Adventurer's Bible - Shuro & Falin

are you still doing ur asks abt the ships? if u are what r ur thoughts on wolfstar? if not have a very good day!

thank you very much for the ask anon - and thank you in particular for leading me into danger...

my answer to this is going to be - and wolfstar shippers keep calm please - similar to my jegulus one. which means the tldr is: write what you want, but i’m unlikely to read it, especially if you don’t acknowledge the difference between canon and fanon.

i have no aversion to wolfstar coming up as a background ship [let them be happy while harry/anyone are having drama, i’m all for it] but i generally don’t search out fics in which wolfstar is [one of] the central pairing(s) and tend only to read wolfstar-centric stuff if it’s written or recommended by someone whose opinion i trust. 

this isn’t because i think the pairing is unfeasible [the canonical sirius and remus very much have the vibes of people who have enjoyed each other’s bodies…] but because the community which has built up around wolfstar, both among "original wolfstar, y’know, like in canon" fans and their sworn enemies"‘marauders fandom, canon who?" fans, largely expects certain tropes and characterisations which divorce the characters from what i personally think is interesting about them.

the most egregious of these tropes, in my opinion, is the fact that wolfstar which purports to be canon-compliant or which follows the canon timeline deals so infrequently with the fact that both remus and sirius have such little trust in each other that they believed utterly sincerely that the other was a death eater.

it’s crucial that we understand the profundity of this suspicion and - therefore - what it says about the fragility of the loyalty between them prior to 1980-81. this is not a brief flash of distrust in a high-pressure couple of days at the end of october. the evidence of canon is that we’re talking about a period of months - if not a full year - in which remus and sirius not only think it justifiable to doubt the other’s loyalties, but also seem to be acting on that doubt to try to get the other in trouble.

harry is born in july 1980, at a point when voldemort has all but won the war. severus snape defects to the order at some point relatively soon after this, when voldemort decides that the potters are the family referred to in the prophecy. peter pettigrew then defects to the death eaters in the autumn of 1980 [which we know because sirius says in prisoner of azkaban that he was spying for a full year before voldemort’s fall].

snape then evidently tells dumbledore that there is a spy in the order - although he clearly doesn’t, despite a common accusation levelled against him, know this is pettigrew, since the voldemort of the first war has apparently heard of operational security, unlike his resurrected counterpart - and this leads dumbledore to demand a restriction on james and lily’s movements until - by august 1981 [the plausible date of lily’s letter to sirius in deathly hallows] - they are basically under house arrest. the implication of canon is that, by this summer at the very latest, james and lily are aware they’re being spied on, from which i think it’s reasonable to infer three things: that dumbledore has begun to suspect that sirius is the spy over the opening half of 1981; that remus, who canonically always trusts dumbledore’s judgements, uses this to confirm his own suspicions about sirius; and that sirius, whose canonical relationship with dumbledore has an undercurrent of unease, especially in order of the phoenix, picks up on this and assumes remus is briefing dumbledore against him. i think it’s also reasonable to infer that the only person convinced there isn’t a spy among his close friends is james.

peter visits the potters’ safe-house and is aware of its address, so we can assume remus and sirius are the same. by october 1981, however, there are clearly concerns that james and lily’s whereabouts are known to the death eaters - perhaps also accompanied by information from snape that voldemort, who loves a bit of symbolism, has selected halloween as the day he will strike - which trigger dumbledore’s advice that they perform the fidelius charm. dumbledore’s unease when james picks sirius as secret keeper is confirmation that he had identified sirius as the spy. that remus is never suggested as a potential candidate is confirmation that sirius believes him to be the spy - and possibly also that james is beginning to think his best friend might be onto something [i always wonder if remus’ bitterness when accusing james of being too trusting in deathly hallows is a flash of self-loathing about the fact that james didn’t trust him]. sirius then persuades james to use peter and, within a week of the charm being performed, james and lily are dead, peter has disappeared, and sirius is in azkaban.

