I'm glad to hear you enjoyed this, and I'm grateful for your thoughtful comments.
a possible beginning to the spiral of hope and disappointment -- I wanted to play with the idea that the prejudice and hard times wouldn't start the instant he stepped out of Hogwarts, because surely he'd have had excellent credentials to begin with. But he knows that every time he has to leave a job it's going to be that much harder to find the next one, since he can't explain why he's had to leave.
Remus seeming cold and retreating into himself to try and stop caring as a kind of coping mechanism -- I really wanted to write something to try to put Remus's DH Ch 11 behavior into some kind of context. We know his usual response to stress or emotion is to go mild and bland; I think it makes sense to see the apparent coldness as a more extreme version of that withdrawal, when there's more at stake and it's harder for Remus to handle. But then, is simply losing a job worth this reaction, if it's Remus's most extreme response and we never see it from him in PoA, OotP, or HBP? I'm thinking that Remus spent all of Hogwarts expecting instant disaster as soon as he left, so when he got his dream job, he was almost giddy with relief, thinking he was actually going to get away with having a normal life. So the sacking hit him very hard, because it's not just the loss of a desirable job, it's a sign that all the negative things he's grown up expecting really are lying in wait for him after all. (Hmmph. I obviously wrote this fic far too fast, because clearly I should have found a way to make him communicate these thoughts to Lily. Maybe if I revise this for posting somewhere, I could develop that aspect a bit more.)
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a possible beginning to the spiral of hope and disappointment -- I wanted to play with the idea that the prejudice and hard times wouldn't start the instant he stepped out of Hogwarts, because surely he'd have had excellent credentials to begin with. But he knows that every time he has to leave a job it's going to be that much harder to find the next one, since he can't explain why he's had to leave.
Remus seeming cold and retreating into himself to try and stop caring as a kind of coping mechanism -- I really wanted to write something to try to put Remus's DH Ch 11 behavior into some kind of context. We know his usual response to stress or emotion is to go mild and bland; I think it makes sense to see the apparent coldness as a more extreme version of that withdrawal, when there's more at stake and it's harder for Remus to handle. But then, is simply losing a job worth this reaction, if it's Remus's most extreme response and we never see it from him in PoA, OotP, or HBP? I'm thinking that Remus spent all of Hogwarts expecting instant disaster as soon as he left, so when he got his dream job, he was almost giddy with relief, thinking he was actually going to get away with having a normal life. So the sacking hit him very hard, because it's not just the loss of a desirable job, it's a sign that all the negative things he's grown up expecting really are lying in wait for him after all. (Hmmph. I obviously wrote this fic far too fast, because clearly I should have found a way to make him communicate these thoughts to Lily. Maybe if I revise this for posting somewhere, I could develop that aspect a bit more.)