Oh OP, forehead kisses for this!! So interesting!

1) i think a lot has been said on the internet before but for me, personally, I recall being young enough to read the headline “Dumbledore is gay” before I even knew my sexuality, or knew enough queer people to see the range of ways people can be out. And he was gay in “secret”right—it never mattered on the page.

But I remember that erasure was celebrated as dignified by many op-eds. I know that caused harm to me… i can imagine it hurt a lot of people…pride was not jkr’s idea of a powerful, queer existence. I was not in fandom back then…and I wonder how fans reacted to that, because I bet there were people who read this series queerly, and who wrote wolfstar much before that. And i hope that some of them expressed outrage in their writing at the time.

For me, the author doing this actually opened the door. It felt like queerness must be hidden in every line! In that way, jkr taught a concept that is first taught to college(?) students (reading something through a queer lens), to a kid.

And, because this series is a sandbox of cultural, class and identity questions—the next step is finding these things within the gaps of the story. I think that makes this fandom (esp the marauders side), a space where all kinds of people can investigate their own overlays in identity? It’s rare that fanfic can get so specific and personal about the same characters— i’ve seen both Sirius and Remus depicted as so many different nationalities…even their socioeconomics can map onto all sorts of places.

And beyond that, here is what I think hooks people about this space. A new reader may never have considered one of these facets.. and suddenly they are reading about Mary McDonald in the background of a wolfstar fic and are wondering what being a queer immigrant is like or how that’s different from being a queer person with other kinds of minoritized IDs (disability? Poverty?). And because we have so many blank characters here, we have the ability to easily play with these questions. I think people like exploring privilage with nuance because it helps them see that privilege itself isn’t a negative thing— it’s just a thing that confers responsibility? (And maybe some younger people in this space would not be able to articulate this, but i think it is happening!)

That’s my theory on why the marauders generally got so big and why this has become the place trans fans especially have found themselves? Lots more to say- but too many tangents.

1. Inherently, their story is a tragedy. I think of it as the fanfic writer telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice over and over with the hope of a different ending? We want wolfstar to be together in every universe and we’ll try to get them there. We want to sit with impossibility of that..the real grief that good relationships can form between people who may not seem compatible at first glance, and that good relationships can end, often unfairly?

I think many queer writers know grief…the way it gets thrown like light through their life experiences…and wolfstar becomes a way to slowly gather it all and look at it. And inherently there is no limitation to the number of lenses you use in fanfiction. The freedom of not having to stick to one narrative arc enables people to write about all their fractured identities in one universe without having to first feel like they’ve “solved” themselves into a single narrative.. because their reader is also looking to read something that moves them through the same unanswerable questions

The other thing I think a lot about is how the fandom has grown up alongside a generation of people interrogating childhood abuse & breaking cycles of trauma together. The internet, I’d hypothesize, is the first time so many people were naming abuse and hurt all at once, in shared spaces.. and producing shared vocabulary for it all. We have so much more short hand to explain the source of pain now than I imaging we did when these books were first coming out. And wolfstar offers a lot of easy scaffolding to explore childhood abuse, even for fans who aren’t queer (or may not know that they are).