Help with Lupin's boggart

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 96322

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Renee" 
<R.Vink2 at c...> wrote:

> 1) Fact: JKR has said that Lupin's her favourite adult character, 
> and that she'd let him teach her own daughter. 
> Would she want a dishonest person to teach her daughter?

Well, if I had everybody buffaloed with  Lupin, he'd be my favorite 
character too! We know a little bit more about Lupin and about 
JKR's philosophy now than we did when I first wrote the 
ESE!Lupin post. I made him out to be a raving psychopath, which 
was fun, but maybe not where JKR is going. She doesn't believe 
that anyone, even Tom Riddle, was born to be evil.

 What I see now in Lupin is  a nice person who made  some bad 
choices, and then made some more bad choices to cover up the 
first ones. That much is canon. The only question is, did he 
confess everything in the Shrieking Shack, or only what Harry 
could have found out from Sirius anyway?

 JKR says that Lupin's great fault is that he wants to be liked so 
badly. I suspect he murdered Sirius, not to keep from being 
punished as a Death Eater, but because he couldn't bear to lose 
Sirius's friendship again. I know that sounds bizarre, but he 
wouldn't be the first person to murder their friend, or lover, to 
keep from losing them.

JKR has said that Lupin is kind, brilliant and a great teacher. She 
has never said that he is good, in fact she's acknowledged that 
there's a darkness in him.  Children often have trouble 
believing that someone who's nice to them, offers them candy 
and the like, could do them ill. Yet it happens. But JKR, as I said, 
doesn't believe that anyone *has* to be evil.  I think that in
a world where Lupin could be Jessica's teacher, he wouldn't be 
a werewolf, he wouldn't be desperate to make friends, and he 
wouldn't have made the choices he has, including becoming the 
sort of person who lies to people who trust him.

On a personal note, I've known people  who experimented with 
lying when they were young and gave it up because they weren't 
good at it, but I've never known a habitual liar who became an 
honest person. Not to say it never happens, but I think it'd be a 
miracle. 

Renee:
> 2) My personal view: One of the main points these books are 
trying to make is that discrimination is wrong. A discriminated 
werewolf faking to be good while really being evil would rather 
undermine  this point (I shudder to think Umbridge was right 
introducing all  the extra anti-werewolf legislation). I'd be 
surprised if I were the  only one to read the series this way.   <<

You're not <g> But consider this...does Bane's murderous 
behavior in OOP justify Umbridge's hatred of centaurs generally?
No, because, for one thing, we know there are good centaurs 
like Firenze. All JKR has to do is introduce a genuinely good 
werewolf, and I think she has...Luna Lovegood.

Pippin