#obviously it is just a silly little fanfiction but i am also. getting v political w it so there is a lot of intention behind like

[rollercoasterwords]

you rly weren’t fucking around with the morally grey sirius huh !

he tortures and kills people for a fascist government i think we are past morally grey lol like. what he's doing is just straight-up immoral!! not trying to beat around the bush with that one

in all seriousness tho this is why i put my little warning spiel on the first ch of the fic abt how this story is like. not intended for a broad/general audience. sirius is not a good person!!! you're getting the story from his pov, which is obviously limited, and while he feels largely ambivalent towards voldemort + his family + can even recognize some of the wrongness, he is for the most part resigned to his work as a death eater. he has never deeply questioned any of the underlying, foundational beliefs that uphold pureblood supremacy, and he actively benefits from the privileges it affords him. he feels some level of guilt for what he does but does nothing productive to address it; instead, he buries it and hides from it and tries to alleviate it by projecting it onto situations where he can "do the right thing" without actually endangering his privileged status (see: remus lupin).

and the thing is, sirius doesn't think of himself as a villain. he doesn't think of himself as "dark" or "evil" or even "morally grey." we get more backstory on how and why he joined the death eaters in ch 7, so i'm gonna refrain from saying too much, but like. the narrative he has internalized is basically that things are out of his hands; he had to become a death eater, and he has to marry dorcas, and he has to have heirs, and he has to carry on the family name. he feels trapped and resents it, but refuses to acknowledge that he could walk out of the cage if he really wanted to, because to actually do so would place himself in danger. at the end of the day, although he himself suffers in certain instances under voldemort's regime, he is also granted immense wealth, privilege, and power--at the expense of those less privileged, like remus.

and the point of all this is not to say that you should be reading sirius as a villain--because he's not. i think the category of "villain" in and of itself is not a very useful tool for approaching this story, because my focus is less on like...a Single Figure of Evil and more on systemic oppression. as a writer, i want readers to sympathize with and relate to sirius because i think it's important to understand that determinations about whether a person is "good" or "bad" which are based on evaluations of like...nebulous internal morality or intent are rarely reflective of the ways in which a person's actions materially contribute to systems of oppression. like--if sirius in ch 4 went "oh yay i love killing people" then everyone would immediately go "oh he's a bad guy!!" but because he went "oough...i am a gutted fish....i have no choice...." he becomes "morally grey." the outcome of his action is the same: he kills. the material impact is the same. so why would we place the emphasis on the internal mindset behind that action? in doing so, we lose the focus on materiality that is necessary to address systemic oppression, because the truth of the matter is that many "good" people contribute to and are invested in these oppressive systems.

anyway this has become a whole rant lol i'm so sorry but basically just....yeah. sirius is not a Good Guy. that's the point!!