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[remus-poopin]

so people are always like ‘snape protected Harry at Hogwarts, that makes him a good person’ but ok

the fact that a woman had to die in order for him to want to protect an innocent child

and he couldn’t even bring himself to treat that child decently

bye

[remus-poopin]

(click for a better view)

Tonks!

I wanted to draw her for quite a while (in fact, I already did a few times but they were pretty terrible lol). I inspired myself from the Jim Kay illustrated books (and also from other fanartists) and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Btw here's a lil Remadora art I did just after that:

Still need to figure out my design for adult!Remus

[remus-poopin]

so back in november (!) i started drawing little outfit concepts for a bunch of hp characters and of course it spiraled into this massive undertaking of drawing about 6 outfits for nearly every character and i’m super picky about them so they’re taking forever lol. but i’ve never posted a single one before! so here are some wips for harry, ron, hermione, ginny, luna, tonks, lupin, snape, and lily – i’m sooo excited to get to coloring them!!!!!

[remus-poopin]

“We were young, thoughtless – carried away with our own cleverness.”

          - Remus Lupin, Prisoner of Azkaban

[remus-poopin]

Oh and 2, 4 and 20 for snep

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

omg where to start... probably just his wonderful dialogue moments. when he's eavesdropping on harry and ron complaining about him and he's like "and what if he's right behind you?" THE DRAMA!!! also that time he teased hermione about her teeth because that was so fucking uncalled for LMFAO. basically i love when he's a huge mean bitch

4. If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would you put them in?

ok this is the question that stumped me for like a week because i honestly have terrible media taste (did hp and pokemon not give it away lol?) and i rarely read or watch movies (this is bad i know). but eventually i came to the conclusion that i would love to see snape in the problematic fave flaming trash heap that is GLEE. initially i thought it would be great if he was a substitute teacher (a la those episodes with gwyneth paltrow) but honestly his childhood experiences actually fit quite well with glee and he could totally sing emo songs about it. the only other thing i could think of was him being a guest judge on rupaul's drag race

20. Which other character is the ideal best friend for this character, the amount of screentime they share doesn't matter?

i mean it's PROBABLY lily like i don't see how there could be any other "right" answer. but in my mind palace it's lupin because if snupin has zero fans then i am dead. i also just like their vibes together (and not just their insane divorced vibes in PoA!)... i think their personalities are kinda opposite and there's def a world where they bring out the best in each other. i do think they first have to bring out the worst in each other to get there tho LOL

thank you for the asks, this was super fun!!!!

send me a character!

[remus-poopin]

10, 12 and 14 for Lups?

(From Remus-poopin btw😔)

hello from sideblog purgatory </3

10: Could you be best friends with this character?

honestly? i think maybe i could. well maybe not BEST friends because the combined forces of our avoidant personalities would probably severely hinder this relationship (aka we would like never talk to each other LOL). but idk remus is a sweet kinda nerdy kinda boring 30-something dude which is unfortunately a demographic i tend to get along with quite well rip. maybe we would be good coworkers

12. What's a headcanon you have for this character?

in lieu of writing a detailed psychoanalysis, i will simply say that i think he would be able to play the guitar... his sheltered youth makes me think he could have that slightly odd only child with millions of hobbies vibe, but it's also EXTREMELY LIKELY that i'm projecting here lol. idk i just feel like he's a guy who plays guitar at parties... not in a flashy way or anything, just that he doesn't really know what else to do with himself. it's kinda self-centered but also kinda endearing in a cool uncle way

14. Assign a fashion aesthetic to this character.

OH i've got something good coming up for this lol so i don't want to say too much... but i can't help myself. he's got such a solid aesthetic imo. that thrift store grandpa swag!!!! lots of knitted garments: old sweaters (jumpers sorry british people) in muted warm tones... gray cable-knit cardigans... socks with holes in them... UGH. i also kind of like a 40s/50s vibe for him what with the tweed and allat (aka give him suspenders PLEASE). basically his aesthetic is messy professor who always comes to class hungover

thank you for sending these! i don't talk about my dearest lupin enough lol

send me a character!

[remus-poopin]

honestly is there a single competent teacher at Hogwarts? Any teacher I can think of with more than 10 lines of dialogue is a pedagogical disaster. Very shippable disasters though, for which I am grateful because your page has made me giggle all week.

maybe Sprout.

honestly, anon? no.

that school is a basket case and the older i get the more my sympathy for cornelius fudge increases. imagine getting the call where dumbledore says "heyyyyy... so, i hired what i thought was an ex-auror who was retired from the service because of serious ptsd, gave him no teacher training, let him perform illegal curses on children for fun, and then it turns out he was an escaped convict trying to resurrect the dark lord all along. lmao."

i'd have devoted myself to trying to discredit him too.

and so, for fun and profit, i think it's only fair for us to establish an official competency ranking of the teaching staff at hogwarts during the period 1991-1998... points on for having a basic grasp of the material, points off for anyone who nearly dies in your class.

1. wilhelmina grubbly-plank, care of magical creatures

genuinely, professor grubbly-plank is the only person we meet in all seven books who seems to be an uncomplicatedly good teacher. she's got a series of well-defined lesson plans which feature a mixture of guided and independent study and which work in a tangible way towards exams, she has clear authority in the classroom but is never unreasonable or cruel, she's demonstrably able to lead a practical class which involves wild animals which might behave dangerously or unpredictably without there ever being any concerns about student safety, she takes an active pastoral role [such as when she helps heal hedwig's injured wing, reassuring harry enormously], she's collegial [she shares her lessons plans with hagrid in goblet of fire, and she refuses to criticise his teaching to umbridge], and she's admired by all of her pupils except harry [who is nonetheless begrudgingly forced to admit that she's incredibly good at her job].

plus, her aesthetic is iconic.

