Two Views of James Potter
The first was written largely in response to smallpotato’s response to my fiction “Liberacorpus”, and examines canon parallels to the actual actions we see James take.
The second re-examines James after Snilysocanon took me to task for being unduly unsympathetic.
“James the Bully: Canon Parallels”
We are privileged actually to view James in action three times. Chronologically in James’s life, they are Severus’s meeting him on the Hogwarts Express, SWM, and his death at Riddle’s wand.
Every action we actually witness James Potter take has a parallel elsewhere in canon.
James says, “Who’d want to be in Slytherin?” Like Draco Malfoy says about Hufflepuff.
James is obsessed by Lily Evans, who rejects him. Like Severus, acto Jo a bully.
James attacks an individual while backed by a gang of three, the most sycophantic of whom is a rat-faced boy named Peter (Piers…) P. One of his cohorts holds the victim immobile while James presses the attack. Like Dudley Dursley.
James uses Levicorpus to hurt and humiliate someone. Like the Death Eaters do at the Quidditch World cup.
And James as a father, presented at his most sympathetic (from the unsympathizing perspective of Tom Riddle) … is shown indulging his son, and trying, unarmed and unsuccessfully, to protect his wife and son from someone armed with magic he can’t possibly combat. Like Vernon Dursley confronting Hagrid.
Everyone, EVERYONE, whose actions parallel James, is presented canonically as a bully.
One can even find parallels between James and Umbridge: using innocuous-seeming spells to torture (assigning lines / using Scourgify to waterboard).
Then there’s one more parallel. James is described to us as a dark-haired, charming boy, “exceptionally bright”, attractive to both his contemporaries and his teachers, regarded with distrust by his Transfiguration teacher but generally receiving such acclaim he makes Head Boy. After years of his gang’s terrorizing other students, and after successfully covering up at least one overt crime he’s involved in—releasing a Dark creature on unsuspecting potential victims. And the headmaster never suspects him.
Like Tom Riddle.
Maybe I’m misremembering. Maybe there’s some scene, somewhere, in JKR’s fiction that doesn’t compare James Potter to the worst of the worst. (Come to think of it, now we have the prequel: anyone come up with any parallels to that?)
One more piece of evidence about James: the dog that spends seven years adamantly refusing to bark in the night. I grew up in a small town of about 10,000 people (about the size of Britain’s Wizarding community per the fabulous Jodel). My father committed suicide when I was 11. For about a year after, no one mentioned him to me. But after that—my father had previously been well-respected and loved, and people told me so. My 7th grade civics teacher tried to talk me into becoming a lawyer, like my dad. The librarian talked about his involvement on the library board. A police officer told me how my dad spent his limited free time researching forthcoming legislation and letting the department know how it would affect their duties. And so forth.
Who ever talked to Harry about his parents? Even Remus wouldn’t, before Sirius. We know for sure that Minerva, Filius, Horace, Hagrid, and Poppy were on staff while Harry’s parents were at Hogwarts; it’s probable that others were as well. And none of them but Hagrid, not a one of them, ever found a good word to say to a hungry orphan boy about his parents? That beggars the imagination, unless it’s a case of “nil nisi”. (Note that Horace, in contrast, won’t shut up about Lily. Which makes one wonder a little why Minerva and Filius did.)
Hagrid managed to snag photos for Harry’s album, presumably from his parents’ old friends, but none of those friends ever once tried to contact the boy. It was the Weasleys who took him in and acted as surrogate parents. When Harry received attention, it was for being the ‘Boy-Who-Lived’—not for being James’s son (except for Sirius), not for being Lily’s son (except for Slughorn). Just how “popular” were Harry’s parents, anyway? Was it the same popularity as Dudley and his gang enjoyed, per Harry—that nobody cared to disagree with them openly, for fear of being hurt?
