#also GREAT point about peter and snape i love that

[seriousbrat]

im literally so obsessed with the post saying peter pettigrew would never be a traitor… that’s like basically The first thing we truly discover about him. right there from book three. like that is The Basis of his role in the narrative, that he was the traitor and sirius was not. that he was willing to bow to the winning power rather than risk dying for his friends and values (which is. the one issue the narrative never flinches on. doing the right thing rather than the easy.) like these aren’t real people, they are characters with narrative functions. peter is everything harry doesn’t respect, everything characters like ron and neville defy, when they doubt their places among their friends and still fight for what they believe in, and a foil to snape — snape’s love for lily causes him to make a good choice, peter’s lack of dedication to his friends causes him to make a bad choice. a bad choice that KICKS OFF THE ENTIRE PREMISE. like. yes these are characters and you can choose to play with them like dolls. but hp is a very tight narrative, and it’s silly to claim they are somehow at heart the antithesis of the space they fill.

I know like... if there's ONE detail about him then that's it. It showed up as a recommended post on my dash and I was so baffled for a moment haha. I could understand an attempt to defend his reasoning (I certainly like to understand it) but like... his character is nothing without that moment, it literally defines him as a character, so to say it's bad writing is so silly.

It's like if I made an impassioned post claiming that Voldemort would NEVER kill Lily and James. It moves past headcanon into just... outright denial of the basic facts of the characters and the story. Harry would NEVER have green eyes!!!! Tbh though Peter Defence Movement in general is the last thing I'd have expected a few years ago.

Recently just before I really started getting back into marauders fandom on tumblr, I posted in a discord asking for people's views on Peter, explaining my own interpretation and wanting input. And I was legitimately SO confused when EVERYONE replied in the vein of "hmm well that's not how I see him but ok. he actually was a poor little meow meow who took care of his friends and rubbed their shoulders after a battle, he was a scared little boy and he couldnt help it."

I was VERY taken aback by the complete 180 that peoples views on Peter seemed to have done, since I assumed my portrayal was controversially sympathetic. Fandom used to largely just ignore him, and when he wasn't ignored he was reviled. It once would have been heresy for me to imply Peter had any sympathetic qualities at all lol, whereas here I was pretty solidly shouted down for saying he had the unsavory characteristics we're shown in canon, such as enjoying watching James and Sirius bully others.

It's honestly so fascinating, like when did this happen lmao

[whinlatter]

The Ginny and Peter parallel though?? How have I never thought about that?? It‘s so horrifying and insanely compelling to me at the same time. I would love to hear (read?) you elaborate on that.

"Sirius, Sirius, what could I have done? The Dark Lord… you have no idea… he has weapons you can't imagine…. I was scared, Sirius, I was never brave like you and Remus and James. I never meant it to happen…. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named forced me - " "Harry – oh, Harry – I tried to tell you at b-breakfast, but I c-couldn’t say it in front of Percy. It was me, Harry – but I – I s-swear I d-didn’t mean to  - R-Riddle made me, he took me over..."

thank you so much for this question anon.  i have been thinking about this for a long time - about how ginny weasley might have made a really, really good traitor - and would love to talk more about my thinking behind it. a little meta on traitor talk - who flips, and why, and why ginny weasley might be the peter pettigrew to the trio's marauders after all - can be found below the cut (with spoilers for beasts chapter 14). 

hp, as a series, puts great moral emphasis on the concept of choice. after all, it’s about a world at war, where the question of whose side you're on is often a matter of life or death. double agents, deception, treachery, people serving the interests of others (either consensually or under duress): these are recurrent tropes, on both sides of the wizarding war. the plot begins the ultimate act of betrayal - that of lily and james potter by peter pettigrew - and the series concludes with the revelation of another (snape). throughout the books, there are all sorts of characters who spy, or flip, for all sorts of reasons. you have those who knowingly pretend to be serving the interests of one side when actually serving another, for principled reasons, either ideological motivation or out of selfless loyalty to another person: snape, peter, likely rookwood, quirrell, fake moody/barty crouch jr, both sirius and regulus black, kreacher, and narcissa in the forest. and then you have the group who betray either out of fear, or who are manipulated into acts of betrayal and deceit, sometimes through possession but otherwise through blackmail and intimidation, to varying degrees: xenophilius lovegood, mundungus fletcher, pius thicknesse, marietta edgecombe, bertha jorkins, bathilda bagshot, those types. (in a sign of jkr’s consistently dicked-up biases re gender in the series, women are never allowed to be interesting enough to actively betray anyone unless they’re doing it out of maternal love eg. narcissa - they can only ever actively be led astray or hoodwinked, whereas male characters can have a vast array of complex motivations and all sorts of shades of moral grey. we'll come back to that in a minute).

in chapter 14 of my postwar fic beasts, during the course of the hogwarts inquiry, augustus rookwood takes the stand and testifies of an attempt by him and his fellow death eaters to find someone who could play double agent to pass secrets about the resistance, the order and harry to the other side during the second wizarding war. rookwood - himself a former double agent - talks about how to make a traitor. he discusses the different motivations of traitors, how to find a target and how to exploit their existing vulnerabilities and weak-points to get them to come around to your side. he also reveals that, during the death eater seizure of the ministry and hogwarts school, he and his peers identified a would-be target in ginny weasley. in the fic, i have him describe the process of traitor-identification as ‘the pettigrew playbook’: finding someone who is connected, who knows the order’s secrets, who has the information you want, and who will flip less out of an ardent ideological commitment, but more because they are weak and scared but also disrespected and resentful and more inclined to save their own neck than act out of loyalty

i’ve always been very struck by peter pettigrew’s attempts to justify his betrayal of lily and james in PoA (see above). peter pettigrew is always a slippery and elusive character, rendered mostly through other people’s memories or descriptions of him. this is one of the very few times he explains something of his own worldview - though, as we know he is a liar, and in this instance errrr trying to save his own life as sirius threatens to kill him (slay), we have to take even these lines with a pinch of salt. we know pettigrew is a character that acts, at all times, out of a desire for self-preservation, trying to secure his own survival. he was tolerated but never respected by his schoolfriends, made the potters’ secret keeper as a ‘perfect bluff’ because he was a  ‘weak, talentless thing’ voldemort would never bother going after, a trait which ultimately made him the perfect and most vulnerable target. when outed as the real spy by sirius and remus here, he acknowledges he is aware of his deficiencies and weaknesses, and talks about his fear for his own life, his sense of how he did not live up to the principled bravery of his friends, and claims  that voldemort ‘forced him’ to surrender lily and james - presumably through the threat of terrible violence, suffering and death. 

pettigrew’s remarks are particularly interesting when put alongside the justifications and excuses of another character who has betrayed harry to voldemort, albeit under very different circumstances. like peter, ginny’s confession is given through floods of tears as a desperate plea to be believed and excused. in it, ginny begs harry to understand her own lack of culpability. just as wormtail does, she insists to harry she was forced by riddle to cause harm to others and to hand information about harry over to riddle, and to play an integral role in returning lord voldemort to life.  of course, the series always frames ginny’s actions in CoS as the behaviour of an entirely innocent person. but even these lines show a streak of self-preservation and a certain amount of weakness and cowardice that runs throughout ginny’s encounter with the diary. ‘I couldn’t say it in front of Percy’, she says, suggesting she feared getting in deep trouble with no proof of riddle’s hand in her actions. in fact throughout the diary episode, ginny shows real moments of acting to save herself rather than do the right thing and come forward with the truth. she tries to dispose of the diary, but doesn’t go to a teacher about what it has been making her do. she stole the diary back not to protect harry but to protect her own secrets and prevent him from discovering her complicity (at least by TMR’s telling). she even watches hagrid get falsely accused and sent to azkaban, and stays silent in the process, a distinctly pettigrew echo if ever i heard one. 

of course, we know ginny and peter pettigrew’s relationships with voldemort are not alike in dignity. it’s clear that, in so many ways, ginny’s encounter with the diary is much more clearly an experience of victimhood than of malicious intent. we know that ginny was possessed; we know she is not a character who would commit murder without that level of involuntary mental surrender. but there are more uncomfortable echoes of pettigrew in her experiences in CoS. we see them in the decisions of a character acting of fear and a desire to save their own skin in ginny’s experience of the diary than we might like to think. ginny ofc was targeted by lucius malfoy because of who her family was, as stalwarts of the anti-voldemort pro-muggle resistance during the first wizarding war, with powerful enemies determined to discredit and undermine them at every turn. but, as TMR makes clear, what makes ginny such a good target in the end, so vulnerable and so useful, was that she was weak. she was insecure, and lonely, teased and misunderstood and feeling inadequate. in all of that, there was a very rich opening for TMR to access her innermost fears and secrets and to use them to manipulate, pressure and threaten her into compliance, in addition to the active possession of her body to conduct deliberate acts of attempted murder. it’s not a perfect pettigrew parallel by any means. but there’s more than a little bit of pettigrew in that, too. 