=2. filius flitwick, charms; pomona sprout, herbology

in joint second place, we have these two.

both sprout and flitwick spend canon seeming to be pretty good at their jobs - they have interesting lesson plans which seem to balance theoretical and practical work well and which prepare their pupils properly for exams, their pupils like them and enjoy their lessons, they're both excellent at the pastoral side of their jobs [sprout's gentle encouragement of neville is really lovely], and they're adored by their colleagues.

they lose marks for lax classroom discipline. harry, ron, and hermione are constantly yapping away in both charms and herbology - with harry and ron frequently failing to understand what they're supposed to be learning because they were too busy have a chat.

=4. remus lupin, defence against the dark arts; septima vector, arithmancy

two teachers here who earn their placement on the list by having one pupil who considers them life-alteringly inspiring.

for lupin, this is dean thomas - whose constant state of readiness to throw hands to defend his honour is one of his greatest character traits. for vector, it's hermione.

obviously, they're both well-qualified, well-prepared, engaging, and [at least in lupin's case, but i can't see why it wouldn't also be the case for vector] well-regarded by their colleagues.

they don't rank higher because lupin loses marks for endangering his students by not disclosing his knowledge that the presumed-to-be-a-death-eater sirius has a means of entering hogwarts without detection [i understand why he does this from a characterisation point of view, but it's inexcusable from a safeguarding one] and because vector teaches an elective subject which is implied to only attract bright, engaged pupils - and therefore has an easier time in the classroom than someone trying to get a student like crabbe through their exams.

5. minerva mcgonagall, transfiguration

in comes minnie mac at number five.

unsurprisingly, her solid curriculum, excellent classroom discipline, high-regard among her colleagues and pupils, support of student extracurricular activities, and investment in helping her pupils pursue the careers they want all give her points.

she loses marks, however, for the fact that she is so casually disdainful of pupils who aren't instinctively good at her subject - which suggests that she doesn't know how to adapt her material so it can be understood by every student she teaches. like dumbledore, she seems to have an identifiable favouritism for brilliant students - who she seems to permit to get away with much more than students she considers average or dull - which probably doesn't endear her to anyone who doesn't get that treatment.

on her pastoral approach, though, i don't think that it matters too much that she's not particularly nurturing - even though she's a head of house. she seems to be good at responding to genuine distress and managing genuine crises with empathy, and the "pull yourself together" vibes she takes in response to more trivial dramas is because she's a presbyterian scotswoman.

6. severus snape, potions & defence against the dark arts

the one on this list that i imagine will be controversial...

because snape is a dick in the classroom - not denying that - but he's also, in terms of his pupils' exam performance, clearly the most successful teacher in the entire school. he can fill his newt-level classes despite only admitting those with outstanding grades, and he expects every pupil he teaches to pass owl-level potions and seems not to be disappointed. hermione reveals that he does teach the theory of potions and the discipline's wider application - harry and ron just don't listen - and that she thinks his lessons are interesting.

snape loses marks - obviously - for his general vibe, although i think he should be allowed some leeway for his dickhead behaviour since potions is clearly a subject in which not paying attention and not being able to follow instructions properly is dangerous [hence why i've been a trevor hater since day one].

i suppose he should also be allowed some leeway because it's a genre requirement for a school story to have a theatrically evil teacher. but he's not getting it - since he clearly enjoys the role so much.

7. horace slughorn, potions

marks on for encouraging independent thinking and for clearly being able to hold a classroom's attention. marks off for not learning the names of pupils he's indifferent to, getting his favourite pupils drunk, and for having no follow-up questions to "hello, sir. i'd like to commit some murders."

8. charity burbage, muggle studies

entirely because i think it's genuinely admirable - and, indeed, far more admirable than the fact that the order of the phoenix all happily keep working for the state following voldemort's takeover - that she publishes an article in the daily prophet, to which her real name is attached, explicitly refuting blood-supremacist rhetoric when she must know that a blood-supremacist government is about to come into power.

marks off because the fact that even wizards who've taken her class appear to know fuck all about muggle society means that she can't be particularly good at her job.

9. firenze, divination

marks on because his pupils love him, marks off because that's a tremendously low bar to clear given... trelawney.

him telling his classes that divination is a bullshit, made-up subject is iconic, though.

10. "alastor moody", defence against the dark arts

i think it's genuinely impressive that he manages to go from being imprisoned under the imperius curse for a decade straight into planning a full year's lesson plans [which his pupils love] and doesn't have a breakdown.

marks off because of literally everything else.

=11. all the miscellaneous teachers: aurora sinistra, astronomy; silvanus kettleburn, care of magical creatures; bathsheba babbling, ancient runes

they seem fine.

14. rolanda hooch, flying

full respect to her for managing to wangle a full-time salary out of an annual workload made up of teaching one lesson [badly] and refereeing six quidditch matches.

15. quirinus quirrell, defence against the dark arts

all the proof those of us who hate professor riddle stories need that voldemort would have been a dogshit teacher, if he can't even get his meat-puppet to inspire a room full of eager eleven-year-olds in a subject which is about the coolest ways possible to kill people.

