Mugglenet.com's Harry Potter Should Have Died - Emerson Spartz [14]
Verdict
No matter how you grovel at the feet of the Dark Lord and no matter how magical your fingers are, Voldemort will never thank you for a foot massage. However, if you do Hagrid the small favor of trimming his back bush, he will be your friend for life. Verdict: Please bring your hedge clippers to Hagrid’s hut.
Which character fails to live up to expectations?
Remus Lupin
Professor Remus Lupin starts out in PoA as one of the best characters, the disabled underdog in society who can’t get a break but stays calm and hopeful. Showing up at Hogwarts carrying a beat-up suitcase and wearing a shabby suit, he becomes Harry’s favorite teacher, a mentor, and Harry soon finds out that Lupin is an old friend of the family. He’s also a werewolf, which instantly makes him super cool. But once he loses his job as a popular professor at Hogwarts, he never gets back on track for the rest of the series. Lupin just isn’t there for Harry most of the time, and he often seems preoccupied with his own problems.
Lupin drops out of Harry’s life for all of GoF, and shows up again in OotP as an Order of the Phoenix member, but his main function for the rest of that book is to babysit his old friend Sirius Black. There isn’t much new character development and he mostly just hangs around Grimmauld Place eating and drinking and talking, until he is needed in the fight at the Ministry. He shows up at Christmas in HBP, telling Harry that he works as a secret agent for Dumbledore among the werewolves, but what does he actually do? No one knows. As readers, we want to picture the “werewolf underground” with secret meetings and Lupin making deals as a spy, but that never materializes in the books. He could have been the coolest literary werewolf of all time, but we only see him transform one time at the end of PoA, and after that he seems to lose the power of the inner beast.
Then there’s Lupin’s love life, which is a disaster. The young witch Nymphadora Tonks falls in love with him beginning in OotP and continues to moon over him through HBP, and Lupin can’t seem to decide how he feels about her. If he really loved Nymphadora Tonks at all, why did Mr. and Mrs. Weasley have to talk him into marrying her? Is it just because he fears that he is too old for her? Or is there just a lack of passion on his part, which is the way it seems from his underwhelming response to her? It’s obvious that married life didn’t agree with him because as soon as he discovers that his wife is pregnant in DH, Lupin hits the road, making the juvenile decision to run away with the teenagers on their quest for the Horcruxes and Hallows. It’s a cringe-worthy Marauder midlife crisis in the middle of a war, and it’s a disappointment to fans who thought Lupin was a loyal, stand-up guy. Only an intervention from suddenly mature Harry calling him cowardly keeps Lupin from being a deadbeat dad, and to his credit, he goes back home to Tonks. But, by then, readers have lost all respect for him, and when Lupin turns up later at Shell Cottage handing out cigars as the proud papa, even Harry, who agrees to be godfather to Lupin’s son, can’t seem to believe it.
Lupin has a few great moments in the books—he teaches Harry the Expecto Patronum Charm in PoA; he’s awesome as the leader of the Advance Guard in OotP; and he saves Harry from following Sirius Black through the Death Veil. But how great it could have been in DH if we had seen Lupin having a smack-down duel with Fenrir Greyback, the werewolf who bit him as a child? Instead, Lupin is written in such a deadly dull way that he might have tried to just reasonably talk Greyback into a coma. While it’s true that Lupin steps up to fight at the Battle of Hogwarts, we don’t see him fight, and we miss the death scene, so it lacks that meaningful blaze of glory. The last time we see him in DH is when Harry calls him back from the dead with the Resurrection Stone, and his spirit makes a gooey speech about wanting