#arcturus black

arcturus black iii aesthetic [the prideful son & father]

the noble and most ancient house of black

Arcturus Black

Melania Black

Orion Black

Walburga Black

Pollux Black

Alphard Black

Cygnus Black

Druella Black

Bellatrix Lestrange

Andromeda Tonks

Harry& Archie

Awww thank you ♥️♥️

So this turned into an essay on Black family masculinity haha.

First I called it Pietas because it’s a deliberate nod to Virgil’s Aeneid (I am very on the nose with this as Marcellus is a character in the Aeniad and in chapter one the Blacks walk past a painting of Dido). In the epic, the protagonist/hero’s defining virtue (something also lauded as a prime Roman virtue) is his ‘Pietas’ which translates from Latin as Piety. But that isn’t in the modern sense, instead it’s duty and loyalty and obligation as a moral framework, the idea that you owe your life to family, legacy, reputation, and the larger order of things, even when it costs you personally. And that to me is the crux of Sirius’s character in canon- he’d die for his friends, he talks about his ‘duty’ as Godfather (and that includes eating raw rat). So I wanted to explore what he thought he owed his family before he ‘hated the lot of them’.

So for me the central marriage contract isn’t just a romance plot device; it’s duty made material, and the whole story is basically everyone colliding with the question of whether you can be a person in your own right when you are so entangled in this collectivist system (Sirius even recalls his Grandmother’s words about not being a man if he doesn’t honour duty, as a means to stamp down his doubts and fears).

So to answer the other question (I view it all through a masculinity lens).

For Arcturus and Orion, I see that relationship as a machine that manufactures a very specific kind of masculinity. Arcturus doesn’t simply want obedience; he wants a particular performance of “Black family manhood”: cold authority, emotional restraint, control of the household, and a total refusal to be seen as soft. Orion has been raised inside that so even when he’s miserable, he doesn’t really have another script. He’s also not actually the top of the hierarchy in his own life. He sits third in the pecking order under his father and his wife, which means he’s expected to embody patriarchal power while constantly experiencing his own powerlessness and so it’s a perfect recipe for repression and shame, and it’s why he’s so emotionally (and sexually) suppressed that it comes out physically; the chest pain and near panic attack, the desire to shag Cygnus’s mistress etc.

That’s also why Orion is such an interesting father to write, because he isn’t simply “cruel .” With Sirius there is a part of him that genuinely admires Sirius’s feral, self-directed masculinity that Orion has been trained to perform and yet has never been able to inhabit (It’s the same reason he’s attracted to Walburga). He’s drawn to that force of nature quality, to someone who takes up space and doesn’t apologise for it. But he also resents that he admires it, because admiration turns into a kind of self-contempt.

The other layer is that Orion actually knows Sirius quite well, in a quiet observational way while he’s not emotionally attuned in an expressive sense, he does understand that he can’t force Sirius into the marriage outright (because Sirius will simply turn pressure into refusal and defiance). And he does want him to be ‘happy’ but Orion doesn’t communicate clearly as he still reaches for the only tools he has: coldness, shame, emotional withdrawal, the performance of being above it all. He can’t meet Sirius with warmth or honest authority because that would require Orion to be his own person rather than his father’s instrument.

Melania’s absence makes all of this worse. She tempered Arcturus and she softened the family’s emotional climate, even if only slightly. Without her, the men are left alone with the machinery of Black masculinity and the looming shadow of Arcturus. And it adds another painful irony: Orion and Sirius could have bonded over Melania if things were different. They both love her deeply, and they both have these small, tender rituals of devotion; Orion spraying her cough tincture around the house, Sirius tending her roses and they both look up at the stars when they are feeling overwhelmed (just as she taught them).

But while Orion ‘loves’ his son, his relationship with Sirius is especially thorny because Sirius hits his deepest insecurity: that Orion is not in control of his own house, not in control of his own son, and therefore not really “a man” by Arcturus’s standards (and by Walburga’s as well). So the worst moments tend to happen when Orion feels particularly emasculated by the machinations of his father and his wife. He can’t hit up at Arcturus, and he can’t win against Walburga’s will, so he hits down, and Sirius is the most willful, most visible target.

And Sirius in turn, has contempt for him for it because he knows Arcturus is the true puppet master and that Orion’s authority is hollow (and also it’s exhausting to always be lectured to).

With Regulus, Orion gets to feel like a “successful father” as Regulus is the child who makes the household run smoothly. He’s compliant, polished, deferential. He knows when to speak, when to disappear, when to anticipate what the adults want before they even ask for it. In a family like this, it reads as “good breeding” and “good character” and “a proper young man.” But it’s actually survival. Regulus learns very early that safety and approval are conditional, and the condition is performance: be easy, be impressive, don’t embarrass us, don’t have needs that require emotional labour and most importantly don’ force Orion into direct conflict with Arcturus.

But while Arcturus demands absolute compliance from everyone, but he also despises the kind of man who complies too easily. Obedience is required, yet obedience is also treated as weak-willed, almost feminised, almost contemptible. So actually nobody can win in this system.