There's A Lot Of Fluff About How Harry Shows No Sign Of Trauma From His Upbringing But Maybe It's Because

Your values usually mirror the values of your closest loved ones. And neither James, Severus or Petunia were particularly kind so the idea of her being this saintly role model doesn't fit the picture.

Hi I have read many of your James posts and so far I agree with all of them. What gets me wondering however is someone like Lily Evans - potrayed as the saintly morally good character - dating someone like James - an entitled bully who kept his jerkish behavior even after he supposedly changed. Who do you think she was? Did she excused James's behavior because she found him attractive and thought she could change him? Or that he would change for her? Was she downplaying his faults because she fell in love? Or was she simply too naive? I cannot believe a person who would marry a person with so many faults like James wouldn't also be far off from being jerkish themselves. And what about her relationship with Severus? Was she as attached to him as he was? Why was she friends with him for so long if she was excusing his prejudice for years? I'm so conflicted about her. The author implies she is something but the text kind of goes against that. As someone who is pro snape and knows Lily was a big part of his life what do you think about her, her motives, actions or relationships? I love your opinions a lot btw never stop sharing them😄

I looove to talk about Lily because her character sucks. And not because of her, but because HOW Rowling portrays her. Sooo.. Lets go! Lily is emblematic of a significant issue in the series: the tendency to use female characters as tools for male development rather than as complex individuals with their own arcs. In Lily’s case, her character functions primarily as a moral barometer—she exists to reflect the “goodness” or “badness” of the men around her. Her choices and relationships with James and Severus are less about her own desires, values, or growth and more about how they impact these two men. This framing does Lily a disservice, stripping her of agency and interiority while simultaneously burdening her with the narrative role of deciding who is worthy and who is not

Rowling’s portrayal of Lily is heavily idealized. She is the perfect mother who sacrifices herself for her son, the brilliant and talented witch who stands out even among her peers, and the moral compass who chooses “good” (James) over “evil” (Severus). This construction paints her as infallible, a paragon of virtue, and the embodiment of love and selflessness. However, this saintly image is rarely interrogated within the text.

The problem lies in the dissonance between how Lily is presented and the decisions she makes. If she is meant to represent moral perfection, her marriage to James —a character whose flaws remain evident even after his supposed redemption—creates a contradiction. James, even as an adult, retains the arrogance and hostility that defined his youth, particularly in his continued disdain for Snape. If Lily was as discerning and principled as the narrative suggests, why would she align herself with someone whose values and behavior contradict the ideal of Gryffindor bravery and fairness?

This contradiction weakens her role as a moral arbiter, making her decisions feel less like the result of her own judgment and more like a narrative convenience to validate James’s redemption. By choosing James, she implicitly forgives or overlooks his past bullying, signaling that his actions were excusable or irrelevant to his worthiness as a partner. This not only diminishes the impact of James’s flaws but also undermines Lily’s supposed moral clarity.

Lily’s role mirrors a common, harmful trope: the woman as a moral compass or fixer for flawed men. Her purpose becomes external rather than internal—she isn’t there to pursue her own goals, ideals, or struggles but to serve as a benchmark for others’ morality. It’s as if Lily’s worth as a character is determined solely by her relationships with James and Severus rather than her own journey.

By failing to give Lily meaningful contradictions or flaws, Rowling inadvertently creates a character who feels passive and complicit. Her saintly veneer prevents her from being truly human, as real people are defined by their contradictions, growth, and mistakes. Yet Lily is static, existing only to highlight James’s "redemption" or Severus’s "fall."

This lack of depth reflects a broader issue with how women are often written in male-centric narratives: their stories are secondary, their personalities flattened, and their actions only meaningful in the context of the men they influence. It’s a stark reminder of the gender bias present in the series, where women like Lily, Narcissa, and even Hermione are often used to drive or validate male characters’ arcs rather than having their own fully developed trajectories.

