ultralaser

my favorite JK rowling stunt was when she said the werewolves in her books were a metaphor for HIV and AIDs

and totally forgot that her books take place in the early 90s when HIV and AIDS was still considered an epidemic with a a HUGE stigma of folks thinking people who had the disease were willfuling infecting their partners

and she completely for got that she had a werewolf character who INTENTIONALLY turned people into werewolves

like she couldnt even fully develop her lie 

Oh, no, let’s take this one further:

She claimed that being a werewolf was a metaphor for being a person with HIV/AIDS, making turning someone into a werewolf a metaphor for unsafe sex (!!), and then the only two werewolf characters in her entire series were:

a) a werewolf who not only intentionally turns people into werewolves, but is stated to prefer and take a particular pleasure in “turning” children and whose only known/stated and inferred victims are male (so, metaphorically speaking, an HIV+ pedophile who preys on male children – is this sounding to anyone else like 90s anti-gay propaganda that positions gay men as pedophiles and predators, because it really is to me)

and b) the “good” werewolf who was intentionally infected by A, but who is straight* and has a child by a woman before he dies and so is allowed to be a heroic character; he also makes a lot of noise about how much of a monster he is.

(* this is notable because this character had a lot of chemistry with other male characters, and JKR made him hook up with Tonks pretty much out of the clear blue nowhere in a way that made no sense for the characters, so it comes off very much as her reacting to people who thought he was gay and got a “vibe” from him with “No, look, he’s straight and a good person because he’s straight he’s STRAIGHT I SWEAR LOOK NOW HE’S MARRIED TO A WOMAN, any woman, as long as she’s not already married like 99% of the adult women in my books!! STRAIGHT!!”)

I really don’t think she “forgot” the metaphor that she made. I’m very sure that she did all of this intentionally because, lest we forget, JK Rowling is a massive homophobe.

not only did he marry a woman, he married a lesbian-coded woman :) don’t worry kiddos, no homos here.

YUP. And I remember that I even read her that way when I was a kid.

And of course, their pure, Heterosexual Love Child™ does not inherit his father’s werewolf tendencies, and is already portrayed as straight in the epilogue and supplemental materials iirc.

(I could probably talk for years about how disgusting JKR’s werewolf = HIV+/AIDS and also the worst kind of homophobic stereotypes about gay people, literally, and also how she portrays Remus as a victim of an evil gay pedophile monster with AIDS who is irrevocably Changed and Ruined and turned into a monster because he was victimized by another man (which brings to mind all the hideous stereotypes of male csa victims, how people used to say – and some still do, no doubt – that male victims of male perps will be “turned gay” by the experience and are “ruined” for heterosexuality, and how that is portrayed as the worst part of their being molested), and he is only saved and made heroic through marriage to and sex with a woman and having a child with her, despite having rather intense chemistry with and a much stronger relationship to another male character previously (who, of course, died first in order to enable the heterosexual relationship to go without distraction). There are so many levels and layers of bad here, it’s like a homophobic onion. YEARS.)

THIS TWITTER IS APPROPRIATELY NAMED AND I’M MAD ABOUT IT

I gasped in anger multiple times while reading tbh

HOW DARE

Oh my godlessgirl O.O

this might be giving jkr too much credit tbh but i can dig it

Okay everyone shits on JKR for naming Remus Lupin “Wolfy McWerewolf,” but no one takes Tolkien to task for the fact that Maedhros means “Hot Ginger,” Silmaril means “shiny glowing rock,” and that Celegorm named his dog “Dog.” 

ELVES ARE SO IMPORTANT

Or that Legolas means “a collection of green leaves” and his last name is Greenleaf. So his name is literally Green Leaves Greenleaf

Mount Doom.

To be fair the actual name of Mt Doom was Orodruin and Doom is colloquial.

*shoves self into locker to save everyone time*

also tolkien made up silly names in languages he also invented, rowling just used loan words

The reason I’m calling you out on this is because you never explicitly state anywhere in your piece “hey, this is an AU idea I have”, and instead treat it as if it’s the god-given truth. As someone who actually loves Tonks, I was merely pointing out the inconsistencies with what you were saying with what is known about her(again, because it seemed to me as if you were just making shit up about her). Also, in the books, Tonks’ dad, Ted, is the one that dies at the hands of the Snatchers, thus leaving Andromeda as the only surviving Tonks(besides Teddy).

In addition, the reason why I’m calling you out, is because as a Tonks fan(who happens to ship Remadora, but the ship is irrelevant in this discussion b/c I’m focusing on her as a character) I see that you’re following the long-standing Wofstar tradition of making shit up about her character to make your fanon ship happen.

