/ESE!lupin questions (long)

[spotsgal]

No: HPFGUIDX 146700

If I had known that I'd get to this tonight, I would have combined
this with the other post.  Mods, forgive me.  I snipped as much as I
could (look upthread for full text).

>>Christina:
>>
>>Harry misinterprets what he sees loads of times, but I've found that
>>his errors tend to be of the interpretive sort, not the factual sort.

>Pippin:
>Um, there's the time he thought he'd heard Slughorn was going to
>teach DADA. And the time he said he hadn't thought of Voldemort
>before he thought of the dementors in Lupin's class.
> <snips a few more examples>

Christina:

Your examples are ones where Harry witnesses something but doesn’t
understand the meaning of it â€" he *assumes* that Slughorn will teach
DADA but it’s never stated in the textual part of the book, it doesn’t
occur to him that he’s already chosen a compartment but we know that
he does because he says so in the text.  My point is, while the books
are not in the first person, they are intended to be from Harry’s
point of view.  With very few exceptions, we see what Harry sees.  And
Harry’s eyes have never failed us when we talk about what is given *in
text*.  I’ll give you that Harry might be wrong about the second jet
of light, but the first one most definitely comes from Bellatrix’s
wand.  And if he sees that, then he should have also seen the origins
of the second jet.  I’d also argue that there’s a huge difference
between noticing something as mundane as the fact that he’s already
chosen a compartment, and noticing that the spell that murders his
godfather (while he is blatantly staring at the scene) is not from
Bella’s wand.  He cares a whole lot more about the second issue.


>Pippin:
>Before starting their tale about the 'weapon' Lupin and Sirius
>exchange a fleeting glance, which suggests that they know something
>the others don't.

Christina:

Yes, but you are generalizing the “other” into most of the rest of the
Order, which isn’t necessarily true.  The fleeting glance could have
very well been between Lupin and Mr. Weasley.  And it’s Mrs. Weasley
that puts a stop to the flow of information, which implies that she
too knows that there is more information to be told.

>Pippin:
> If the Order knew that Voldemort was trying to steal a prophecy
> about Harry, then any of them could have warned him, despite
> Dumbledore's wishes.

Christina:

But why?  How often to the members of the Order blatantly disregard
the instructions of their leader?  If Sirius knew about the prophecy,
as you suggest, even *he* kept his mouth shut, obeying Dumbledore's
orders.


>Pippin:
>If Peter could be bullied into betraying his friends, why is it
>far-fetched to think he was bullied into confessing?

Christina:

Well, I guess we disagree on Peter’s motivations for joining the Death
Eaters.  I don’t think he was bullied into it at all â€" Peter’s a guy
who likes “big friends” that can protect him.  The Order is hugely
outnumbered in VWI and is losing.  What’s a self-preserving rat to do?

>Pippin:
>And if he does want revenge on Pettigrew, what sort of revenge would
>he want on the Ministry of Magic, who are forcing his kind into
>stealing and killing to live?

Christina:

Many characters have grievances with the Ministry.  Also, Lupin has
had a better lot in life than most werewolves.  He certainly hasn’t
(to our knowledge) been forced to steal or kill to live.  He was
allowed to go to Hogwarts as a child and receive an education
(complete with books and robes and such).  He was even able to live at
Hogwarts for a year, complete with room, board, and a teacher’s
salary.  He must have had a place to live after that because Sirius is
able to “lie low” with him.  He has social skills, which suggests that
he didn’t spend his entire life living in a box and eating out of
dumpsters.  Dumbledore has done more for Lupin than anybody else has,
and taking revenge on the MoM by joining the Death Eaters is taking
revenge on Dumbledore, too.  I find it more likely that Lupin would
ally himself with the man who showed him kindness and fairness, as
opposed to a group of snotty pureblooded Slytherins.


>Pippin:
>I don't think I see your point. What matters, in my scenario, is not
>how the Trio came to realize that werewolves should not be outcasts,
>but whether the Trio's faith that werewolves are not more
>untrustworthy than humans could survive a betrayal by the werewolf
>they trusted most. IMO, ESE!Lupin hasn't done anything that an
>uncontaminated human with the same character faults wouldn't have
>done in his shoes. The fight against prejudice should not depend on
>whether one werewolf is good or bad... It would be unrealistic to
>show all that bitterness and enmity going away overnight even if
>Lupin was another Gandhi.

