm. Yes, he probably would have ended up with every rat in the castle, but it's not as though he was without distinguishing marks.

Accio Nine-Toed rat. Also, this thread is expressly for the purpose of speculation on possible plotholes, Raine. There's no reason to come in here and rant and bitch when someone mentions what may be a far-fetched possibility . . . that's what the thread's for, so kindly calm yourself and be less of a cunt. Simply debunk it and move on if you see a problem with it.

 

I recognize the reference, but for headcanon's sake I can't believe that the Fidelius can be cast on a concept, even if it's a concept that you own. Every instance of its use is applied to an address- a building, and one whose owner is involved in the casting.

The plot hole I still see is the one buried in one of my earlier posts:

If Bill is the secret-keeper for his house, how did Ron tell Dobby and everyone to head for Shell Cottage, outside Tinworth?

 

Because it's a plothole. Or rather, given what we currently understand, it's a plothole. We don't know the intricacies of the Fidelius, so it's possible that it's not. But it is a contradiction given what we currently know. So hence, plothole. A real one. You know, for a change.

 

House elves laughs at Fidelius.

 

Speaking of House Elves... could they just pop over to Azkaban?

 

For that matter, can dementors affect them?
It's all well and good if they can just pop in there, but doesn't do much if they are crippled upon arriving.
The potion in HBP hurt Kreacher, and it seemed to simulate the same effects as dementor proximity.
Depending on who you ask, that would make the elves the most vulnerable, giving their lifetime of servitude and abuse. (The Malfoys couldn't have been the only asshat owners. In fact, Crouch may have been too? The only ones we see treated well are the Hogwarts elves. You know, that school ruled by the cuckoo wizard no one seems to think ever acts like a normal human being?)

 

If I remember correctly, Dobby used to be owned by the Malfoys, so that would explain why he could pop over there. He also wasn't able to take some the prisoners with him. The wards allow house-elf travel, but not humans moving with them. If I remember correctly.

 

Most of what you're remembering is a little thing called fanon.