I regret ever reading Marauders fanfic
I was a fan of Harry Potter when the films came out during my teen years, but I hadn’t ever read all the books. I read them all last year, fell in love, then turned to fanfiction once I’d discovered I simply couldn’t get enough of the wizarding world. This is where it all went wrong. The story of the Marauders (canon and otherwise) is so utterly heartbreaking that I now find it difficult to engage with the canon texts or films at all. Now that I've read texts that center the Marauders— their childhoods, their friendship/kinship—how am I supposed to dive in and enjoy the whimsy that once pulled me in about HP when I know that: James and Lily will never know their son, Sirius is rotting away in prison, Wormtail (booooo!) betrayed his brothers, and Remus lost everyone in one fell swoop. Knowing that Remus and Sirius are suffering in the background until Harry's third year, then seeing them enjoy a very very short period of relative normalcy before both being killed is seriously just too much to handle now that I'm attached and all. Lol.
Has anyone else found that reading fanfics that center these characters makes it too damn heartbreaking to even enjoy HP anymore? It's like they ruined the original texts for me. I really just wanted to vent on here and ask if anyone else knows my pain.