I'm answering the questions posed in their lily discussion post, my answers are in bold.
Marauders Era - Before School
What do you think her childhood was like? How do imagine her parents? Snape’s memory of her as a child, suggests she knew about her magic from a young age and was practicing controlling it effectively without a wand?Compared to other characters do you think this implies she was very magically talented? Why? Why not?
My headcanons about Lily start with her class background. I often see Lily depicted as middle class compared to Snape's working class, but I personally think that she is only the barest step above him in terms of class status, and is working class herself. I headcanon Lily's parents as WWII veteran turned factory worker Roger Evans, from a working class family somewhere not Cokeworth who got a job at the Cokeworth mill and married a Cokeworth girl, homemaker Geranium Evans (who he's a little older than). The 'class difference' is literally that Roger is employed (until Lily's later years at Hogwarts, when he is laid off from the mill amidst Britain's industrial downturn) while Tobias Snape isn't. This precarity makes Roger and Geranium cling to class markers, they are striving for the impossible middle class and like to think themselves above the likes of the Snapes. The Evanses are patriotic and 'respectable'. Geranium values a neat home and cares a lot about her daughters' appearance. Roger is a bit xenophobic tbh. Lily is to some extent their favorite as the younger daughter, especially after she gets her Hogwarts letter. She is essentially viewed as the one who will make it out, the family's ticket to middle class respectability, which puts a lot of pressure on her. Lily does well in school but is a little socially awkward with her main friend being Snape. She spends much of her pre Hogwarts childhood hanging out daydreaming with him. She's kind of a romantic and enjoys fantasizing about a different life. A lot of what she and Snape do as kids is indeed practicing magic: they are probably making potions before her Hogwarts letter. She is often left to her own devices as her parents can't afford any sort of extracurriculars and her mother is often busy visiting her sisters who also live in Cokeworth. She's not popular among her classmates, seen as a bit weird and always hanging out with that one Snape kid, but she doesn't care if she's seen as weird because she has Snape and Petunia. She and Petunia are competitive but caring in their childhoods and Petunia sometimes tags along to her and Snape's adventures. Petunia and Snape however cannot stand each other and are constantly competing for Lily's affection. Lily doesn't recognize this as a kid, she's a little willfully oblivious to their rivalry until Petunia grows obviously distant from her after Hogwarts. And yeah, Lily has unusual levels of magical control and understanding of her own magic, she's a prodigy.
She also talked to Snape about his home life, as an under eleven, what does this suggest about her character?
Lily is both romantic and practical in my head. She's clear eyed and can recognize that his home life is awful and does her best to provide a sanctuary for him (complicated by the fact that her parents really don't like him and don't want her involved with him) but also doesn't fully understand how bad it is and kind of has this idea that her friendship will 'balance it out' for him. She is kind and wants to help people but is also not always aware of the most effective way of helping.
Marauders Era/First War - School
What do you imagine her friendship with Snape was like in their early years at Hogwarts? How do you think Lily felt about him being sorted into Slytherin? What do you think she thought about her own sorting into Gryffindor?
Codependent as fuck tbh. They are each other's only close friend really and they are both happy like that. They spend a lot of time fucking around with magic together. She is honestly disappointed to not be sorted into Slytherin initially, but is soon warned about the nature of Slytherin by other Muggleborns and realizes she's better off in Gryffindor, and develops a Gryffindor identity. She views Severus as the 'one good Slytherin' and willfully ignores those Death Eater connections. She'd had an image of her and Sev's friendship as being unbreakable before Hogwarts but him being sorted away from her is the first crack in that image--she doesn't realize that fully until she has to do the postmortem of their friendship post SWM.
Having been horrified by his of father is somewhat mollified by his glimpse of his mother in OoTP? His mother had been decent. How do you feel about what we see of her?
Yeah, she seems like a great person, kind, funny, and brave. She is a fundamentally decent human being! Of course I also think she needs to have her flaws, we just don't really see them in canon.
Slughorn provides us with more information about Lily; One of the brightest I ever taught. Vivacious, you know. Charming girl. I used to tell her she ought to have been in my House. Very cheeky answers I used to get back too.This makes her sound much more like Fred and George than Percy. How do you think she was as a pupil, prefect and Head Girl? What do you imagine her priorities were at school?
