#any of yall are welcome to rant back in my inbox anytime

[narcissa-black-supermacy]

there IS a bias against sirius in the marauders fandom, which ppl don't talk about because like u can't admit to disliking him PUBLICLY but which comes out in a lot of ways and i think it's because he's the character whose flaws are pointed out the most in the narrative and who is the most transparently morally grey and in a fandom centered around OC's which it's easy to sanitize (regulus can't have any flaws if he has three lines dedicated to him), it leads to a lot of shitty takes (cont)

(cont, part ii re: sirius) I have noticed that people who HATE Snape and LOVE regulus nearly always have terrible characterizations of sirius because it's emblematic of this fandom's inability to accept characters who don't easily fit into uwu soft boi boxes and instead have real, actual flaws.

I think there's two separate issues to tackle here in what you mention: one is this fandom's inability to stomach actual morally grey characters that have done too many bad things to be easily forgivable without raising the question of morality, but too many good things to just be written off as evil (Snape, Regulus, Barty Crouch Jr, Narcissa etc).

((I don't want to talk about it here because if I do this post will never end, but if anyone wants to hear my thoughts on it (why?) just send me a separate ask about it. Let's talk about Sirius instead --))

The other issue is the bias against Sirius (which I don't think is related to the previous one, at least not directly) - which honestly confuses the hell out of me the more I talk about it, because I absolutely can not put my finger on where it's coming from.

The worst thing is that it comes from people who claim/think they like him, like in WolfStar - there is an obvious and very clear bias against Sirius in so many WolfStar fics (@ padfootastic has several brilliant posts where she talks about it).

When I see anti-Sirius hate from, say, Snape fans who hate the Marauders - it does not surprise me. It's usually irrational and they don't claim to like him to begin with, so it does not bother me. It's just your typical fandom character hate. I get that.

What I don't understand is when you go to someone's blog, who genuinely believes they like Sirius, and then you read their content (which is usually wolfstar, just bc it happens to be the most popular Sirius ship) and it's just.. Sirius fucking up over and over again and apologising to everyone and everybody else (James, Remus, even fucking Regulus) being just perfect and untouchable and it's like... do any of yall actually like Sirius or is he just a prop to make the characters you actually like come off better?

me and Niki talked about it the other day - how in post-Azkaban wolfstar fics it's always Sirius apologising to Remus over and over for thinking he's a spy while Remus believing the Order that Sirius is the traitor and never doing anything to find out the truth or help him is just brushed under the carpet because "oh but all his friends were dead he was so sad!"; wait, and Sirius wasnt? Sirius lost the only family he ever had, which was James.

I don't think it stems from his flaws being pointed out the most, though. Because there's so many characters who are presented in a much more negative light (in the actual canon people tend to forget), which the fandom absolutely adores (including Remus, Snape, Draco and Regulus themselves, each in their own way).

I think, overall, Sirius is a character whose base is specifically made in a way that's easy to hate. He is rich, pureblooded, famous, he is handsome, he is confident and loud, popular, smart, charismatic, good at everything he does, young Sirius is the typical stereotype of a popular high school jock bully, who is usually the unlikeable anti-hero-- but, and here's the twist-- instead, Sirius is kind, Sirius is loyal, Sirius is selfless, Sirius is good.

(Sirius makes everyone around him better - he makes James less hypocritical and more self aware, he makes Remus more open and less self absorbed, he makes Regulus kinder; Sirius is kind, he is giving, in a way it's his response to the trauma he's been through, he responds to it by being kind, and kind, and giving, and selfless)

He has the data to be unlikeable, but he actually isn't, which is where, if I had to take a guess, I would say the confusion people are feeling is coming from. They don't know how to stomach him. They don't know how to write him. Because if you write him the way he is, it makes everyone else seem worse all of a sudden, it brings out their negative traits (whether it's James, Remus, Regulus-) and we can't have that, right? So instead people go in the other direction and make him dramatic, make him annoying, make him selfish, make him all of the things Sirius actually isn't just to bring up the others.

Which is where we go back to the first point (which I see now that is related, now that we're talking about it) - people are afraid of this, because they've already sorted everyone by good and bad, and made it impossible for themselves to like flawed characters.

But there's nothing bad about a character being flawed - the most frequent reason over which I drop fics mid-reading is when one of the main characters is not flawed enough. Lily and Remus are so often written as Mary Sues (Lily for lack of an actual personality, while Remus because his entire character arc is centered around being a werewolf, so we can't give him any other bad traits right? god forbid), James even in Jegulus fics sometimes lacks any personality whatsoever beyond being a good, lovable guy.

So people do everything upside down - they write real, complicated characters as bland and flawless, and then take someone like Sirius, who is so so good, who everyone adores, and drop EVERYBODY'S flaws on him because they don't know what to do with him.

I don't get it.

If someone can explain this phenomenon to me, please do.