Remus/Sirius Small Gifts

I like to think that it was actually a family tradition. Maybe the wolf was a family crest, or something.

Ah! That's an elegant solution, actually. Nice. M.

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pteropoda

Thanks! I like that because it gives some additional reasoning for his patronus being a wolf, too-- I've always gone back and forth on the whole "werewolf has a wolf patronus" thing.

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paulamcg

Yes! I’ve felt that we who write more about Remus (than Rowling did) need to come up with an explanation for the coincidence that someone who happens to be bitten by a werewolf has got such a wolfy name. My solution (as early as 2003) was that that the Werewolf Registry demands the bitten to be registered with such a name which warns people, and cultured parents, who insisted on keeping their son but let outsiders believe that he’d died and they’d adopted a boy, chose a name which only cultured, possibly less prejudiced people would recognise as wolfy, and the Registry demanded a middle name, Jaws.

I can’t even remember learning that Remus’s patronus form is revealed in Rowling’s books, as I’m more interested in the first five, on which my fanfic is based. But my Remus’s patronus is a wolf in any case, just for different reasons.

Anyway, yes, I like the way you’ve looked for reasoning on the basis of everything Rowling’s said about Remus’s family. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that someone with a wolf tradition in the family chooses such work which leads him to anger werewolves.

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coriaria

I like the idea of Remus's name being something required by the werewolf registry.

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paulamcg

Oh, thank you for saying that. It’s reassuring that my solution can still work for you, even after Rowling’s told us (in my view) too much about a Lupin family.

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pteropoda

I don't mind not having an explanation sometime (though that might be because I'm used to just accepting silly on-the-nose names as part of the camp factor, especially in kids'/YA books). It's nice to theorize, though, and I do like the additional angst factor it adds to have a meaningful family symbol twisted around like that, both for Remus himself and for his father.

For the canon reveal of the wolf patronus, I think it's revealed in a roundabout way, as part of the reveal of Remus and Tonks' relationship. I don't remember if we ever actually see Remus cast a fully corporeal patronus himself.

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paulamcg

I didn’t mind the on-the-nose name while only reading the books. When I started writing Remus’s story from his perspective and it turned into (I hope) more like literary fiction, rather for adults, I needed the explanation.

Yes for angst factor! The one I added was the forced change in identity on the level of name and of legal relationship to parents.

Thank you for the information on the canon patronus issue. My Remus managed to cast a corporeal patronus only later in the story, after starting to come to terms with belonging to the werewolves, too, and shedding the shame.

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coriaria

Cool, I've had the traditional wolf name as a head canon too.

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pteropoda

nice! glad to know it's been around. I see a lot more of the tongue in cheek making fun of Remus for being "wolf wolf", so I wasn't sure if it was out there much.

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paulamcg

My Remus’s second name is not John, as I’d extrapolated the story of his name (in 2003) before reading Rowling’s “boring but true” interview comment – and I decided not to consider such comments canon, or decided to call my fanfic Rowling’s-first-five-novels-compliant. His parents are my OCs, not any Lupins at all. Remus Jaws Lupin was a compromise grudgingly accepted by the Werewolf Registry.

In my short stories there are sometimes small references to Remus’s childhood home, to his herbologist and musician father’s sheep or his mother’s healing potions or theatre troup of half-human and part-human actors. He’s had only one Muggle-born grandmother, and the estate he’s got no right to inherit is magical and ancient – the family not rich in coin, though.

My Sirius, unlike Remus, did not grow up learning that physical demonstrations of affection were healing. He’s the one in my R/S head canon who finds it hard to accept touch and accept that he’s homosexual even though he loves and wants to be close to Remus, who’s different from any other man – in Sirius’s words, more than human.

Edited Date: 2019-11-28 07:09 pm (UTC)

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Ooh, I like that bit about Sirius! Fanon often gives young/teenaged Sirius the personality of a big, floppy puppy, eager and demonstrative and larger than life. Which I actually quite enjoy (as long as it's not overdone to the point of making him absurd). But you're right, there's a very strong case to be made for the idea that Sirius never learned how to show affection, especially physical affection, given his upbringing, and that he has to learn it as a teen/young adult from his friends and/or partner. That's intriguing!

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Agreed with both of you! I understand where the puppy personality comes from, but he's also curiously reticent in canon sometimes, so it's a point where it's easy to read a lot of different interpretations.

My own head canon, on a related note, is that Sirius is an introvert--passionate, impulsive, but interested in and fond of only a small group of people. And Remus, though not especially talkative, is more the extrovert. He's got a quiet way of getting along with quite a few different types of people, and he enjoys it. M.

