How do we solve a problem like Jily?
If you’re in the Harry Potter fandom, there’s one pairing you will see everywhere no matter how you participate. Whether you’re a gif maker, fanfiction writer, or whatever way you get into the fandom, you don’t have to be around for long until you realise that one of the most –if not the most– popular pairing is Jily. That is James Potter and Lily Potter, née Evans. You get a lot of cute fan art of them, adorable headcanons, people talking about them doing sweet things together and generally acting like cute dorks, the usual things you find when people are celebrating their favourite ships. It’s pretty much recognised everywhere as the perfect ship that are sweet and perfect for each other and any disagreements are seen as just cheeky banter between the two of them.
The problem is, there are a lot of things that people are overlooking about their relationship and the fact is, it wasn’t a healthy relationship. The fact that this is being seen as something ideal, something perfect (or at least close to perfect) and when you think about it, this is a very worrying view to have about their relationship. Personally, I don’t see how James and Lily could have had a healthy relationship whatsoever.
First of all, we need to look at how James actually views Lily. From reading the scenes with James and Lily, there seems to be more of a possessive want, and certainly not feelings of love and tenderness. For one thing, James calls Lily by her surname, “Evans”. There are only two situations where people call each other by their surnames, one is out of respect and is always preceded by a title (e.g. Mr Weasley, Professor Dumbledore), or when they’re on bad terms, such as Draco and Harry calling each other by their surnames. Everyone else who’s on friendly terms generally calls each other by their first name. So, Lily and James are on surname terms, we know that still by 6th year they don’t get along due to the fact that Lily calls him an “insufferable toerag”. So, they don’t get along.
In the Order of the Phoenix, we see James Potter doodling a snitch and writing the initials L.E. either on it or next to it. The quote is as follows:
“Harry stared at Wormtail for a moment, then back at James, who was now doodling on a bit of scrap parchment. He had drawn a Snitch and was now tracing the letters ‘L.E.’. “
Perceptive as ever, Harry. Now let’s bear in mind that on the Quidditch team, James Potter was a chaser, not a seeker. He’s often seen with a golden snitch that he’s recalled as having in his words “nicked” (stolen). So, what’s the importance of this? I don’t know about you, but I found that teenagers with crushes usually put their initials in hearts, or perhaps would write something along the lines of “Mrs Lily Potter”, but in a snitch? The snitch was something he stole, because he could, that he played with, because he could. He would deliberately show off the snitch in a display of arrogance, to show off that he stole it and nobody else could do anything about it. So this is how he’s seeing Lily. Something he can take, something to have and show off because he can. To me, this suggests that he was seeing Lily as more of a trophy than anything else.
We all know that James Potter had a power complex. He felt this need to show off displays of masculinity and power. He would show off the snitch just to show that he’d done it, he undressed Severus Snape in public just to show that he could. J.K. Rowling has even specified that James suspected that Severus had a crush on Lily (remember at no point in the books does Severus explicitly tell Lily that he has feelings for her) which is why he bullied him even more. Already he’s attacking another boy that he sees as a potential threat to a relationship with a girl he doesn’t have, who doesn’t actually like him. There was an unhealthy power complex he had, where he felt the need to show off that he was the most powerful, which I think we need to bear in mind as I move onto my next point.
Harry often wondered if James forced Lily into the relationship.
“How come she married him?” Harry asked miserably. “She hated him!”
Let’s look at James and Lily’s relationship as a whole. They met when they were eleven, and James and Sirius teased Lily at this point as well as Severus for their relationship. Up until the age of sixteen, Lily didn’t like him and refused his advances, even saying she’d rather date the giant squid than him, and bad mouthing him to Severus. Lily and James Potter died when they were twenty one years old while protecting their son, so let’s assume that they got married before Harry was conceived, this would have meant that they will have got married between the ages of nineteen and twenty. I know we change a lot during puberty, and often the person we are at thirteen is very different for the person we are at sixteen, but we need to consider the time frame here. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen, they didn’t like each other and towards the end it was just Lily who had a strong distaste for James. So for five-six years Lily positively hates him then suddenly in the space of three-four years he manages to marry Lily and get her pregnant? In fact they started dating when they were seventeen. A lot of people may be thinking “she saw his good side” and “she forgave him”, but part of me wonders if that is the case, or whether she was coerced into a relationship.
Looking at Severus’ worst memory, we see evidence of this.
“I will if you go out with me, Evans.”
This was James’ response to Lily asking James to stop hurting Severus Snape. Now, no matter how you feel about Severus or what your opinions of him are, we can all realise that he was Lily’s best friend and that she did love him and care about him. This line is often dismissed as him ‘being a dick’ and ‘just asking her out in a bad way’. What was he doing at the time? Hurting and undressing her best friend to humiliate him. I’m rather sure that if somebody came up to you, or anyone, and say “hey, unless you date me I’m going to hurt and sexually assault your best friend in public for a laugh”, I’m pretty sure you’d be outraged, immediately blogging on Tumblr about how entitled and horrible this guy was, how you were essentially sexually harassed and threatened into a relationship, right? Exactly.
Even if Lily did end up having feelings for him and getting into a relationship willingly, this still says a lot about him, his attitude towards Lily, his attitude towards women and relationships.
“But he grew up!” people say. “James was the better man, he was just a dick as a teenager!” First of all, I want to point out that I’m not saying that Lily should be with Severus Snape, I don’t think that would have been a good relationship either. We’re looking at James and Lily. Do we see evidence of James Potter growing up? No we do not. I will give it to him that he cared about the Marauders, and he clearly loved his son as he gave his life willing to protect him. But did he grow up? He told Lily he stopped bullying, but he continued. Also, we need to understand that he didn’t just bully someone for a few months as a teenager, no, he bullied and harassed someone for seven years straight. It wasn’t a case of him getting better, although Sirius said that at first, he then admitted that James continued hurting and bullying behind Lily’s back. (Order of the Phoenix, page 738) So he was in a relationship with a girl that he tried to threaten into a relationship, bullied for a certain amount of time, lied to by hurting others behind himself to feed his power complex and showed evidence of wanting to own her rather than love her.
These things are constantly overlooked when discussing Jily, and people are just seeing them as the perfect couple who were both wonderful people in a loving relationship which isn’t what happened at all.
I think this constant romanticisation and glorification of Jily as the ideal relationship actually is quite a damaging and potentially dangerous idea to have, and it’s a particularly dangerous lesson to teach young boys. It’s saying that you can threaten, and bully, and sexually harass and assault, but as long as you have friends and you’re good looking and charming you might just be able to make them fall for you in the end.
I don’t think there’s any way that their relationship could have been healthy. Even if James Potter was a good friend and father, he showed a power complex, coercion, a desire to own more than be in a relationship with someone and overall a very unhealthy attitude towards love and relationships.
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