Christina:

I don’t think that it is realistic for that to happen either, but it
is Lupin himself that is a powerful force in changing the minds of the
Weasley family, whose opinions of werewolves changes only after
contact with Lupin.  His influence to open people’s minds seems pretty
broad by the reaction of the students in OotP to Umbridge’s complaints
about Lupin.  Dean Thomas angrily says that Lupin was the best DADA
teacher they ever had.

>Pippin:
>The fight against prejudice should not depend on whether one werewolf
>is good or bad.

Christina:

The fight against prejudice shouldn’t depend on the loyalties of one
werewolf, but when we know that the loyalties of *all* werewolves
belong to Voldemort, that is something else entirely.

My point, and the thing that causes me the most unease, isn’t that
Lupin being evil is bad because he happens to be a werewolf.  It’s
that people believe the worst of him *because* of his lycanthropy. 
Many of your own reasons for believing in ESE!Lupin touch on issues
surrounding his lycanthropy, and that is my central problem.  Earlier,
I used a lot of other examples in the series to show how JKR gives us
examples of goodness in varying minorities, but Lupin is more than
this.  JKR has come out and said that lycanthropy is a metaphor for
“people’s reactions to illness and disability.”  JKR is careful in the
way she speaks about her books, but she’s never lied to us.  It seems
odd for her to wax poetic on the hardships that Lupin has had to face
as a disabled person, only to have him pop out of the woodwork as a
bad guy who just can’t help but be evil. 

>Pippin:
>I want to see Hermione persist in her efforts to help the WW's
>outcasts gain their freedom, but I don't see that JKR has to make it
>easy for her or that there needs to be any more than a better hope of
>progress at the end of the book.

Christina:

I don’t see how keeping Lupin on the good side does either of those
things.  Fighting prejudice will never be easy.


>Pippin
>She has told us that there was a reason Sirius had to die, and I
>assume this means that there was both a plot reason and a thematic
>reason.

Christina:

Why?  I can think of many reasons why Sirius might have had to die,
having to do with both plot and theme â€" from the dreaded “Harry must
go it alone,” to the fact that Dumbledore is the one that needs to be
close to Harry in Book 6, to the fact that Harry might have been
compelled to show Sirius the RAB note (in which case, Sirius might
have recognized his brother’s handwriting).  We still don’t know what
is going on with those mirrors.  And as I said before, there is still
a lot we need to find out about James and Lily.  JKR can limit Lupin’s
access to Harry in HBP by carting him off to spy on the werewolves,
but Sirius doesn’t have that sort of freedom.  To get rid of the
possibility of Sirius telling Harry more than he can know at this
point, JKR might have had to kill him off.


>Pippin:
>We can't even argue anymore that justice wouldn't have been served if
>he'd turned Peter in, since the head of the Wizengamot at the time
>was, it turns out, that unreliable Ministry bureaucrat Albus >Dumbledore.

Christina:

Could Dumbledore have really done anything?  Who heads the Wizengamot
is irrelevant because the entire court votes on cases (at least those
of high importance, which this would be).

Might justice have prevailed?  Sure.  But the argument is definitely
still there that it might not have.


> Pippin:
>...Lupin must have become estranged from his old friends. But what
>would he do then, this man who wants so much for people to like him?
>Where else would he turn? .... It was a dangerous time to go looking
>for new friends, or so Hagrid told us in PS/SS.

Christina:

How about the rest of the Order?  Lupin seems to be friendly enough
with members of the Order when he goes to pick up Harry in OotP.  He’s
told them in advance how much Harry looks like James, which is pretty
irrelevant from a business standpoint.  If we’re taking the order in
which Moody says the names on the photograph, Lupin was standing near
Emmeline Vance and Benjy Fenwick.  Maybe he was friendly with them, or
at least as friendly as anybody can be while constantly living in
terror and whisking off to complete secret missions.  The members of
the Order in OotP and HBP seem unusually chummy, even the new members
that don't have a background of being reliable or trustworthy.


> Pippin:
>There's more evidence of estrangement than the photograph. James
>must have thought Sirius's suspicion of Lupin was credible, or he
>would have wanted Lupin told about the switch. More than that, Sirius
>never confronted Lupin with his suspicions until the Shrieking
>Shack. Odd, if they were such close friends. Remember when Harry
>thought Hagrid had opened the Chamber of Secrets? He didn't get a
>chance to ask Hagrid about it, but he *was* going to. That shows up
>"each suspected the other but didn't know how to broach the subject"
>as the melodramatic contrivance it is. Sure they might hesitate for a 
>while, as Harry did, but for an entire year?

