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Character Name: Remus Lupin
Series: Harry Potter (books)
Canon Point: End of Prisoner of Azkaban
Character Age: 34
Background: Wiki.

Personality:

Saying Remus is the best behaved of his old friends isn't saying much, but it is true. He's amiable, on the soft-spoken side, and usually even-keeled, more likely to use his considerable social intelligence to diffuse conflicts than to create them. On the whole he's terribly easy to get along with, if only by virtue of being unlikely to offend. But he's also terribly easy to underestimate. His polite, placid surface overlays mischief, dry humor, and quiet, breezy confidence, coming together into something sufficient for many of his students to ignore his patchy clothes and decide he's cool. Over the course of the year he shows up late to his first class, casually wins over a bunch of skeptical thirteen-year-olds by shooting a wad of gum up a poltergeist's nose, helps a student dress the apparition of another teacher in his grandmother's clothes, and returns the Marauder's Map to Harry as soon as he's no longer technically a professor—yet still walks away considered the responsible, mature one.

It's a gift. Or maybe it's a testament to how low his peers set the bar. Or both.

Mild manners aside, Remus is far from shy and even further from spineless, possessed of hard-earned thick skin that allows him to hold his own against shoutier types fairly well. He's all about weaponized amicable calm: he's good at lying with a smile, using manners as a shield, being assertive without ever needing to raise his voice, and pleasantly side-stepping accusations and aggression (Snape) in a way that can make other people (Snape) look foolish or paranoid (Snape) even if they're actually right about everything (Snape). If he never stood up to his friends directly, he did make them feel ashamed of themselves sometimes, and with Harry he plays the "I'm not angry, just disappointed that you're disrespecting your dead parents' sacrifice" card rather deftly.

However! Remus isn't as serene as he pretends. He's often putting noticeable effort into keeping himself contained, betraying himself with aborted movements or fumbling or brief flashes of emotions he'd have rather kept hidden. He spends most of his pagetime in the books around children, but it's reported that he watches his mouth less around Sirius. And when he is eventually pushed far enough to lose his head in front of the trio, there's some shouting, some kicking of furniture, and some blasting Harry Potter into a wall for calling him a coward. It's pretty spectacular.

Still, if his equanimity is sometimes affected, Remus's good nature and kind heart are entirely genuine. He can be cagey and short with people who pry, but as long as no one's digging into his personal business, he's warm and approachable. While his moral compass is a little askew, pointing eternally toward the people he loves instead of the people who are necessarily right, he does his best to be a voice of reason. He's principled and political, voicing opinions on things like goblins' mistreatment and the Dementor's Kiss when few others do. He's quick to reach out to underdogs, from Peter to Neville, and determined to find the good in everyone, even Snape, or at least to not dwell too much on the bad and bygones. He knows what it's like to be defined by the worst part of yourself.

The worst part of him, in his opinion, is his lycanthropy, and Remus has a complicated relationship with it. For starters, he's terrified of his transformations. Despite everything else he's seen and everything he's lost, hurting someone else during a full moon remains his greatest fear. He doesn't embrace what he is, and he's bitter about being equated with the less well-behaved werewolves who do. That he doesn't exhibit the signs that allowed Lyall Lupin to identify Greyback as a werewolf even in his human form is a testament to both Remus' tame upbringing and to his personal effort to maintain distance from what he is. Greyback can run on all fours and maul people even in human form; Remus wouldn't be caught dead.

On the other hand, however much he hates his condition, Remus doesn't believe he deserves to be treated the way he has been. He's used to it, of course. He voluntarily resigns from his job at Hogwarts without any fuss, and when his condition is so public it's printed in the paper and he can't find a job at all, he's nonchalant enough to joke with Harry about not being a very popular dinner guest. But he does care—he complains colorfully to Sirius in private, and eventually he has a total meltdown over it in front of Harry & Friends. And under all those layers of public good-humored acceptance and private indignation, disapproval of how other werewolves behave matched with disapproval of how the Ministry reacts, there's a kernel of genuine self-loathing and fear. Avoiding his widowed father to keep from disrupting his life, dodging Tonks' adamant affection for over a year, and trying to walk out on his family because he doesn't want them to have to be ashamed of him—that's not reasonable behavior, however convinced he is that it's the right thing to do. He's disgusted enough by himself that he even intentionally obscures the form of his Patronus so no one can see that it's a wolf.

