Hiii ✈️ & 🎧 Pls!

"Improve your skills" this "Learn to make your stuff look professional" that - what if I want to stay shitty at it?

What if I don't want to become the very best like noone ever was because that sounds fucking stressful? What if I just want to continue making my silly shit for my own enjoyment? Why does the goal of everything has to be to make it "better" one day? Is art only worthy if it looks like you spent days on it? Have we maybe all lost track of the whole point of drawing and writing and crafting being that it's fun?

just to add on, this is absolutely true when it comes to people shitting on fics just to shit on them (eg not liking characterizations). this does NOT apply, however, when people are calling out racism and making other such important and valid criticisms. (this is not directed at op, they didn’t say anything about this! i just wanted to say it because i’ve also seen some people yelling at people for calling out racism and that is not okay)

Yall need to remember that no matter how popular a fic gets (even if it’s literally the most popular fic on ao3) it still goes against fandom etiquette to publicly hate on it or say that it’s bad. Those opinions belong in private conversations or in your private bookmarks, nowhere else. Fanfics are gifts that we aren’t entitled to, and we have to treat them as such.

i want to write a chronic illness remus fic so badly but every time i try it starts to feel like a diary entry and i have a stop

do you know of any wolfstarbucks fics that start out with moonchaser? 👀 I feel like they have a lot of potential

omg this is a GOOD QUESTION and i agree it would be interesting! unfortunately i can’t think of any? i feel like it’s always wolfstar or prongsfoot if there’s an established couple.

i do have a wip on my tbr, silly me (to fall in love with you) by jeonkaktus, which looks like remus and james get together first but i obviously can’t say for sure since i haven’t read it. it’s a soulmates au where remus and james are each other’s soulmates but they don’t know that they’re both sirius’s soulmates as well. the summary sounds like remus and james will get together first! maybe i’ll read it soon 👀

FINISHED DRAFTING CHAPTER 4 OF LOTF ‼️‼️ i just need to edit it now!! gonna try to cut some stuff because it is…Long.

this is an interesting discussion to have tbh and i like getting to hear other chronically ill people’s thoughts on it! same thing applies for my rambles here, not saying this to invalidate your experiences or your perspective, just want to share my own thoughts on it since i didn’t rly add anything to it before haha

i think a lot of this honestly just depends on the person and the chronic illness. different illnesses obviously have different symptoms and different people experience things to different levels of severity. so i’m def not by any means saying no chronically ill person can or does have good grades, bc that would be factually false and ableist.

i’ve had almost perfect grades up until this point in my college degree, to the detriment of my own health like remus may have, but this academic year is honestly a lot harder on me for reasons im unsure of—i think some of it is a cumulative effect though, and im only doing a 4-year degree compared to the 7 years of Hogwarts. plus, this is not mentioning my high school career, in which i got Ds in most of my classes and missed so many days of school i nearly didn’t pass high school at all just based on attendance. we don’t even know if there’s an attendance requirement at hogwarts! but in a modern day college or high school au there might be.

there’s also the fact that hogwarts is huge, and has a ton of stairs with, canonically at least, no elevators or ramps, meaning he’d have to use more energy on a daily basis than a lot of us in the modern real world have to with ADA (this is not to say all campuses are accessible, but a lot are at least partially so). there’s the fact that some of the classes, like DADA, are a lot more physically involved than the classes many college students are taking in the real modern world. and going back to the attendance itself, we don’t know if hogwarts grades on attendance but a lot of modern day public schools require attendance and if you miss too many days you cannot move on regardless of grades. as for college, a lot of professors at smaller universities grade on attendance and hogwarts seems to have relatively small class sizes. so if professors aren’t willing to be flexible on that? his grades would be shit just from sheer number of absences.

then there’s the fact that remus may not be old but he has been ill for a very long time, having been bitten so young. if we think of lycanthropy as a progressive illness, which seems likely based on various canonical descriptions, it will have had a lot of time already despite his young age.

also what makes lycanthropy different from a lot of real illnesses is the routine nature of the flares. he will have at least one flare every single month. with a lot of real illnesses people can go months without flares when they’re on proper treatment. they’re unpredictable and randomized, you might have twelve one semester and two the next. lycanthropy guarantees he will be sick for at least a day every single month, but likely more (because i don’t think there’s a lot of detail on this in canon but i find it immensely hard to believe that the full moon would only affect him the night of).

