the craziest thing (and also my favorite thing) about the marauders fandom is how everyone has collectively just headcanonned the entire thing. sure the names and basic descriptions were invented by someone else- sure she created them. but we have brought them to life past any point that was ever even intended.
everything we take as fact has absolutely nothing to do with anything that exists in book canon, and still all somehow feels even MORE real??? any unrelated anecdote claimed as them just always makes sense. someone can come up with a totally random microfic scenario and it’s like “yeah that absolutely happened.”
you can tag a group photo with their tags and not say another word, and still i can instantly pin out who is whom.
they’re real because we’ve made them real. like a tulpa.