Okay, I said that at some point I’d write a dedicated entry about Shoebox, and as I’m extremely obsessed at the moment and have nothing else to do, here it is.
The Shoebox Project is basically a very large scale fanfic about selected memories from the lives of Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, James Potter, and Peter Pettigrew. It is slash, but if that bothers you the first half of the story is so subtle you can ignore it – or, in my case, not notice until something actually happens, at which time you go WAIT, WHAT? and have to read the whole thing again to pick up on all the subtext. Anyway. I feel silly calling it a “fanfic” because it’s so much more than that – it’s more well-written than most published books. Also, it contains alot of little nick-nacks, like photographs, notes, drawings, etc. Hence the name “Shoebox Project” as it is kind of like a metaphorical shoebox full of memories. There are almost ten thousand people following the Shoebox community on Livejournal. It is so much better than the real Harry Potter books that it is almost painful to think that that is where the whole idea originated.
Hmm. As it turns out, I’m really bad at this, I just can’t describe how well done the whole thing is. The style of writing is perfect, and each of the characters is just so well thought out and realistic – they even manage to make Peter likeable, and in later parts you can almost understand why he turned on his best friends so completely.
The project isn’t updated very often anymore, in fact, it hasn’t been updated since May this year, but this is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, I want more!, but on the other hand, I really don’t want to get to the inevitable end we all know it’s going to reach.
“I like to remember everything,” Remus says, very quietly, so as not to wake him. “As it was. Because moments by themselves aren’t enough; they’re just — they’re like photographs. They move a little, they wave, but they aren’t everything. You can look back on a moment and say ‘In that moment I was happy’ or, more often than not, ‘In that moment I was uncomfortable’ or ‘In that moment I was sad’ or ‘In that moment we were all berks’ but you can look back on everything and you think, ‘That was good.’ Because when all the moments come together, when all the songs meet up with one another, you get something whole and complete and wonderful, people you loved and people you hated and a fondness for them you may not be able to recapture but everything you remember about them being somehow more than they really were, because that’s what remembering everything does.”
