#queer remus

[picturethesoul]

Ok but what if what if and hear me out...

Peter was the first to notice that Remus and Sirius like each other more than friends and notice how they're so different with each other and that they both feels safe??

....

What if Peter was the first one to tell Remus that he should go for it and talk to Sirius because Sirius loves him too?

....

Making that betrayal 100x harder

[bloodbruise]

the bitches traumatized by saltburn would never survive the fics in my ao3 history

[messervixen]

At his core Remus is just that one teacher who “has a wife and kids”

[art-crumbs-art-blog]

[danceinthunder]

The day Remus Lupin realises he’s in love with his best friend, and as a consequence is gay, he takes out any book he can find that may help explain his feelings.

He finds himself in the pages of the Iliad and the sonnet love declarations of Shakespeare.

Remus usually reads to learn but this time he’s doing it to understand, to feel and to empathise.

His identity grows from books and he yearns for experience, for love and connection - he has time to feel it all.

[jehcee]

Barty: not lying to your partner is so difficult.

Remus: true

Barty:I mean how am I supposed to maintain my reputation if I give you the real reasons for why I did what I did.

Remus: yeah, why do you want to know my insecurities bro? Just accept that I'm a bitch like everyone else!

Regulus: sigh

Evan:

Sirius:

James:

Sirius: thank God I'm not alone in this.

[bimoonphases]

@wolfstarmicrofic September 15 - prompt 15: DADA Class [word count 508]

“Hurry up and get in pairs, one boy and one girl please!”

Marlene sighed as she dropped the two volumes on Kappas on the desk and sat down. By her side, Sirius rolled his eyes.

“Why can’t we just be with the same gender,” he grumbled, taking a fresh roll of parchment out. “No offense, McKinnon.”

“None taken, Black. As long as you get us both a good grade on this essay.”

“Please,” Sirius smirked. “You know I live at the top of the class.”

“Yeah, along with Lupin, Potter and Lily.”

“I love switching places.”

“Come on ladies and gentlemen, get to work,” the Professor clapped her hands. “You have two hours starting now.”

They were barely through their introduction, Sirius putting the calligraphy that had been drilled into him since he had started writing to good use when a whacking sound made them both raise their heads from their books. To their right, James was looking down, a red bruise blooming already on his cheek while Lily was putting a heavy book back on the desk, her green eyes blazing with anger.

“Of the dangers of mixing sexes,” Marlene rolled her eyes, wondering what new obnoxious thing Lily would later on tell her and Mary James had said.

“Leave us with our peers and no one gets hurt,” Sirius sighed.

But when she turned to look at him, he wasn’t looking at James and Lily. His gaze was focused one desk over, to where Mary was pointing at a page while Remus nodded. To be more precise, Marlene mused, Sirius’s gaze was fixed on Remus, as if he didn’t want to miss any movement the other boy made, be it a bare flutter of eyelashes. And there was something, there in Sirius’s eyes, something so tender and so sad at the same time. Something Marlene recognised instantly, something she had seen quite often while looking at herself in the mirror. Marlene hadn’t told anyone, despite the number of times either Lily or Mary had had to nudge her back to reality when she got lost looking at Dorcas Meadowes across the Great Hall. She had a hunch her friends knew but she still hadn’t said the words out loud. She didn’t know if she was ready for that. She didn’t know if she would ever be. But this, this was different. This was a pull she couldn’t ignore, and didn’t want to, like finding a long-lost brother again when you didn’t have any hope left.

Sirius finally looked away from Remus and back at her desk and at her, catching her looking at him. He blushed slightly, his hand already moving in a dismissing manner. Marlene didn’t stop to think, the words coming out of her mind as the easiest thing on Earth.

“You too?” she whispered.

Sirius stared at her, then slowly nodded. They smiled to each other, a new form of relief washing over their faces.

They didn’t get a good grade on their essay. They didn’t care, not really. They weren’t alone anymore.