=16. cuthbert binns, history of magic; sibyll trelawney, divination

they're terrible, obviously, but the fact that they remain in their jobs despite being so clearly incompetent is entirely dumbledore's fault. are you not giving the staff performance reviews, albus? come on now.

18. dolores umbridge, defence against the dark arts

umbridge deserves to be in prison, but she did at least bother to plan out a curriculum.

=19. gilderoy lockhart, defence against the dark arts; rubeus hagrid, care of magical creatures

both victims of dumbledore's "lol this will be so funny" era of hiring practices. both deservedly regarded as completely fucking incompetent by all but one defiant brownnoser. both possessing jazzy taste in textbooks.

21. amycus carrow, defence against the dark arts

he beats his sister simply because his pupils do appear to know how to perform the unforgivable curses correctly.

22. alecto carrow, muggle studies

literally nothing positive can be said.

[remus-poopin]

I need your thoughts on aunt petunia/rita skeeter

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

and i think... hot. entirely on "incredibly niche moments in british pop-culture" grounds...

by which i mean, when i try to imagine what rita looks like, she always takes a form vaguely similar to a journalist named samantha brick, who went viral in 2012 when she published an article in the daily mail entitled why do women hate me for being beautiful?

brick's article was typical, boring misogyny - and so was the response to it, which all centred on the idea that she didn't actually have any right to call herself attractive - but the relevant point here is that i can guarantee that petunia hate-read it literally a thousand times, that she told anyone who'd listen that she thought brick was a delusional tart who should stay away from other people's husbands [especially when they're fine british beef, like vernon], and that she was secretly quite jealous of brick for proclaiming loudly that she thinks herself beautiful.

the way that jkr uses physical appearance - and, especially, the way that women we aren't supposed to like are described either as fat or as unfemininely thin - has always annoyed me [even though i recognise it's a trope borrowed from many of the children's literature influences upon the series].

when it comes to petunia, so much of her physical description is intended to hint at her villainy. that she's unfemininely tall and thin, that she has a harsh, slightly equine appearance serves as a visual metaphor for her lack of the feminine characteristics the series considers admirable - she's cold, unnurturing, brittle, sterile, nosy, obsessed with how she's perceived, performative, cowardly, and so on. lily - with whom she's always contrasted - is a good woman - the ultimate mother - because she's real. and she's also - as the text tells us on several occasions - beautiful.

but if one wants to be more sympathetic, petunia's brittleness can be read instead as fragility. after all, she's a woman who - by the time she's twenty-four at most - is caring for two toddlers [one more than she was expecting], has lost her parents and sister, appears to be at home all day without much social support, is hyper-focused on not embarrassing a husband who appears to be quite a few years older than her by fucking up the class performance he expects but she's not completely familiar with... the list goes on.

what this must do to petunia's understanding of her own embodiment is really interesting to me. the entirety of the person she presents to the world is a fiction - she's a working-class girl with a sister who was a witch, who lives behind a thoroughly mundane and middle-class mask. this concealment will have an impact on how she understands herself as a physical creature - the petunia dursley she's created will not sweat or cry or shit or have body hair or devour or laugh until she can't stand or take or bleed or want or fuck.

and so, when she's alone and the mask comes off, can she think that the real woman who lurks underneath - whose body does all of these things she tries to hide - is beautiful?

i imagine petunia as being prone to a sort of obsessive, corrosive jealousy in her attitude towards women who are more defiant of social convention - especially women who reject the expectation that they will be meek, humble, self-deprecating, and demure.

which brings us onto...

rita skeeter is another character whose physical description in the text is something i think it's important to unpick. she's an example of the second technique which jkr uses when describing women the narrative doesn't wish us to be sympathetic to - that their gender expression has an exaggerated, hyper-feminine aesthetic.

jkr clearly thinks that this aesthetic is unnatural - in that it only belongs to women who have to play up a pantomime of femininity because they are improperly feminine in any "innate" way. dolores umbridge's girlish, pastel looks, for example, are horrifying because the person beneath them is sociopathic in her cruelty to children.

with rita, i am always struck - especially given the turn jkr has taken in recent years - that she is described in goblet of fire as someone with a hyper-feminine aesthetic which fails [in the text's eyes] to mask that she is physically unfeminine.

she is described as having "hair ... set in elaborate and curiously rigid curls that contrasted oddly with her heavy-jawed face", and "thick fingers [which] ended in two-inch nails, painted crimson", and "large, mannish hands", and she's caked in make-up, and she likes her accessories with a slightly tacky vibe.

she's described - in short - in ways which are intended to make her seem ridiculous [cheap, brassy, mutton-dressed-as-lamb] within the confines of how the text [and the world] thinks cisgender women should properly perform femininity.

but she's also described in ways which suggest that we're supposed to think that she looks like someone who is not a cisgender woman trying - and failing - to "pass". the text is of the tedious opinion that we should think less of her because of this.

but fuck that!

what i like about rita is the fact that she takes this treatment by the text and... doesn't give a shit about it. she's loud and eye-catching and caustic and rude and grasping and a complete hack. what you see with her is what you get - nobody thinks she's a good or impartial journalist, including her, and she simply doesn't care! and she thinks she looks hot as hell while doing it. after all, she has her quill describe her as an "attractive blonde". harry thinks that's an offensive suggestion - but she doesn't have to.

do i think rita is a straightforwardly admirable person? no. do i think that she doesn't mask and conceal her insecurities from the world? also no.

but i think she has that self-belief which petunia would pretend she thought was disgusting but which she secretly envied rita for. and i think this - someone like petunia, repressed and concealed, meeting someone who has no shame in immoderation and who gives them permission to exist greedily - is a trope which always hits.

do i think it would last? no. i think it's a wild fling and then they go their separate ways - and i also think, as i know i say ad nauseam, that this matters. the harry potter series thinks of love as something which endures for years in solemn silence, which sacrifices and which suffers.

but sometimes love is a week of getting your nails done, sunning yourself in a leopard-print thong bikini, being trashy and immodest and demanding, and eating ice-cream out of the navel of a blonde who doesn't give a fuck what people say about her. nothing more, nothing less.

good for them.