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OOH, good point. Sirius seems to be someone who's PASSIONATELY devoted...to the very small circle of people he's chosen as his family. And maybe feels he doesn't need anyone else beyond them. Whereas Remus does seem to be able to get along with everyone - though I tend to see that as a product of his life circumstances: that he's so careful to get along with everyone as a counterbalance to having to live in a world with such prejudice against him, and that he's such a people pleaser because initially he didn't believe he would be able to have friends at all, and he's so grateful and surprised to have friends after all. Whether he would innately be an introvert or an extrovert, without those circumstances, is an intriguing question! Because you're right, he does seem to feel at ease with all kinds of people, especially his students, and genuinely enjoy interaction.

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Yes, I've always seen Sirius as quite physically reserved, to the point of being stand-offish. James and Remus seem far more likely to be the cuddly type imo, both having spent a lot time with doting adults when they were kids.

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That's true, "aloof" seems like a word that would fit well with the glimpse of teenage Sirius we see in the Pensieve!

With Remus I tend to focus on his Hogwarts years, how he must have arrived there believing he can never have friends (as he seems to go through his adult years in canon believing he can have neither friends nor love...) and being accordingly hesitant around people; but that's a good point, that what his early years with his parents were like would influence him at least as much as anything else.

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Rowling’s-first-five-novels-compliant

An excellent solution. :) (Quite a few of us in R/S seem to be de facto compliant only until the Department of Mysteries!) I've seen other fandoms where that's more of an explicit thing, but for some reason HP never seemed to pick it up.

What's the story behind the half- and part-human troupe, do you mind if I ask? M.

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paulamcg

Oh, I’m thrilled you’ve asked – although I’ve got so much head canon that I mustn’t try to share it all here.

My Remus’s parents are from a region (the Cotswolds) where there are multicultural magical communities. His mother, after defending a warlockal thesis in Potions at Oxford, got involved with her brother’s bohemian friends. This uncle’s got included in the backstory for the purpose of showing where Remus got the model for becoming a prankster. The troupe founded by the siblings, both for pure artistic and for political purposes, for empowering of oppressed not-fully-human creatures, serves as such an extended family which explains how Remus could develop good social skills despite having no friends of his own age before Hogwarts.

I needed this background, these minor OCs and settings also for the post-OotP plot of my novel Remus Lupin and the Revolt of the Creatures. That’s why I didn’t want to give up my version of Remus’s family on the basis of what Rowling wrote or said later, although it’s seemed to me that HP fandom somehow expects us to do such things.

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That is amazing! What a wonderful, rich backstory. And I *think* there are still plenty of people writing based on their own headcanons/backstories rather than Pottermore's latterly revelations. (I certainly still write my own headcanons in cases where they're something I came up with before JKR contradicted it, and I tend to see Pottermore as interesting additional information, but not strictly canon (book purist here!) so I can take it on or not as I choose.)

Would you share a link to your fic you mentioned?

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paulamcg

Oh, thank you! However, I feel somehow guilty of doing something similar to what Rowling does in Pottermore, when I mention the facts of my backstory instead of letting readers receive them within the story itself. It’s reassuring that you think not everyone has abandoned fic based on only the books or only on some of them.

The long chaptered fic I mentioned is on my live journal. Here’s the last chapter, with links to all the earlier chapters, so you can check what the novel looks like, if you care to. I’m thrilled if you do. Let me say that the later chapters, as well as my short stories, are better than the very beginning.

I’m happy to hear that you’re loyal to your own head canon, too.

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Thank you! I'll bookmark that. (Unfortunately, right now my list of bookmarks is absurdly long and my time is frustratingly short - but I'll definitely bookmark, which means I can't forget to at least come back and have a look eventually.) :D

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paulamcg

Thank you for bookmarking! It’s such an old and big fic that I haven’t assumed new friends here will hurry to read it. It’s obviously not necessary for readers of my short stories to be familiar with it. But (because it continues to mean a lot to me) I’m happy that some people know it exists. That’s why I gave a link to the last installment, so that in case you’re curious, you could click at links to some chapters and see what it looks like – rather different from new chaptered R/S fics, I suppose.

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That's fascinating. There are so many aspects of culture that seem to be missing in the books--acting, writing, art, the crafts, intellectual life, academic life, activism, voluntarism--that it's especially satisfying seeing them developed in fic. The combination of acting and activism is great for the period, too.

I don't think fandom expects us to adopt JKR's thoughts! What do the rest of you think? I've been trying to keep myself Pottermore- and interview canon-free, and it's been surprisingly easy to stay relatively unaffected. The excitement that surrounded Pottermore seems to have died down, which helps. M.

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That's a really good question! I'm glad to see there are others around who don't take it as a given that we necessarily have to take on Pottermore, or JKR's other latterly thoughts about the characters' pre-canon backstory or post-canon life.

