Reasons I Love Sirius Black

rosalui:

This is small version of the novel-length in-depth post I shall someday undoubtedly write. It’s one part love, one part headcanon, and one part stringent defense.

• He came from an aristocratic pureblood family with centuries of deep-rooted prejudice who enjoyed killing, torturing, and hunting Muggles (if that doesn’t horrify you, replace ‘Muggles’ with any minority). If he had aligned with their beliefs, he would have been filthy rich, politically powerful, in Voldemort’s inner circle, and ‘loved’ by his mother. He could have been Lucius Malfoy.
• He instead befriended a poor halfblood werewolf and a blood traitor (plus his Muggleborn wife), ran away from home, joined the war, and gave his life to protect his halfblood godson.

• Flying motorbike. And leather jackets and punk rock.

• There’s nothing to suggest that anything remained of his childhood’s ingrained prejudice. Note him unceremoniously pointing out that Hermione was correct over Ron, staying friends with Andromeda and Tonks but giving up on Regulus, looking warily at Lily Evans’s drawn wand during SWM… little, important things. We never see him participate in behavior like Slughorn’s.
• He moved to give Lily Evans space to sit after the Sorting. The heir to the House of Black moved over for a Muggleborn he had been arguing with. It was only common decency, but common decency toward Muggles was what Sirius had never been taught.

• Insolent good looks.

• I think he was an idealist. (Many people say he was loyal to people, not causes. I respectfully disagree. I think he was loyal to both.) Consider the line, “What was there to be gained by fighting the most evil wizard who has ever existed? Only innocent lives, Peter!“ He could have said ‘What was there to be gained by fighting the person who wanted to kill Lily and James?’ or ‘You could have saved our friends’ lives!’ Instead he names Voldemort as a cause worth fighting against in and of itself; ‘innocent lives’ means more than just Lily and James.
• He missed Harry’s birthday because he was on an Order mission. He was dedicated enough so to miss his godson’s first birthday.

• Sirius and James were like brothers, never saw one without the other, with matching t-shirts and identical fluid movements. *endless sobs*

• He seems to actively approve that Moody ‘never killed if he could help it,’ and condemns Crouch for his extremism and pro-violence stance. That’s not the Sirius I usually see written into fic.

• “The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters.” This is one of the best quotes in the books. People call him a hypocrite for it – and I find that mind-boggling. Not because he isn’t a hypocrite about it, but because I can’t think of a human being on the fucking earth who isn’t. Of course there will be anti-(Nazi / etc) bigots and rapists and murderers and corrupt politicians, and pro-(Nazi / etc) men and women who love their families and are talented individuals capable of kindness. The fact that I recognize this intellectually doesn’t mean that I will stop calling them and WBC and Fox News and Robin Thicke the actual spawn of Satan.
• Slytherin House, pureblood supremacy, and Death Eaters – every ideology associated within those muddled lines – are exactly what Sirius was raised to be and exactly what he spent his life fighting against. He must have un-learned massive amounts of prejudice, re-educating himself to realize it was intrinsically wrong, then being verbally abused for having failed to conform. Mid-teenage-rebellion is not usually the most common place for objectivity. If this carries on for too long, it can of course become problematic in its own right. But Sirius ran away at sixteen, spent the next seven years at war, and then got chucked in Azkaban. He’d still have been emotionally connected, with a reactionary anger against everything Slytherin symbolically represented.
• People talk a lot about Snape being skinny and odd and an easy target while Sirius was pretty and popular, but forget that Snape was also anti-Muggle and pro-Dark Arts from nearly the beginning. Every time Sirius looked at Snape, he saw him embracing everything Sirius was trying not to be.

• He missed doing the crossword. I bet he did the Saturday crossword. In pen.

• He put the pieces together well in Goblet of Fire. It’s one of the best demonstrations of how intelligent he really was. He noticed the right things, made the right deductions, just couldn’t come to the right conclusions – and who could? Not even Dumbledore.

• The first thing he did after learning of Lily and James’s deaths was try to take care of Harry. He tried to take responsibility for a baby. That means raising it, that means diapers, that means exhausted nights. Would he have been any good at it? Fuck knows, but he was going to try. It was only once Hagrid refused to give him Harry even after he argued that Sirius decided he had nothing to lose and went after Peter.

• He tries to push Crookshanks out of harm’s way when he thinks Harry is about to kill him.

• The first thing he said when he was back in his right mind, despite this being his only chance to escape after twelve years of imprisonment and knowing the Dementors were coming? “What happened to the other boy? Ron?”

• “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.“ Again, one of the best lines in the series, and one he gets called on a lot.
• The obvious point is Kreacher – and there are massively problematic themes here. House Elves are institutionalized slavery and even the most enlightened characters don’t seem to see that.  Kreacher’s ideologies were obviously shaped by his owners, something he had no choice in, so mistreating Kreacher in any way is very wrong and I’m very disappointed in Sirius for doing so. That said, we never see him abusing Kreacher (see: Malfoys and Dobby) – even for walking around calling his friends horrifically racist things. When Sirius was young Kreacher would have answered to Walburga first, Orion or Regulus second, and Sirius was the ‘Mudblood-loving shame of Walburga’s flesh’ stuck in a nightmarish and abusive household. Would Kreacher have actively contributed to making Sirius’s life hell? We have no proof either way. But I can conclusively say is that Sirius’s feelings about Kreacher more represent his attitude toward his upbringing, than they do his attitude toward elves.
• Snape and Peter were both people he was either hateful toward or dismissive of, but Remus Lupin is essentially proof that neither halfblood status nor wealth were likely deciding factors.
• The quote is so good because treating your inferiors like dirt is literally what he would have learned from his family. Inferiors in blood, money, and social status would have been like actual pieces of shit to them. Sirius saying this quote is most likely an echo of his own realizations from when he began to learn that his family was wrong. He saw the way they treated their ‘inferiors,’ and realized it told him what they really were like.

• Sirius’s reaction to Hermione calling him ‘Mr Black,’ which mostly amounted to: o_o?

• I invite anyone to spend 12 years indoors and then after a taste of freedom do it again for a year. Never mind a freezing prison where you starved and had to relive your worst memories every day, never mind being in your abusive childhood home that you’d run away from. Just try being indoors that long, and tell me you wouldn’t be moody and climbing the walls.
• (Of course, it wasn’t ‘moodiness,’ it was chronic depression and PTSD.)

• He was awkward and nervous when asking Harry to live with him.

• He was never reckless with Harry’s life, and only sometimes with his own.
• He’s responsible when it comes to Harry. He is. He writes him to say be careful, keep your eyes open, don’t leave Hogwarts without permission – not encourage him into trouble. He gives Harry practical, useful presents, not packages of Dungbombs. He was only flippant about danger if the danger was already over.
• With the exception of the DA, which was the right thing to do and the reason half the students survived the battles of HBP and DH.
• He was the single adult who treated Harry like he honestly deserved to know the vital life-or-death information that directly involved him. And he was right to do so. If Harry had been told what was happening, there are a lot of mistakes he wouldn’t have made. (This is, of course, because Sirius knows what happens when you keep things too close. People die.)

• Look how far he brought himself in 10 years. Imagine what he’d have done with another 12.