So Lily is interesting in school for several reasons. One is that she's pretty unique among the other Muggleborns of having had a lot of pre Hogwarts exposure to magic so she comes in at a higher level compared to her direct peers (normally automatically disadvantaged by being eleven years behind), and honestly she has a better understanding of magic than most pure blood students too. Oh, and she's also super smart. She and Snape are so far above the other students that often their classes don't really register it's so low level, lol. Similar to James and Sirius honestly. Lily was also taught to be polite and to present herself well to authority figures by her parents. So she coasts by in school without needing to try all that much and doing higher level work on her own fucking around with Snape on the weekends, but she presents well and professors don't really realize she doesn't need to put in much effort. Basically she comes across as better behaved than she is, too, she seems like she has it together when she really doesn't. She also actively tries to get the prefect position, she knows it will help her future as a Muggleborn. So Lily is popular among her teachers, who don't actually see her internal struggles and the fact that she isn't actually popular among her peers and is..actually a delinquent lol. She occasionally skips if she and Snape have weird magic to fuck around with and professors assume she's sick, she and Snape do drugs and the teachers have no idea. She takes her prefect position semi-seriously, when it involves like moral leadership, such as anti-bullying, supporting other students, and also the fun projects prefects occasionally have to do. But she won't really punish a snogging couple or be super conscientious about her rounds and boring duties. As Head Girl she feels a lot of impostor syndrome especially as she knows the professors have a false ideal of her, but she also feels a political commitment to be the best head girl she can be and tries to use her position to lead anti-fascist efforts at Hogwarts, which doesn't work as well as she'd like.
In Snape’s memories the only mention of another girl around Lily’s age is Mary MacDonald. Do you imagine Lily was friends with her? Who else do you imagine she was friends with?
OOH OK I love this question. I headcanon Lily as someone who seems more popular than she is. For most of her time at Hogwarts, she has one close friend, Snape, and then more peripheral casual friends who she hangs out with if Snape is off with his other Slytherin friends. And honestly? A lot of people see her as a Death Eater apologist due to her relationship with Snape and she has to make a new name for herself after their friend breakup. Mary Macdonald is her dormmate and one of these..honestly the only one of Lily's friends (until after Snape) to be at an equal level with her as Lily generally befriends either older girls like Marlene McKinnon (who I headcanon as 2 years above her and Lily's prefect and mentor) or younger girls she mentors. Another casual friend of Lily's is Ravenclaw Pythia MacLeish, a bit of a Seer who Lily knows from Ancient Runes class and isn't as close to her as Mary but they talk about magic sometimes (Pythia is the significantly younger sister of Pandora MacLeish Lovegood). Lily makes most of her friendships over shared intellectual interests, lol. Mary and Lily have a significant falling out when Lily takes Snape's side after Mary's attack, and Lily has to spend a lot of time repairing that relationship through her sixth year. Of Lily's female friends the most emotionally significant for her is an OC of mine called Evelyn Riddle, who is another Muggleborn Gryffindor in Lily's dorm, who sort of assumers they will automatically be friends. They aren't. Evelyn is a strong personality and Lily is also a strong personality, and they clash. Evelyn amasses a clique of other girls and is kind of Lily's rival, though they are generally cordial--just get on each other's nerves. One of their main conflicts is that Evelyn, who is of a much higher class status than Lily, judges Lily's friendship with Snape as bad for the broader Muggleborn cause (which Evelyn has very reductive and naive ideals about lol). Evelyn also wishes she was made prefect and resents Lily a little for that (and honestly might have done a better job since she is less lax about the rules and doesn't spend all her time getting high making weird potions in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom). Lily thinks Evelyn is condescending and can't understand her because of their class difference and can't understand her friendship with Snape. However, after SWM Lily and Evelyn actually start seeing each other more clearly and working together, and they end up challenging each other and influencing each other. Evelyn is also an Order member and her and Lily often worked together in the Order. By the end of the war, Evelyn and Sirius would probably be Lily's closest friends.
Marauders Era/First War - Jily
It is clear from OoTP that James fancied Lily and she was not impressed by him when they were in fifth year. Remus and Sirius reassure Harry that James matured and she changed her opinion of him in seventh year. How do you imagine that happened?
