Proven Guilty: An update to my previous thoughts on the topic

[raidem]

Question, prior to CD, were Mab and Murphy ever in each other's presence or has Mab ever made reference to Murphy? While I believe that Mab knew of Murphy and her ties to Harry, I don't think that Mab credited her with much significance.

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My thoughts, say Mab=Murphy or Mab=another character on stage that has yet to go into the past and ascend, then Mab would need to minimize her interactions and deals with her prior self as that would greatly complicate time travel related plots.  So, it could be consistent that Mab would marginalize Murphy, or at least Jim marginalize Mab/Murphy interactions from Harry and ultimately our viewpoints.

***I moved this to Mab/Murphy Ironies
http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,50304.0.html

[raidem]

@Namckas I agreed with everything you said except for this in your OP, which is where I sprang my post from. I guess you assumed that I didn't agree with you and was offering a totally different theory.  I wasn't.  Your theory and others like it are the predominant ones in my head. So, I kinda don't even argue them.  I pretty much consider them fact at this point.  Sorry that I didn't start by saying I totally agreed, but I did jump to the bottom issue with the point I disagreed with. I assumed that there would be assumption that agreed with everything up until that point. My bad.

Finally, Ace likely is the one that hits Harry's car.

From this point I offered a different perspective one that had a side effect of bringing in Murphy into the equation who showed up at the accident site, and participated directly in helping Harry find out how to track Molly.

Compare what I wrote to the text of the books and WoJ's, etc.  The point of the exercise is to see how well what the Theory Wrote compares to the information that we have. 
You have posted the same stuff for years about time travel and alternate realities and such.  My theory is that NONE of that happened in PG.  That there is NO Time Travel NOR is there any Alternate Reality NOR is there any Special Connection, except as I have spelled out.  This was Mab saving Molly.  In a Mab way.

All of that, is kinda wasted space because I agreed with your theory with the caveat that PG in many people's mind is probably one book where there will be a revisit of some kind which does include time travel.
I constantly think through my Mab/Murphy theory and try to see where/how it can jive throughout the books.  It's a series spanning theory, so it touches on much.  I also try to examine it in light of what others bring up.  I'll try to cut and paste those discussions to more appropriate threads of my own.  My apologies.

[Kindler]

Finally, Time Travel is a horrible answer in this series.

I agree. I think it basically amounts to a cop out. It's too easy to wrap things up with time travel.

I don't know if any of you were into Marble Hornets when it was running, but there was a lot of theorizing that one of the characters who was always seen masked and wearing a hood (named "Hoody" by the fans) was actually the lead protagonist from the future. Whole forum threads were derailed with supporters and detractors of the "Hoody is Future Jay" theory. It worked in Tribe Twelve, but it would've been grossly out of place in Marble Hornets—and Tribe Twelve did the work foreshadowing it and leaving easter eggs for years so that it would make sense when it happened.

I didn't like it as an answer then, and I don't now, even accepting different mediums and stories. Pretty much any mystery in the series can be solved with time travel. As a series that was basically pitched as noir-style detective stories with a twist of wizardry, it wouldn't be consistent, in my opinion.

I'm sure there is a way to incorporate time travel into the series without it being too simple—an uncontrollable LSD style trip to the past, where Harry is thrown to various points in his life and forced to interact with things in order to close the stable time loop that put him on this path in the first place might work, for example. But time travel being the origin of other characters is... dicey. Regardless, if there is time travel, I don't think it should be voluntary, should be uncontrollable by Harry, and should be focused on a specific event.

For example, I could see Winter Lady Molly and Harry going back in time to chase after someone who was altering the timeline to prevent Molly from being saved (and thus ascending to Winter Lady several years later). That could be worked into the overarching Black Council plot, because Molly's been doing too good of a job and has been preventing the Outsiders and others from gaining too much influence.

No offense intended to you, Raidem; you aren't simply throwing this out there with no reasonable evidence. There are parallels between Murphy and Mab to be drawn. I just don't think they indicate time travel.

[raidem]

No offense intended to you, Raidem; you aren't simply throwing this out there with no reasonable evidence. There are parallels between Murphy and Mab to be drawn. I just don't think they indicate time travel.

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I understand; And, thank you. I've struggled with the theory too. I've entertained one that doesn't need time travel, that Murphy becomes Mab in the future or alternate reality not distant past. It's definitely less cumbersome.

Spoilered and Moved to Mab/Ironies Thread.

[beetnemesis]

I didn't go too much into the time travel thing because it could be done any number of ways. My thought is more along the lines of, "A villain gets a way to travel in time, he goes into the past to cause trouble. Harry has to follow him, drag him back to the present. Along the way, various things happen that cause little details we've noticed in previous books."

