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

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 180686

> zgirnius:
> It is not his presence that is the danger, it is his *existence*. 
> Bella might or might not leave Tonks alone once she is no longer 
> pregnant, but little Teddy, once he is born, is someone who needs 
to 
> be 'pruned' from her family tree regardless. His family is already 
> associated with him.

Magpie:
I don't think it's so unreasonable for him to think that if he's 
left the family they'd have an easier time of it. It isn't all about 
Bellatrix hunting down Tonks and Remus is trying to take away 
Bellatrix's power to hurt Tonks and the child by what he's doing. 
Lupin knows he's already caused Tonks and the child this danger by 
marrying etc. I would imagine that's part of what gives him his 
desire to go out and fight that danger.  

Whether or not his leaving is going to immediately lessen the danger 
for Tonks and his baby I can see why he thinks that he can start to 
do something better *now* by separating himself from them and 
working to bring down Voldemort. His emotions don't only come down 
to trying to get out of responsibilty, and I don't really think it's 
a given that in a time like this obviously his most important 
responsibility is to sit at home in close physical proximity to his 
wife and child. Ultimately the book doesn't either since it seems 
happy to honor him as one of the fallen dead at the school--and show 
him wonderfully happy in the afterlife with Sirius Black and James 
(he's slipped Tonks' leash again!). 


> > Magpie:
> > Far from being something that disgusts Harry, it's something 
Harry 
> > himself would do. He thought himself perfectly self-righteous 
when 
> he 
> > considered leaving Grimmauld Place when he thought he was 
possessed 
> in 
> > OotP and he made similar speeches in this book about not wanting 
to 
> > put other people in danger because they're with him. 
> 
> zgirnius:
> He was not married to anyone at 12 GP, nor had he fathered a child 
> with anyone there. 

Magpie:
But so what? Being married to someone or being someone's father 
doesn't change the basic idea of not wanting to put them in danger. 
If anything it would give you even more of a horror of putting them 
in harm's way. Lupin's situation is different (Harry's also worried 
about the damage Ginny does to his ability to fight) but I don't 
think the fact that he's married suddenly makes it irresponsible to 
consider leaving to make his family safer or to consider leaving to 
join the fight. That can be the right decision in some cases.

zgirnius:
> 
> Harry's most notable noble leaving of someone because of the 
danger 
> it would put her in, is his breakup with Ginny at the end of HBP.

> Which, while it had not occured to me before, was quite possibly a 
> contributing factor to Harry's anger, though secondary to the 
issue 
> of abandoning a child, which is a sore point with Harry. He also 
> tries this speech on Ron and Hermione, who turn him down. Of 
course, 
> in all three of those cases, he tells the people in question what 
is 
> going on. My own impression of Lupin from that scene is that he 
makes 
> his decision without consulting Tonks, which is the source of my 
> problems.

Magpie:
And that's a perfectly fine source of problems--but it's not got 
anything to do with Lupin being a coward for preferring to act as a 
part of the Resistance movement rather than stay at home with his 
wife and wait for Harry, Ron and Hermione to do something. Not 
discussing it with Tonks, if he didn't discuss it with her (and we 
don't know that he didn't), is a different issue. Harry 
didn't "discuss" his decision with Ginny either, he just told her 
they were done and Ginny told him that's why she likes him so much. 
(Ginny's usually being in the emotional state or of the opinions 
Harry needs at any given moment is a great part of her attraction 
for him.) If Harry had been married to Ginny at the time, and had 
fathered a child with her already, she probably would have said the 
same thing: "That's why I love you Harry, because I know fighting 
Voldemort comes first. Me and the baby will be waiting when you come 
home!" Ginny's always been a hero groupie, after all.