Minerva, not knowing Harry was listening, did talk about James to Filius, Hagrid, and Fudge. She did NOT confirm Lupin’s sycophantic statement that James and Sirius were “the best in the school in whatever they did” (OOTP) or “the cleverest students in the school” (PoA): she says that they were “exceptionally bright” (note: “bright,” not “the best,” even in her own field, Transfigurations, which was presumably the Animagis’ best subject and James’s wand’s strength, per Ollivander).
What James and Sirius WERE the best at, per Minerva McGonnagall, was at making trouble.
And Minerva was probably at school with Tom Riddle, which is quite a standard of comparison.
We know who did talk of James to Harry: Quirrelmort, Dumbledore, Hagrid, Sirius, Remus under Sirius’ influence, and Severus. As for Severus—for two years Snape DIDN’T throw the despised James in Harry’s face, whatever he might have felt. The first time Snape mentioned James to Harry was when Severus caught Harry returning from a forbidden, hazardous excursion (which the boy had indulged in only for his own entertainment), lying about it, and reveling in having frightened and assaulted a fellow student. Sound like the behavior of anyone Severus had known as a child?
Regarding the assessments of James: the only one who doesn’t have an obvious axe to grind is Hagrid, and we know that Hagrid’s greatest flaw is his absolutely uncritical admiration of “interesting creatures”. With which we can, apparently, class James Potter.
Hoo boy. Does JKR have ANY idea what she wrote? Talk about Bad Boy Syndrome!
The Children of Privilege: Reconsidering James and Sirius as Tragic… Whatevers.
Um, sorry, the word I should be inserting here is ‘Heroes, ’ and I can’t. But it can be argued, as in the Greek tragedies, that James and Sirius brought about their own destruction because of a single tragic flaw. Hubris is the classic flaw of Greek tragedy: that form of arrogance which consists of believing one is smarter or stronger than one’s fate, that one can get away with overstepping the bounds of mortals.
And overstepping is always what James and Sirius were ABOUT. But the thing is, they were the golden boys, the children of privilege: they were raised to think they could get away with overstepping. And for years they did. But eventually….
Did you ever see the short (extremely so) animated film, “Bambi Meets Godzilla”? I’ve seen it several times; once was in a seminar as the example of what happens when one’s fantasies meet reality. As the opening credits roll, we watch Bambi gamboling on a spring meadow, while sweet music tinkles in the background. Then Godzilla’s foot comes down, splat, and the closing credits roll.
One could say that that’s what happened to James and Sirius.
I had a very long exchange with a Sirius fangirl (Nyxfixx) last year which altered my understanding of Sirius. Not that she got me to like him, or to forgive his treatment of Severus. But she did get me to see that his mind worked fundamentally differently from mine in some ways, and that behavior I saw as inexcusable, in fact criminal, was not ill-meant from his point of view.
It was not meant at all.
I may need to extend that charity towards James.
My grudge against Sirius was two-fold. I could wrap my mind, barely, around the thought that sending Severus to Remus in the Shrieking Shack was not attempted premeditated murder. It was hard for me to grasp that idea, because it seems intuitively obvious to me (as it did to Severus himself) that the expected, normal, predictable result of sending a sixteen-year-old into an enclosed space with an unconfined werewolf is a dead (or mutilated and infected) sixteen-year-old. So one would not do it unless one wanted that result. But Sirius was thoughtless and careless; maybe he really was stupid enough to imagine that Snivellus would just get a scare.
But afterwards he must have realized that he’d endangered Snape’s life, and he should have been sorry. And he clearly wasn’t: “He deserved it,” Sirius told Harry.
Similarly, I could see a bunch of reckless teens thinking it was cool and exciting to roam the countryside with a werewolf. Unlike them, but like Hermione at fourteen, my first thought is ‘That’s incredibly dangerous! OMG, what if he got away and bit someone!’ But I could understand, and maybe forgive, a bunch of thoughtless boys NOT worrying about that.
Until the first time it almost happened.