[remus-poopin]

Are Lily and Petunia working class? I feel like they’re coded more like lower middle, with parents who are very class conscious in the way that people who’ve only relatively recently inched their way into respectability can be - Lily and Petunia both have classist insults on the tip of their tongue when they’re done with Snape and that had to be a deliberate invocation of the attitudes inside the Evan’s’ home considering they’ve got basically no other personality traits in common - and who hope their daughters marry up, which they both do. They don’t really seem as kids to speak or act in the way that the few unambiguously working class characters in the books do. She can’t be raised middle middle, because she’s far too obsessed with the performance of it once married to be comfortable that status won’t be taken from her, but her dad was like…a bank clerk. Or a council worker. Not a lawyer, but not a working class factory guy or tradesman either. Cokeworth reads to me as split by the river, with Snape’s condemned Victorian slums in the shadow of the mill and then Lily and Petunia over a bridge in the nicer part of town on one of those endless 1930s estates with a gated playground that are all over the country. Sometimes it’s hard not to read an uncomfortably condescending undertone into JKR’s words about Lily’s goodness that a key part of that goodness in the author’s eyes was her ability to overlook the class disparity with Snape. Would love to hear your thoughts on this because you usually spot much more going on in the text than I do!

(also, what working class family names their first child Petunia???)

so, i certainly think this is a fair reading, anon - which definitely works with snape and petunia and lily's canonical... vibe.

i just prefer the class divergence between the snapes and the evanses to be smaller in real terms - and, therefore, more profound in imagined ones.

by which i mean that i like the tension between the two families to be intra-working-class beef between a "respectable", "aspirational" working-class family and the feckless delinquents it considers beneath them.

this is because it always strike me that so much about petunia's relationship with snape is based in her fear of the mirror he holds up to her, and the inadequacies she's terrified it will reveal. the main one of these - obviously - is that snape's continued existence reminds her of her desire to be magical [and shocking, bohemian, unconventional etc.], but i also think that snape works well as someone who reminds her that all the affectations of middle-class respectability she puts on are mere fiction. she's just a working-class lass from cokeworth, no better than he is...

[which offers an explanation for her terror as an adult that her solidly middle-class lifestyle will be snatched away from her - this fear is connected specifically to harry's magic; magic is what took lily away from her; lily was introduced to magic by snape. she has escaped him by ascending into the middle-classes, but the frightening, corrupting influence he represents - which threatens to unmask who she really is and where she really comes from - stalks her still...]

i certainly agree that her and lily's parents would be incredibly class-conscious, but i see it as the adult evanses looking to receive recognition which would allow them to distinguish themselves from the lower orders in a way which might help them advance in terms of class status, rather than allowing them to retain a previous ascension up the greasy pole.

and this will obviously have involved the demonisation of members of the working-classes they believe to be letting the side down - petunia clearly being desperate to call snape whatever the seventies version of a "chav" was during their first meeting can definitely be read as having that "it's people like you that give people like me a bad name" flair. and i think that's more potent - and would bother petunia a lot more - if it's something she thinks from within the same social class as snape, rather than [however tenuously] from a bracket above him.

the evanses house and mr evans' job would absolutely play into this intra-class divide. i agree that they probably lived on a housing estate built between the 1930s and 1950s - but i think it's also entirely possible that the estate they live on was council housing. the housing division in cokeworth might be a smaller-scale version of that seen in other post-industrial cities in the north-west, such as liverpool and manchester - policies intended to move families out of unfit victorian stock into new-builds, which came with things like indoor toilets and central heating.

[in reality, these policies rehoused a lucky few in nicer estates within their original communities, displacing many onto estates miles away from where they'd started and leaving others stuck in condemned slum housing.]

i think it's worth noting that - while the perception of someone who lives in council housing has become exceptionally negative since the 1980s, in the 60s it was still considered perfectly respectable to live in council housing which might have looked like this:

[none of which, i imagine, are still in use as council stock...]

certainly, it was considered infinitely more respectable than living in the slums.

the sorts of council tenants who would end up in these houses often had a reputation for their own version of "keeping up appearances" - tidy gardens, community interaction, not behaving in "rough" ways - which is very similar to how this is performed by the middle-classes, but which still has a distinctly working-class flavour - particularly when it comes to the perception of jobs, education, and what one receives from the state.

mr evans could, for example, have a trade and still think of himself [and expect to be perceived in society] as meaningfully more sophisticated than a low-skilled and frequently-unemployed mill-worker, like tobias snape - especially if he was something like a plumber, electrician, or gas-fitter. this would be the case even though both of these jobs can be described as "blue collar".

