they make movies about this experience it fucks with people deeply so ofc its changed
Yeah like she's clearly experiencing feelings that are intense enough to alter her motivations and goals in life! And that affects her patronus! Because she is 23 and experiencing grown-up romantic feelings for the first time. Falling for someone so hard that the feeling becomes your primary motivation isn't an inherent indicator of "true love", just of intense feeling and, to some degree, a lack of other strong motivations. Both of which are normal things to experience! So is romantic love that runs parallel to your actual motivations, or a crush that's at cross-purposes with something you sincerely believe and value.
incidentally this is also what i believe happened with jily but anyway
I know you mean the war elopement thing but it's always been my headcanon that the memory James used for the stagtronus was Lily agreeing to go out with him/marry him, because these are teenagers and getting your longtime crush to go out with you can easily clear the bar for happiest memory ever when you're like 17 and have no coherent life goals.
Absolutely agree with everything you've said, Anon!!
We don't actually interact much with Tonks as readers, only seeing her during group scenes and brief encounters during HBP when she's already fallen in love with Lupin, but it's clear that she's an upbeat, energetic young woman that probably did not pursue romance as a teenager - and, in fact, in Hogwarts Mystery (which isn't canon material but has excellent writing that I enjoy picking apart), a teenage Tonks outright says that she's not interested in romance at all and she'd rather play with her friends than have a boyfriend etc etc
And then BAM as a twenty-three-year-old Tonks falls in love with a significantly older man, and this is likely her first experience with romantic love, and it's happening during a war when emotions are already running high, and Lupin himself has been cooked in a lab to attract alternative girls with fantasies of saving an older man - which I suspect Tonks has because why is she running after an older werewolf in the first place fhsdklfsd
The fact that her Patronus changes form doesn't have anything to do with her being Lupin's soulmate because that misfortune belongs to Snape and everything with her developing identity because Tonks is still discovering herself as a young person in her twenties like what is so difficult to understand here 😭
I believe that Tonks, God help her, truly and deeply loved Lupin; I also believe that her own circumstances as a 23yo female soldier, who recently witnessed her aunt (who looks like her mother btw) kill her cousin, amplified her feelings beyond what they naturally would have been if it was peacetime.
JKR has mentioned on her twitter that Patronuses only change when you experience an immense emotional upheaval. This isn't evidence that R*madora keeps winning because Tonks was the only person in that relationship going through Real Emotional Turmoil because she's a 23yo experiencing what could possibly be her first ever situationship and people famously never fully recover from that fdhslkfsdf
Meanwhile Lupin's Patronus stays the same because he's a 36/37yo man with a fully developed personality, no arrested development*, and is probably shocked that his one-night stand with the quirky pink-haired girl is rapidly developing into something more serious against his will 💀
Me personally, I think if your Patronus changes to match your loved one, then wouldn't it make more sense that, alongside Tonks' Patronus becoming a wolf, Lupin's should have become a jack rabbit? But this doesn't happen at all! Honestly, we could have another conversation about Patronuses cast by shapeshifters because James' stag Animagus matches his Stag Patronus, and then you have both Snape and Lily with the doe - which is again more indicative of Snape's inner qualities than the jily true love narrative, because then by that logic snarry is #real because they also have paired Patronuses that btw clearly display sexual dimorphism which of course could mean nothing😩
I know you mean the war elopement thing but it's always been my headcanon that the memory James used for the stagtronus was Lily agreeing to go out with him/marry him, because these are teenagers and getting your longtime crush to go out with you can easily clear the bar for happiest memory ever when you're like 17 and have no coherent life goals.
I feel a little insane reading about jily stuff and the power of romantic true love because I was and still am disinterested in having a romantic relationship that I'm pretty sure my Patronus would be a literal bookworm given how much time I spend at the archive with 250yo papers🗿
But you're soooo right there as well! James' only goal in his short life was getting together with Lily, so of course it fuelled his stagtronus that also happened to match his Animagus form. I know the narrative talks about Patronuses as these unchanging representations of your inner self etc etc, and while I think it works for some characters - the key example being Snape's doe Patronus that persevered through two decades of espionage, bitterness, and loneliness - I don't know how well it accommodates normal changes within young people. I think it makes more sense for young people's Patronuses, assuming they can cast them, to change forms until it finally settles on a specific animal that represents their fully-developed adult personas and remains fixed until something really impactful happens later in their lives. A change of Patronus would be more striking in a 55yo witch rather than a 23yo witch, you know what I'm saying?
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