I agree, no one is stopping either of us from speculating or developing our own headcanons about things, especially the convoluted mess that is the film!verse of HP. However, I did want to raise up these points with you because you seem like someone(one of the few actually) Wolfstar shippers who seem to like Tonks and are trying to integrate her into your AU in a respectful manner. Full disclosure: I actually don’t mind Wolfstar(since both Remadora and Wolfstar aren’t mutually exclusive and Remus could be bisexual/pansexual), but I do take issue with the ship when those who ship it vilify and hate on Tonks, who’s one of my favorite hp characters.

oh man part of me is literally 'what the fuck are you talking about, liking an unpopular character in harry potter IS NOT FUCKING OPPRESSION'

and another part of me has been literally yelled at and called names on message boards for, like, not hating the hasbro marvel legends figures compared to the toy biz line, or being a fan of the wrong year of transformers toys based on when i was five, and all kinds of terrible terrible bullshit

which is still not actually //discrimination//, just shitty hashtag turf-war bullying, but i get that feel on your part

at the same time i didn't explicitly say 'this is an au' bc i thought it was obvious given that it contradicted canon both in the backstory details part and in the 'remus and tonks are not dating in this post' part

i didn't know to disassociate myself from a hardline ship affiliation, i didn't even know what wolfstar meant until i thought about it for a second - hence the casual tone and casual bending of canon

fwiw i do love tonks, i love natalia tena, i wish she'd gotten more scenes, but personally i always felt even in the books that remus/tonks fell somewhere between heavy-handed authorial intent and vaguely inappropriate

and i'm not at all saying nobody can have a vaguely inappropriate ship as their favorite, it's just not mine in this story

to be honest i didn't even remember that she //had// parents, they didn't make much of an impact when i was reading and they weren't in the movies which i prefer

tl;dr, if my casual indifference echoed aggressive bullying from previous skirmishes in a shipping war then i apologize, and will be more careful in the future

also if we take sirius/remus as canon (and as far as the films are concerned, yolo), then the whole tonks thing works a lot better if the big news she never actually gets to tell harry at the start of deathly hallows 7.1 is that remus has officially adopted her and she’s finally legally out of the black/malfoy/lestrange clan

bc omg marauders fic where gloomy lupin is teaching right after the war, all his friends dead or in azkaban, but he promised sirius he’d look after little nymphadora while she was at hogwarts

only he wasn’t counting on a thirteen year old girl getting sent to his office with a bloody lip and bruises on her knuckles every three days, and complaining about his carefully cultivated melancholy, and opening the curtains bc the sun is out, so he nails them shut, so she //steals the curtains// and makes them into an amazing purple velvet coat

basically lupin is sirius to tonks’ harry, but in the 80s with a lot more synthesizers

so in hbp she’s helping her surrogate dad recover from staggering heartbreak and find the will to live again, bc she’s done it before, and she needs a new coat anyways

How would that “adoption” actually work when Tonks’ parents(Ted and Andromeda Tonks) are still alive and well?

Please do tell me more about how her parents(one of which was disowned by the Black family to begin with for marrying a muggleborn and therefore left the Black family) magically disappear in order to make your ship happen.

Also, how was Remus supposed to keep an eye on Tonks while she was at Hogwarts when by the time Remus became the DADA professor, she had already graduated and gone on to Auror training.

 #I STG THE LOGIC FAIL FROM SOME OF THESE WOLFSTAR STANS IS JUST ASTOUNDING

the thing you have to understand about the hp canon is that i don't give a fuck about the canon

and you loving remus and tonks as a canon ship doesn't mean nobody is allowed to have an au headcanon alternative preference, nor does my not liking that ship interfere with you exalting it as your otp

and if you're going to troll me for not agreeing with you and jump right the fuck into 'man look how dumb this guy is for shipping remus and sirius bc //canon// amirite' then you need to pull your head out of your ass bc that's ridiculous

JK ROWLING JUST SAID LITERALLY YESTERDAY THAT SHE REGRETS RON AND HERMIONE BEING CANON

WE ARE ALLOWED TO HAVE A PERIOD OF WHAT-IF SPECULATION ABOUT OTHER SHIPS AND WHAT-MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS

AND IN FACT THAT PERIOD IS ALLOWED TO BE 'FOREVER' OR HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF HOLMES/WATSON

i mean if you love remus/tonks then go for it, it's hard canon in the books and explicated much more clearly, she was pregnant with his kid, their backstory was explained, it's a doomed tragic romance, whatever

//literally nobody is stopping you from liking that//.

in the films it just kind of happens, their first scene together they're hooked up, their big reveal of a kid never happens, they have a couple of small, nice scenes and it's nice and i like the subtlety of it, but if you don't think that leaves wiggle room in the official movie canon for alternate interpretations, maybe //you're// the one making absolute pronouncements based on personal opinion and not FACTS FACTS FACTS

which, absolute-value facts about a made up story with two massively popular and internally contradictory interpretations in two different mediums already

like, in the books her parents die in the war, in the movies they're never actually seen, that definitively leaves wiggle room for a headcanon movie prequel au where she was an orphan or whatever and remus became a teacher at 25 right after the first war

and somewhere in between mentoring her in the 80s and mentoring harry thirteen years later he went off to do something else, bc he was run out of town by snape on accusations of lycanthropy, which is why snape is such an ass when he comes back in prisoner of azkaban, bc //snape still doesn't trust him// and also resents his very presence bc they were never friends, and possibly also feels a slight twinge of guilt?

and EVEN IF IT DIDN'T MEAN ANY OF THAT

EVEN IF I WAS JUST MAKING SHIT UP THAT I HAPPENED TO LIKE MORE THAN THE OFFICIAL CANON

I AM STILL ALLOWED TO DISAGREE WITH YOU

i don't need your fucking permission

//and you don't need mine// - my opinion on your ship of choice did not take the form of 'remadora shippers are fucking idiots'

maybe return the favor

Do you ever think about how Remus Lupin got on the Hogwarts Express to travel to Hogwarts and fell asleep in a compartment by himself and then woke up to find that James Potter’s son had sat down in the same compartment as him?

because I do