[as an aside here, i don’t love the amount of dumbledore bashing in wolfstar, and i think it’s worth doing some dumbledore defence: sirius’ internment in azkaban without trial - a reference to an actual historical event, if you were thinking it sounded far-fetched - is not dumbledore’s fault. the wizengamot acts on dumbledore’s credible belief that sirius was the secret keeper, while sirius - who is cackling his head off the whole time - refuses to speak in his own defence. similarly, dumbledore does not deny sirius access to harry (via hagrid) when he arrives, distraught, in godric’s hollow because he’s contrived a machiavellian plan to keep harry alone and unloved with the dursleys instead of with his true family, but because all the evidence he has available to him is that harry’s life is in danger at sirius’ hands.]

so sirius spends the next twelve years in azkaban, with remus clearly nowhere near his mind. that he stays in prison, and only escapes when he has an unimpeachable chance to get his revenge and protect harry, is because he - like his narrative mirror, snape - is so haunted by his role [indirect, but he canonically thinks that he essentially cast the killing curse himself] in the death of someone he fiercely loved that he considers azkaban a punishment he deserves. 

this links to the next issue i have with a lot of wolfstar: that the defining force in both remus and sirius’ lives is james, not each other.

the dynamic of the marauders is frequently reduced to the following: wolfstar, who are best friends and lovers it would take the heat-death of the universe to pull apart; james and whichever romantic partner the story wishes to pair him with, who are the same; and peter, who is either there and completely futile, or is replaced with a fanonised female character [dorcas, marlene, alice etc. - none of whom, may i say, it makes sense to have in the same school year as the marauders, dumbledore is not actually running the order as a gang of child soldiers] or a woobiefied death eater [regulus black, barty crouch jr., evan rosier etc.].

but in canon, a different dynamic is clear. james is the lynchpin of the marauders’ world, the anchoring point to all their senses of self; and the moment he is out of the picture no bonds of loyalty remain among the other three. [it’s tempting to imagine that remus always harbours a belief that sirius is innocent, but i think that this would be less due to an unconditional affection for his friend and more due to the fact that his own self-loathing needs to believe that he couldn’t have stopped james and lily dying; which he should have done if sirius really was the culprit, since he clearly suspected he was a death eater]. 

if you asked remus, sirius, and peter, clearly each of them would describe james as their best friend [even though james’ eyes are only for sirius - he only has one best man, and harry only has one godfather], but their relationships with each other outside of james are less clearly defined, at least before sirius and remus are the only two left.

this doesn’t prevent pre-1981 [or james lives au] wolfstar - your boyfriend and your best friend being different people is fine, obviously - but it is going to change the dynamic between them in ways i think are significant and which i would like to see explored more, particularly in fics which acknowledge that - for remus and sirius - this dynamic might not lead to the healthiest relationship…

for example, during their schooldays, wolfstar are likely to talk to each other through james, rather than james being surplus to the flirtatious dynamic between them; remus is likely to feel awkward or insecure about the fact that sirius - whose personality is closer to james’ than his - is so happy and gregarious in james’ company; sirius is likely to resent remus’ tendency to stay out of the action, since the fact that he and james mutually encourage each other in their exploits is key to their relationship; remus is likely to resent the fact that sirius is treated by the potters as a second son, while he isn’t, and so on.

during the first war, even if we remove the fact they suspect each other of spying from the equation, they will clash over how to protect james - and remus will undoubtedly take this to mean that sirius cares more for james than for him. during the second war, the long shadow of james - so painful that remus can still barely talk about him, while sirius wants to do nothing but - will hover over everything.

and this leads on to the third reason i generally don’t enjoy wolfstar: that the complicated threads of their canon personalities are removed or reduced to irrelevance to make them fit fanon which has no basis in the books.

