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Disclaimers
These are just my purely anecdotal observations as a longtime Wolfstar/Jily/Marauders fan who has recently spent some time mucking around in Wolfstar spaces from the aughts/noughties. I have not made any attempt to review Wolfstar fandom history in any sort of comprehensive or systematic way before spouting off like I know something in this post. Also, I wrote this on a whim in a little over an hour, so please forgive any mistakes/sparse sourcing.
My Qualifications (?)
I started dipping my toe into HP fanfic spaces as a reader in 2005. My understanding of fandom has been shaped by the time I've spent on MuggleNet Fan Fiction, FFN, LiveJournal, AO3, Reddit, and Tumblr. If you've seen this tumblr post about fandom generations, I sort of straddle the "I was there Gandalf" and Citrus Cheesecake generations. I'm much too young to have participated in online fandom when the ship first sprang into being in 1999 with the publication of PoA. Most of what I know (or think I know) about early/mid-2000s fandom comes from later efforts to locate fics from that period and learn about fandom history.
State of the Fandom
Wolfstar was a Serious Adult Ship for Serious Adult Writers
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Older fans of the Harry Potter series were naturally more drawn to the adult characters and their relationships than those of us who were reading the books as children. I at least heavily identified with Hermione as a child and grew to love Remus and Sirius more in my teens. Therefore, ships like Wolfstar that featured characters who were adults in the series attracted a much higher proportion of adult authors than ships like Harmony or Hinny did at the time. (Remember, we don't get our one glimpse of the teenage Marauders until HBP, which came out in 2005.)
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A lot of people wrote Wolfstar as a messy relationship between adults with complicated pasts. That was the whole point for them—it's what drew them to the ship. Plenty of Wolfstar authors, such as busaikko, wrote both Remus/Sirius and Remus/Snape (or Sirius/Snape).
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Marauders/MWPP-era Wolfstar was relatively less common at this point, and the long Marauders-era epics rarely included Wolfstar. There was a Marauders/Jily fandom and there was a Wolfstar/broader HP slash fandom, with limited crossover, though I should note that that split stemmed from broader fandom trends than just the higher average age of Wolfstar authors.
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I'm not super confident on this point, but I don't think the ship really took off among teens until it was popularized with a broader audience by The Shoebox Project (2004-2008), which is set in their Hogwarts years and also includes broader Marauders gen and Jily plots. That fic was able to pull people from both sides of the fandom interested in these characters.
Their canon story was unfinished
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The other major factor at this point was that the Harry Potter books were still coming out. You can clearly see the shifts between post- PoA, post-GoF, post-OotP, post-HBP, and post-DH fics featuring Wolfstar. Everyone wrote their take on what happened when Sirius went to "lie low at Lupin's" after GoF came out. OotP gave a Wolfstar shippers a ton of fodder to work with between that year they lived in Grimmauld Place and Sirius's death, and that period of their lives was fresh and raw for authors. It's what writers had Opinions about and wanted to "fix" or explore. HBP, of course, threw a bit of a wrench in things by confirming Remadora was canon, but Wolfstar shippers (obviously) carried on by either disregarding Remadora entirely or writing Remus as bisexual (previously more of a Sirius thing).
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I'll add here that before Remadora, a lot of readers thought Wolfstar was canon—the thought was that JKR couldn't have openly written a same-sex relationship into the biggest book series in the world so she'd limited herself to subtext and hints for the discerning reader to pick up on. Obviously, we now know this isn't true, but it's a completely legitimate and easily understandable reading of the text. Wolfstar is the only queer Harry Potter ship with years of history of readers thinking it was intended to be canon. See the first meta post below for more!
Fic Trends Then vs. Now
As a result of both of these factors, and probably others I haven't thought of, I'd say, overall, Wolfstar was portrayed in a much more dysfunctional, sometimes toxic way than it typically is now, when it's more popular to write a softer, sweeter Wolfstar relationship. Post-Hogwarts fics were more common, and there was a lot of enthusiasm about writing "missing moments" from the most recent book or speculating about what was in store for Remus and Sirius. Modern/non-magical AUs, previously a fairly niche genre given the focus on developments in canon, have really skyrocketed in popularity.
As someone who started out in Jily/Marauders gen spaces before discovering Wolfstar, I want to stress the massive tonal differences between the two communities during this time. Jily and Marauders gen was a fun romp, pretty clearly written by teens and young adults, that focused a lot on teen dramas and relationships. The older Wolfstar authors spent more of their time trying to tackle serious themes in a serious way. They liked to pepper in a lot of literary references, and the comment sections often turned into deep literary analyses that I personally found very intimidating and never participated in! It's been interesting to watch the Jily/Marauders fandom shift in a slightly more serious, complicated, and nuanced direction as the Wolfstar fandom has moved in the opposite direction. This trend toward the middle has coincided with much greater blending of the two groups into a more integrated Wolfstar/Jily/Marauders community. It's wild to compare the proportion of long Marauders-era fics that feature Wolfstar alongside Jily now vs. back then.
I've noticed that the average fic length in the early years seemed to be a lot shorter than in recent years. One-shots used to be the dominant format—maybe they still are, but if so it's to a lesser degree. I’m not sure whether this is a Wolfstar- or HP-specific trend or whether it’s indicative of a broader shift in fanfic. If I had to guess, I'd say one of the drivers of the length differences is the shift from slash fics in particular mostly existing on sites that were set up in such a way that each chapter had to be a separate post (e.g. LiveJournal) to primarily being housed on AO3, where it’s easier to read and write multi-chaptered fics and really long chapters.
Style-wise, there's been shift toward a more straightforward writing style compared to the lyricism common in the early days. Again, this is on the macro level! There are still plenty of Wolfstar writers today who write in a more poetic style. I just think there seems to be a bit more directness with narrative and storytelling now than in the past. The differences in average author age and word count may have something to do with this, or perhaps this is just aligned with broader writing trends in the past 20 years. I'd love to hear from someone who actually took an English class in college/university on this one!
Old-School Ship Meta Posts
These are sadly hard to track down these days, but if you want to see more then check out some of these old-school ship manifestos and trope bingo cards!
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The Case for R/S by elwing_alcyone (2003): An incredible textual analysis of Poa-OotP using direct quotes from the book to make the case for Wolfstar being canon. In addition to the insightful character studies, read this for the flashback to how much trust HP fans had in JKR's writing skills and in her care for her LGBTQ fans at that time. Oh, how she has fallen... it's so sad.
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Strange and Beautiful by blacksatinrose (2004): Another ship manifesto that focuses more on compatibility (and incompatibility) and potential than a close reading of the text. The author likes the ship precisely for their mismatch and the infinite number of stories that can be told depending on when and how you start their relationship.
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Wolfstar circa 2005 by @theprogressofspring (2016): A bingo card based on popular tropes/elements in Wolfstar fics back in the day. (They also posted a screenshot of the earliest recorded use of the name "Wolfstar"—2001!) If you want bingo cards covering more recent tropes, tumblr user @bloodyhellharry made this one and @bookspark made this one five years ago.