It's not lazy at all, done like that- it's just a time travel story. The inconsistencies aren't the POINT of the story, just a by-product of them.

Obviously it's not going to be "Harry gets supreme temporal power, he decides to go hang out in Proven Guilty."

____

Anyway, it doesn't matter. My main point was that the other theories for this thread would make for a terrible story. @namkcas, you said:

Things come back 10 years later in this series.

Which... kind of misses my point. References to old things aren't bad. But a reference, by itself, isn't interesting.

I guess I'm presupposing two things:

1. The inconsistencies in Proven Guilty are numerous, and blatant, enough to have been done as a setup.
2. A setup needs a PAYOFF. Jim wouldn't put that much effort into something if it wasn't going to be part of a good story.

Do you see? There is no (non-time travel) way to make "10 years ago, Ace hit Harry's car" an interesting payoff. It would cover ground we've already seen in Cold Days. We already know Ace was still around, we already know he's kind of ineffectual. He took his swing at Harry in CD, and missed.

Same holds true for the popular Mab theory. We already learned, from Skin Game, that the fae can enter a home if they mean no harm. That information is stagnant, unsurprising. So, if in a book or two, Mab says, "Oh btw, I fixed your model for you 10 years ago. Thought you could use the help, nbd" it would make SENSE, but it would be completely and utterly BORING. It wouldn't make for a good story.


The reason I mention time travel is because it is one of the few ways to make the mysteries of PG interesting, give them some immediacy. After all, there isn't much at stake otherwise, is there? Molly was rescued, the fetches defeated, everyone moved on with their lives.

It doesn't HAVE to be time travel, but it does have to be interesting.

[Cozarkian]

Unfortunately, beetnemesis, you are probably right. Bob gives a lecture about time travel in PG but there is no time travel reveal. Which means either JB put effort into a magical theory explanation that was mostly irrelevant, or there actually was TT in PG and we just didn't see it happening.

[raidem]

We already had a form of Time Travel at least according to one of the characters in the series, Murphy, and it resulted in her demotion.

She wiped at her mouth and looked at her watch. She tucked the last of her sandwich between her lips, and then started resetting the watch while she chewed.
“Gone almost exactly twenty-four hours. So we did some kind of time travel?” she asked.
“Oh, God no,” I said. “That’s on the list of Things One Does Not Do. It’s one of the seven Laws of Magic.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But however it happened, a whole day just went poof.
That’s time travel.”
“People are doing that kind of time travel all the time,” I said. “We just pulled into the passing lane for a while.”
She finished setting the watch and grimaced. “All the same.”
I frowned at her. “You okay?”
She looked up at the children and their mother. “I’m going to have one hell of a time explaining where I’ve been for the past twenty-four hours. It isn’t as though I can tell my boss that I went time traveling.”
“Yeah, he’d never buy it. Tell him you invaded Faerieland to rescue a young woman from a monster-infested castle.”
“Of course,” she said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
I grunted. “Is it going to make trouble for you?”
She frowned for a moment and then said, “Intradepartmental discipline, probably.

So, it's possible that Team Harry (time travelers) enter the mortal world during those 24 hours in which Harry's team were off in the NeverNever.
Again, it would allow Murphy to be involved in time traveling, another detail to support TTMurphy theories.

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“No clue. Just black.”
“Vague, yet unhelpful,” Bob said.
“Annoyingly so.”
“Oh, the Gatekeeper didn’t do it to annoy you,” Bob said. “He did it to prevent any chance of paradox.”

“He…” I blinked. “He what?”
“He got this from hindsight, he had to,” Bob said.
“Hindsight,” I murmured. “You mean he went to the future for this?”
“Well,” Bob hedged. “That would break one of the Laws, so probably not.
But he might have sent himself a message from there, or maybe gotten it from some kind of prognosticating spirit. He might even have developed some ability for that himself. Some wizards do.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Meaning that it’s possible nothing has happened, yet. But that he wanted to put you on your guard against something that’s coming in the immediate future.”
“Why not just tell me?” I asked.
Bob sighed. “You just don’t get this, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“Okay. Let’s say he finds out that someone is going to steal your car tomorrow.”
“Heh,” I said bitterly. “Okay, let’s say that.”
“Right. Well, he can’t just call you up and tell you to move your car.”
“Why not?”
“Because if he significantly altered what happened with his knowledge of the future it could cause all sorts of temporal instabilities. It could cause new parallel realities to split off from the point of the alteration, ripple out into multiple alterations he couldn’t predict, or kind of backlash into his consciousness and drive him insane.” Bob glanced at me again. “Which, you know, might not do much to deter you, but other wizards take that kind of thing seriously.”
“Thank you, Bob,” I said. “But I still don’t get why any of those things would happen.”