and lastly for many chronically ill people success in academia depends quite strongly on how accommodating and flexible professors are. we don’t know much about the marauders era professors iirc, so we don’t know if they’re decent people who would allow him flexible deadlines when he’s ill or not. we don’t know if they’re prejudiced against werewolves and refuse to accommodate one. i might be forgetting some details bc i haven’t read the canon series in many years but even if we meet some of them i know for sure we don’t know them all. plus just because someone seems nice from a 2-minute flashback doesn’t mean they aren’t ableist etc. and depending on the illness, the severity, etc pushing through just is not always physically possible! yes there is a certain extent to which you can ignore your needs and overuse energy you don’t have but it’s not always possible. my brain fog has been really bad this semester. i can force myself to do all the readings for my classes, but i physically cannot force the information to stick in my brain, so going through the motions does shit for my grades. we don’t really know what kinds of symptoms he has but if remus is injured and physically cannot, say, go gather plants from the forest for herbology, or he gets dizzy/lightheaded and cannot brew a potion bc the steam/heat will actually make him pass out, or whatever else, it won’t really matter how hard he tries or wants to push through. to be completely candid about something i’ve not even said out loud yet, i’ve had to give up on my dreams of going to law school because i am physically unable to maintain the grades necessary to get into a decent school, or to do the amount of reading law school entails, despite my best desperate attempts at pushing through even when it’s destroying me mentally and physically.

anyways, as i said this isn’t to negate anything anyone else said, it’s just my own interpretation of things! ultimately we’re working off of very little canon information about this and i’m not here to tell anyone their experiences are wrong. i think it’s a really interesting conversation to have though.

people who think rjl would have really good grades have never been chronically ill and had to miss school consistently because of it. I'm sure he was smart! I'm sure he did really well on tests! but there has never been a character I'm more sure struggled to achieve the academic success that he was capable of.

I think a lot of what makes fanfiction so magical is writers taking the time to explore tiny elements that were imagined into existence in the source material and then abandoned. It's the deep dive into that t-shirt, the forgotten gift, the nickname, the spare key, the anger they swallowed down, the trauma they supressed, the love they denied, the story that wasn't mainstream enough to make it. It's the little things getting their moment to shine and I fucking love that and I will fight for it always.

chapter five of BRTC is here!

Remus’s body aches; Sirius takes care of him.

Write it shitty, write it scared, write it without a clue but don't you be so spineless and have an AI write fanfic for you.

🌟 RANKING REMUS LUPIN’S BEST "WEREWOLF CARD" EXCUSES 🌟

🥉 TIER 3: LOW EFFORT, BUT IT WORKS

5. "I'm experiencing a rare sensitivity to [current weather]."

Used For: Avoiding outdoor activities (changes reason based on conditions)

Effectiveness: 7/10 - Teachers assume it's a chronic condition and stop questioning

4. "My circadian rhythms require recalibration."

Used For: Skipping early morning classes

Effectiveness: 6/10 - McGonagall's eyebrow twitches but she allows it once per lunar cycle

🥈 TIER 2: MEDIUM-EFFORT LIES WITH A STRAIGHT FACE

3. "The moon’s in retrograde." (Not a real thing.)

Used For: Avoiding having to watch Quidditch practices (James buys it; Sirius cackles).

Effectiveness: 8/10 – James panics and asks if he needs chicken soup.

2. "I've developed an unfortunate reaction to [nearby object]." (gestures vaguely)

Used For: Leaving uncomfortable situations

Effectiveness: 8/10 - Works best in potions class where plausible accidents happen

🏆 TIER 1: ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECES OF DECEIT

1. "I'm presently engaged in critical lunar research."

Used For: Leaving any situation with an air of academic importance

Effectiveness: ∞/10 - Works best when said while holding a chocolate bar as if it's research equipment

0. "I’m legally required to lie down." (No such law exists.)

Used For: Everything. Everything.

Effectiveness: ∞/10 – Even McGonagall lets it slide once.

HONORABLE MENTION (THE ONE TIME IT FAILED):

"I can’t, I’m allergic to... this conversation."

Used On: Sirius, who immediately throws a pillow at him.

Verdict: "Try harder, Moony."