now, i’m not going to get into appearance discourse here, although yes, i prefer a tall sirius who tends to wear wizarding clothing and has never heard a single cool piece of muggle music in his life, and i prefer a hollowed and world-weary remus who doesn’t have visible scars. i think background discourse is slightly more important: a great deal of sirius is lost if he is turned into someone who likes being pureblood, who feels more comfortable around his "own kind", or who aspires to sit on the hereditary wizengamot; a great deal of remus is lost if he is turned into someone who didn’t grow up in a loving home with parents who did their best, but whose inability to give him the childhood he really deserved in the face of the prejudice against werewolves in the wizarding world encouraged his absurd gratitude towards anyone who made even a half-hearted effort to act in his interests.

all of my preferred aspects of characterisation are canon-compliant. but deviating from canon is not a moral failing. the term is more flexible than many of its defenders acknowledge, and people are at perfect liberty to imagine that characters look, identify, or behave differently than they do in the canon narrative without that automatically bringing accusations of writing them out-of-character [after all, it’s clear in the books that both harry and hermione are white, but art and fics which portray them as a different race can still meaningfully be described as canon-compliant if that's an aim they're written to have].

similarly, rejecting canon compliance entirely is just as fine - i think you should indicate to your readers if you’re doing that, but i’m capable of using the back button and moving on with my life if you don’t.

the only hard and fast rule is don’t seek out people who do things differently to you and insult them directly, although i would also suggest that it’s worthwhile to spend a bit of time in introspection about how lots of popular wolfstar and the fandom around it - like the fandom around all slash ships - portrays queerness in ways which are heteronormative [i.e. exclusively equating bottoming with femininity] and portrays women in ways which are misogynistic [i.e. how tonks is often treated in wolfstar discourse].

however, with this said, i think there is a difference between rejecting canon compliance and yet still writing the characters in ways which feel connected in interesting ways to their complex canon selves, and just writing original characters named sirius black and remus lupin. 

because i just cannot get on board with a remus who is written as the cleverest one of the four, as assertive and direct instead of avoidant and passive-aggressive, as anything other than incredibly selfish, as anything other than an extreme people-pleaser, as being soft and sensitive [his mild manner hides the fact that he is incredibly cold and calculating - this is a man who is prepared to execute wormtail in front of three children mere minutes after learning he’s still alive], as majorly regretting the snape-versus-werewolf incident [he loves it! snape is terrified of him! he downplays it constantly!], or as functioning as the moral heart of the marauders [when sirius says in order of the phoenix that remus tried to restrain their bullying of snape, he is doing it to make remus - who is incapable of self-criticism - feel better in the face of harry’s anger] when he is in fact quite morally cowardly.

and i cannot get on board with a sirius who is written as a goofy himbo, as a constant flirt and womaniser [more grey-ace sirius, i would like to see it], as the world’s wokest king [a man who’s upset his slave isn’t sufficiently deferential to him isn’t someone who’s going to speak in queer theory buzzwords - this, of course, doesn’t prevent sirius being written as queer, non-binary, trans, femme, and so on, it just means that authors have to deal with the fact that sirius’ way of existing as any of these things will be human, rather than perfect], as a small bean unable to take care of himself [he escapes from prison and swims across the north sea! he charges into danger at the drop of a hat!], as anything other than incandescently loyal to james and harry, as - after james’ death - anything other than completely wrecked by guilt over the fact he caused it, as best friends with his brother and his gang of slytherins, or as lacking the fundamental arrogance and cruelty which make him so interesting.

and wolfstar can work, absolutely, when these things are taken into account. i find the idea of second war remus and sirius, stuck in grimmauld place together, buying harry a joint christmas present, the last survivors in a generation completely hollowed out by loss, incredibly moving. remus' choice to self-destruct in half-blood prince - having lost sirius so soon after having found him again - does, i think, justifiably indicate a change in their relationship during order of the phoenix which can be seen as romantic. i find the idea of first war remus and sirius, each in love with a man they think is a spy, wonderfully bittersweet. i find the idea of school-aged remus pining desperately for a friend who is head-over-heels in love with james to be, quite frankly, canon. 

and i also think that two original characters called sirius black and remus lupin can do whatever they want - i’ll just be closing my eyes, pretending i cannot see, and leaving them to it.