maybe more parallels with ginny and peter pettigrew than meets the eye - particularly in ginny’s relationship to the trio. there are a few posts that periodically do the rounds on tumblr and reddit that talk about neville’s relationship to the trio as the parallel to peter pettigrew’s with the marauders - as this post compellingly puts it, ‘all who peter could have been’. neville, these posts usually point out, was a character who was weak and much less talented than his friends, an outsider who needed the protection and patience of cooler classmates, who was always on the outside looking in on a friend group that largely excluded him. what distinguished neville from peter was his approach to his own weakness, and how that approach drove him to heroism rather than betrayal and villainy. it’s an interesting idea, and there’s something to it. but the more i thought about it, the more i thought - is neville + the trio the only parallel with peter + the marauders? what about ginny? 

it’s remarkably under-appreciated in fandom that ginny is remarkably poorly treated by the trio for much of the series. ‘go away, ginny’ - that’s how ron banishes his sister at the start of PoA, because harry mutters to his two mates that he wants to talk to them in private and to ditch ginny. neither harry nor hermione object to it - hermione, though kind to ginny when the dementors arrive, makes no defence of her right to stay. ginny duly leaves, hurt, to go sit by herself on the train back to school, returning to hogwarts for the first time after her deeply traumatic experience in the chamber, dismissed and dispatched. not meaning to drag ron here - this is, ofc, how big brothers have behaved for time immemorial, as is their wont. but it’s kind of the statement for how the trio treat ginny for much of her school career really until HBP, harry and hermione included. ofc there are many textual/plot reasons ginny needs to be held at arms length from the trio. but it is striking that the effect of this plot habit for the reader is a usually unkind and sometimes even callous exclusion of ginny by the trio throughout many of the books.

in CoS itself, ginny is never invited to join the trio or spend any time with them: when she isn’t, you know, trying her hand at possessed attempted murder, she’s doing a light bit of potter hero worship that does recall a certain lakeside snitch-catching display of yore. it’s ginny who’s left feeling left out when the trio are swapping suspicious eyes and sirius secrets in GoF, ginny who is hermione’s back-up friend when the ron and harry showdown kicks off over the triwizard tournament, ginny who shoulders the role as harry’s consolation prize friend when ron and hermione go off to the prefects on the train in ootp (and takes him to neville and luna), ginny who goes defenceless when the trio are demanding to be included in order secrets and is physically removed from the room with no protest from the others, ginny who has to fight her case to be taken seriously and included in the department of mysteries plot to rescue a man she too is friends with (‘I care about Sirius as much as you do!’), being patronised by three friends who pick her up and put her down when they feel like it (always enjoy hermione being like ‘we need three thestrals!’ and ginny being like ffs we need four why won’t you show me an ounce of respect). in fact, when ginny is revealed to be becoming popular in a different social circle throughout ootp and hbp, it is something of a shock to harry and ron, who have spent a good six years making no effort to include her and now are finding she has built a much more successful social life beyond them (you reap what you sow, lads). i don’t say this to overstate the trio’s malice nor to overstate the pettigrew comparisons (ginny is clearly both conventionally attractive and much more socially adept).. but i do think it’s striking that  if there is a character with pettigrew echoes in the trio’s surround, always orbiting the trio, trying to feel included (and hero worshipping the potter at the heart of it), it’s more often young ginny than it is neville. so many of the things that made ginny vulnerable to TMR - her loneliness, her isolation, her insecurities and sense of inadequacy - are not helped by the trio in the years afterwards, and in some cases, actively reinforced.

(to briefly say something on gender - sometimes wonder if ginny were a male character if people would have made more of this. percy stans, for instance, go to great lengths to point out all the ways percy was bullied or teased by his family as an excuse for his errrrr war crimes. would people care more about many ginny's exclusions if she were a maligned misunderstood young man? probably? it's noticeable too that all traitors in hp are men lol, a classic example of jkr’s weird and fucked feminism striking again. women are led astray or hoodwinked - men get the complex motivations and agency arcs. but i digress).

why does any of this matter? we know ginny doesn't take the path of pettigrew, however much she might have good reason to. harry's endearingly naive line in DH ('I trust all of you, I don’t think anyone in this room would ever sell me to Voldemort’) ends up being borne out: there are no betrayals during the second wizarding war, and certainly not by ginny (though the sword heist almost ended up doing it on accident). but i found myself thinking a lot about this as i was sketching out the plotline for beasts and thinking about ginny’s war, and what is asked of ginny in it. i was particularly thinking about it relation to how the second wizarding war plays out, the unique position of danger ginny would have been in as a hogwarts student in the 1997-1998 academic year, and what a good target she would make for death eaters on the hunt for a spy within the order of the phoenix.

when i was reading DH for the first time, i remember thinking that it is absolutely bonkers that ginny weasley goes back to hogwarts in september ’97. by that summer, the weasleys are the order of the phoenix. no longer just the blood traitors’ blood traitor, they’re now the face of the wizarding resistance, both parents and (nearly) all sons in active combat, something the ministry certainly knows about even when trying to normalise death eater rule and allowing the facade of arthur et al going to go to work in the ministry/gringotts etc. ginny’s family home is order hq: she lives there all summer, and trots off to the hogwarts express straight from the kitchen table where order meetings take place. when death eaters descend on the wedding, she’s there alongside the rest of the rest of dumbledore stans. she is also famously in the DA, and fought death eaters alongside the trio in the department of mysteries, and again in the battle of the astronomy tower. and then there’s the obvious point that hinny shippers everywhere have pointed out is baffling since the dawn of time, which is that the world and his wife knows that ginny weasley is harry potter’s ex, something that might put a big fat target on her head for a death eater or two to have a pop at trying to get some secrets and intel out of her. 

of course, there’s a compelling case for why ginny has to go back. ron’s already used the splattergroit excuse, and arthur’s going to work, and so is bill, and the twins (at least for a bit), and the weasleys are going for normalisation and at least a fig leaf of compliance. so off ginny goes, into the belly of the beast, back to school, despite all the access she has to order secrets and intel, as well as information on harry and the trio. she is in a uniquely dangerous position of risk: it’s a fortress run by death eaters and her card is marked. she finds herself in an unenviable and unrivalled position as a very good person to go after if you’re a death eater fancying some intel about what the guerilla resistance - and harry potter - are up to. we know there are death eaters about who would like to claw themselves back into some level of relevance by working towards the big man and trying to curry favour (yaxley). we know there is a family intimately aware of ginny weasley's weakness and failings who are desperate to get back in voldemort's good books (the malfoys). we also know there are witnesses to ginny's exclusions both from the order and from the trio over the years - in particular, one witness that already sold secrets on the order to death eaters, namely kreacher.

the reason i came back to thinking about parallels between ginny and peter in beasts is because beasts is a story about ginny’s war, but also in part about morality in the wizarding world, about war and sides and choices. at various points in beasts, i’ve tried to play with ginny’s echoes with characters that waver morally - including regulus - or who find themselves drawn to or in some way embroiled in darkness, and who are at times governed by fear and cowardice and self-preservation in a moral universe that prizes bravery, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. so this plot came from putting all these pieces together - ginny's existing vulnerabilities and insecurities, her position of privilege and access, but also her alienation and mistreatment, and this interest in moral motivations and what experiences or traumas might lead a person, or even justify, a person's treachery, moral inaction, or active moral failing. it was even more interesting for me to play with the idea that other people might have noticed ginny weasley's weird position relative to the trio and the order too, people who want to know what she knows and who would be willing to exploit the cracks in those relationships for strategic wartime gain. and that's for chapters fifteen and sixteen!

[blitheringmcgonagall]

Someone was asking me did I think Sirius was cunning or had lots of Slytherin traits.

I don’t think so at all.

The Slytherin traits are essentially:

Cunning - this is not the same as intelligence or cleverness. It’s the quality of being astute or sharp in practical matters; the ability to find and pursue the most advantageous course of action, sometimes at the cost of moral compromise. Canny, crafty, weighing up the possibility and deciding based on what’s going to be in your best interests. Someone who is cunning has the ability to achieve things in a clever way, often by deceiving other people. When was Sirius like this? I’ll tell you who is cunning and shrewd, it’s Albus Dumbledore.

Ambition where in canon was Sirius ambitious? If he was he’d have pretended he was a good, obedient son and not run away and gotten blasted off the family tree. He might have stayed on and lied to them all, then if he was also cunning he might have brought Voldy down from the inside. Sirius like this? Nope!