[leo-is-trans]

[drowningmoon]

I just want to know that who looked at the lines "finally, the flesh reflects the madness within// well you'd know all about the madness within, wouldn't you Remus?" And thought that 'yeah that screams straight best friends and heterosexuality'

[bloodbruise]

you're out doing normal young adult activities like having drinks or socializing and i am in my room reading about the same fictional couple fall in love in every universe. we are NOT the same

[let-roman-bite-someone]

in honor of pride month, here’s some incorrect quotes for all my aspec folk out there! y’all are rad and i’m fist bumping you through my screen

[moonyswarmsweaters]

James: Moony, you gotta stop texting me when you’re half asleep, I never know what you’re saying.

James: you texted me and said ‘bring some queer’. I’m assuming you meant beer, But just in case, I brought Padfoot.

[wisteria-lodge]

And now for a HP fandom question - do you have any thoughts on queercoding in the series and if JKR ever actually intended it, and then backtracked, or if it was always completely unintentional? I'm thinking specifically about Lupin and Tonks (as individuals, not as a ship) Inspired by your post about the intention vs how fans perceived Draco Malfoy. Thanks!

So the first thing I want to do is make a distinction between femme-coding and queer-coding. They're tropes with very similar histories, and a lot of works treat them as the same thing. But Harry Potter doesn’t, and I think we can chalk this one up to JK Rowling’s habit of grabbing aesthetics and visuals without really thinking through the history behind them. 

(Like - the goblins. She says she didn’t mean to write an antisemitic thing, and I actually do believe her. But did she use a lot of tropes and images with a long history of being tied to antisemitism? yes.)

So when I say “femme” I mean giving a male character traits stereotypically associated with femininity. Heightened sensitivity/emotionality, an interest in hair, clothes and being attractive, a love of lace/pink/frills, a dislike of violence and physical confrontation, and a preference for the soft power of manipulation, character assassination and poison - versus the hard power of direct confrontation and physical prowess. Are these things super stereotypical? Yes. But they’re ALSO traits you see all the time on male villains, especially ones that you don’t want to seem that threatening. Femme-coded villains show up a lot in children’s media, or as the Big Bad’s #2. They’re not meant to be heroic or sympathetic (since all these feminine traits are not desirable, especially for guys.) But they also aren’t scary, and you can pretty much always play them for comedy. 

For example: see almost every male Disney villain. And JKR was writing children’s literature in the 90s, so of course she’s pulling from the same zeitgeist as the Disney Renaissance. 

JKR loves herself a femme villain. The absolute gold standard is of course Lockhart - who wears pink, wants to start his own line of hair care products, is self-centered, vain, obsessed with popularity… but he sucks in a fight. His entire MO involves manipulating people into thinking he has these traditional masculine qualities when he just doesn’t. But there’s also fussy, prissy Percy wearing his prefect badge on his pajamas. Bitchy, emotional mean-girl poisoners Draco and Snape (especially early book Snape - which is Snape at his most villainous.) Draco, Percy and Snape are also unusual for being male characters who we see crying for reasons other than grief (apparently the only truly acceptable reason for masculine crying). 

Lucius Malfoy is an interesting case because he starts off quite masc. He’s threatening to curse people, the governors are scared of him, etc. But, as the books go on… and he gets less powerful… he also gets more femme. When we meet him in Book 5 he’s no longer threatening people, but bribing them, spreading rumors, and giving interviews to the Prophet casting Arthur Weasley in a negative light. He's also getting really into peacocks. In Book 2 he was a major threat, but as he gets recast as Voldemort’s #2 he becomes a more femme, soft-power villain. When he leads the attack on the Department of Mysteries, he absolutely bungles it, which defines his character (and relationship with Voldemort) for the rest of the series. And it makes sense that Lucius is given this kind of treatment! It’s a way of communicating that there's a new villain in town, a real villain. 

So, are any of these femme-coded villains additionally queer-coded? I’m actually going to say no. Queer-coding is (like it says on the tin) finding ways to imply that your character is specifically gay. Like maybe giving them a same-sex relationship that is written romantically, but not explicitly called out by the text. Or pairing up all of the characters except them. Maybe have other characters joke about them being gay, and use that as a way to talk about the subject with some plausible deniability. Or they could just play suggestively with a cigar, or a walking stick. There are different strategies.  

