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montpahrnah · 7 years ago

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Diff anon, similar ??: do you view remus as loving sirius outside your fic elcipse & transit? I guess there's a part of me that needs soulmates to exist, even in fiction (& if that's not how you see r/s, that's okay! I don't mean to put that on you, AT ALL, just me being soppy) & am curious if you interpret r/s as soulmates or not? Also curious on your remus thoughts in general, his redeeming qualities & not so, how your interpretation of him has changed over time & why you love his character?

this is such a big question and i love you for asking it… let me just wax poetic @ you for a bit

the short of it is, YES, we are the same, i do believe r/s are soulmates and write them as such, and i’ll fight anyone about it because i’m right. i got an ask vaguely in that vein here a while ago. before that fic i’ve never written remus as anything but in love with sirius (and sirius irrevocably in love with remus), for better and for worse; when i wrote it i was really thinking about remus’s weird emotional coldness and his self-interested nature that sometimes edges into flat-out callous selfishness, and how that might fit into a wartime story where he realizes he can’t pretend anymore. and as remus would he just goes on to try and pretend differently with someone else, and when that ends badly too, he blames–as remus would do–anyone but himself.

in a lot of ways fandom tends to fall into the same trap a lot of characters do with remus in the books–we buy into the image he wants to project of himself, i.e. competent, caring, emotionally intelligent, a font of truth and wisdom with an inoffensive charm, infinitely suffering through no fault of his own at all ever, etc etc. and remus is a good person with a wonderful brain and a heart in the right if slightly off-kilter place who is capable of being those things, but that’s not the whole picture–it’s like, a head shot where the only things in the frame are a shoulder and an ear. remus is the same guy who cared more about himself than giving anyone crucial information when sirius was thought to be stalking the hogwarts grounds. the scene with the map and snape in poa has nothing to do with harry and everything to do with remus covering his own ass. he’d rather look the other way or take the path of least resistance and let things simmer than actually deal with them.

he has a certain carelessness occasionally wrt other people’s feelings (other characters are def careless with remus’s feelings and boundaries, but that doesn’t like, cancel this out). he’s a phenomenal liar. he’s manipulative, which we see with harry repeatedly, and a bit with sirius. he’s colossally irresponsible–he’d rather run away than deal with anything or admit he made a mistake. and when he’s confronted with his mistakes, he reacts very badly–trying to manipulate harry with james in dh after he runs away (i know no one likes to think about the shitshow involved with that, myself included, but remus’s behavior there is 100% in character when he’s made a mistake and wants out), and then firing off a curse at harry when he doesn’t get what he wants. in poa he runs off immediately rather than face the repercussions of forgetting his potion (i’m not talking about parents and the hogwarts governors or w/e, but his unwillingness to face what it cost harry and sirius). he cuts and runs and lets other people clean up his messes. he utterly, absolutely cannot/will not communicate anything important. he seems to have no desire to fix any of these things.

generally i think we’re soft with remus in a way he doesn’t deserve, and which kind of does an injustice to his character. like there’s this tendency–even when we are acknowledging that remus is flawed and isn’t always interested in doing the right thing–to cut him slack for it and implicitly justify it, or present them as cute character quirks or as remus being a stone cold badass, or act like everything bad in his life is actually all sirius’s fault. and yeah, there are plot reasons and blah blah and in the dingy light of remus’s circumstances/his lycanthropy, much of this is understandable, and it makes for an amazing, compelling character! whether it’s forgivable or not is a totally different story, and it’s a big part of why i love him so massively.

so! the thing that’s changed the most for me since i first started writing r/s is wanting to write/see remus as more than a tea-stained genius badass with a seductively ill pallor who has never hurt anyone in his life and definitely never would. writing him doesn’t come as easily to me as sirius does but i’ve also tried to move away from like, writing remus as this vessel for sirius’s development/love/hopes/dreams/growth etc, which i’ve been guilty of doing. they’re not dissimilar people at their cores and so much about their characters is predicated on each other and their history/preoccupation with each other, which is partly why they’re so interesting together, but for me so much of it is that sense–narratively and like, cosmically–that they don’t have a future without each other, whether they like it or not. i think it would take time for them to come to terms with it, sirius particularly, but by the time they do canon-wise it’s too late.

to circle back to your first point, i guess as weird as it is i think they are still soulmates in that story. sometimes that doesn’t look the way we want, and there is maybe something in the way preventing you from loving this person completely or at all–fear, resentment, wildly different desires/feelings, the pain/difficulty that i think is sometimes inherent in relationships like that… in other words i do believe they’re meant for each other and all that gooey fated multiverse nonsense, but it’s never going to be a hallmark original movie for them. it’s mostly why i’m kicking around a short sequel-ish thing, which i’m now more interested in than ever thanks to your amazing ask–thank you so much for this, dude

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