Resourcefulness he’s pretty resourceful fair enough

Pride where in canon is he proud? Pride is a feeling that you respect yourself and deserve to be respected by other people; Pride can also have a negative meaning and refer to exceedingly high self-regard. Sirius is shown as racked with guilt about making Peter secret keeper, doesn’t believe Harry will want to live with him when he offers, didn’t try to leave Azkaban for 12 years because he believed he deserved to be punished for being responsible for the Potters’ deaths. He’s kind and thoughtful to Harry and his friends and to animals. He can be cutting towards others that he dislikes but that’s not pride. He’s rude to Kreacher but it’s not because he thinks he’s superior to house elves but because Kreacher hated Sirius and adored his mother and brother.

Self-preservation Sirius scores -10 points!

Shrewdness as above, not a talent of his

The Gryffindor traits are:

Daring To be daring is to be bold, adventurous - a quality possessed by people who tend to take risks. The fellow who became an animagus as a teenager and risked Azkaban every full moon to run wild with his pack. The guy who joined the Order at 18 to risk his life fighting against the bad guys. “What’s life without a little risk?” Now you’re talking!

Nerve Some common synonyms of nerve are audacity, cheek, chutzpah, effrontery, gall, hardihood, and temerity. While all these words mean "conspicuous or flagrant boldness”. The fella who got millions of detentions with his best mate, who loved breaking rules, who nearly got arrested by muggle policemen for his antics, while wearing a stupid, brazen phoenix t-shirt, who converted a muggle motorbike into a flying machine? The guy who taunted his psychopathic Death Eater cousin? Who told Snape about the Whomping Willow… Ah, yep, that’s him!

Chivalry - polite, kind, and unselfish behaviour, especially by men towards women. As noted above, he’s very much like this to Harry and the other children. He tells Hermione she’s the brightest witch of her age. He buys Ron a present of an owl. He’s caring of Buckbeak, he’s great pals with Crookshanks. He risks the dementors’ kiss to buy Harry his Firebolt and watch him play Quidditch and help him fight Dementors. He was polite to Molly despite the fact she told him he wasn’t there for Harry growing up (when he was innocently imprisoned in Azkaban!!) which was very upsetting.

Courage - courage is taking action in spite of the fear you feel. Standing up to his family, fighting against Voldemort in the first Wix war despite being outnumbered 20:1, fighting in the second Wix war to try to protect and save Harry etc etc

Sirius: "What was there to be gained by fighting the most evil wizard that ever existed? Only innocent lives, Peter!"

Peter Pettigrew: "You don't understand! He would have killed me, Sirius!"

Sirius: "THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED! DIED RATHER THAN BETRAY YOUR FRIENDS, AS WE WOULD HAVE DONE FOR YOU!"

Bravery the quality or state of having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty. It wasn’t just the above, it was also agreeing to live in Grimmauld Place so he could let the Order use the safety of the house, despite the painful memories of a bad childhood and the death of his brother, despite sounding depressed/PTSD/drinking heavily during that part of the book. Resisting Snape goading him for sitting in the house and doing nothing.

“I don't like being back here...I never thought I'd be stuck in this house again.”

😭😭😭

Determination managing to become the first prisoner to escape from Azkaban etc

[shakespearean-snape]

I’m rereading OOTP right now and I find that scene between Severus and Sirius in the kitchen to be highly relevant in the context of Severus as a feminine-coded character (and Sirius as a representation of toxic masculinity). Sirius is very outwardly aggressive in this scene in a conventionally masculine way, while Severus weaponizes his sarcasm and wit in a way that could be thought of as a more “feminine” form of defence. While Harry describes Sirius’s voice as getting progressively louder and angrier, he describes Severus’s voice as “soft” in contrast (as he usually does, which is also interesting in the context of Severus as a feminine man/GNC character). Sirius gets up and tries to intimidate Severus physically, and Severus grips his wand inside his pocket in a way that reminded me of a victim of domestic violence preparing to defend herself against her abuser.

I’m not sure how much of this was intentional considering how rigid JKR’s views on gender have unfortunately turned out to be, but I can’t help but read Severus as a feminine character, especially since he’s meant to act as a stand in for Lily in the same way as Sirius acts as a stand in for James. It’s very easy to read Sev as gender non conforming and/or LGBTQ, although given JKR’s own views it’s doubtful she meant for us to read him that way (but fuck her, she’s a massive transphobe, the characters are ours now, we can do what we like with them).

Note to self, start checking your inbox regularly. These changes to Tumblr are killing me because the notifications when I get messages or asks are hit-or-miss at best.

Anyways, this is such a great observation! I'm only just learning about coding and that that is even the term for it from reading about it from other Snape bloggers like @idealistic-realism00, @raptured-night, and @professormcguire since I only took the required English courses both my undergraduate years and beyond that my major was in sociology.

So, I'm not really any kind of expert but I do have a lot of personal experience from being biracial and queer myself just with learning to read between the lines and find representation for myself where I can and I think that is the case for a lot of people from less represented, marginalized backgrounds. We have a certain instinct for these things so even without any kind of formal study we sort of know the "codes" (for better or worse depending on what the author's intent is and if it's a negative dog-whistle or something more positive to get around censorships of the time) if that makes any kind of sense.

For me, I always saw Sirius and Snape as two sides of a coin. There were some very obvious parallels and contrasts between them and this really goes to that in a lot of ways for me. Both Sirius and Snape are two men who made pivotal choices in their youths that very much define them and have led to a great deal of internalized guilt and impacted their behaviors as adults. Both Sirius and Snape find themselves confined to their childhood homes at different points, Sirius at Grimmauld Place with Kreacher and Snape at Spinner's End with Peter Pettigrew (both Kreacher and Peter are characters that also are known for betraying Harry and costing him someone he loves at different points and making a turn around in regards to Harry because of kindness or mercy he showed to them).

Where Sirius made the choice to make Peter the Secret Keeper with only James, Lily, and Peter knowing and it ultimately led to the death of the Potters and him being sentenced to twelve years in Azkaban, Snape also unwittingly delivered part of the fated prophecy that led to Voldemort targeting the Potters. Most interesting for me is that Snape's friendship with Lily and Sirius's friendship with James could be read as either platonic or a case of unrequited romantic feelings. There is the observation in SWM made by Harry that while Sirius was clearly a looker who attracted the attention of girls, his attention was fully on James and not on those admiring glances. So, when looking at Sirius's relationship with James through a comparative lens to Snape's with Lily they could be platonic friends or both Sirius and Snape could have had romantic feelings for their best friends while, ironically enough, Sirius had to watch James fall for and succeed in winning over Lily just as Snape had to do the same.

In the case of Snape and Sirius there is also a degree of regression and arrested development stemming from trauma (and both men at different points make the clear mistake of seeing Harry as a stand-in for James as a result of said trauma). Where Sirius spent twelve years in Azkaban able to hold onto his sanity against the Dementors in part because he knew he was innocent and the truth of what happened was a deeply unhappy thing for him, Snape spent decades in Dumbledore's service at Hogwarts (a place with its own unhappy associations for him having found it was not a refuge from life at Spinner's End with Tobias as he had hoped but another place where he would be bullied relentlessly, overlooked by his Head of House and housemates for being a poor half-blood with no status, subject to institutional failures resulting from yet more adult authority figures in his life not protecting him, groomed by Voldemort's followers and responsible for alienating his closest friend as a result) teaching children when clearly he does not have the temperament and, courtesy of his role as a spy, concealing his own truths and intentionally not allowing people to know the best of him. In a sense, both men had a negative public image that ran counter to the full truth about them and both of them died without being able to see those misconceptions vindicated (Sirius died still presumed by the Ministry and general public to have been the traitor who turned his friends over to Voldemort and murdered innocent people and Snape died knowing he had delivered information to Harry that would lead to his death and unsure of the outcome of the war with everyone thinking him a coward and murderer).

There's just, a LOT of parallels there between the two when you start to unpack them as characters. Even the fact that they both came from domestic dysfunction and unhappy home lives. It makes their mutual antagonism all the more of a tragedy because if not for Sirius's prejudice (which is arguably more understandable given his family and their long tradition of being sorted into Slytherin) against Slytherins and antagonism of young Snape on the train and the years of bullying and bad blood that followed, these two men had the most potential to understand each other. Alas, they do not, but it is their likenesses that makes their differences in how they clash all the more interesting because, as you noted, there are stark differences there. Sirius is all overt masculine energy; hot-headed and physically imposing while Snape is more strained, the ice to his fire.