But that they continued to let the werewolf out to play after “many” near misses indicated, to me, that they were near-psychopathic criminals. They repeatedly, callously, endangered the lives of every student at Hogwarts and every villager in Hogsmeade, for no reason but their own idle amusement. They committed the same crime for which Hagrid was expelled and Tommy should have been: loosing a lethal monster in an inhabited area.
What Nyxfixx kept saying and saying until it finally sank in was, ‘But nothing really happened! Why should Sirius be sorry or worry about something that didn’t happen?”
Now see, that’s fundamentally—I do mean, FUNDAMENTALLY—foreign to my mind. I usually think—a lot—about things before I do them. I do sometimes do or say things on impulse or without adequate forethought; and I did that more when I was sixteen than now. But then I think about it afterwards; I have to. Especially if it seemed a mistake or a near-disaster.
If I’d been stupid enough to let a werewolf out to romp in the streets of Hogsmeade or the grounds of Hogwarts, the first time it almost got away and killed a courting couple or old lady out gathering moonlit herbs, I’d have been sick with horror for days. As Lupin apparently was in retrospect. I would have felt, each time afterwards that I let out the wolf, that I was playing Russian roulette—at best, one round closer to an inevitable disaster. Keep playing long enough, and disaster WILL occur.
(Note: speaking as a math major, statistically, letting out the wolf is not strictly the same as Russian roulette, in that each near-miss does not make a fatality next time more likely. But I would have felt it did. Which means that, for me, the only way I could have continued to let out the wolf is if I were a psychopath who put my entertainment above other people’s lives. You know, like Tommy.
You understand, there are times when I’ve put my selfish interests or my feelings above other people’s feelings, if never their lives. So I can understand doing that, putting my interests first. I can’t understand simply not thinking about probable consequences to others, even after having my nose rubbed in those consequences, because I can’t imagine not thinking. Eventually, at least, even if I flew off the handle at first. Sooner or later my mind catches up and starts calculating probable consequences, including ones I seem to have escaped this time, whew! Not thinking of consequences at all? In anyone whose intelligence bests Gregory Goyle’s? Does not compute.)
What Nyxfixx made me realize is that for Sirius, each near-miss had the OPPOSITE effect.
The fundamental thing that Nyxfixx made me realize about Sirius is that he was a child of privilege. He spent his childhood being sheltered from the consequences of mistakes he made. So he grew up believing that any mistake could be put right: he never really BELIEVED in consequences past mending.
And part of that is that Sirius grew up with magic—and intention does matter in magic, except when it doesn’t. What does Bella (possibly Sirius’s babysitter) tell us about the Unforgivable Curses? “You have to really mean them.” But Sirius thinks that applies to everything: if he doesn’t intend a consequence, he’s blind—almost literally—to the idea that it might happen anyhow. Even if it’s much more likely than what he did intend. Like sending another kid to meet a werewolf and sincerely expecting no worse to happen than that the other kid will be scared.
When Sirius said, “He deserved it,” in POA the eavesdropping Severus thought Sirius meant, “Snape deserved to be torn to pieces” for the high crime of trying to garner enough evidence of the Marauders’ crimes to turn them in to the headmaster and get them expelled—as Harry was trying with Draco in HBP. This interpretation is natural enough, I contend, since being torn to pieces is both the most probable result of going down a tunnel with a werewolf, and what would have happened in reality had James not intervened (per James, Severus, and Albus). So I don’t hold Severus wrong for thinking that way, and for being a tad annoyed that Sirius is reiterating his belief that Snape deserves to die horribly for interfering with Sirius’s criminal schemes.
But I think now that what Sirius really meant was, “Snape deserved a good scare”—and that Sirius STILL, years later, didn’t quite understand (or admit to himself) that he almost killed the other wizard.