When people manage to hack their way past all of his defense mechanisms and accept him for what he is, Remus is so astonished and grateful that there isn't much he won't do in return. That's a short list, back home, and Albus Dumbledore is at the top of it. The headmaster accepted him both at Hogwarts and within the Order when few others would have. In return Remus is, to borrow a phrase from Harry, Dumbledore's man through and through. Remus trusts his judgment and follows his orders without exception.

He's similarly loyal to his friends, but Remus can and does take it too far. To quote JKR, "Lupin's failing is he likes to be liked. That's where he slips up—he's been disliked so often he's always pleased to have friends so cuts them an awful lot of slack." So while he understands that some of things he and his friends did at school were dangerous and/or cruel, as long as he lives he'll never hear a bad word about James, in particular, without explaining it away or brushing it aside. (He's less indulgent with Sirius—more inclined to tell him to sit down and be quiet, at least, if not likely to tolerate anyone else speaking poorly of him—and obviously no longer at all indulgent toward Peter Pettigrew, who he'd have been just fine with murdering in front of a bunch of kids, thanks.)

In a way, he cuts himself the same slack as he does other people. His reputation and his own sense that he's a good person are so important to Remus that he's willing to lie, evade, and do some impressive mental gymnastics to maintain them, such as when he convinced himself for a full year that Sirius was escaping prison and evading capture some way other than turning into a dog, so it was fine to keep the fact Sirius was an Animagus a secret from Dumbledore rather than admitting how badly Remus had screwed up. In hindsight, he can recognize when he's been foolish. In foresight he can usually recognize it too. But after he's identified a risk, maybe even announced to everyone that it's risky, the odds are good that he's going to go ahead and do the risky thing. Yay Gryffindor.

Powers/Abilities:

■ WIZARD: Remus can fiddle with the rules of nature in the usual ways: animating inanimate objects, conjuring simple objects, transfiguring things into other things, Apparating, generating fire and water and so on, inflicting harm or warding it away, etc. He's "exceptionally gifted" at Defense Against the Dark Arts, good with handling Dark Creatures in particular, a talented duelist, and a notably quick draw. JKR specifies that he's killed at the Battle of Hogwarts because hiding out with his wife and child put him out of practice; he comes out of every other fight in canon pretty unscathed

On the other hand, he's specifically noted to not be much of a potion brewer, and in general he's less naturally, brilliantly talented than some of his peers—James, Lily, Sirius, Severus—and definitely no Hermione Granger. He can do nonverbal magic and some wandless spells, but he'd be in trouble if he lost his wand altogether. And he's limited by his own ability and memory. Spells in his world have their own incantations and wand movements and sometimes come accompanied by complex equations and that sort of thing, so just because a spell exists doesn't mean he'll know it or be able to recall it offhand.

■ WEREWOLF: Full moons make Remus turn into a large beast distinguishable from a normal wolf in only a few small ways. In that form he's very difficult to contain or kill—it takes whole teams of wizards to capture werewolves, and they're assigned the same danger classification as things like dragons, basilisks, and manticores. Werewolves remain conscious and intelligent but lose their sense of self and morality, so they might kill their closest friends without hesitating. Biting others as a wolf passes on the curse to them, if they even survive the bite, as a specific remedy involving silver and dittany is required to close the wound. In human form, biting or scratching will still leave permanent scars and might give someone some wolfish traits. Animals, however, are safe.

Being a werewolf is almost entirely a weakness rather than a strength. It hurts, it leaves him sick and tired for several days afterwards, he hates it, and he would never voluntarily use it to fight someone else. If he were given access to a Wolfsbane potion or something like it that allowed him to keep his mind intact during transformations, he might be able to use it to specific purpose instead of indiscriminately murdering whoever is nearby, but it would still hurt and he would still hate it.

■ MISC: Remus spent his late teens and early twenties surviving a war that involved a lot of secrecy, magical cloak and daggers type stuff, and never knowing who to trust, so he can hold his own in that kind of environment. For the one year that he taught, he was really good at it. And in between he spent twelve years cycling through menial low-paying jobs quickly enough that no one could notice the pattern to his illness, so he has a collection of the sort of odd skills one might acquire from a long chain of labor and service positions.

Inventory:

■ WAND: 10.25", cypress and unicorn hair, pliable. It's used as a focus and amplifier for magic. Out of a wizard's hands, it's just a fancy stick. In another wizard's hands, it would work but not be very well-behaved.

■ CLOTHES: Robes, shoes, socks, pants, trousers, shirt, sweater, etc. Mostly brown tones and mostly shabby.

■ POCKET CONTENTS: A watch, a sickle and three knuts.