I'm almost afraid to ask, but... when are we going to acknowledge that there’s no actual evidence Sirius Black was physically abused in canon?
It’s become so common in fan spaces to treat it like an indisputable fact that Walburga and Orion were regularly using Crucio on their teenage son - as if that wouldn’t have literally landed them both in Azkaban for life.
Yes, I understand that abusive people don’t care about legality - but the level of violence some fanon depictions of the Blacks reach is so extreme, it starts to feel disconnected from the characters entirely. We're not just talking about toxic parenting anymore - we’re talking about full-blown war crimes happening in a family home.
It doesn’t always sit right with me as a survivor of abuse myself - this unspoken implication that the only kind of abuse that really "counts" is physical abuse. That unless Sirius was tortured to the brink of death, the trauma he endured doesn’t feel valid enough to explore. As if emotional abuse isn’t already damaging, isolating, and deeply formative.
Canon gives us plenty to work with.
Sirius calls his family unpleasant and describes being seen as the "bad" son for rejecting their ideals, while Regulus was the "perfect" one - classic emotional abuse: scapegoat vs golden child. He talks about his home as being dark and miserable, and he actively rebelled against his parent's pureblood beliefs just to spite them.
This all clearly points to psychological abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect - but there’s no mention of physical abuse, and there doesn't need to be.
Walburga, especially, is a textbook example of a verbally and psychologically abusive parent - the way her portrait rages with such intensity, the language she uses, the way she made Sirius feel othered and lesser. That’s already serious trauma.
If the physical abuse is part of your headcanon - go for it.
Ultimately, this is fiction - it’s a sandbox, and everyone should feel free to build the version of the story that speaks to them. Honestly, I think it’s totally plausible that there was some element of physical abuse involved, and I’ve written Sirius that way myself, more than once. I will again - I completely understand why some people love the idea of Sirius falling out of the Potters' fireplace half-dead.
But that's just one possibility.
When that headcanon becomes so dominant in fandom spaces that any deviation from it is met with resistance - that's when it becomes slightly frustrating. Especially in roleplay, where that collaborative, "yes, and…" approach is key to keeping a scene alive. If tortured!Sirius is the only headcanon people are willing to engage with, it makes it nearly impossible to explore different dynamics, motivations, or emotional arcs.
The dominance of that headcanon doesn’t just flatten his story - it shuts down the nuance of the entire Black family dynamic. If we take it as given that Walburga and Orion were literally torturing their son, then how do we make sense of Regulus staying? How do we explore complex family loyalties, internalised ideology, or the slow erosion of self that happens in environments like that? It reduces the entire family to caricature, and removes any space to write meaningful conflict, guilt, or generational trauma.
The truth is, the Blacks were awful - but they were also interesting. Shades of grey exist, and fiction is a perfectly safe place to explore that. Sirius himself summed this up with "...the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters..." and it would be incredibly dull if things were so black and white.
Sirius, canonically, pushed back. He rebelled. He resisted. His bedroom alone tells you everything you need to know about who he was and what he was up against. That kind of defiance in the face of psychological control, suffocating expectations, and constant verbal degradation is real. It is damaging. It is abuse.
We don’t need to crank it up to cartoon villain levels of torture to take it seriously.
I think it’s important to remember that the Blacks were oppressive bigots hiding behind respectability - not open criminals. Walburga and Orion didn’t join the Death Eaters; they just quietly subscribed to the same hateful ideology. And honestly, that’s what makes them so terrifying. It’s also part of what cost them Regulus - but that’s a rant for another day.
They weren’t the type to take bold, visible action, even in support of the cause they believed in. So the idea that they were secretly committing acts of illegal, mind-destroying torture on their own children should be a huge leap - a leap which, in my opinion, should be considered an AU, rather a widely accepted fact.
Anyway - live and let live, it's fiction, none of it really matters anyway.
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