The marauders sign their map - this started as a fall theme illustration which ended having no pumpkins no leaves,,,

goodbye

Klance as the Binary Star

(klance 2025!)

While I do think eventually Kabru would be okay with Mithrun and Milsiril dating, I think that at first he would have some regrets over encouraging Mithrun to discover new desires if one of these desires turns out to be a desire to fuck his mom (understandable)

i will say, the worst thing that happened in fandom was when shipping just became “i ship this bc it’s gonna be real” and not just “i ship this bc i think it’s a fun dynamic to explore idc what the writers are doing that’s not my business”

blocked because your interpretation of that character doesn’t match the way they act in my bedtime narrative i imagine when i’m falling asleep every night

Ooh more about the subtext around James/Sirius? I’ve always read the text this way too!

thank you for the ask anon!

this question could have been prompted by any number of posts i’ve made, because i am a great proponent of the idea that unrequited prongsfoot is canon. 

why?

i’m so glad you asked…

let’s begin with a small caveat which - regrettably - involves some engagement with discourse.

the things created within fan-fiction aren’t real - an individual fic can’t cause actual, material harm to a reader, even if it contains tropes that would be harmful or distressing if they happened in that reader’s real life; an author’s use of certain tropes or interest in certain characters is not indicative of their actual morals and values in real life; thought crimes are not real crimes - but fan-fiction is produced by human beings who are themselves products of the societies and communities in which we all live, and these societies and communities all have flaws and failings.

which is to say, those of us who prefer to read male friendships like james and sirius’ as romantic do need to be aware that, no matter how enlightened on gender and its foibles we think ourselves to be, we are nonetheless influenced as modern humans by a modern tendency to discourage platonic physical and emotional closeness between men, especially straight men, on the grounds that two men having this sort of relationship is inherently queer and, in being queer, implicitly sexual - another powerful societal influence on our thought, even if we know we don’t agree with it. we should also be aware that reading a friendship as defining and life-altering as james and sirius’ as romantic gives weight to a modern tendency to prioritise romantic love - and one of its expected outcomes, the love of parents for their biological children -  over platonic love, and to regard people for whom romantic love is not a priority as not properly having achieved the milestones of adulthood, nor as properly fulfilled, adored, or satisfied.

everything which follows here, then, can be taken to refer just as validly to a purely platonic relationship between james and sirius if the reader prefers. and, indeed, my view is that this is how the canon narrative wants the reader to understand james saw the relationship. 

but i also think that the canonical text wants us to infer that, for sirius, his relationship with james was one of unrequited romantic love.

it must be said, however, that the narrative doesn’t show this explicitly. of course, it emphasises sirius and james’ compatibility, their similar personalities, their shared affection for each other, and a certain element of codependency (the thought of these two boys unable to be apart even for a detention without talking through their mirrors! my heart breaks!), but it also sets up these shared elements as - in some senses - fraternal: sirius is quasi-adopted by the potters; harry thinks of him and james as like fred and george, at least until he sees snape’s memories in order of the phoenix. when sirius speaks to harry about james, the profundity of his love for him is obvious, and on the two occasions when we see them physically together (snape’s worst memory and the prince’s tale) it’s clear that each is the primary driving force behind the other’s decisions. but we have nothing which indicates unambiguously that sirius’ feelings for james were romantic.

until we dive into a bit of narratology. because the text does do something to suggest that its intention is for sirius’ relationship with james to be read as non-platonic, and that something is its use of narrative mirrors. the harry potter series loves assigning its characters to narrative pairs - harry and voldemort are the obvious one; ron and draco malfoy are the one which deserves more attention - and it assigns to sirius a narrative mirror whose own story is one of unrequited romantic love.

severus snape.