Most striking to me was always the difference in how little respect Sirius showed to Snape's body while he was unconscious (further demonstrating how little Sirius has changed from the teenage boy who once stood with James and exposed Snape to laughing schoolmates) versus how Snape conjured a stretcher while still under the impression he was the one responsible for betraying the Potters (and the death of Lily). In that way, we get to see how Snape has developed as a person away from his past choices and learned from them. He may still regress, as he does quite plainly when forced to return to the Shrieking Shack and is confronted by Sirius and Remus there, but he isn't quite in the full state of arrested development as Sirius (but given his circumstances in Azkaban that isn't entirely surprising either; there is a tragedy to Sirius's character for all that there is as much of a darkness as there was in Snape during his time as a Death Eater and the fact so many Marauder apologists who double as "Snaters" refuse to acknowledge that outside of romanticizing the angst of it all while vilifying Snape is quite possibly an even greater tragedy, imo) which is why Sirius's death came in part due to his inability to move beyond his past and find it within himself to treat Kreacher with a modicum of understanding or empathy (in addition to his desire to be part of the action again and recapture his lost youth when it was him and James in the Order together) while Snape's death came only after he had to reconcile with the fact his original raison d'être for becoming a spy (to protect Harry for Lily as penance) ran counter to what was needed to defeat Voldemort for good and he still chose to stay the course instead of pursue his own agenda and act on his own self-interests.

In short, Sirius's death was partly due to the fact he couldn't move beyond the past. While Snape's death came as a result of the fact he had grown enough as a character to set aside his past motivations and see things through because he had become someone who conjured stretchers even for hated enemies and risked his life to save all those who he could save (including Sirius and Remus).

Thanks for the ask and I'm so sorry it took so long to respond but it gave me even more to think about. The masculine vs. feminine coding just adds an extra element to Snape and Sirius's dynamic when it was already interesting to me and I've always had a lot of thoughts about how those two were written with so many parallels and points of contrast. Love this ask!

[v-h-lupin]

Maurauders Era Characters if they were Demigods (with explanations) pt.2

find part 1 (the main 4, Lily, Mary, Marlene) here and then pt 3 here

Christopher (ATYD):

I'm not sure but its giving... minor god with interests in education. not athena. someone other than athena. Honestly? I wanna say Iris. Iris is a minor goddess, but important in symbolism. Chris has a lot of feelings of.. insecurity, and while its not necessarily a trait Iris has, a lot of "minor" demigods sometimes have that issue. Also rainbow... insert gay joke here

Severus Snape:

ok i know this may just be my thirst for symbolism but if he was a son of poseidon it would be so cool especially since I had Lily as a daughter of Athena (and Athena and Poseidon are constantly at odds). Poseidon was known for his intense jealousy-- "better than Zeus!" but not by much. And he can really wreck your ships if he's unhappy with you.

Regulus Black:

Okay I know I said Sirius was a son of Aphrodite. And I know this is going to sound... odd. But. given that this is headcannon and they only need to share 1 parent, I'm actually going to say Athena. This kid is a child of thought. He was a major turning point in the war. This would also explain some of the times he and Sirius butt heads, because of the difference in the way they think. Regulus lays low and changes the course of the war with one move.

Arthur Weasley:

... something something, im honestly. not sure. Athena, perhaps, because of his absolute thirst for knowledge about his special interest (that being muggles) so much so that he hoards the objects and stays in a job that does not pay him nearly enough because he gets to mess with them all day

Gilderoy Lockhart:

oh. this one is tough. I consulted people and they said Hermes. I think we can see why but its so odd to say that when I also said James and Peter were Hermes kids. Hermes just has HELLA range. Lockhart is clever enough to act dumb. That sounds like a Hermes thing to do.

Pandora Lovegood:

I wanna say Iris, goddess of the rainbow, for the aesthetic. But something in my heart says Hephaestus. She was so curious and dedicated to her experiments. I feel like it's "unexpected" but she doesn't really listen to other's judgements and kinda does her own thing. Like making magical experiments. It's great.

Grant Chapman:

this man is the sun, his father is apollo. theres no discussion about it hes just like that. If I wanted to give reasons, he's got this motivation (eventually) to make the world a less s**tty place, he loves music, also in the future he fosters children with his life partner and that seems like an extremely Apollo thing to do (considering he's the protector of young boys and men)

[greenerteacups]

Would LOVE to hear more re: Lily Evans as the bolter of you want to share more about that idea

Ogh god I have So Many thoughts about Lily and the Marauders in general because I had to basically do a full outline of the Backstory in order to have context for the living Marauders' backstories, but here is my official Harry's Mom Was A Player dissertation:

I like the idea that Lily grows up with relatively few people around (we only see her with Petunia and Snape, which you could read as a function of Snape's perspective, but I prefer to read it as Lily and Snape being "those weirdos in the corner of the playground making Potion in the dirt" buddies). From that, she becomes pretty closed-off emotionally, and despite having general charisma and kindness, she's pretty hard to connect with. Nice, but a little brusque. She's glad to help you with your homework, but when you invite her to Hogsmeade, she'll smile and make a vague excuse, and you'll never hang out again.

This would also explain why she and Snape remain friends for five years, despite being in different houses and having a lot of political differences: he's one of the few people she's vulnerable with. So we're picturing this Lily who's beautiful, charismatic, clever, but also very closed-off and hard to find. I.e. 100% the kind of person who attracts a lot of admirers, but doesn't actually get close to any of them.

My headcanon for her is a long series of two-month relationships running from around fifth year through sixth, none of them very intense, and petering out around the time that the other person starts asking for labels or commitment. Because (a) she's Busy, but (b) she's not really comfortable with any of them. And so she gets a bit of a (slightly mistaken) reputation as an ice queen.

We know Lily and James started dating in seventh year, after he "stopped being an asshole." ACCORDING TO SIRIUS. This is his account of his best friend's love story. A lot of the read here turns on (1) how much you think James told Sirius about him and Lily, and (2) how much of that Sirius wants Harry to know, as someone trying to protect James's memory.

"He was a cad" is obvious big James energy, especially since we know (1) he's an unserious arrogant jock for most of his Hogwarts career, and (2) she would have absolutely no reason to take him seriously if he expressed interest in her, because — he's a dumb kid! And a bully, from her point of view.

Because they're not close, verging on antagonistic, I tend to think that his interest in her actually was superficial to start with — based on her looks or her reputation (or both). Which, of course, plays right into her issues with intimacy and not being really Seen by anyone. And the ritualized game of his pursuit only contributes to her disbelief in its sincerity.

So basically, by seventh year, you have these two incredibly desirable, successful, popular people who are both in fact really locked-up and struggle with sincerity, but have the beginning of real feelings for each other, and are freaking out about that.

And then you get a great Player4Player love story about intimacy and the mortifying ordeal of being known.

[superfallingstars]

Superfallingstars, will you be mad if I interrupt Snapetober with more Marauders questions? These are halloween themed. If yes, give me some time and I’ll come back to you with Snape and Lily questions. But for now, I’ll stick to what I know!

- Which marauder would be the best at telling ghost stories? And who’s the most scared of them?

- Which marauder is most likely to enjoy horror movies? (Context of your choice - AU or if they ever came across muggle cinema. Horror was popping in the 70s and personally, if someone has never came across movies before, I think they’d be blown away by the magic of editing, music, and lighting!)

- Slasher horror! How would each of them die?

- Halloween party in the Gryffindor room! What are they dressing up as?

- Costumes trick the spirits into thinking you’re something you’re not. Who’s the best at impersonations?

- Who borrows their friend’s clothes the most?

- Who lets their friend borrow their stuff the most?

- We know Remus’s boggart. How does fear materialises itself for James, Peter, and Sirius?

- Which marauder was the most likely to befriend the Moaning Myrtle?

- Who had the most symbiotic relationship with Peeves?

Spooky stuff. Love to hear what you think!

Hiii I’m happy to answer Marauders questions and I would love Snape and Lily questions! This gives me a great excuse to keep procrastinating on Snapetober (not that I want to but omg I'm burnt out... I keep drawing things that I just fucking hate lol). October has been a ridiculously busy month in my personal/work life and it is totally cramping my style. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, where is my daily 12 hours of thinking about Snape time? Ugh. Anyways I’ll stop yapping now and get to the asks (where I will do more yapping but this time it’ll be relevant)

Which marauder would be the best at telling ghost stories? And who’s the most scared of them?

I love the idea of Sirius telling ghost stories to an absolutely terrified Peter. Sirius certainly has a bit of a mean streak, and I think he would derive great joy from making Peter quake in his boots. And this gives James the perfect opportunity to quietly slip away from the group so he can sneak behind Peter and make him scream lmfao. Also I think Remus would be the least frightened because he basically lives the plot of a horror movie every month. Speaking of...

Which marauder is most likely to enjoy horror movies? (Context of your choice - AU or if they ever came across muggle cinema. Horror was popping in the 70s and personally, if someone has never came across movies before, I think they’d be blown away by the magic of editing, music, and lighting!)

My only reference point for horror movies are shitty monster B-movies from the 50s and earlier so I feel rather unprepared for this question lol. Though I think maybe the answer is just Remus because again, he feels seen and affirmed by them. I could totally see Remus and Peter wanting to go to the movies and talking it up, fully invested in the magic of cinema, meanwhile Sirius and James are like wow people are actually scared of this shit? But at least they would all enjoy the popcorn (and probably figure out a way to steal some to take for later)

Slasher horror! How would each of them die?