Regarding Lily and Severus relationship, their bond begins in a world where both feel alienated. Severus, growing up in the oppressive and neglectful environment of Spinner’s End, finds in Lily not only a companion but a source of light and warmth that he lacks at home. For Lily, Severus is her first glimpse into the magical world, a realm that she belongs to but doesn’t yet understand. Their friendship is symbiotic in its earliest stages: Severus offers Lily knowledge of her magical identity, while she provides him with acceptance and validation. However, this connection, while powerful in childhood, rests on a fragile foundation—one that fails to evolve as their circumstances and priorities shift. When they arrive at Hogwarts, the cracks in their bond begin to surface. While Lily flourishes socially, Severus becomes increasingly marginalized and becomes a frequent target of James Potter and Sirius Black. This social isolation only deepens his reliance on Lily, but for her, this dependency becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

It’s important to recognize that Lily’s discomfort isn’t only moral; it’s also social. By the time of their falling out, Lily has fully integrated into the Gryffindor social circle, gaining the admiration of her peers and, most notably, James Potter. Her association with Severus, now firmly positioned as an outsider and a future Death Eater, risks undermining her own social standing. While her final break with Severus is framed as a principled decision, it’s difficult to ignore the role that social dynamics might have played in her choice.

It’s worth considering that Lily’s shift toward James wasn’t necessarily a sudden change of heart but rather the culmination of an attraction that may have existed all along, one rooted in what he represented rather than who he was. James Potter, as the embodiment of magical privilege—a pure-blood, wealthy, socially adored Gryffindor golden boy—offered Lily something that Severus never could: validation within the magical world’s elite.

Though Lily was undoubtedly principled, it’s plausible that, beneath her moral convictions, there was a more human, and yes, superficial, desire for recognition and security in a world that was, for her, both wondrous and alien. Coming from a working-class, Muggle-born background, Lily would have been acutely aware of her outsider status, no matter how talented or well-liked she became. James’s relentless pursuit of her, despite his arrogance and bullying tendencies, may have been flattering in ways that bolstered her sense of belonging. James’s attention wasn’t just personal—it was symbolic. His interest in her, as someone who could have easily chosen a pure-blood witch from his own social echelon, signaled to her and to others that she was not only worthy of respect but desirable within the upper echelons of wizarding society.

This dynamic raises uncomfortable questions about Lily’s character. Could it be that she tolerated James’s antics, not because she believed he would change for her, but because she enjoyed the social validation his affection brought her? Interestingly, this interpretation aligns Lily more closely with her sister Petunia than one might initially expect. Petunia’s marriage to Vernon provided her with the stability and status she craved within the Muggle world. Both sisters may have sought partners who could anchor them in environments where they otherwise felt insecure. For Petunia, that meant latching onto the image of suburban perfection through Vernon. For Lily, it may have meant aligning herself with someone like James, whose wealth, status, and pure-blood background offered her a kind of social and cultural security in the magical world.

If we view Lily’s relationship with James through this lens, her character becomes far less idealized and far more human. Rather than being the moral paragon the series portrays, she emerges as a young woman navigating an uncertain world, making choices that are as practical as they are principled. While it’s clear she disapproved of James’s bullying, it’s equally possible that his persistence, confidence, and status were qualities she found increasingly difficult to resist—not because they aligned with her values, but because they appealed to her insecurities.

It’s also worth noting that Lily’s final break with Severus coincided with her growing relationship with James. This timing is telling. Severus, a social outcast from a poor background, represented the antithesis of James. By cutting ties with Severus, Lily not only distanced herself from the moral ambiguities of his choices but also from the social liabilities he represented. Aligning with James, by contrast, placed her firmly within the Gryffindor elite—a position that would have offered her both social protection and personal validation. And this whole perspective is much more interesting than her image as a moral compass for the men around her. Unfortunately, as with many of her characters, Rowling didn’t put any effort into giving us definitive answers; she just insisted on that unhealthy, idealized view of motherhood and the idea that everything is forgiven if you're on the "right" side and rich and popular.

Sorry for the long text, but whenever the topic of Lily comes up, I tend to go on and on, haha.

HP META MASTERLISTS

Hey! Here is a huge master list of all my favorite Harry Potter character analyses and Metas! 