and i like these really minor distinctions because they play up just how petty the performance of class is in britain - but they also reveal just how thorny and multi-layered it is at the same time. this really vibes with how i see petunia: petty and competitive and obsessed with rules which people outside of her class bracket don't care about [i.e. how marge doesn't give a fuck about the prim middle-class manners the adult petunia will come to pride herself on] and worried about the fragility of her position and very much faking it until she makes it - and also complex and multi-layered and inextricable from the long and complicated history of social class in the twentieth century.

two final points: on the names, i basically think that the fact she's called petunia is a little wink to the camera for the mams and dads in 1997 reading the books at home with their children - "petunia dursley" is absolutely intended to remind you of "hyacinth bucket", the social-climbing protagonist of the bbc sitcom keeping up appearances. that character was also a working-class lass who ascended to the middle, and who went to extraordinary lengths to keep that hidden from the upper-middle-class circles she was desperate to access...

and the main thing which i think "others" the snapes? religion. i am wedded to the idea of tobias as a catholic of northern irish extraction - which would have been accompanied by all sorts of stereotypes about fecklessness [drunkenness, having too many children who can't be paid for, violence] which, when compounded by him living in a slum and being unemployed, would have turned him into someone the evanses would have seen it as entirely appropriate to define themselves against even if they nominally shared a social class.

this would only have got worse as the 1970s began...

[remus-poopin]

I come to you with this question because, having read all your other metas, I think you'd be the right person to ask. Id love to know what you think about Regulus because I have a very hard time understanding his character. Partly because of fanon characterization of him makes him seem like some secret rebel against Voldemort and partly because I just can't really understand any of his motivations. But regardless, I think what we know about him in canon is so interesting - i just can piece it all together. I'd love to know what you think!

(Sorry for the longish ask)

thank you very much for the ask, @hauntingpercival! regulus is a character i also find a bit of a mystery, and so thinking through this answer was really fun.

i'll start by being clear that i'm certainly not a regulus fan. by which i not only mean that i don't vibe with the fanon!regulus of the marauders fandom, who is essentially an original character - and you can read my views on jegulus here... [spoiler alert: i do not back it] - but that when he appears in my own writing in ways i'd like to hope feel influenced by his canon form, i always find myself focusing on aspects of his character which are rather unlikeable.

there is a little bit of a discourse-y reason for this, which will be pertinent to the rest of this answer...

i really don't like the sort of "omg aristocracy is so hot and sexy and interesting" tropes which are so prevalent in writing around the black family. this is firstly because i don't think that aristocracy is in any way these things - and i find it distasteful to imply otherwise - which is because i'm a prole who lives somewhere still bearing the scars of british colonisation who also went to the sort of university where one sometimes encountered aristocrats and they were all cringe and unbearable.

but it's also because it's not - and i will genuinely die on this hill - an accurate reflection of how the blacks are presented in canon. not only does it take sirius' comment that his parents considered themselves "practically royal" to be a statement of fact [sirius is quite clearly taking the piss out of his parents' pretensions], but it also misses that the purpose sirius' discussion of orion and walburga's politics serves in the narrative of order of the phoenix is to show how mainstream their blood-supremacist views were.

sirius tells us that his parents were not death eaters, but that they nonetheless thought voldemort's overtly sectarian political aims were correct. in this, they hold the political views order of the phoenix emphasises belong to cornelius fudge - unimaginative, deferential to the class system, casually prejudiced, and so on. orion and walburga function as a way of showing us just how entrenched the death eaters' manifesto is, how close voldemort came to winning the first war, and what an uphill struggle the order faces to unravel the roots blood-supremacy has in the wizarding world.

[and they also show that the baffling vibes of grimmauld place - while these are made worse by it being three different gothic literature vibes in a trenchcoat - are wizarding norms, rather than evidence that the blacks were uniquely immersed in dark magic. the decor at grimmauld place - and the family's collection of dark artefacts - is the same as that found in malfoy manor, even at a time when lucius malfoy is considered eminently socially respectable. this is a point we will come back to...]

i think, then, that it's crucial to approach regulus not as a swaggering aristocrat, but as someone from an upper-class background which - while still posh, rich, inferring enormous social capital, well-connected - was unremarkable within the circles in which he moved.

by which i mean that hogwarts is based on real-world institutions - britain's elite boarding schools - which are so exclusive and expensive to attend that the student body are from a class-background which seems inhumanly exclusive, affluent, and powerful from an outsider perspective [i.e. from the perspective of someone from the majority middle- and working-classes] but which seems completely normal within the student body itself.

[i.e. nobody at eton with princes william and harry will have been astonished to have been at school with a royal, because they will have been familiar with the social circles, cultural experiences, level of wealth, and expectation of knowing someone with considerable social influence from childhood.]

while hogwarts appears to be a state-funded school [although it also expects an enormous amount of financial investment on the part of parents - such as buying all the textbooks], the fact that its real-world parallels are so elite [and, therefore, come with a specific "look" in the british cultural imagination] means that the student body is incredibly well-heeled and working-class students stand out enormously in a way very rich students do not. hogwarts also exists - like real-world elite schools and universities - as a way of propping up the status quo of the class system by which the wizarding world functions. its pupils have an expectation of procuring jobs in the civil service and other influential professions - using not only connections established at school but connections they possess through their [male] relatives. many hogwarts students we meet in canon are related to someone who occupies an elite position in the wizarding executive or is otherwise socio-politically influential.

