So, I don't have an issue with what little we see of Lily Evans in the books, even during SWM. Now, do I think she was right to leave him to be assaulted? No, absolutely not. Severus was wrong to use a slur, Lily had every right to be hurt by it and to sever their friendship because of it, but she (and every other bystander in that scene) should not have allowed a boy to be sexually assaulted regardless of what he said. She should have, at the very least, gone to get a teacher. Lily Evans did not make the correct moral choice in that moment in my opinion. However, I do not require characters to always make good moral decisions for me to like them. Probably what fascinates me most about Lily is how she is so dogmatic and sure of her beliefs that she cannot accept that she can be wrong. A great example of this is when she and Severus are talking about what Mulciber's did to Mary MacDonald. Now, we don't know what he did was, it's never specified, it could have been a prank or it could have been worse, Lily only says it was Dark magic. Severus points out that the Marauders do horrific things to him, and Lily basically says it doesn't really count because it's not Dark magic. Girl, Severus gets waterboarded with Scourgify, that's against the Geneva Convention, you are sliding down a slippery slope. But she's not lacking in confidence! and I'm always fascinated by characters like that (which is probably why I roll my eyes every time Remus Lupin shlumps across the page, maybe if he started biting people I'd like him more).
There's also the fact that she's literally from the 70s and that was a fucked up time. Like, there's a reason why late Boomers and Gen X-ers on TikTok says shit like, "We had a great childhood! We got to play all day and weren't allowed to come back until the street lights came on, and okay, Timmy was murdered by a serial killer and I found his body in a drainage ditch, but at least I wasn't an iPad kid!" I'm not going to expect a Boomer to think like someone from the 2020s. Lily would not have recognized what happened to Severus as sexual assault. He was a boy, and that's how it was in those times. Were there people who did view it as sexual assault regardless of gender? Absolutely, but they were the exceptions to the rule and not the majority.
No, my issue is with JK Rowling herself. Because she is writing these scenes with the hindsight of someone in 2003, when it was written, and she's writing this for children. This is where I stop being a Watsonian and become a Doylist, because if Rowling is going to write something like this for children she needs to be responsible for how she presents it. I don't expect adult media to follow these rules. If you want to write the nastiest, most fucked up things that would make even the Marquis de Sade blush and you're writing for adults? Go for it. But what Rowling does instead is this: in GoF we see this same spell being used against a Muggle woman, her nightdress is flipped over and her underwear is exposed. This is a scene that is supposed to elicit disgust because it is presented as sexual assault. In OotP, James Potter threatens to remove Severus's underwear and then the memory cuts off because Severus finds Harry's nosey ass. Rowling knew damn well she could not finish the scene where James strips Severus naked in a children's book published in 2003 (she probably very well could have in 1976 though), she knew it was wrong. But she didn't do enough to show why it was wrong. Harry is repulsed by seeing the bullying and having the scales ripped from his eyes, not by what James was about to do, and when Sirius and Remus are like, "oh no, that was the worst he ever did, but he got better, and Snape gave as good as he got," Harry is relieved and able to brush what he saw aside. This is not the same horror he felt when he witnessed the Death Eaters use levicorpus against the Muggle woman in GoF. But it should be, because they were both instances of sexual assault.
