Question: Lupin's appearance

[kiricat2001]

No: HPFGUIDX 33240

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "anavenc" <vencloviene at h...> wrote:
>  Thinking about Lupin:
> 
> We don't know how he looks, apart from weariness, old robes and 
> prematurely graying hair. He is the only main character about 
whose, 
> say, facial features  JKR writes nothing. 
> We know a lot about appearance of others, especially Dumbledore and 
> Snape, whose looks are described to the smallest detail.
> Why not Lupin? 
> 
> Yes, I've consulted Lexicon.


We are given a more complete physical description of Peter Pettigrew 
in the Shrieking Shack scene than any description we receive of Remus,
although we're told in PoA that Lupin has light brown hair.  

And, no, he's not the only person who's features are not described.  
We are not given any physical description of Sirius in PoA, other 
than that he's tall, gaunt, with long, matted hair and yellow teeth.  
That's it, at least in the US version of the book.  The only other 
assumptions we can make about his appearance are if we assume that 
the Animagus transformation keeps some aspect of the human's looks.  
So, since his animal form is a large, black dog with pale eyes, we 
might be able to assume that Sirius has black hair with gray, blue, 
green, hazel or some other eye color that is not brown or black.  
It's not until the "Hungarian Horntail" chapter in GoF that JKR tells 
us straight out that he has black hair.

I've always found this rather interesting, as I pictured Sirius as 
having very dark hair throughout PoA.  Plus, when I've asked any of 
my friends who have read that book to describe Sirius, they have all 
immediately started by saying, "Tall, thin, black hair" and can't 
believe that they didn't read that somewhere in the book.  I think 
JKR makes us get the right mental picture of Sirius because of a 
number of factors:

- the description of his Animagus form.
- the assertion by the teachers that he and James were like brothers, 
and we know James has black hair, so we might assume that there was 
some physical resemblence between the two.
- the name Black.
- Harry musing that the picture of Black in the newspaper reminded 
him of a vampire, and, Anne Rice aside, we may tend think of vampires 
as dark-haired.
- the illustration of the Prisoner in the beginning of the book.

So, Lupin is not the only one with a vague description.

Marianne