at school, then, regulus would have been completely, perfectly average in terms of social position. i also like the idea of him as perfectly average in terms of intellect - and as a good, but not exceptional, seeker. this provides a really interesting point of contrast with sirius, who - while he's also not socially unusually in terms of class [and i will never vibe with tropes like him being followed by whispers going "omg, he's a black, that means he's important"] - stands out in that he's the first black in generations not to be in slytherin, that he's precociously intelligent, and that he - and the rest of the marauders - are class clowns and show-offs.

and i like the idea that this would give regulus a desire to stand out - to be considered the most important person in the whole school. we can get a hint of this in canon - the picture of sirius and his friends harry sees in deathly hallows is immediately contrasted with a picture of regulus sitting in the seeker's position in the team photo. the seeker who acts alone.

and i think this desire for notoriety is what drives him to sign up to become a death eater - that he decides he's sick of having parents with the perfectly normal level of social influence and a brother who is more popular than him, and that he thinks that he's cleverer and more worthy of attention than everyone else in the castle and the world better start showing it.

[and i've never bought - i'm afraid - the idea that he and sirius are close. it's clear from canon that regulus' had no issue being thought of as "a much better son" than sirius, and that he colluded with his parents against him. sirius can love him - and miss him, and regret how they were never able to repair their relationship - but i don't think this means that he feels he's lost a bestie.]

that he holds sincere blood-supremacist views is a given - because within the world in which he lives, these are completely normal and held completely casually [i.e. that slughorn is shocked lily could be muggleborn because she's clever]. the more virulent expression of these views - saying "mudblood", etc. - is clearly considered ill-mannered, but not something which might have any real impact on one's social standing [draco malfoy uses the term with impunity while at school, and nobody ever considers that informing a teacher of this would result in him being punished; equally, nobody from the crowd who witness the event report snape for calling lily a mudblood].

and so i think it's clear that he becomes interested in joining the death eaters - and starts putting together his terrorism pinterest board - because his mainstream belief that being pureblood is better crashed into his desire to be special to form a conviction that riding the coattails of voldemort's ostentatious malevolence was the way he could become famous.

[in this, he is very like snape.]

my assumption is that regulus is one academic year below sirius, meaning that he was born in 1960-1961. my assumption is also that he receives his dark mark while still at school - probably at some point in his newt years [so the academic years 1977-1978 and 1978-1979].

the standard view - expressed vehemently by various order members in half-blood prince - is that voldemort has no interest in death eaters who are still at school.

the order is wrong about this, obviously - not only when it comes to their refusal to accept that harry's right about draco malfoy being marked, but also in the fact that several of the death eaters who are very young at the end of the first war, barty crouch jr. [who is still young enough to be described as a "boy" in 1982 at the earliest], chief among them, must have been taken on by voldemort prior to graduating.

but it seems fair to say that admitting teenagers into his inner circle is unusual for voldemort, especially when those teenagers don't really offer him anything useful. crouch, for example, could be put to work informing on his father's movements. regulus is - as i've said - just ordinary.

and so my view has always been that regulus is marked by voldemort as a favour to bellatrix. i think this partially because i'm bellamort trash, partially because i think it's a nice narrative parallel between regulus and draco [who are very similar] to have bellatrix be responsible for regulus' recruitment when she's canonically vociferously in favour of draco's, and partially because realising that voldemort thinks of him as just some guy would be a big blow to regulus' conviction that joining the death eaters would make him impressive.

[i also think regulus is recruited before 1978 because i think there has to be a shift in voldemort's modus operandi at about this point, in order for the fact that sirius says that his parents got cold feet about what the dark lord was prepared to do after regulus became a death eater. my view has always been that voldemort's violence prior to c.1978 overwhelmingly targets state institutions and people connected to them, meaning that ordinary citizens can regard them being killed or injured as reasonable risks of their jobs. and then that after c.1978, the dark lord begins targeting civilians - including upper-class pureblood civilians - indiscriminately, which makes his casual supporters start to waver a bit.]

so, let's suppose that regulus leaves hogwarts in june 1979 and finds himself expected to participate as a full death eater, after having been let off all the dirty work by virtue of being at school...

as i've said, regulus has an enormous number of narrative parallels with draco malfoy. and i think that the best way to think about him is to write him as sharing draco's canonical attitude to voldemort's cause - that he believes whole-heartedly in the message of blood-supremacy the dark lord promotes and that he has no problem with people he considers subhuman [mudbloods and blood-traitors] or unimportant [faceless families massacred in their own homes] being subjected to violence in the name of that message, but that he lacks the character traits necessary to perform that violence himself, to see it done to people he likes, or to witness what it actually involves versus the image he has of it in his head.

and so i imagine he starts struggling pretty quickly with the fact that being a death eater isn't quite as easy as he thought it would be when he was making voldemort fancams on tiktok. and that part of the reason he's primed to turn against the dark lord is because of the tension he feels warring within him at the fact that he's still a blood-supremacist, still desperate to be important, and yet growing disenchanted.

i don't however, think this is why he does what he does... so let's get into that:

why does regulus turn against voldemort?

let's be clear about one thing - regulus turning against voldemort has nothing to do with him having some sort of damascene conversion against blood-supremacy.