Well James has to die first of course. He’s the one who checks out the mysterious noise in the closet at the end of the dark hallway and gets got. Or maybe James and Peter are cornered by the killer and Peter has the chance to save him and instead he pushes him into the arms of the killer and runs away crying lmao. Also Peter needs to lose a finger in the skirmish. Remus either dies a pretty nondescript death or there's a grand twist where it is revealed that he was actually the killer the whole time and didn't know it (how brutal). But if Remus dies then Sirius gets to be the final girl, laughing maniacally as he tries to cope with all of the horrors he just witnessed <3

Halloween party in the Gryffindor room! What are they dressing up as?

Ohhhh good question… I would love James to dress up as someone culturally relevant (like, some hot famous person) but I don’t know enough about the wizarding world in the 70s to pick someone. I think Sirius would either dress up the same as James, or do a couples costume with James, or he wouldn’t dress up at all (he's too good for that)… but he could be convinced to smear some fake blood on his face at the last minute. Or wait maybe he does something really insensitive and dresses up as a werewolf djfhksjdkhfdhk. I mean, it would be cute for them to dress up like their animagi, though I doubt Remus would want to participate… but I’m extremely enjoying the idea of James dressed up as a cute little deer. Also one year they should be the Beatles (Peter is Ringo, Remus is George, but I’m torn between who should be Paul and John… James is a loverboy like Paul but he kinda dies like John lmfao so idk. But Sirius and James are sooo Paul and John coded, I'll stand by that hfsjhfjks).

Costumes trick the spirits into thinking you’re something you’re not. Who’s the best at impersonations?

I think it would be fun to give this trait to James. I’ll admit I’m only choosing him because I don’t think the rest of them would be very good at this, but I think it would fit his mischievous yet charming vibe.

 Who borrows their friend’s clothes the most?

Sirius/James for sure. Meaning Sirius borrows James’s clothes (he never asks permission but he knows it's fine) and James borrows Sirius’s leather jacket when he knows he’s going to see Lily that day.

Who lets their friend borrow their stuff the most?

Naturally James… I actually quite like the idea of James being very selfless and giving towards his friends, but it’s totally a trait born of blind privilege. Like yeah sure you can have whatever, I’ll just ask my parents for another one LOL

We know Remus’s boggart. How does fear materialises itself for James, Peter, and Sirius?

Ooooooh, this is difficult... I'm really unsure of what their actual boggarts would be (as in, the physical object that symbolizes their greatest fears), but I can at least discuss what I think they're afraid of... I think for James his biggest fear might be exactly how he died lol (aka his friends turning on him). I think of James as someone who is extremely insecure and is always compensating for that trait through big flashy displays of friendship (or hatred, if Snape is around). But overall I think he’s quite desperate to be liked, at least in his teenage years. For Peter, idk probably just death or something... being completely defenseless, with no one to turn to for protection? And Sirius… man idk. I said in the last batch of asks that Sirius is the character I struggle the most with and yeah that’s really showing itself now. The thing is, Sirius basically lives through his greatest fears! What could be worse than going to Azkaban after being convicted for the murder of your BEST FRIEND and then having to essentially be imprisoned (AGAIN) in your childhood home that you hated? Like, James dying probably was his worst fear, and lo and behold…!

Which marauder was the most likely to befriend the Moaning Myrtle?

Gotta go with Remus if only because he canonically 1. befriends underdogs and 2. is a pushover. Also shoutout to this fic that changed my life which has a really great Remus/Myrtle friendship arc

Who had the most symbiotic relationship with Peeves?

Ooooh this is tough. I would say James, but I also think James would get jealous of Peeves trying to be the center of attention…

Wow these were surprisingly challenging, but they were fun! I appreciate the commitment to the holiday theme. Thanks for the ask!

[fandoomrants]

Okay, so I'm fully into my HP obsession again (honestly, I don't care what anyone says or how much the world tries to cancel this fandom. This is my childhood, it's a part of me that's always there and I eventually go back to between the other things) and therefore, the Marauders era's obsession.

And like, I've always loved them for some reason. Honestly, when I found fandoms and stuff and saw they're actually almost a fandom on it's own, I was so happy and relieved that I'm not the only one. (I realised at one point that I love HP yet I've never read a fic that's not about them from this fandom...)

But I've been thinking about some things and also came across some random videos summarizing what we know about them (because there are so many hcs that most people accept as common that it's easy to forget the real facts) and now I have so many thoughts I need to share because they haunt me.

-They were like... Big jerks. Especially James and Sirius. Mostly them, tbh. Like, not only because we see them from Snape's perspective in memories and he hates them but because, well, they were mean. Especially Sirius (he's my absolutely favourite character but still), he's done pretty shitty things. I think James mostly had beef with Snape but they were overall kinda bullies.

-Even though I love Wolfstar just as much as 90% of this fandom (I mean the Marauders era), I think they're a famous ship just because we get to see interactions between them while alive and not just flashbacks but I don't think they were really close back in the days. James and Sirius were the ones extremely close and maybe if we had seen extended Marauders' interactions or they were eventually all alive, then most likely Wolfstar wouldn't have been that popular.

-I'm 99% sure that the great friendship between Lily and Remus is completely fan-made. I believe Remus was the most reasonable (but nobody can convince me he wasn't the mastermind behind 99% of their pranks at the same time) and wasn't into being mean with anyone so it's possible that they were interacting on much better terms than her and James (I mean, until they got together) but I don't think they could have ever been called friends.

-In fact, canonly, Sirius was taller than Remus. (What a shock, right?)

-Lots of people say stuff like "Who was the fifth guy in their dorm?" and there are many theories about it but do we even have a proof that the four of them were in the same dorm at all? Nope.

-Now that's my personal opinion but... I absolutely believe they were really good friends and while at school at least, nobody was left out intentionally but... Maybe Peter betrays them in the end because of some build up stuff throughout the years. We know James and Sirius meet on Hogwarts Express and immediately become best friends. We don't know when Remus and Peter join exactly but it must have been shortly after, I think Peter is pretty much the last who joins. Seeing how some of the people are very good friends, it's a bit hard to truly feel a part of a friend group and might make you feel a bit left out at times (but that's basically a rule in every friend group, tbh. There are the two best friends and well... the other, still close friends).There's also the fact that Peter canonly wears the Sorting hat for over five minutes so here you have another episode of feeling kind of left out. Then later they learn about Remus and they all decide to support him and even learn how to transform and Peter is the last to learn how to do it too. Then even later, James and his family take Sirius in. What I'm trying to say is, we have no canon information of any of them doing anything for Peter and I'm not saying that they weren't good friends, it's just that he was exposed to them doing stuff for each other, and like, really big stuff too (granted, it was really all about helping a friend in a big need) but he was never the center of it + some occasions that might have left him feel kind of uncertain and uneasy about himself like not being sorted for a longer time or needing help to transform. And the result might be feeling emotionally distant from the group and with desire to prove himself worthy of something. So, that's maybe why he finally turns to Voldemort.

-They canonly don't trust Remus much by the end and even suspect he might be Voldemort's spy.

-There is a big chance that Harry and Remus really meet when Harry is 13, meaning that he never saw him as a baby.

-Speaking of feeling left out earlier... I think Remus might have also felt so more often than not. I think they were all into innocent pranks but he wasn't into actively being a jerk, especially considering that he was someone who would have gotten lots of hate if people knew about the werewolf thing. The stupid prank in 5th year must have been a real punch in the gut too. The fact that he gets to stop interacting with them and they even start mistrusting him. Lots of things, really. AND HE STILL NEVER BETRAYED THEM, WAS NEVER A JERK TO ANY OF THEM, AND GOT TO LIVE FOR 12 YEARS BELIEVING THAT ONE OF HIS BEST FRIENDS KILLED THE OTHER TWO!!!

Okay. I made myself enough sad for one evening. Might add more to this.

[saintsenara]

Your ships opinions are at the same time so funny and so interesting I'm like rolling on the floor howling in laughter and nodding my head in appreciation at the same time xD

I'm wondering now, since you posted ur opinions of snegulus based on Scylla and Charybdis (great fic btw! It's been a while since I got that invested in a fanfiction!), what are your opinions on: James/Severus, James/Lily and Tobias/Eileen?