But Harry's logic in protecting Ginny has the same holes as the ones 
you see for Lupin above. He's already involved with her. Voldemort 
would already know he could use Ginny against him, even if he never 
does. But Harry still says he's "too dangerous" to have a 
girlfriend, and Ginny respects that. Everything about her character 
indicates to me that if she were married to him she'd see it as 
perfectly right that her man left them to hunt Horcruxes--because 
that's the way he is and that's his way of protecting them--while 
she stayed home with the baby. Women and children have been waving 
their men off to war for thousands of years.

zgirnius:
> This (noncanonical) Lupin seems to me the guy you are defending. 
> Heck, I admire that guy too. He just was not in evidence in "The 
> Bribe".

Magpie:
Canon doesn't tell us what went down between Lupin and Tonks in "The 
Bribe." Canonically Tonks seems to have different priorities than 
Ginny and might never have agreed Lupin should go. And one can 
imagine Lupin avoiding the confrontation and just leaving her a note 
for all we know. Or maybe he just, like Harry, announced he was 
doing it and went off, either with Tonks angry or weepy or with 
Tonks bravely supporting him like Ginny. Or perhaps they did discuss 
it. I don't remember if Harry asked anything about this.

But none of this has anything to do with Lupin being a daredevil or 
trying to avoid his responsibilities or his offer to Harry being 
unreasonable or bad. It's only a problem in the way Lupin 
communicates or fails to communicate with his wife, which isn't what 
Harry yells about. 

Pippin:
IIRC, the point of Harry's conversation with Phineas was to show us 
that Harry was rationalizing: he told himself that he was worried 
about the danger to his friends, but he was more worried about being 
different from them in a horrible and unique way. Now Harry 
perceives that Lupin is doing the same thing.

Magpie:
Harry *wasn't* different from them in a horrible and unique way, and 
he wasn't a danger to them, so the problem was taken care of for 
him. If he really had been Voldemort's weapon and Voldemort had been 
able to act through him things might have been different. Given the 
current climate Lupin's fears aren't totally irrational. So Harry 
shouldn't just assume his own projected issues tell the whole story. 
Lupin would hardly just now be dealing with being horrible in a 
unique way and different from other people--he probably can't ever 
remember feeling any differently at this point in his life.

It's not that I'm arguing that Lupin was obviously absolutely right 
that he should leave Tonks, or that he was only being self-
sacrificing and heroic here and couldn't be led by any of his own 
issues. I can totally get behind Lupin needing to be honest with 
himself and figure out when he's really taking rational precautions 
and where he's hiding behind old defense mechanismss.

But I don't see why he'd be able to do that when all of his concerns-
-including the practical ones--are dismissed by everyone. If Lupin 
is truly acting out of his own issues, those issues never come to 
the surface. It's this sort of thing that adds up to my general 
feeling that a big part of this guy is terrified of how kind of 
satisfying it is to imagine turning into a wolf and killing these 
people.:-)

Pippin:
Just as Harry forgot about Diary!Ginny, Lupin has forgotten that 
Harry knows something about being treated as an outcast by his own
family and being viewed as a dangerous freak with criminal
propensities and powers he could not control. 

Magpie:
I don't think Lupin "forgot" this but that he naturally doesn't 
equate Harry's situation with his own because it's not the same. 
Other characters are quick to say they know what Lupin's situation 
is like and he should just do like they want him to do, when I just 
don't think they're really putting any effort into understanding his 
pov.

Pippin:
Lupin is not proposing to protect Harry in addition to protecting
his child, or in order to protect his child from Voldemort. He's
proposing that the child won't suffer by his absence, which is 
absurd.

Magpie:
Ironic that JKR then decides to randomly kill off both Lupin and 
Tonks--having Tonks run off even more heedless of her child having 
no parents--and then that child is part of the happy epilogue having 
had a life that shows nothing like Harry's suffering by the absence 
of his parents.

Not that I think this means Teddy didn't miss anything by not having 
parents--of course he did. But he had a very different life than 
Harry did and in the end it looked like fighting Voldemort was 
considered an okay reason to put yourself in danger while your child 
is left behind with somebody else. As long as you did it on the 
author's terms. She wanted her war orphan.

-m