I DID NOT write these! Please do yourself a favor and check out some of the wonderful and intelligent writers of these metas as they deserve all the praise for their hard and impressive work!

If anyone of the writers for whatever reason wants me to remove their meta from this list just tell me and it will be done!  

Some of these may be contradictory to each other but that is because I like to hear other interpretations. These may not line up exactly with your view of the characters (not all of them line up with mine) but please try to be respectful.

*Almost all of these are from Tumblr except one from reddit and one from a outside blog.

Enjoy!

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I love a blushing, giddy, nervous-around-Harry old Voldemort.

my favorite type of tomarrymort is actually Voldemort at the ripe age of 70 discovering feelings of true love compassion towards Harry and suddenly acting like a giddy teenage girl who writes about her crush with added hearts in her diary

real

regulus is not posting books and sad boy poetry on instagram he’s spreading propaganda on 4chan

Still, to appease the more radical purebloods and future death eaters, Snape must have internalized some of that anti muggleborn propaganda that Voldemort was spewing and the hatred his Slytherin friends were spreading. Although I'm aware that majority of the wizarding society held some superiority over muggles and I even believe many of the so called good purebloods (like the Potters) were condecensing to muggleborns sometimes, tho unknowingly, there is a difference between quiet prejudice with no ill intent and the radical bigoted beliefs that some of the wizards held. The death eaters clearly believed that muggles were human sickness and muggleborns were no better and Snape was around that rhetoric every day and later became part of its circle. I always just saw Snape as a selfish person who tried to gain more power and a sense of belonging and he was insecure enough to believe many of the bigoted beliefs that was part of Voldemort propaganda or just the overall hardcore prejudice. He called muggleborns mudbloods even when he was Lily's friend. I always imagine him as someone who would dismiss Lily's feelings about slytherins and even gaslight her about Voldemort's propaganda and her worry behind anti muggleborns rhetoric. Like he downplayed it while participating in it at the same time. We can see this with any real life prejudice existing in our world. Many people who are homophobic try to create reasons for disliking gay people and when gay people complain about their hatred, they just downplay it, make it seem like its not that big of a deal or just continue with their excuses. I can see Snape being like that. And even if his reason for joining death eaters had nothing to do with violence and hatred, he became part of it anyway and being part of something like that influences the way you think especially if you wanted to be part of it. He also became part of it during the time the violence was already known and that certainly did not stop him so he must have had some prejudices or highly ignorant beliefs towards muggleborns.

It seems like you're very determined to apply a strictly logical, real-world mindset to a fictional, fantasy world. I get that imagining a Severus Snape with deeply ingrained, extremist, anti-Muggle biases would make more sense in a real-world context and may feel more "realistic". But that wasn’t the point of Snape’s character. This is a story, and not everything needs to follow real-world logic exactly. Even in reality, not everything unfolds as expected. Snape’s character is, in many ways, an exception—he surprises audiences frequently and makes choices that don’t always align with his past actions or logical expectations. Some of these contradictions seem deliberate; Snape has to exist in this gray area for the story to hold its depth and ambiguity.

So, while Snape does associate with future Death Eaters and, at times, seems to justify their actions, that doesn’t mean he fully internalized all of their views or intended to act exactly like them. Lily did a similar thing, in a way: she mentions that she often tried to excuse Snape’s behavior or overlook his mistakes. But we wouldn’t conclude that Lily agreed with or had adopted Snape’s beliefs. Another example is Peter Pettigrew, who is almost Snape’s opposite. Peter was sorted into Gryffindor, the very house that upholds Dumbledore’s ideals and values. He surrounded himself with people destined to be future Order members, yet look at what he became. Peter didn’t just reject his friends’ beliefs; he betrayed them completely and was loyal to Voldemort for years, even plotting his friends' deaths and stayed loyal to Voldemort for years afterward, to the point of risking Harry’s life for Voldemort's return.

