Lupin's behavior (Was: CHAPDISC: DH11, The Bribe)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 180628

 a_svirn wrote:
> > <snip> I don' see it. Lupin said that Tonks would be OK. Which
means that he  had thought it over and concluded that she wasn't in
any immediate danger. And what sort of danger she would be while
staying with her mother and under the Fidelius protection, anyway?
> 
zgirnius replied:
> Let's see. Maybe she'd get all depressed and not be able to do
magic, because her new husband had left her without so much as a by
your  leave?
> 
> Anyway - was Andromeda under Fidelius? I don't recall reading that,
and it makes little sense that Ted left if she was. I thought her
safety consisted of her undeniably pure, Black blood.
>
Carol responds:

I've snipped the rest of zgirnius's excellent post, every word of
which I agree with, to add that the possibility of Tonks's losing her
powers as the result of depression over Lupin's abandonment of her and
her child is excellent and has canon support to back it. She lost her
Metamorphmagus powers when he refused to accept her love. What would
happen if she felt that he had rejected not only her but the unborn
child he "knowingly" (his word) brought into existence? Would she
become another Merope Gaunt?

Regarding Andromeda's being under Fidelius, clearly she wasn't. Both
she and Ted were Crucio'd for information. Why he wasn't stripped of
his wand at that point is unclear, but, certainly, he would not have
gone on the run if the Order had immediately placed him, his wife, and
their pregnant daughter under the Fidelius Charm. (Surely, Tonks could
have done it, and protected Lupin as well? But either the adults are
incompetent in this novel, or they're not thinking clearly.) As you
say, Andromeda's protection (which didn't prevent her from being
tortured for information, any more than it protected the Longbottoms
long before) consisted in her being a Pure-Blood. Tonks, the
Half-Blood "brat" of the marriage that caused her mother to be burned
off the family tapestry, is under no such protection, as we see in OoP
when Bellatrix tries to kill her own niece. And now, as we see in "The
Dark Lord Rising," Bellatrix has been ordered to "prune" her family
tree, which has been further contaminated, in LV's and Bellatrix's
view, by her marriage to a werewolf. 

Lupin does not know, of course, of this specific mission, though he
certainly knows that Bellatrix's vendetta against her niece can only
be intensified by her marriage. He says himself that he shouldn't have
married her because he's "made her an outcast" by doing so. At which
point, unprovoked by Harry, he kicks the chair he has earlier
overturned and accuses Tonks's family, groundlessly, as far as I can
see, of being disgusted by their daughter's marriage to a creature
reviled by the WW. And, still unprovoked by Harry, he starts pulling
his own hair and expressing his fear that the child he wants to
abandon will be a werewolf like himself, trying to persuade himself
that "it" will be "a hundred times" better off without him (DH Am. ed.
213).

Harry's reaction, "So you want to dump her and the kid and run off
with us," may not be courteous or respectful, but Lupin's conduct
before and after the remark, is not, IMO, worthy of respect. He is
thinking, not of the welfare of his wife and child, but of himself as
a reviled and dangerous creature (who nevertheless can somehow
"protect" the boy who has fought Voldemort and lived and "the most
gifted witch of her age," as he calls Hermione in PoA).

And when Harry says, "If the new regime thinks Muggle-borns are bad,
what will they do to a half-werewolf whose father's in the Order?
{Oops, Harry; his mother's in the Order, too.] My father died trying
to protect my mohter and me, and you reckon he'd tell you to abandon
your kid to go on an adventure with us?" Lupin neither acknowledges
the danger he's placing his child in nor answers the question about
James, instead spluttering "How dare you? this is not about a desire
for--for danger or personal glory--how dare you suggest such a--"

That angry, incoherent, defensive, and completely irrelevant response,
which evades both of Harry's questions, prompts Harry's remarks about
Lupin's wanting to be a daredevil (like Sirius)--an idea suggested by
Lupin's own words about danger and personal glory, along with the
charge of cowardice, which relates to running away from his
responsibilities.

Lupin draws his wand and knocks Harry against the wall, running out
and slamming the door like an angry teenager.

That he returns to Tonks and later speaks of Harry affectionately on
Pottercast, saying that "[Harry's] instincts . . . are good and nearly
always right" (441), surely indicates that he has come to see the
truth in Harry's (instinctive) view of him and the justice in the
charges Harry has made against him, and, as Harry understands when he
hears the words, his view of Harry as "a symbol of everything for
which we are fighting: the power of good, the power of innocence, and
the need to keep resisting," Lupin has forgiven him for the "terrible
things he had said when they last met" (441), "terrible" being Harry's
interpretation, not Lupin's. Likewise, his naming Harry as his child's
godfather is surely a symbolic response to Harry's defense of the then
unborn "half-werewolf" who needed his father's protection much more
than three newly adult wizards trusted by Dumbledore to accomplish a
dangerous mission on their own could possibly need it. (It's entirely
possible, though, of course, I'm speculating, that Teddy Lupin might
not even have been born had Remus not returned to his pregnant wife.

Carol, who forgot to mention in her post on Squibs and Muggles that a
"squib" in RL is a firecracker that fizzles and goes out, failing to
produce glorious pyrotechnics just as a Squib in the WW fails to
produce magic--an appropriate, if cruel term that doesn't apply to
Muggles, whom no one expects to be magical