It's funny - since I didn't start actually writing fic until well after the series was complete, I don't have as much of a problem with some of the early revelations JKR made, when she first started sharing tidbits in interviews and such. (Like Dean's family backstory, or who Neville marries.) That all came before I started writing, so it was easy to more or less absorb that into my mental catalogue of the canon. But Pottermore came out well after I'd started writing fic and established my own headcanons, so yeah, then I got to experience what others had been experiencing all along, the frustration of establishing something in fic and then having the creator endlessly coming along and jossing it!

Basically, I've ended up feeling that canon is canon; anything that came after (including Pottermore, anything JKR has said in interviews, and even the movie adaptations - yes, obnoxious book purist here!) is a potentially interesting expansion, but not strictly canon. So I'll take it on if it works for me, but I'll skip over it if it contradicts an already established headcanon, or just seems wrong for the character. I'm pretty much of the "Death of the Author" camp – what the author wrote into canon is canon. Any of her thoughts that she had in her mind but didn't actually set down in canon, those are potentially interesting as insight, but also are, in the final analysis, only one person's thoughts out of many.

(It is hard, though. I do sometimes feel like I have to mention in an author's note that "these are headcanons I came up with ages ago, before Pottermore, so it may not always match the official word from JKR.")

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paulamcg

Yes! So good to meet a fellow member of Death of the Author camp! I think I’ve shared this view in general even before I entered the fandom. But perhaps starting to write fanfic – starting to write fiction and discussing it with my readers – made me fully aware of and passionate about defending readers’ right for interpretations and extrapolations. I believe that a piece of art is completed only in a recipient’s interpretation. The author’s own interpretation is not more valuable than each reader’s. And when the author offers us – outside the books – some tidbits that have no role in her story, I wish we managed to give them no importance.

Now I think I’ve just seen an exclamation like “screw canon” in a comment on one of the first gifts here. We love so many different kinds of "AUs". If I understood correctly what Maggie said above about practices in other fandoms, it would perhaps be good to start stating explicitly something like: This story is compliant with ( or is an extrapolation from) Rowling’s first five novels.

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paulamcg

Thank you for your lovely words and for spelling out and making me more aware of how I may have developed in my fanfic some aspects of culture that were neglected in Harry’s story. I’m happy I included the acting and activism in my Remus’s mother’s life, as it turned out to serve him and the story well. Myself I started acting in a community theatre about ten years later.

You’ve made me realise that I shouldn’t think everyone else in the fandom is affected by Pottermore and interviews. It’s been easy for me to stay unaffected, not only because I wanted to stick to my version, but because I didn’t read interviews and Pottermore started only after I’d started my long break in fic-writing. But I felt disturbed around 2005 when suddenly people just knew that Remus was half-blood, and after coming back I first found it strange that so many people agreed that his parents are called Hope and Lyall. Thank you for posing that question to others!

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I've recently grown very fond of the idea of mixed-race Remus - specifically I write him as being brought up in Wales, to a white Welsh mother and Trinidadian father. I also like him to have at least one indomitable maiden aunt, though I don't even have a reason for that.

Sirius having some sort of artistic skill is something I really like as well. Of course, Sirius always struck me as the "obnoxiously good at everything" type so ofc he'd be great at drawing as well as everything else.

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pteropoda

headcanon shared! Though when I started thinking about it I worked it out to his mother being of Afro-Carribean descent (probably also mixed) and living in Wales, and his father being White & Scottish. And I love the maiden aunt idea.

Does this carry through to Sirius doing most of the drafting for the Marauder's map, in your mind?

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That is a good one as well!

And, yes, I do see sirius as drawing the map. In fact, I have specific ideas for all of them: James was the leader who inspired the project and gave it personality, Sirius did artwork and charms, Remus organised and made sure nothing got missed, and Peter did the most research.

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paulamcg

My head canon agrees with yours: one of these brilliant boys is artistic.

For me it’s Remus. He started drawing and painting – with his left hand, which he later learns to use for some wandless magic, whereas his wand arm is the right one – soon after he was bitten and as a way of coping with the pain and the change in his life. In my stories there are often mentions of Remus making pictures, and I’ve developed some theory of what I call the Magic of Images or the real moving art.

My Sirius has brilliant magical talent and verbal memory, which helps him to be obnoxiously good at most things. But he’s got a sloppy handwriting, and while he presents Remus with art materials, he wants to give the impression (at least to others) that he doesn’t value art.

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I like Remus drawing too! It seems like a nice thing for him to do when he's resting after the full moon.

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coriaria

The one about Sirius being obnoxiously good at everything is one I tend to have as well. It doesn't always appear in my fics, but it's mostly there in my head.

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