But Lockhart doesn't get any of that. Honestly, I think that if JKR actually thought of him as gay, she would have been a lot more wary about a scene where he keeps Harry alone with him in his office for way longer than he’s supposed to. And she might have skipped this joke: 

“Harry was hauled to the front of the class during their very next Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson, this time acting a werewolf (...) “Nice loud howl, Harry — exactly — and then, if you’ll believe it, I pounced — like this — slammed him to the floor — thus — with one hand, I managed to hold him down — with my other, I put my wand to his throat (...) he let out a piteous moan — go on, Harry — higher than that — good —” 

Like. At least she would have picked a different word than “moan,” right? Which unfortunately has slightly sexual connotations. Especially if she wanted to keep Lockhart a buffoon, to properly set up the twist at the end. 

Slughorn also gets femme-coded in a similar way: he loves his candy, his parties, his smoking jackets, his lilac silk pajamas, his web of connections he can use to get stuff (Lucius style.) We are introduced to him squatting in specifically a “fussy old lady’s” house. He’s also unusually emotional, getting weepy at Aragog‘s funeral. But I don’t think we’re meant to read him as actually gay, or else his relationship with Tom Riddle might’ve read a little too close to Tom seducing/trying to seduce him. Which is a beat JKR does subtly play out with Hepzibah Smith, but idk. by that point at least Tom is a legal adult.

(As a side note - the Harry Potter series got so lucky that all of its adult characters are played by absolutely top-shelf actors who are aware of the connotations and history behind various symbols, and do consider these things in their performances. Kenneth Brannagh and Jim Broadbent are good enough to make sure there’s not even a hint of iffy subtext when they play Lockhart and Slughorn. Also, Emma Thompson took the potentially very problematic character of Trelawney and made her cute and sympathetic… and not Romani in the slightest.) 

Draco, Snape, and Percy all have a case of the not-gays. Percy has a girlfriend (we don’t really see her or anything, but we’re told she’s there.) Snape of course gets his whole thing with Lily, and Draco… after one too many beats where it’s clear that Pansy is into him, but he’s not into Pansy…  gets a scene where he’s talking to his buddies with his head in her lap. (JKR uses “no one‘s good enough for me” beats with Blaise, Draco and Sirius, and the idea there seems to be more that they have undeservedly high opinions of themselves, and less that they don’t like girls.)

But, I do agree that a lot of JKR's characters do come across as a little more queer than intended. It boils down, I think, to the general lack of any kind of romance in the Harry Potter books and JKR being generally bad at/uncomfortable with writing male attraction directed at women, BUT being perfectly happy writing attraction directed at pretty guys. And because of that… yeah, it can sometimes feel like maybe Harry has a thing for Cedric. Especially when Dudley goes on to tease him about Cedric being his boyfriend, which I believe is the only actual mention of gay people in the entire series.  

So is there any intentional queer-coding in the book? It’s really subtle, but yes. I think Dumbledore is queer-coded. He is unusually emotional/cries unusually often for a Rowling guy. He is also given a scene which emphasizes his “flamboyantly” cut plum-velvet suit, and his relationship with Grindelwald is implied to be romantic for one book and two movies before being actually confirmed in Fantastic Beasts 3. (With the line of dialogue “I was in love with you.” Big step up from “We were closer than brothers.” which is an odd thing to say about someone you are interested in romantically.) 

But you brought up Tonks and Lupin, two characters very commonly interpreted as queer. So let’s get into that. JKR has said that she considers Lupin’s lycanthropy to be a metaphor for stigmatized diseases like AIDS. And… as incredible as it is to say… I actually do not think that she made the jump from there to thinking that maybe the character suffering from AIDS should be gay.

Because the narrative places so much weight on Lupin being bitten young and then on maybe not being allowed to attend school, I’m pretty sure that he’s not intended to be queer so much as he’s meant to be Ryan White, the literal poster child for AIDS activism who got infected via blood transfusion when he was two. Tragic, absolutely. But not gay. Honestly, I hope JKR was thinking of ‘lycanthropy’ as a metaphor for stigmatized illness in the abstract and not as a comment on gay people specifically. Because otherwise, Greyback’s thing about biting children becomes a mash-up of two of the biggest homophobic boogeymen from the 80s: gay men infecting people with AIDS on purpose because… idk, they hate the world or something. And the influence of gay men somehow “turning” children gay. Both absolutely real, if ridiculous, moral panics.