Bob sighed. “Okay. Temporal studies 101. Let’s say that he hears about your car being stolen. He comes back to warn you, and as a result, you keep your car.”
“Sounds good so far.”
“But if your car never got stolen,” Bob said, “then how did he know to come back and warn you?”
I frowned.
“That’s paradox, and it can have all kinds of nasty backlash. Theory holds that it could even destroy our reality if it happened in a weak enough spot.
But that’s never been proven, and never happened. You can tell, on account of how everything keeps existing.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the point in sending the message at all, if it can’t change anything?”
“Oh, it can,” Bob said. “If it’s done subtly enough, indirectly enough, you can get all kinds of things changed. Like, for example, he tells you that your car is going to be stolen. So you move it to a parking garage, where instead of getting stolen by the junkie who was going to shoot you and take the car on the street, you get jacked by a professional who takes the car without hurting you—because by slightly altering the fate of the car, he indirectly alters yours.”
I frowned. “That’s a pretty fine line.”
“Yes, which is why not mucking around with time is one of the Laws,” Bob said. “It’s possible to change the past—but you have to do it indirectly, and if you screw it up you run the risk of Paradox-egeddon.”
“So what you’re saying is that by sending me this warning, he’s indirectly working some other angle completely?”
“I’m saying that the Gatekeeper is usually a hell of a lot more specific about this kind of thing,” Bob said. “All of the Senior Council take black magic seriously. There’s got to be a reason he’s throwing it at you like this.
My gut says he’s working from a temporal angle.”

[namkcas]

raidem,

Here is an example of that form of Time Travel....fly in an airplane.  You time travel when you do it.  Frankly, you time travel when you drive in a car (though the effect is so small that it can not be measured).  Any time you move...even walking...is time travel...just do the math with relativity.  The difference is that backwards time travel is not possible in the real world.

@beetnemesis,

I guess my theory is that there are 0 inconsistencies in PG.  None.  Which is the point of my theory.  That the entire book is entirely self-consistent and has a complete conclusion.  What it doesn't have is a wrap up that explains it front to back.

[raidem]

I already know that, but the nn isn't simply time dilation. Nn can speed up time or slow it down relative to other areas in it, or relative to the mortal world.  Anyways, for such a drastic difference in time of one day you would need to be going at speeds much closer to light speed relative to point b. And that isn't what is happening, therefore it's a different form of time travel that is the basic form your describing of our world physics.
There is time traveling occurring in pg, or at least time manipulation occurring and Kringle even references it in cold days.

when suddenly the silver starlight turned bright azure blue.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing at the sky.
“A temporal pressure wave,” the Erlking said, his flaming eyes narrowed.
“A wha’?” I asked.
The Erlking looked at Kringle. “This is your area of expertise. Explain it.”
“Someone is bending time against us,” Kringle said.
I stared at him for a second and then it clicked. “We’re being rushed forward so that we’ll get there too late,” I said. “We’re looking at a Doppler shift.”
“Is what he said correct?” the Erlking asked Kringle curiously.
“Essentially, aye. We’ve already lost half of an hour by my count.”
“Who could have done this?” I asked.
“You have encountered this before, wizard,” Kringle said. “Can you not guess?”
“One of the Queens,” I muttered. “Or someone operating on their level. Can we get out of this wave?”

[wardenferry419]

Unfortunately, beetnemesis, you are probably right. Bob gives a lecture about time travel in PG but there is no time travel reveal. Which means either JB put effort into a magical theory explanation that was mostly irrelevant, or there actually was TT in PG and we just didn't see it happening.

Bob did that lecture fairly early in the book, didn't he?

[Kindler]

Bob did that lecture fairly early in the book, didn't he?

Like the third chapter, right as Harry goes home. Not even fifty pages in. It's the infodump to explain why Rashid was so vague about there being black magic.

[wardenferry419]

Which did seem to be a bit of leap to explain how Rashid learned of the black magic.

[jonas]

Like the third chapter, right as Harry goes home. Not even fifty pages in. It's the infodump to explain why Rashid was so vague about there being black magic.

Ah.. but most every info dump has at least two purposes Imo, if you can find them.

[wardenferry419]

To inform and to distract.

[Talby16]

To inform and to distract.

Or it could be three-fold. To inform, distract, and plant seeds.