I don’t deny that Snape held biases and some prejudiced views, whether as a teenager or a young Death Eater. But, as I mentioned in my previous post, there’s no solid evidence that he was an extreme racist, a torturer of Muggle-borns, or someone who delighted in the idea of “cleansing” the wizarding world.

As a personal opinion, I also feel that comparing real-world homophobia to anti-Muggle sentiment in the wizarding world isn’t quite the same. Muggles and wizards have a long, tumultuous history, and at one point, Muggles persecuted wizards to the extent that they had to hide their world to ensure safety and survival. This isn’t a distant past—Hagrid even mentions in Philosopher’s Stone that Muggles would likely exploit wizards if they discovered their powers. So, while homophobia is irrational and baseless, anti-Muggle sentiments in the wizarding world, however wrong, are somewhat rooted in historical fear and survival. It’s no surprise, then, that the wizarding society hasn’t fully let go of its anti-Muggle biases, even after the wars.

Every time I see someone in the fandom joke about Harry being an “attention seeker” or “dramatic” I think about that one post that says that Harry goes through a lot of problems women face (people calling you a liar/dramatic/an attention seeker when you’re in pain and suffering). Because how the hell is both canon AND the fandom calling him dramatic after everything he experienced and went through.

(If anyone knows the post I’m talking about and has the link please please please send it to me, I would love to reread it but idk where it went.)

Sometimes people don’t realize they experienced abuse but the effect from it is the same.

I don’t think Severus knows what James did to him was technically SA, and even if someone told him, his pride and shame would not let him accept it.

I didn’t know that the guy I dated when I was 21 was gaslighting me and psychologically abusing me either, or that because of him, I had spiraled into severe depression. But thanks to my therapist, I realized that he was—and that doesn’t change the fact that I went through psychological abuse.

Everytime I see Snape posts that include Rickman's face I get the urge to cry and throw up.

Snirius AU! idea where both of them survive the series and Sirius cannot deal with the idea of Severus being a hero who basically saved the entire world from the shadows and even less so that Harry is now grateful to him. More of that: that Harry went from despising him to respecting him and has basically become his #1 defender to the point where you can’t even breathe a slightly negative word about Snape in front of him without Harry going off. The jealousy is eating Sirius alive, diva-level, feeling completely replaced and displaced and meanwhile Severus is somewhere remote in Muggle England where no one can find him, deeply depressed about having survived — because dying was literally the only thing he wanted — and he absolutely does not want to see anyone from the wizarding world ever again because he’s completely, utterly done with all of them and hate all of them and expend his days avoiding everyone.

I’m just leaving this prompt here. Now you authors go and make magic.

Omg yes

I may or may not have spent a lot of time scrolling through your incredible blog yesterday 🫣

You are incredibly talented and I’ve loved reading your hot (intellectual) takes😍🤓

I know you’ve mentioned you’re not a fan of Dramione, what are your thoughts on Lucius/Hermione?

I was a skeptic until I read ABitofWits writing which is *chefs kiss*

thank you very much for the asks, anons!

perversely, i am compelled to back this because lucius is so transparently a wife guy.

the problem i have with many of hermione's non-ron pairings is that they tend to assume that what she's looking for is a man who's smooth and sophisticated and ambitious [which is why ron is usually - in such stories - turned into a boor with sawdust rattling around in his head] and which turn her into someone who's similarly polished and perfect in turn.

whereas what she clearly wants is to be able to be herself [annoying] around a man who uncomplicatedly adores her.

she and narcissa are very different people - obviously - but since lucius is arthur weasley's narrative mirror and ron is very like his father [aka: a stone cold legend who is devoted to his missus and clearly fucks like a champ] we can assume that he has many of the same traits which canonically attract hermione to ron.

[and narcissa's clearly not only spiralling in half-blood prince because she's worried about her son but because she's suffering withdrawal symptoms...]

hermione's having the time of her life, lucius is prepared to throw hands if anyone dares to point out that his new girlfriend is a nightmare at parties because she simply has to have the last word all the time, and draco is sitting on his bed staring into the middle distance and wishing - for the first time in years - that voldemort was alive.

hot!