#is fanvid acceptable parlance

[justafriendofxanders]

the perfect fanvid doesn't exist-

[picascribit]

I've been thinking about the fact that it's been almost 20 years since OotP was released, and how traumatic that experience was for Wolfstar shippers. Only it wasn't Wolfstar back then; we called ourselves puppyshippers, or R/S shippers, or SBRL shippers (theirloveissocanon).

I remember a fic challenge in the wake of OotP's publication, which I believe was called "Through the Veil". The premise had Sirius using the Veil to jump between parallel realities, trying to find his way home, a la Quantum Leap. We were in a lot of denial about the nature of the Veil in those days, you understand. Much like Harry, we were unwilling to accept that Sirius might actually be dead. I can only remember two of the fics, both of which were deeply painful, because back then we enjoyed nothing more than to HURT one another.

One involved Sirius ending up in a reality without magic. He found Remus, who was all alone and dying of AIDS, and approached him as a dog, staying with him until he died, before jumping to the next timeline.

The other was called Without Moony. Sirius can't find Remus, but eventually finds himself at St Mungo's. It turns out in this timeline, Remus died as a teenager, as a direct result of the Prank (oh god do people even still use this parlance?). Out of guilt, Sirius never transformed into Padfoot again, and lost his mind in Azkaban. All he can do is repeat over and over, "There's no Padfoot without Moony".

I also remember things like fanvids of movie clips set to Evanescense songs, infinite animated livejournal icons, and long essays pointing to details in canon that PROVED Remus and Sirius were an item. (Of course we know now that what the author intended doesn't matter, but I would hate for the passion with which such things were written to be forgotten.)

I'm sure most of these things still exist somewhere out there, but a lot of the context has been lost. It's not really possible to convey what it was like to be there and to experience such things in real time. I guess this is just me pushing back a little against the sands of time, before these fragments of our history become lost forever.