sirius and snape are incredibly similar, personality-wise. they also serve identical narrative roles, in that they function as the guides who lead harry through an emotional arc which begins in earnest in prisoner of azkaban and concludes in deathly hallows, in which he sheds his childish, black-and-white view of his parents and comes to regard them as real, flawed, and complex people. harry does this with james in order of the phoenix - after the realisation that he was a bully stops the hero-worshipping which has defined his earlier attitude towards his father - with sirius as his guide (sirius is then killed off the second this narrative sub-arc is complete). he then does it with lily - who spends the earlier books as secondary in importance to james in her son’s mind - in half-blood prince and deathly hallows, in which snape (via the proxies of slughorn, the discipline of potions, his textbook, his patronus, and his memories) serves as his guide, until the fact that lily is the key to the whole mystery is revealed just before harry sacrifices himself to save the world.

in the course of this, it comes to be revealed that each of them considers their life to be defined by their relationship with and love for one half of the pair of james and lily (although the series hides this in snape’s case - making it look as though he is also motivated purely by his antagonistic relationship with james - right up until the last moment). their mirrored relationships with harry - while the idea that sirius is incapable of distinguishing him from his father is an invention of the films - is also driven fundamentally by their relationship with one of the two halves of his parents.

sirius and snape’s mirrored motivation-by-love is shown most clearly in their identical approach to guilt and grief, the two things which overarchingly drive their individual character arcs across the seven-book canon (or three, if you’re sirius - rip king).

both sirius and snape indirectly trigger the death of the person they love - and, let’s be frank, if we’re going to excoriate snape for reporting the prophecy to voldemort, exactly the same level of ire needs to be reserved for sirius and his plan to switch secret keepers (what we could do instead, of course, is recognise the life-altering tragedy of making this kind of mistake, which we all have to hope we never experience ourselves, and treat the lads with compassion) - but it’s clear in canon that neither accepts the idea that their involvement was, in fact, indirect. sirius openly tells harry that he considers himself to have ‘as good as’ cast the killing curse on james and lily; snape rejects dumbledore’s (back-handed) comfort that james and lily’s deaths were caused by ‘putting their trust in the wrong person’ by wishing to die himself.

wracked by guilt and hollowed out by grief, both of them then decide to punish themselves in an effort - one which, i think, they both consider futile, since they clearly regard their sins as too great to be redeemed - to atone for causing james and lily’s deaths. both of them do this by subjecting themselves to the pain and humiliation of imprisonment.

in sirius’ case, obviously, this is literal. we know from canon that he refuses to profess his innocence at any point during his show trial - and why would he, when he considers himself to be guilty? - and that he remains in azkaban for twelve years, despite possessing the means to escape before then. he leaves the prison only to attempt the one action which he thinks will redeem him in james’ eyes: murdering peter pettigrew.

in snape’s case, the prison is a metaphor (foucault just sat up). snape entombs himself both at hogwarts - not a place he seems to have been particularly happy - and in spinner’s end, allows dumbledore to repeatedly humiliate him, and risks his life as a spy as a means of self-flagellation. like sirius, he fails to profess his innocence - through ordering dumbledore to tell nobody of his true allegiance - because he considers himself to be guilty. he leaves the self-constructed cell in which he is skulking only when dead - when harry, who has taken on the burden of fulfilling snape’s atonement himself by preparing to kill voldemort, starts screaming his true motivations in the dark lord’s face - although there is some implication in canon that dumbledore’s intention was for snape to end the series by attempting himself the one action which he thinks will redeem him in lily’s eyes: murdering voldemort.

[after all, why does dumbledore say to harry at king’s cross that his intention was for snape to control the elder wand if he wasn’t hoping he’d use it to give the dark lord his death blow?]

snape and sirius mirror each other exactly in their response to the death of the person they love. we can justifiably assume, then, that we are intended by the text to read that love as identical in type. 

jkr has been very clear that snape’s relationship with lily is one of unrequited romantic love. we obviously don’t have to accept this in our own readings or in the way we write the characters in our own work - i love a queer snape sacrificing everything for his platonic best friend as much as the next girl - but we do have to acknowledge it as the doylist text’s stated intention. it stands to reason, then, that the text’s intention is for us to regard the mirror-image of snape’s love for lily - sirius’ love for james - as romantic as well.

or, unrequited prongsfoot is canon.

stop talking about the USA. I have heard enough about that wretched place

i love him