Tonks feels that she is obsessed with Remus to the point that she prefers to die with him in the war with Remus than to raise Teddy, whom she left with his mother Andromeda Tonks.
Am I the only one who felt that way about Remadora? I don't like the couple; they would seem very toxic to me in real life, Tonks being emotionally dependent on Remus.
And let's not mention the age difference, I don't like Tonks' insistence on being with that useless Remus.
Do you like the remadora ship? Sorry if I asked, but I'm new to your blog.
I find this couple extremely problematic for many reasons, and honestly, I don’t think the decision to pair Tonks with Remus was planned from the beginning, it felt incredibly forced. But above all, it led to the complete erasure of Tonks as a character and of her independence as a woman and narrative subject.
Tonks is introduced as a skilled Auror, charismatic, full of personality, and with a narrative presence of her own. She is an independent character, and that individuality is shattered the moment she falls in love with Lupin. She basically turns into his lapdog, following him around, desperate for his attention. I find it deeply troubling that a female character is turned from a fully realised subject into a mere extension of a male character with greater narrative weight. But what’s worse is that Rowling’s concept of love seems to involve a young woman essentially harassing an older man and completely disregarding his boundaries. Because Remus tells her “no”, and she refuses to accept that no. And no means no, no matter how much you like someone or how little you’re convinced by their reasons for turning you down. But just as Rowling frames Harry/Ginny as the ultimate couple—despite Ginny having stalked Harry her entire life—or portrays James and Lily as peak romantic love even though James literally blackmailed Lily into going out with him, she repeats the same toxic, problematic dynamics when it comes to Remus and Tonks.
Apparently, for Rowling, love means overriding people’s boundaries and consent, or at least putting them on hold “in the name of love”. There’s definitely room here to dig deeper and analyse just how much her view of romance is shaped by patriarchal ideals, but that’s not the point right now.
What matters is that Tonks goes from being a promising young woman with a career as an Auror to a girl chasing and chasing after a man thirteen years older than her, a man who says no repeatedly. But she doesn’t care. And the most outrageous part is that it’s not just her, everyone in the Order seems to agree that Remus should accept the relationship, regardless of his reluctance. There’s group pressure, because obviously, how could anyone possibly want to be alone in the Harry Potter universe? As if people couldn’t be happy without their heterosexual partner and nuclear family. In the end, Remus gives in, in the middle of this toxic, borderline non-consensual mess, and Tonks stops being Tonks. She becomes Remus’s partner and the future mother of his child.
Exactly what happens to Fleur too: a character we meet as strong, independent, smart—a Triwizard Champion, no less—who once she gets married, is reduced to a background wife. Everyone seems to forget she was once brave enough to move to another country, work there, and learn a new language. Once she’s married, she becomes just “Bill’s wife”. This is a recurring pattern in Rowling’s world: women seem to lose all ambition and independence once they get married, and they’re not allowed to exist as individuals beyond their husbands. Tonks suffers this fate exactly, her role as an Auror or Order member becomes irrelevant. Now she only exists through Lupin and for Lupin’s development. She is made entirely subordinate to him.
And it doesn’t stop there. She also becomes part of one of the most grotesque subplots in the whole series: Tonks is 24 years old (and I’m sorry, but a 24-year-old getting pregnant by a man pushing 40 is problematic whether people like it or not), and she gets knocked up by this greying man, and he abandons her. It’s the most disgusting subplot in all seven books. A cishet man gets a much younger woman pregnant and bails because he’s scared. AND THE NARRATIVE FORGIVES HIM. Rowling actually has the audacity to portray Remus as if he’s repented, and suddenly everything’s fine.
Tonks is turned into this pitiful, spineless woman with no self-respect who just forgives the man who left her in the middle of a pregnancy—with all the emotional, psychological, and physical toll that pregnancy takes on women—because he was too much of a coward. A man abandons you and you practically thank him for coming back??? It’s insulting. It’s a slap in the face to women, plain and simple. That whole scene is dripping with patriarchal, macho nonsense. It reads like something out of a trashy soap opera.
And then she gives birth and goes off to war, postpartum, to die. That’s not bravery, that’s J.K. Rowling being a piece of shit and not respecting her female characters.
So no, I can’t stand Remus/Tonks. To me, they’re the epitome of a toxic, deeply problematic couple.