I think it was several things. First was that she became friends with Sirius in her sixth year, and this made her think more positively of James. Second was that the end of her friendship with Snape made the war feel a lot more real for her, as she'd otherwise kind of had this fantasy of it not affecting her personally though knowing intellectually it would, and she admired James' anti-Voldemort commitment and was a lot less positive towards Snape and his Slytherin Death Eater friends so James fighting them looked more like war than bullying as they all got older and it became obvious that Voldemort was recruiting the Slytherins. Third was that she and James had to work together as Head Boy and Girl and did a lot of projects to try and fight Voldemort's influence and bring the student body together and they bonded. Fourth was that..well, Lily has a pragmatic side, and was not immune to societal messaging that told her to get married quick and he was there and into her and also had a very advantageous social position.
Do you imagine James told her about being an animagus? Do you think he told her about the Marauders Map?
Oh my god yes. She ate that shit up. The Map was what truly impressed her with James and might well have gotten her to marry him.
What do you think James and Lily’s relationship was like? Sirius describes him as hiding his dislike of Snape better once they got together, does that imply a lack of honesty between them?
I want to think they were happy, though it can be interpreted as a dysfunctional relationship with lacking honesty and iffy dynamics, or as a romance. I hope they were happy, though it varies depending on what universe I headcanon out. I'm also mostly interested in Jily to get Harry, lol, as James just isn't a super interesting character to me.
Marauders Era/First War - After School
How did she get into the order? When? What do you head canon she did for them?
As I said earlier, Lily was an unusually talented student and stuck out to her professors (who didn't realize the extent of her dabbling in dark magic and illegal activity lol). So she seemed like an obvious recruit to Dumbledore as a sort of exceptional Muggleborn, who was 'well-behaved' (LMAO NO) and looked respectable and also clearly very smart, though he didn't realize HOW smart she was. But the younger members of the Order (people like Evvie Riddle!!) DID realize that Lily was, well, a magical genius on a level with Snape. And so Dumbledore didn't give her much to do except play the good, politically acceptable, assimilable Muggleborn and do a little spying at her job as a shady potion brewer at a shady AF Knockturn shop. What she actually did was crazy magical research, inventing and brewing an energy potion that would have been banned if the wrong people had learned about it and other extralegal genius stuff. The Order's Unspeakables wanted her to join the DOM. For a while Lily had wanted to be a Healer, but she didn't want to take the Healer's Oath (which requires you to never cast any offensive magic again in my headcanon) because of the war. She could have lived off of James' money but chose to get a job for her own sense of self worth and independence and also because she felt pressure to support t her parents (her father was unemployed by this point) until they eventually died (probably due to the war, haven't worked out the details yet though). Had she lived longer she would have been a serious magical scholar and experimenter, and some of the things she invented for the Order are still being used in the modern HP canon.
According to extra-canon sources, Voldemort tried to recruit Lily and James? How do you imagine Lily responded?
She was mostly horrified, but at the back of her mind a little bit flattered.
What was the first war like for her before the prophecy? Was she scared, proud, regretful, or dutiful about having joined the order?
Lily was pretty proud of joining the Order, and remained so for the rest of her life, since she saw it as fully resisting Voldemort and doing her part to create a better world (Lily was part of the faction of the Order that was pretty anti-Ministry as well and wanted to go further in fighting pureblood supremacy alongside Voldemort). However, she also struggled with the stress of combat, PTSD, hiding really sucked for her, she felt underutilized by Dumbledore especially once she was in hiding and had fewer chances to do stuff on her own or share what she was doing, and she was also deeply upset by whatever happens to her parents (not entirely sure yet).
Some interpretations see James and Lily as important ideologically and symbolically for the order (the pureblood and the muggleborn in love and harmony). Do you think that’s true? How do you imagine that pressure impacted on their relationship?
If they'd lived longer this might have become the case, but it wasn't really true at the time considering the level the war was at when they joined (very high intensity). By the time Lily and James were involved, the war was at its worst and they were long past public relations stunts and symbolic warfare. Also they weren't really prominent Order members and the Order itself wasn't well known in broad wizarding society.
James appears to put her on a pedestal, how do you imagine that impacted their relationship?
I would have hoped he got over it, but if it continued..yeah definitely difficult for them. But Lily is also used to being put on a pedestal. Sadly that kind of idealization is normal for her and she's used to coping with it. So she would have hidden the darker parts of herself and played up to his fantasy and maybe eventually snapped.
We know that she, not James, wrote Sirius a letter in early August ‘81, what do you think her relationship was like with Sirius, Remus and Peter?