Also, for the sake of crack, what do you think of Severus/Peter, Marvolo/Albefort and Umbridge/Fudge/Scrimgeour?

thank you very much, anon, both for the very kind shoutout to scylla and charybdis and for the selection of ships.

james potter/severus snape

snames isn’t really a pairing i vibe with, because - in my view - they don’t have any particularly interesting points of narrative convergence or divergence. snack - snape and sirius - is a hot ship because they’re narrative mirrors: they have identical experiences of and attitudes towards grief, duty, atonement and so on, caused by the fact that they are both indirectly responsible for killing the person they love the most; they both have complicated relationships with their families; they are both outsiders among their peer groups; their differences are polar opposites - sirius is rich, snape is poor, sirius is an outsider within gryffindor, snape is an outsider within slytherin, sirius is attractive, snape is ugly; and so on.

but snames doesn’t have that spark. their differences don’t exist on a scale, like snape’s do with sirius, they just exist as separate categories of experience. james is beloved by his family, snape is not. james is an inherent insider, whose whole family have been in gryffindor, snape is an inherent outsider. james is rich, but his wealth doesn’t come with strings attached, whereas sirius’ is obviously only something he’s permitted to access if he conforms to his parents’ restrictive social views and snape has none at all. james is a physical everyman - neither as ugly as snape nor as good-looking as sirius - and, therefore, someone who has no idea how it feels to stand out because of your looks (or name, or choices).

that said, james’ obvious sexual jealousy of snape could definitely be because he wants to bang him. i think we can all see him trying to get to lily by befriending her bestie, only to end up in love. good for him.

lily evans/james potter

i don’t really care about jily, beyond saying that james deserves our respect for bagging a baddie.

i don’t subscribe to the common anti-jily position that if they’d lived they wouldn’t have stayed together - nor that they weren’t sincerely compatible - i’m just not particularly interested in them because i think that there are far more engaging first-war characters, and that fics in which both of them live always kind of flop. harry is just much less interesting if he’s just from a happy home.

what i do like about jily is thinking about the other marauders’ reactions to it. the fact that sirius and lupin never mention lily is - of course - a narrative necessity, since the harry potter series needs to keep the fact of her centrality to the mystery hidden until the very last minute, but i am committed to ignoring that and being sincerely convinced that neither of them liked her. in sirius’ case, because she took the man he obviously loves from him. in lupin’s, idk, who cares about him.

eileen prince/tobias snape

my view on this is informed by the fact that i simply do not accept the fanon that eileen is from an elite pureblood family - she can’t be! her marriage to a muggle man is announced in the daily prophet! what purebloods are doing that?

the only person who ever suggests she might be is harry, who does so on the basis of no evidence, in order to force a comparison between snape and voldemort as a way of soothing his furious grief over dumbledore’s death. but one of the central jokes in voldemort’s background is that he is - by far - the most aristocratic character in the entire series, in both the magical and muggle worlds, but he is denied access to the social cachet this brings in the muggle world because he’s raised in an orphanage and never acknowledged by tom riddle sr. and in the wizarding world because he has a muggle name which means he’s denied access to the lineage-based hierarchy of wizarding society, even though he’s descended from slytherin. it doesn’t make sense, then, for snape to be in the same position - the uniqueness of voldemort’s parentage is the point.

i think of eileen, then, as a half-blood. i also think of her, regardless of her blood-status, as being from a working-class background herself, rather than raised in ancestral majesty. [after all, we have andromeda for that.]

i also think of her and tobias as childhood friends - from the same class background and the same area - with magic the only difference between them. i love this as a trope, because the canonical series does far too little interrogation of the fact that - for all dumbledore and the order’s grandstanding over the inherent goodness of the muggle world - all but one of the mixed muggle-magical relationships we see in canon fail*, all muggleborn children extract themselves totally from the world of their birth, and the two worlds are as completely segregated by the good guys as they are by the death eaters. eileen discovering that magic - which looked so unlikely to cause an issue when she fell in love with toby aged ten - causes the man she adores to despise her, the son she loves to resent her, and the poverty in which she lives to continue unabated is something i think is really valuable to explore.

plus, the idea that eileen - in her son’s eyes - threw away her prestigious magical education to return to a cotton-town slum and marry a poor man provides the perfect explanation for why severus snape makes the choices he makes in his adult life.

[*we hear of four muggle-magical relationships in canon - jkr has added several more in her post-series writing, undoubtedly because she realised how this looks: tom riddle sr. and merope gaunt, tobias and eileen, dean’s parents, and seamus’ parents. we all know what happened to tom and merope, tobias and eileen are canonically a violent, unhappy marriage, dean’s dad leaves his mum when he’s a baby, and seamus’ parents may or may not still be together.]

peter pettigrew/severus snape

so, can we all agree that making snape and wormtail live together for a summer is a god-tier petty move from lord voldemort? imagining him rocking up at spinner’s end with wormtail in tow and saying ‘he’s doing my head in, so he’s your problem now’ sends me every time.

i think they fuck once or twice - what else is there to do in cokeworth? - but neither of them enjoy it.

aberforth dumbledore/marvolo gaunt

i’m sorry, but i can’t stand the disrespect being shown by this question towards one of my favourite canon couples… aberforth/goat.

cornelius fudge/rufus scrimgeour/dolores umbridge

hot!

after all, scrimgeour is gassing her up to harry when he visits him in half-blood prince, and you only do that if the sex is good.

my theory, though? fudge isn’t on board with it - his vibe in canon is that he appreciates umbridge’s bureaucratic loyalty to him but he’d love to stop getting raunchy letters from her, and when rufus suggested that they add a third to their bedroom activities it never occurred to him that she’d be in contention. he wishes he’d known. he’d have vetoed.

[momo-t-daye]

9, 13, 24 - for both Sirius and Severus!

9. Scene that first made me love (or hate) the character (in canon)

For Sirius, I think the scene in OotP where he, as Padfoot, accompanies Harry et al. to King’s Cross Station and tries to cheer Harry up by chasing his tail and pigeons and cats really stands out.  I like how much Sirius can cheer Harry up and the efforts Sirius went to in order to see Harry (even if his early Grim-esque appearances seemed ominous on the first read), and how much they both really would’ve liked to be a proper family.

For Severus, golly, he’s got more scenes and many of them excellent!  Showing up behind Ron and Harry after they crash into the Whomping Willow is great, as is disarming Lockhart in the Dueling Club.  Showing Fudge the Dark Mark, that’s also a major favorite scene and glimpse of Severus’ character (rather than his act).

13. Dumbest thing they’ve ever done (in canon)

Sirius’ attempts to get into Gryffindor in pursuit of Peter (slashing the Fat Lady and showing up over Ron’s bed with a knife) were pretty badly thought out, he did not behave at all like an innocent man, he really leaned into the “escaped mass murderer” role there.

For Severus, hm… in some ways I think how he reacted to the Marauder’s Map insulting him by bringing Lupin in was not well thought out on Sev’s part.  Not only does Lupin get away with the map, Remus manages to get the better of him in front of Harry AND manages to get Harry to feel bad about going to Hogsmeade (which was what Severus was trying to do).

24. Most annoying habit (headcanon; not based on past roommates)

Sirius Black is a morning person.

He is also a trained flautist (he couldn’t be trusted not to hit his brother with a violin, but a musical education is expected for a son of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black).  It took him all of five minutes to coax the sounds of liquid flatulence out of a trumpet in his first year at Hogwarts.  Even when his friends schemed to dispose of the trumpet (the only times James Potter purposefully conspired against Sirius Black), Sirius comes from a family with resources and procuring another instrument was simplicity itself.

No amount of careful reasoning, desperate pleading, hexing, destruction of instruments, threats of bodily harm, etc. has yet managed to convince him that 4:32 AM is NOT a good time to unleash the noise pretzel upon the still slumbering.

This is not because Sirius is dense or incapable of seeing sense or insensitive to other points of view.  No, rather, it is because tooting the bad cone at ungodly hours has become a bit, a comedy routine, a running joke. If he has a good bit going, he’s never letting it go.

Severus Snape drinks directly from the milk bottle/orange juice carton/etc. (he also eats potions ingredients from the jar but those, at least, aren’t for shared consumption).

He excuses himself in the name of brutal efficiency and time optimization (dishes are a futile and Sisyphean task).

Worst of all?

He puts the container that is 99.49% empty back in the fridge.