Christina:

It’s funny you should use this as evidence of further estrangement
among the Marauders, because I see it as exactly the opposite.  The
spy in the Order had been giving Voldemort information on the
whereabouts of the Potters, specifically.  I doubt Dumbledore would
see fit to announce at Order meetings the location of Lily and James
(particularly once he realized there was a spy), which is why
Dumbledore doesn’t just suspect any old Order member of being a spy,
he suspects somebody *close to the Potters,* somebody close enough
that would actually have the information concerning their location. 
Therefore, for Sirius to have suspected Lupin at all means that Lupin
must have still enjoyed a close enough relationship with the rest of
the Marauders to have been privy to the knowledge of the Potters’
whereabouts.

Sirius is fiercely loyal and all evidence shows that he loves his
friends very much.  I don’t see him as they type to sit around
pondering the ways in which his friends might betray him.  His
accusations to Peter adopt a tone that borders on incredulity.  We
know he suspected Lupin of being the spy, but not enough to “out” him
to Dumbledore.  The way I see it, the Potters, on the run with a small
child, only kept a little group of people in the know about their
location.  When they kept being found, Sirius had *no choice* but to
face the facts â€" one of his very closest friends was a spy.  I don’t
think that Sirius had a thought-out accusation of Lupin (like I said,
he doesn’t bring his suspicions to Dumbledore).  His thinking Lupin a
spy seems to be more like a process of elimination â€" he knows *he*
isn’t the spy himself, he vastly underestimates Peter, and the only
person he has left is Lupin.

I think you underestimate the atmosphere of the day â€" even the closest
of friends were suspicious of each other.  Also, just because Sirius
was only left with Lupin as a candidate for being a spy, wouldn’t have
proven to him that Lupin was truly evil.  He could have been under
Imperious, or locked in a trunk while a polyjuiced!Lupin floated
around (my, where have we heard that one before?).

As to the amount of time that goes by without Sirius confronting
Lupin, the spy was handing over information on the Potters for a year,
but that doesn’t mean that Sirius suspected Lupin for that entire
year.  Also, I would say that Lupin and Harry have a decently close
relationship (they certainly trust one another), but they barely
interact in HBP, a book that takes place in an atmosphere very similar
to the one existing back in VWI.  We don’t know exactly what Lupin and
Sirius were doing for the Order back then, but they may not have been
able to see or have contact with each other very much.

One more thing - in talking about the "each suspected the other"
issue, are you referring to Lupin and Sirius?  I don't think it's made
clear in the text that Lupin ever suspected Sirius of being the spy
(until he was put in prison).  When Lupin asks Sirius to forgive him
for thinking he was the spy, he is probably talking about letting
Sirius rot in Azkaban for all of those years.  If Lupin had believed
Sirius to be the spy, I can't believe he would have just sat by and
let Sirius become the Potters' Secret Keeper.

> Pippin:
> The murder of Cedric is ambiguous. Harry thinks Voldemort did it.
> JKR said that "Wormtail" killed Cedric...I don't think we can be too
> sure she meant Peter. Especially since, as loyal DDM!Snape 
> supporters, we must believe that JKR is highly, er, selective, about
> what she tells us.

Christina:

One of my biggest problems with ESE!Lupin is right here â€" it
complicates a ton of events that have very simple explanations.  JKR
said that Book Six was a “time for answers.”  Now I don’t know about
you, but I still think there are tons more questions to be answered in
Book 7, and I have no idea how she is going to fit them all in.  Now
is the time for simple, elegant theories that explain a lot of
different mysteries all in one go.  It isn’t the time to create new
mysteries out of things that had previously been cut-and-dry.


>Pippin:
>Er, how does a dreadful sneak feign friendship for an entire year
>without a qualm?

Christina:

Peter might have barely interacted with his friends, like I said
above.  And as for feigning friendship â€" look at Tonks!  She acts
REALLY WEIRD throughout the entirety of HBP, and people just seem to
accept the explanation that a once-confident Auror (who had to have
gone through some psychological testing before being able to join)
actually lost magical power because of love.  Heh, maybe Peter had a
girlfriend back then and could hide any nervousness or weirdness in
that (not to mention super-secret dates with Voldemort).

Christina