July 4, 2004
SMALLTOWN AMERICA. A young fanfiction author lost her temper today, throwing books, breaking pencils, and tearing up story sketches. The purported cause of the breakdown was the unrealistic characterization of the marauders in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
"It's just plain ridiculous what the reader is expected to believe," she said, granting an interview on the condition that she remain anonymously known as Mary Sue. "Look at the four of them: you've got the conceited lovelorn jock James, the arrogant daredevil sidekick Sirius - then what? Shy bookworm Lupin and the cowardly sychophant Peter. What sort of group dynamic is that?"
Mary Sue professes to be a Harry Potter fan, but admits that she expected better characterization of the group that fans commonly refer to by the mysterious acronym "MWPP." Introduced by J.K. Rowling in Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban, the so-called marauders are a group of students at Hogwarts in the generation before Harry's. "We were all dying for a glimpse of them in action after book 3," she said, "But when they do interact in Snape's memory it's kind of lack luster. Lupin ignores the others half the time and Pettigrew just drools. Who can believe that James and Sirius would ever want to hang out with these guys? The whole Peter Pettigrew thing is pretty pathetic. I mean - can a rat really keep up with a stag, a dog, and a werewolf anyway?"
"Don't get me wrong - as individuals they're fine," she continued, cleaning up the debris around her desk. "James and Sirius you can even believe are best friends. Pettigrew strikes me as the insecure type who just needs reassurance all the time and that's why he's always kissing up. Lupin is clearly gay. But you put these four together and it just doesn't add up to the sort of carousing good ol' boys we think of when we hear the name 'Marauders.'"
On the subject of a possible homosexual relationship between any of the four marauders, Mary Sue concedes, "Fanfic writers love slash, and I guess the most believeable pair is Lupin/Black, but that's not to say that Pettigrew isn't sketchy either. In fact, the only one of them with any connection to any female seems to be James."
When asked if she would ever consider writing her own marauders fanfiction, Mary Sue laughed. "It already reads like a fanfic. We all know that Lily and James will be together by the end of school. Black and Lupin will have some lover's quarrel that makes them suspicious of each other, while Pettigrew secretly runs off to Voldemort and betrays them. The real question is what Pettigrew has on the other three that they deign to put up with him when they're still at school."