[or, at least, that's what i think.]

the outline of regulus' defection that we get in canon goes as follows:

voldemort asks someone to lend him a house elf. we know that regulus volunteers kreacher, because he told kreacher so - and so i imagine voldemort mentions at a meeting that he wants to procure an elf [although, of course, he doesn't elaborate on why] and regulus immediately jumps up and says "pick me, my lord" because he sees this as an opportunity to get voldemort to finally notice him.

his assumption must be that voldemort will use kreacher for a purpose which is considered normal in wizarding society - i.e. that he will require him to do something akin to domestic service, perhaps preparing potions ingredients.

it evidently does not occur to him that voldemort would transgress this social boundary and harm kreacher. not - to be clear - because i think that regulus was some kind of abolitionist legend, but because we see several characters express the view in goblet of fire that how barty crouch sr. treats winky is his own business, and that it is impolite for respectable wizards to comment on how anyone else treats his slave. this sort of social behaviour will have a second part - that it is impolite for respectable wizards to treat anyone else's slave in a way which goes beyond what wizarding slaveowners see as normal.

or: that it's fine to be lent a slave to serve you, but very much not fine to nearly kill that slave [someone else's property!] for your own gain.

kreacher informs regulus what voldemort asked of him, which makes regulus suspicious about what the object voldemort deposited in the cave was. regulus then decides to investigate.

kreacher tells us that regulus goes away for an indeterminate period of time and then returns to grimmauld place "disturbed in his mind".

dumbledore claims in half-blood prince that voldemort appears not to wear or display the objects the horcruxes are made from after he turns them into horcruxes. i think we can agree with this or not without it affecting the story - i quite like the idea that voldemort doesn't make the locket until the later 1970s [maybe after the murder of dorcas meadowes, the only person in the first war other than james and lily to have canonically been killed by him personally], but we can also say that he might have worn or displayed it when it was already a horcrux. certainly, regulus must have seen the locket - either on voldemort or somewhere in his lair - and, after kreacher tells him what happened, he goes to see if it's still there.

when he discovers it isn't, he comes to an important conclusion. one which requires a little detour...

how does regulus know what a horcrux is?

i complained at the start of this answer about the black family being portrayed as unusually immersed in the dark arts - rather than some sort of familiarity with the dark arts being perfectly normal for people of their social class.

and i am sure that you might think I'm about to have to eat my words, since i'm not going to try and deny that regulus was able to identify a horcrux all by himself...

but, actually, i'm just chucking malevolently at the opportunity to clamber onto my soapbox and say:

horcruxes are canonically not magic which only a handful of people know about. where voldemort goes beyond the theory of horcruxes which a wizard of regulus' class-background would be familiar with is that he makes seven.

this doesn't mean - to be clear - that i think it was ever common to make a horcrux [i don't think the wizarding world is quite that lawless...], but that it was reasonable to know they exist in the way that we might have some general understanding of something macabre like techniques for disposing of a body, which would enable us to suspect if we saw a neighbour behaving strangely while doing one of those things...

after all, slughorn can suggest [even if he doesn't believe this is what he wants to do] that voldemort could justify his interest in horcruxes by using the excuse that he's working on a project for defence against the dark arts.

that harry, ron, and hermione don't know about them is a result of a combination of their own lack of interest in the theory of the dark arts, the information blackout instituted by dumbledore at some point after voldemort graduates [and my theory as to why dumbledore hates horcruxes even in the forties? grindelwald made one - hence why dumbledore is so hopeful at king's cross that the rumours of his repentance might have been true...], and the fact that they don't discuss their mission with anyone [tonks, kingsley, and moody, who literally have to specialise in dark objects as part of their jobs, would one hundo have known what a horcrux was].

[what they would not have known is what voldemort's horcruxes were likely to be made of. it's this - rather than the idea that horcruxes are completely unknowable magic - that is why it has to be harry in charge of hunting them down: he's the only person in the series who knows voldemort well enough to imagine where he might have hidden them and what they might be.]

so, regulus has a little rummage, works out the locket has disappeared, and has no trouble - especially because voldemort mentions in goblet of fire that he'd told his death eaters he couldn't die [which regulus might not have thought was him speaking literally] prior to 1981 - guessing what it's being used for.

and so, regulus turns against voldemort.

and i think that he does this because the horcrux makes it impossible for him to pretend any longer that voldemort's aims are - when the ministry is forced to the negotiating table by his paramilitary activities - an oligarchy in which upper-class pureblood families benefit and muggleborns and blood-traitors become second-class citizens, but which doesn't deviate too much in terms of its overwhelming norms from the way wizarding society functioned at that time. instead, he is confronted with the undeniable fact that voldemort intends to reign forever as an immortal absolute monarch, and that he has never had any intention of elevating regulus and people like him to the positions of importance he so craved.

[we see something similar happen to draco, whose increasing fear of voldemort throughout half-blood prince and deathly hallows is clearly driven by him realising that voldemort isn't joking when he says that he'll kill him and his parents unless he obeys orders, but is joking when he says he'll be considered a valuable servant should he manage to kill dumbledore...]

and so his death - and his threat to destroy the horcrux - is a repudiation of his beliefs. but, specifically, it is a repudiation of his conviction that voldemort was a primarily political figure who would act as a champion of the pureblood class-system. it's him recognising that voldemort would not stop with a takeover of the ministry - he would kill and kill forever, concerned only with how much further he could venture beyond the norms of magic.

[remus-poopin]

Hi! For the ask game… opinions on the main character? 2, 7 and 8 for Harry!

Hi! Thanks for to ask!

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

He genuinely seems like a sweet dude,

Things like how he ignored Ginny putting her elbow in the butter dish because of her crush in CoS or how he didn’t make fun of her valentine card or singing get well soon card in PoA even though he was 12-13 at the time and that would be almost expected behavior is very endearing to me.

7. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you like?

