Subject: What really gets me about Peter's treatment in fics...
Author:
Posted on: 2014-03-09 17:17:00 UTC

...is that, well.

HE WAS THEIR BEST FRIEND. THEY TRUSTED HIM. THEY SUSPECTED REMUS BEFORE HIM--THEY NEVER SUSPECTED PETER AT ALL! AND HE WAS WORKING FOR VOLDEMORT FOR AT LEAST A YEAR BEFORE THE POTTERS WERE KILLED AND SIRIUS WENT AFTER HIM!

Sorry, it's an old fandom for me. And this has become one of my buttons for it.

It's so easy to vilify Peter. Oh, yes, he's going to be evil when he grows up, so he must be evil now! Oh, hey, he's a coward when he's older (never mind the argument I can make against that, it's currently irrelevant), he must be the same way when he's younger! Oh, hey, he's going to betray them--so they never trusted him in the first place!

That's not exactly how betrayal works. That's not how Peter's 'evilness' works. I know it can be easy to use him as a plot device by making him a Death Eater earlier on--I've used it myself--but if you want to stay at all true to what we know of him? That's not how to do it.

In addition, there's this idea that he was stupid. What people tend to forget is that he was hanging around with James, Transfiguration prodigy, Sirius, popular and talented, and Remus, quiet but very smart. If anything, he was average! Not stupid, not talentless--just average! And that's something that people tend not to realize.

I don't at all support what Peter did when he grew up, even if I understand some of it. Young!Peter? I'll defend him forever.

I've got a fic where (don't throw rotten tomatoes at me for this) I've been trying to do the Fifth Marauder thing relatively realistically (albeit with a slight AU, because there obviously wasn't a fifth Marauder in canon). It's undergone a massive reworking--several of them, actually. In the first version, Peter ended up transferring to Beauxbatons at the end of the second year. He just never ended up becoming friends with the others, and decided to leave after getting rather the wrong impression about some of their jokes. (Also, who wants to be the only one of five boys left out of the four-boy friendship?) So he left...and therefore never betrayed Lily and James...and probably lived out his life happily. At some point, I decided to change that, and bring him back in. In the new version (this is such spoilers, actually), he helps them solve a mystery at the end of the first year, whereupon he joins their group. Because it didn't make sense to me that they'd take him on just because he'd follow them around and praise them (yes, I know, but that doesn't really make for trust), I figured he must have had something a bit more useful than that...and made him very good at thinking quickly and putting things and plans together. Where'd I get that from? Well, when Sirius went after him, he formulated and executed the plan to frame him pretty much on the spot. It's possible he thought it out ahead of time, but...he couldn't have been sure. So, logically, that's one of his skills...and, as I said before, he's not stupid. He's just an average kid, who happens to hang out with a group of somewhat exceptionally talented kids. That's all.

But yeah, to sum up: bashing young!Peter is something that people find very easy to do when they haven't thought very hard about him, and I've even done it myself; however, he doesn't deserve that, and it's not accurate. So any fanfic bashing young!Peter is probably going to get me ranting.

~DF

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