Ok so Sirius is her bestie. I am a firm believer in Lilypad BROTP. She dislikes him for five years while he actually quite likes her but also gets pissed off at her when she goes against him and James, they become friends in her sixth year after bonding over Muggle music and weird magic shit, and they honestly have a more equal relationship than she had with Snape and possibly with James depending on how positive I'm feeling about James/Lily that day.
Remus and her have a good working relationship as co-prefects, though they also kind of look down on each other as James and Snape's toady respectively. As she gets closer to Sirius she improves her opinion of him somewhat and they sometimes work together in the Order (though not often bc he's off spying). On one hand she respects him for persevering through anti-werewolf prejudice and the full moons (in a kind of magic disability way on her part), on the other hand she thinks he tends to avoid responsibility for his own actions (a trait she sometimes has and tries to work on in herself). So she and Remus are never super duper close. I'm not decided whether she thinks he's a spy but she might have.
Peter is kinda there. He really doesn't like her because she spoils his ideal of the Marauders friend group and his dislike for her leads him down a route of anti-Muggleborn prejudice. Lily tries to be nice to him at first, and she does notice he's very smart in a way overlooked by his friends, but she also thinks he has a terrible personality and notices his growing bigotry. She also doesn't notice his skill as a manipulator and looks down on him. it is possible he is able to manipulate her into believing Remus is the spy.
Marauders Era/First War - Harry
Why did Lily and James have child so young in the middle of a very scary war? How do imagine Lily felt once she learnt about the prophecy?
TBQH I imagine Harry was an accident. Lily then decided fuck it YOLO I might as well take my chance to have a child, since who knows if I'll live long enough otherwise (she's nineteen and still self-centered here lol). She was scared, but also wanted the opportunity of having a child and also wanted to repair her broken nuclear family by replacing them with Harry.
What do you imagine it was like having a child in such fraught circumstances?
It sucked. Especially as she couldn't go out and see anyone and get a fucking break, and most of her female friends were dead or not having kids yet so she didn't have mom friends(Evelyn's oldest daughter is Demelza Robins who was born a couple years after the war, Mary wasn't having kids and I think she and Lily grew apart after school, and Alice Longbottom, the other mother in the Order, was much older and never close to Lily at all). But she also enjoyed certain parts of it and had fun. Like it was kind of like having a fun doll for her at points? But then the crushing reality of having brought a child who might be doomed into the world would intrude and he'd be crying and it sucked again. There was, however, a tiny bit of pride in that it was her kid that might defeat Voldemort, buried under all of the horror . She spent a lot of time coming up with fail-safes in case Voldemort got to Harry, never fully thinking she'd have to use them.
How do you imagine Lily reacted to motherhood?
She missed her own mother and her sister very much. She had complicated feelings and often felt out of her depth, though there were also parts where she was able to pretend Harry was a fun doll LMAO. She loved him intensely but often had no idea what she was doing.
How do you imagine What do you imagine the last thing she thought as confronted Voldemort over Harry’s cot? What are your head canons about her thought/action process?
Resolve. I fully headcanon that Lily had created a fail-safe in the event the Fidelius was broken to use her own death to kill Voldemort (by this point she was pretty paranoid). She didn't want to die and desperately didn't want her baby to die, but she also knew that if she played it right she would activate the ritual and possibly save Britain from fascism.
What would she have been like as a mother if she'd lived?
She would have tried her best, and probably being able to go out of the damn house, get another job, and have mom friends would have helped. But she would be pretty imperfect! Also there probably would have been some point where she would have realized she made a whole ass real human and had a breakdown. Especially given she's insanely smart and Harry, much as I love him is average--she would have been frustrated at how 'slow' he seemed and had trouble relating to him on occasions. Her teenage problems were different enough from his that it would be hard for her, and she might have some misconceptions about him as a person (as she has a tendency to sometimes idealize people and willfully ignore what she doesn't like) that she would have to undo. She also is ambitious and intellectual and might have occasionally guiltily felt having a kid was holding her career back.
What job would she have gotten if she'd survived?
Like I said, crazy magic researcher--possibly an independent scholar, possibly an Unspeakable. Maybe a Healer if the war had ended and she was certain Voldemort was dead. Especially if she felt very guilty about all the Death Eaters she'd killed.
How would James and Lily’s relationship have developed if they had lived?
It depends on how I'm feeling about their relationship. I generally think they would have stayed together and maybe had more kids, but there are definitely universes where they broke up.
What is modern AU Lily like?
Politically active, probably some kind of scientist. Also probably not married and doesn't have a kid.