Further, Sirius (and James) HATE Dark Magic. And they really seem sincere in thinking that so as long as they’re not using Dark Magic, anything goes. As I pointed out in another post, it’s actually worse from the point of the view of the victim to be tortured by a common household spell than by the Dark Arts: if one is to suffer torture flashbacks, which is worse: having the trigger being someone yelling “Crucio” or someone saying “Scourgify”? Which trigger is one more likely to encounter frequently in the WW?
But Sirius (and James) really seem to think that THEY’RE not using Dark Magic, they’re not INTENDING evil, therefore it’s impossible that evil results will occur.
And every time they got away with something—whether letting out the werewolf or torturing other students—for them, it just reinforced that they are golden, that they can control the consequences.
In his heart of hearts, Sirius truly believed that consequences are controllable: that if he doesn’t MEAN harm he hasn’t committed it.
And James is mostly the same. True, James had sense enough to rescue Severus from being killed (and Remus from probable execution, and Sirius from a life sentence in Azkaban). But James, too, is golden; he grew up indulged. As a teen, he got away with criminal behavior (torturing other students, becoming an illegal Animagus, letting out a werewolf in an inhabited area) with no serious consequences. And he successfully fooled the Headmaster, weathering the investigation into Sirius’s attempted manslaughter with Dumbledore getting not the least idea that the Marauders are Animagi who’ve been letting Remus out to play among the unsuspecting villagers and students.
So of course, three or four years later, James would be vulnerable to the suggestion (from Pettigrew?) that if he and Sirius could so easily fool Dumbledore, they could fool You-Know-Who, the wizard who dasn’t take Dumbledore on. Because that’s really what using Pettigrew as the Secret-Keeper relied on—rather than using Dumbledore, who couldn’t be taken or broken unless their whole side had irrevocably lost anyhow, they’d play a shell game with Voldemort. And they were so sure they could pull it off, they had no backup plans at all.
Which, from the point of view of someone who always broods over possible consequences and failures, is unthinkably remiss. From the viewpoint of a golden boy, who’s used to luck breaking for him, it’s natural.
*
Now, to backtrack to myself: I’m the child of an alcoholic and a suicide. Anyone who’s lived in the alcoholic brand of dysfunctional family learns that the drunk always claims the morning after that they didn’t mean anything bad they’d done the night before. And for years the child agrees, it doesn’t count (except it does) because they didn’t really mean any harm. It was the drink speaking and acting; it shouldn’t really count. What COUNTS is what they MEANT, their innocent intentions.
(Translation: being affected by their misbehavior, however egregious, is wrong of YOU. Get over it already; forget it! They have, after all. They didn’t mean to hurt you, so it’s wrong and perverse of you to insist that you were damaged by their words and actions.)
If one ever becomes healthy enough or hardened enough to resist that argument, “I meant no harm” becomes the ultimate red flag.
Which leaves me peculiarly ill-suited to like the Marauders. In tormenting other students, the Marauders didn’t mean any harm; they were just relieving boredom. In loosing the werewolf, they didn’t mean to endanger innocent people; they just wanted to get some kicks. In relying on their own cleverness to fool Voldemort, James and Sirius didn’t mean to make Harry an orphan; they just thought they could pull it off. After all, they’d pulled the wool over Dumbledore’s eyes for years, and he’s smarter than Voldemort.
Even years later, in dragging his feet in taking the Wolfsbane that night, Lupin didn’t mean to almost kill three kids, to allow Pettigrew to go free, and to condemn Sirius to remaining a fugitive; he just wanted to wind Snape up a little.
See, it’s a philosophical or personality difference. I, after watching (and enduring) the damage my alcoholic (but charming and attractive) mother inflicted, find it HARDER to forgive someone who “meant no harm”—but did it, repeatedly, anyhow, and used the pristine innocence of their intentions to insist they should be let off the hook to do harm AGAIN—than to forgive someone who DID mean harm, but who subsequently repented and tried their hardest to make amends.
Sirius and James versus Severus, in effect.