I enjoy alot of the character breakdowns and analysis I see people writing. There is obviously alot to work with so it feels like every meta I read on him has something new to offer.

8. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you despise?

I wouldn’t say I despise this but I find it annoying when people say that Harry is unobservant or stupid, because he really isn’t. That kid is noticing the slightest change of tone and the subtlest facial expressions of people. Now he sometimes doesn’t come to the right conclusions but that doesn’t mean he isn’t observant. I get that people usually say that because they want their ships to be real or whatever but it feels annoying that they have to take away one of Harry’s character traits to do that.

[remus-poopin]

James for 1,2, and 9?

1. Why do you like or dislike this character?

My opinion on James literally changes week to week, I can't even say that I like or dislike him. Honestly any negative feelings I do have towards him comes more from being annoyed at fandom than the actual character himself.

I’ve really tried to get into him because it’s difficult being such big fans of Sirius and Lupin but then end up rolling my eyes everytime this dude come up (which is the worst thing a character can make me feel, apathetic verging on annoyed). But I think it come down to the fact that I’m just more into complex characters that just have a lot to analyze about them and James just isn’t that. He’s dead the entire series and has to remain somewhat sparse so Harry can project his ideal masculinity onto him (and then be able to take him off his pedestal when he gets developed a bit more). I get why people who are more into blank canvas characters would be into him because it’s fun to try to fill him out but that’s not really how I personally interact with fiction so he’s just not that appealing to me.

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

Usually the things I find most interesting about James is his relationships, specifically his relationship with Sirius, Lupin and Snape. They feel like things I can grab onto for a character that feel very intangible to me. I especially like his relationship with Sirius because it feels so intense and very codependent.

9. Could you be roommates with this character?

Absolutely not, I feel like he would always have his friends over 24/7 and they seem like they'd be very rowdy and loud. Basically I would not be getting many moments of silence.

[remus-poopin]

Hi! Lily #14-16 ?

Hi anon!

14. Assign a fashion aesthetic to this character.

Hm maybe something like Mid-century twee? I associate Lily with warm colors and rust like colors and twee has a lot of that. Twee is also a mix of feminine, quirky and a slightly preppy aesthetics and that works for how I see Lily.

15. What's your favorite ship for this character? (Doesn't matter if it's canon or not.)

I actually don’t think I have a favorite ship for her. Maybe Lily/Giant squid? That could be cute.

16. What's your least favorite ship for this character?

Probably gonna have to say Jily mostly because it consists of all my least favorite tropes. I’ve really tried to get into it but I just don’t think it’s for me.

[remus-poopin]

Sirius, Snape and Remus for 11? (lol)

11. Would you date this character?

Not enough money in the world.

[remus-poopin]

#5 for Snape and Lily?

5. What's the first song that comes to mind when you think about them?

Snape: “This night has opened my eyes” and “Headmasters ritual” by The Smiths

Lily: “That’s the way I’ve always heard it should be” by Carly Simon and “All I want” by Joni Mitchell

(Also I have playlists for them if your interested!)

[remus-poopin]

Sirius black: 16-18 please?

16. What's your least favorite ship for this character?

Hm I guess I would have to say wolfstar but literally only because I have this REALLY annoying thing where if a fan base is somewhat irritating to me it ruins the thing they are a fan of for me (I honestly need to change this about myself so I can enjoy Lana again). Also I think that a lot of the fanon characterizations that I dislike about both Sirius and Remus usually come from wolfstar spaces so I just tend to avoid it.

But the ship itself is actually pretty compelling to me when it actually goes off of their canon dynamic and personalities.

17. What's a ship for this character you don't hate but it's not your favorite that you're fine with?

Im super into Snape/Sirius parallels and exploring it through a romantic lens isn’t usually where I go with it but I am definitely not not into.

18. How about a relationship they have in canon with another character that you admire?

I really love his relationships with James. I can get into it as it being romantic or them just being platonic soulmates, but either way it’s probably my favorite relationship in the series because of the intense codependency and devotion they show.

[remus-poopin]

Hi! This character ask game looks like fun :) I’d love to hear your responses to questions 7, 8 & 25 for Severus Snape!

Hi thanks for the ask!

7. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you like?

The snapedom always comes through with top tier analysis of this man that I think I could read forever without getting bored.

8. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you despise?

I really don’t understand why people feel the need to add a bunch of nonexistent flaws to this man when in canon he has plenty of flaws present. If your committed to hating him there is plenty to work with without making him a homophobic incel child predator.

More generally I just really don’t care for the all moralizing I see when it comes to Snape (and the marauders too). I find alot of the discussions around him tiring and a bit pointless.

25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now?

As a kid reading HP I remember truly not caring about him. I didn’t hate him, nor feel compelled by him, just straight up apathy. I don’t think I cared about any of the adult characters at that point but eventually I got into the marauders fandom as a middle schooler and you can imagine my opinion of snape soured a bit. After taking a break from the hp fandom in general then jumping back in when I was a teenager I started to feel very drawn to him.

Now I would say he’s probably tied for my favorite with Lupin. I find his radicalization and atonement extremely compelling and a really important story to be told.

Also I find that he is usually my favorite part whenever im doing rereads, honestly whenever there is a potions class scene im hyped because I know this man is about to be a little cunt for no reason and I find it SO entertaining. Seriously I’m at my most animated when reading those scenes because its so unserious to me to have this grown ass man beefing with these 13 year olds. I really find it endlessly funny.