[seriousbrat]

hi this may be long so sorry in advance but

i always loved hp and when i got into the marauders i started caring about sirius, remus, and james more (peter hater till i die unfortunately i can’t get behind him) and like every marauders stan i despised despised severus, i thought that since he was in a known death eaters friend group and called muggle borns mudblood he was unredeemable. but then i saw more and more pro snape content and it made me feel bad for him, james bullied him (which i’m still not even sure if it was classified as bullying because james didnt have any power over him and it wasn’t even 1 vs 4 it was 1 vs 2 so i’d like to know your opinion on that as well) and he had an abusive parent, but then i saw snily shippers (i am a major jily shipper fyi) saying how james basically manipulated lily into marrying him by not telling her he still bullied snape, how the prank was the best thing to happen to james because their “fights” wouldn’t be seen as bullying but as a teen rivalry, how james was the rich boy who got everything he wanted and he got the poor girl as well, how it was him constantly asking lily out and her always saying no etcc, so ik this may sound stupid but i love ur takes like ur always sooooo fucking real so if u want to share your opinions on these like if u think any of these things are wrong 🙈 id be glad bc i dont know how to feel about severus and idk how to feel about jily either which is just making my small world inside of my head crumble bc i used to love them so much

Of course and thank you! First of all as I've been saying I don't think it's necessary or even really a good idea for us to base our preferences or interests in fiction with our moral beliefs. so we can accept that snape or james did bad things and still like them. Fiction gives us that freedom to delve into aspects of humanity that in real life we might try to avoid. So I don't think you should feel bad for liking james or severus or jily or whatever. Ok, that being said let's get into it:

First it's normal to feel sympathy for Severus, he's a sympathetic character in many respects! That's what makes a good anti-hero (or even villain. we're even supposed to feel sympathy for voldemort and barty crouch jr at certain points)

what james and the marauders did was definitely bullying. there's no way around that. you say james didn't have any power over him but he did; social power. You touched on economic class, which is a big factor, but James was a popular student and Sev was deeply unpopular. whether it was 1v4 or 1v2 or 1v1 doesn't really matter in terms of whether it was bullying, though tbh it was really 1vthe whole school because the spectators also participated in Sev's humiliation.

However, in my mind there's almost no way that Snape wasn't instigating just as much, possibly more, in seventh year. Like you think he was just going to sit around and accept that his worst enemy was dating Lily? lol. I tend to believe Sirius when he says that Sev "never lost an opportunity to curse James" like good for him get his ass. But I think it was definitely a different dynamic in 7th year than in 5th. there's this tendency to portray Sev as being a meek little helpless victim his whole life but personally I feel that's a disservice to his character-- this is the guy who invented sectumsempra 'for enemies' like three guesses who 'enemies' was.

re: jily, I really doubt that James manipulated Lily into anything, I think that's such an overdramatic reading lol. We don't know much about the way they got together-- although many fic writers have taken it upon themselves to fill in the gaps-- but everything points to them having been happy and in love, that clearly was the intention by the author. If James didn't tell her about duelling Snape that isn't great, but there are a lot of things that can be imperfect in a relationship without jumping to manipulation and abuse which require a specific pattern of behaviour that we have no evidence for. We also only have the external perspective of Sirius and Remus, which is likely incomplete.

(also James 'always asking Lily out' is fanon, we see him ask her out ONCE albeit spectacularly badly. it seems more likely to me that lily 'you make me SICK' evans simply saw james grow into someone she rly liked rather than gave in and gave in so fully that she married him bcause he was pressuring her. idk she didn't read like a pushover to me.)

So no need for world crumblage! It doesn't sound stupid at all, but I think it's important to keep in mind that we can enjoy fictional characters/relationships that aren't perfect, in fact those are the ones that I find more enjoyable. It's totally possible to be a fan of snape and james and jily and snily all at the same time, fandom tends to create conflicts or 'shipping wars' or whatever lol but idk if that's necessary. I don't see it as a moral debate or an either/or, I just find all the characters and the dynamics between them interesting.

For instance, you mentioned the class differences between Lily and James, and I always thought that was probably a point of contention in the relationship; but to me it's one that makes it more compelling to explore. Relationships irl are rarely perfect and evenly-matched from the start, they take work. Similarly people are never perfect- they learn and change and grow. James did, Snape definitely did. otherwise they would be boring and unrealistic as characters.

[sarcasticsoup]

was curious what the Marauders were and.

huh.

honestly I've never read or even SEEN HP so idk what's going on

**massive harry potter spoilers ahead**

hello! sorry this took me so long i went to answer you and then completely forgot to post it. also i may over/under explain things, idk how much of the series you know so sorry about that.

also this is really long, theres a tldr at the end if you want

basically in the books theyre mainly only mentioned through Snape's eyes (and snape is a racist terrorist who created torture spells - dont listen to snape stans they havent read the books) so the marauders are presented as "bullies" that used to hex people for fun.

ill admit, james potter (harrys dad) wasnt a great guy when he was younger and did take it out on snape a bit, but we're only really given the worst bits, and obviously snapes memory will have exaggerated it a bit.

the marauders were james potter, sirius black (harrys godfather), remus lupin (harrys 3rd year defence against the dark arts professor) and peter pettigrew (a traitor prick).

Voldemort (aka Tom Riddle) leads the Death Eaters, a terrorist group based around blood supremacy (hating wizards that have non-magical/muggle family members, especially parents, and arent 'pureblood' wizards), and the marauders and their friends joined the original Order of the Phoenix, lead by Dumbledore (hogwarts headmaster) against the death eaters in the first Wizarding War. Snape was a death eater, but later joined the Order as a spy for Dumbledore.

Regulus Black, Sirius' younger brother, gave up his life to help take down Voldemort, by stealing one of his horcruxes (an item that contained part of voldemorts soul, keeping him immortal) and as a fandom, we generally bloody love reg.

**this is where the spoilers start**

Peter Pettigrew, who was Wormtail in the Marauders due to his animagus (animal you can turn in to) being a rat, was part of the Order but also secretly was working as a Death Eater spy for Voldemort. As a fandom, we generally hate the bastard and wish he died sooner.

There was a prophecy made about Voldemorts death, that seemed like it was about James' son Harry. so James, Harry, and harrys mum Lily went into hiding to protect themselves.

(its worth mentioning that Lily was muggleborn - her parents werent magic - and snape had ended their 'friendship' while they were attending hogwarts by joining the death eaters, terrorising other muggleborns and then calling lily a slur. he claimed that he loved her and its supposed to be his turning point that he reveals he was secretly good bc he loved lily, but he didnt he was creepily obsessed with her. again, dont listen to the Snape stans)

lily and james made pettigrew their secret keeper, meaning peter was the only person who could tell people where they were, and peter told voldemort

voldy then came to their house, killed james and then asked lily to move out of his way (Snape had made him promise not to kill her, snape didnt give a fuck about james or harry though). lily didnt move, and sacrificed herself to protect her son. this act meant that when voldy tried to kill harry, the spell backfired, killing voldy instead of harry, and accidentally created another horcrux inside of harry. harry had a piece of voldemorts soul inside of him.

anyways harry goes to live with lily's sister and her family, and theyre incredibly abusive, and then the first book starts when harry is 11 and gets accepted into hogwarts, finding out that he's a wizard and all of the horrid shit that happened to his parents. snape hates him because harry looks exactly like james did and reminds him of lily.

sorry this was so long

tldr; we mainly see the marauders through the eyes of the terrorist group that they fought, so they look like 'bullies' but actually snape was a prick. the fandom is composed of people who know this, and most of the canon isnt relevant to us.

thanks for giving me the opportunity to write this, i enjoyed explaining it far too much :)

[captain-aralias]

🌿💫💥

hello!! nice to hear from you <3 and thank you for these asks.

🌿how does creating make you feel?

this feels like it should be easy to answer. the act of writing often makes me feel like - ugh, i can't do this today. but if it's going well and i've written some good dialogue or something, then i'll feel - pleased, kind of the way i would reading some good dialogue, but also because i'll feel smart and like, yeah - i've got this. because i create in fandom, it also makes me feel part of something bigger, and then hungry for COMMENTS. vv much: when are the comments here, i need instant validation in trade for this fic.

💫what is your favorite kind of comment/feedback?

i love all comments, thank you for comments! my favourite kinds are the ones where people try to predict what is going to happen, or talk about why they think something is happening, while i post, and then i think 'yeah, that'd be cool', or 'hm, not that, but it gives me an idea'. this is sad times for book-writers who could be accused of stealing ideas, but for me as a fandom person i just slap a note at the front saying 'thank you to X for giving me this awesome idea in their comment!'

💥find your least kudos'd fic - say something wonderful about it.

oof. my least kudosed fic is a harry potter fic i migrated from ff.net and backdated, it's unfinished, and it has ZERO kudos. the plot is that the marauders are all in slytherin, which may or may not have been an original premise twenty years ago, i don't know - it almost certainly isn't now.

i forced myself to read enough of it to answer this question and discovered it's in james potter's first person!! (not a well liked POV outside of carry on). honestly, it really could be worse, even though it's mostly just him grumbling about the premise of the fic.

meanwhile, there's some nice repetition i set up:

Sirius is one of things that makes being here bearable. I'm not sure but I think he likes it. Peter does too, you can tell when he whoops extra loudly when I make a great pass or when Sirius forces Snape to sing HMS Pinafore in falsetto. Sometimes I laugh too. Sometimes I'm the one torturing Severus; too much of the time it's my wand pointing at him, my lips curling into a sneer of triumph. Sometimes I hate myself for being who I am.

and then later on:

Yes, Remus is certainly different. Perfect Mr. Prefect Sirius calls him; mocks him. As if being a model student and not wanting to turn Snape's hair violet or make him tap dance across our breakfast table is a crime, or a character flaw. Sometimes I hate Sirius for being like me.

i could have written these paragraphs today. and i think i'm quite good at writing now. TWENTY YEARS ON. so well done little me.