On top of that, Remus and Sirius do get a pretty clear case of the not-gays early on (“He embraced Black like a brother.”) Buuuut Alfonso Cuarón did think through those implications for Movie 3, absolutely saw Lupin as gay, and directed David Thewlis to play him accordingly. No reports confirming or denying whether Alfonso Cuarón ships Wolfstar, but I think that if I’m an actor trying to make sense of Lupin’s motivations… and I know he didn’t show Dumbledore the Marauders’ Map and didn’t tell anyone Sirius was an animagus… and then I’m told my character is gay… well. Anyway, I think there are absolutely hints of Wolfstar in that performance. 

And there's Tonks. Tonks is introduced during a very spooky segment in Book 5: Harry has been going through it, been left alone at the Dursleys while having what sounds like a depressive episode. It’s dark, he hears intruders. It's a really good piece of writing. But JKR knows that it’s the good guys who are coming and thinks, okay. Let’s make that as clear as possible from the word go. And so the first thing Harry sees is Tonks' pink hair. And what kind of person has pink hair? A young adult. A punky young adult. And what power would a teenager think was cool? Well, the ability to change the color of their hair at will. That, by itself, would have worked perfectly fine for this character.

But then (for reasons best known to herself) JKR goes further. Even though Tonk’s hair changing color is easily 90% of the transformations we see and there is no plot reason her appearance needs to change more than that, we see her drastically change her age and body type. When you think about this power for more than five seconds, it becomes kind of OP. For worldbuilding reasons alone, my instinct would’ve been to tone it down a bit. 

But no, we have this counterculture character who seems interested in her career and not in a relationship, who can easily change anything about her body, and (if her ability works anything like Polyjuice) that means she should definitely be able to change her gender. Cool.

Then, in everyone’s least favorite romance, Tonks and Lupin are paired up. I have heard the argument that this was meant to walk back queer-coding, or to punish people who thought they were queer... but I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think JKR expected these two to be fan favorites, and then was kind of surprised when everyone wanted to hear about their continuing adventures. 

(There are a handful of characters who JKR clearly really enjoys - and really enjoys writing - that fandom honestly could not care less about. Mundungus Fletcher and Ludo Bagman spring to mind. But the reverse is also true. She had one story for Lupin and people wanted to see more. Tonks is probably supposed to be her comment on immature young adults: she is loud, in your face, causes mild destruction and is “a little annoying at times.” But the fans fell in love with her.) 

So JKR has these two fan favorite characters and nothing for them to do. A romance is something for them to do. JKR also has a kind of weird pattern where good people need to either have kids or take care of kids. It’s not good to be a woman who isn’t involved with taking care of children in some fashion: see Rita Skeeter, Dolores Umbridge, Bellatrix Lestrange. This is also (I think) why Harry names his kids specifically after Severus, Sirius, and Albus. Since they’re good men, JKR had to find a way to give them kids after the fact. 

So yeah. I think we were meant to read Tonks and Lupin having a kid as kind of a reward, or at least as proof of their intrinsic goodness. There also just isn’t another guy in the right age range to ship Tonks with. The only other option is Sirius. 

(Harry in the books and Lupin on Pottermore both suspect that Tonks/Sirius is a thing. Completely forgetting, I guess, that they're cousins.)

[sheshirkat]

Literally cackling at the idea that the harry potter fandom made its own work, that we mostly agree on stuff like draco could be a potion master or wolfstar, giving pansy more room to exist.. the harry potter fandom stands nearly alone, apart from the original works, with deeper world building, and that we created such a huge something from harry potter that jk rowling can't touch and that is SO QUEER she would be so scared. Love it.

[silly-little-gooses]

DARRRRRLINGGG GUESS WHO JUST ESCAPED THE PSYCH WARDDDDD

[lexithwrites]

Lil headcanon but trans masc Remus attending his first pride event as a performer and he sings with his guitar on stage then a few acts later sees Lady Stardust and they’re the BEST drag performer he’s seen, and the hottest, and Lily, Mary and Marlene just so happen to know them,,,