(check out the two semi colons, though. that's how you can tell i was 16 when i wrote this 😂)

[mswhich]

20 questions for fic writers!

Thanks to @whimsicalmeerkat for the tag! I think a lot of my mutuals have done this already so I'll just say to tag yourself if you want to do this!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

52, but one is still unrevealed for an upcoming exchange.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

609,172

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Lots. My top fandom is Original Work (technically not a fandom! But I have twice as many works in it as in my next-most-populated fandom). Also very actively writing in Formula 1 RPF, and I have a WIP for 2001: a Space Odyssey. I also occasionally write in Teen Wolf, Taskmaster, and Harry Potter. (Used to be my main fandom, and I still have a few WIPs I dream of finishing someday.)

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Unforced Error (Harry Potter, Snape/Hermione), 3529 kudos.

Forged in Flames (Harry Potter, Snape/Hermione), 3526 kudos.

No Secrets (Teen Wolf, Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski), 2331 kudos. (I would fucking love it if this surpassed my HP works at some point, just putting that out there.)

Bondmate (Original Work, Alien with no concept of consent/His human neighbor), 1135 kudos.

The Frontier Spirit (Original Work, Ship AI/Lone Crew Member), 1041 kudos.

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try. I'm not always great about hitting every single one.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

I don't know about angsty, but most horrifying ending is probably A Scream is a Wish Your Heart Makes, my I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream fic. If you're familiar with the canon, you can probably guess why the ending is bleak.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

I write a lot of happy endings, but the one that makes me personally turn into a cat with heart eyes emoji is probably Stripped as you are.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Not really, surprisingly enough for an unapologetically problematic author! I think the worst I've had on AO3 was a bookmark comment that said one of my fics was mid.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Yes. The smutty kind. No but seriously, my smut tends to be kinky and very explicit. (Is there non-explicit smut? I don't know, but if there is, I'm not writing it.)

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

I have not written a crossover, but I wouldn't rule it out in the future.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

More than once. Usually I notice because a friendly reader lets me know in the comments. A couple of times it's been on AO3, and AO3 took it down after the fic was reporter, and once it was on Wattpad, which also got taken down.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Many times.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not exactly, but I did a Teen Wolf Big Bang in which @midmorning-bomb did the art for my fic No Secrets (linked above), which was a fantastic collaboration.

14. What’s your all time favourite ship?

Jeez, I don't know. I feel like I ship everything that moves. Honestly, maybe Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, just because it ticks so many boxes for me: power dynamics, smartass characters, age gap, angst, superpowers, etc.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I have most of a whole-ass novel written about a post-War Ginny Weasley/Severus Snape fic. The premise is that she's sort of kicking around at loose ends at Grimmauld Place after the War is over, while Harry goes off doing Auror stuff and being a hero. Snape gets kicked out of Hogwarts for the summer for renovations and ends up having to move in as a boarder with Ginny. After some initial friction, they start talking to each other, and he realizes she's less vapid than he'd thought, and she realizes he's slightly less of an ass. There's also a mystery plot involving the moving portraits and a loose Death Eater, and part of it's set in Chicago. Literally 85% of it is written, and I just don't know if I'm ever going to finish it, partially because I've moved on from the fandom and partially because of the fandom's creator. So I don't know.

16. What are your writing strengths?

God, I don't know. You tell me. Kinky smut, maybe? I feel like I'm good at writing dialogue for some characters; less good at others.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Too repetitive within scenes; overuse of em dashes and other quirky punctuation; too reliant on what you might call "route 1" plotting.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

Only very minimally, and preferably with lots of cognates so people can at least get the gist even if they don't speak it.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Harry Potter. The first fic I ever wrote is actually the one with the 2nd-most kudos. (1st-most until very recently.)

20. Favourite fic you’ve written?

Crown of Neon Lights, a Mafia story about an uncle and his orphaned niece.

[waitingondaisies]

Hi! Welcome to my blog! I’ll go ahead and say a little about myself here so we’re all on the same page. My name is Ilahi (ee-lah-ee), and I am 24 years old. I’m currently in grad school, which means that I have to do a lot of academic reading and writing. This sometimes means that I slow down on my fun reading/writing. Despite that, I am bound and determined to update how like home (my main wip) at least once a month, as well as my other wips as often I can. 

The fandoms I write for currently are Harry Potter (yes, I know, it’s 2022, but I have an allergy to abandoning projects, so until I finish the fics I’ve started, I’m a bit stuck. Fuck JKR, fuck terfs, trans women are women) and Irondad (note, not the MCU, but irondad specifically). The fandoms I read are much more diverse, but also tend to be much more fleeting. At the time of writing this, I’ve been reading a lot of the owl house fanfic. 

Which brings me to the fic rec portion of this intro post! Here’s a couple favs that I’ve read recently!

1. the ceramics series by unexpected chair: darius takes hunter in and they figure out how to navigate their new situation despite all of their trauma. the misunderstandings and difficulties they face make so much sense and are resolved in a way that heals both them and me 2. irreplaceable by for_the_night: tony discovers that harley is his bio son and ends up neglecting peter. peter has to deal with that and then, once tony realizes how much of a dick he’s been, peter has to figure out how/if he wants to let tony back into his life. i’m a sucker for a parental figure having to dig themselves out of a hole of their own making and this one really hits that spot 3. no bed of roses by ladyluciusash87: as a kid, harry meets snape’s daughter... except she has no idea and neither does snape. eventually the truth outs, and snape is horribly jealous of how much more his daughter loves harry than him. the oc’s are so well developed and i am loving watching snape deal with that emotional minefield and also very gradually open his eyes as to how great harry actually is finally, and i know this is a massively long pinned post at this point, i’d be remiss if i didn’t include the invitation to my discord server! everyone’s welcome, and i’d love to see you there! click here to join <3

[lunapwrites]

rules: pick any 10 of your fics, scroll somewhere to the mid point, pick a line, and share it! then tag 10 people.

Thank you to @spindrifters for the tag!

Applied Theory

Remus briefly debated the merits of burying his best mate in his own backyard. Maybe beneath the tree; he'd probably get a kick out of that. Probably make a joke about permanent wood or something equally crass, which honestly would just set Remus to giggling like one of his third years and he'd never get the job done. He'd keep dropping the shovel.

Where the Wild Thyme Grows

Its voice was strange, like bells dragged over gravel, chiming and rasping all at once. It choked words like a curse. It pulled Harry closer as if to punctuate its point, the vines tightening, and Harry let out a hiss of pain, blood trickling down his face, from his nose and mouth.

Louder Than Love*

Twenty-one was a good year for whisky but a bad year for his mental health. It was twelve backwards. It was apropos and terrible and he’d wanted to spend hours drowning himself in it, mapping out the symbolism on the bathroom tile so he didn’t have space in his head to worry about whether or not this was the time Remus didn’t come home.

Ouroboros

“I’m gonna wind up killing him before his lungs do, fucksake,” Remus groused to himself. He was leaning out the attic window, waiting for moonrise with a cigarette jammed firmly between his teeth, and he was certainly not going to call Sirius.

three knocks upon the door

The whole universe tipped on its axis, a top hitting a knot on the table where it sat spinning. An eldritch light shone in Lily’s eyes for the span of a heartbeat, match strike bright and hungry, and in that moment Tonks understood that Lily could swallow her like shadows if she let her, knew it like she knew her own name.

Numb (Phobos I)

"You know, as pleased as I am that you've stopped throwing tantrums over the food," Peter mused through a mouthful of toast, "I'm genuinely surprised you haven't asked me why I did it."

Monster (Io I)

Despite what society would have them all think, Remus was no monster. He took his toast with raspberry jam and wore mismatched socks on purpose and named the spiders in his bedroom window.

for him.

"Sounds to me like you've identified your problem," Remus replied lightly. Harry's glare deepened, and Remus laughed outright. "Look, I learned very early on never to assume with you, as you have a knack for surprising me, and then getting very insulted when I expect you to be —God forbid— a teenager."

The Great Biscuit Calamity of 1978, and Other Such Disasters

“Social commentary vis-à-vis a subtle subversion of gender roles in biscuit decorations. Bold. Stunning. I love it.”

A Matter of Interpretation

The idea of living in a world without Remus -- whether because Snape had finally grassed him (because apparently baby Death Eaters are fine but werewolves who get too stoned and cry over Dark Side of the Moon are not ), or because Remus managed to literally kill the greasy git (which was Understandable and Reasonable but also would likely result in his arrest) -- was Anathema to Sirius. Positively Unacceptable.

I always feel like an awkward bean about tagging, soooo if you see this and want to play, go for it! <3