Lily (was Complimenting a character )

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 184418

Lynda:
> 
> Does it? Lily "puts up with" listening to Snape insult every other
muggle-born witch/wizard than her. She turns her back on the trio for
years, simply due to her friendship with Snape. She only turns from
him when he publically insults her. <snip>

Carol responds:
This is one of those points on which people will never agree, but I'll
state my views anyway. By "the Trio," I assume that you mean James,
Sirius, and Remus, but, of course, it was really a tight friendship
between James and Sirius, the two boys who (respectively) tripped and
insulted Lily's best friend, Severus, on the Hogwarts Express before
they even got to school, with Remus (their friend because he was a
werewold--how cool!) and the tagalong sycophant Peter as members of
the foursome about half the time. If Lily "turns her back" on MWPP,
for example, refusing to sit by Sirius when the Sorting Hat makes her
a Gryffindor, she has good reason. James and Sirius are troublemakers,
Remus becomes the schools's most ineffectual Prefect (well, maybe Ron
gives him a run for his money), and Peter is probably beneath her
notice. Sirius ignores the girls who admire him for his looks; James
shows off for everyone but especially Lily. He hexes people who annoy
him "because he can," and he and Sirius sneak up on Severus and
publicly bully and humiliate him, two on one.

Now, granted, Lily says that Severus calls other Witches and Wizards
"Mudblood" (though we never see him doing it), and he does use the
term for Lily in a moment of torment and humiliation, to his lasting
regret. He also has friends who use Dark Magic, but there's no
evidence that he does it himself. She tells James that he's as bad as
Severus is. Severus has been her friend since they were nine or ten;
he's loved her all that time. James is "an arrogant toerag," a
show-off and a bully. Exactly what Lily is supposed to see in him, or
the foursome, I don't know. I don't think it's so much a matter of
turning her back on them as of having no interest in them (at least
until, against her will, she starts feeling a sexual attraction to the
athletic and somehow charismatic James). Those boys ignored her until
she became a Gryffindor and insulted and mistreated her best friend
just because he exressed a desire to be in Slytherin, which he had
been told was the House for brains (with Gryffindor, apparently,
characterized as the House for brawn). *Of course* she would loyally
stay by her old friend (though apparently not publicly--she seems to
have associated more with girls, a la Cho) than hang around with a
group of boys that included two self-described "arrogant little
berks," a quietly ineffectual Prefect who never stopped and sometimes
joined their mischief, and a simpering, apparently talentless nobody.

I'm no fan of Lily, but I certainly understand why she wanted nothing
to do with MWPP for her first five years (and perhaps even her sixth)
at Hogwarts. The mystery is why she ever married James at all. Surely,
the absence of prejudice against Muggle-borns was not sufficient
reason to fall in love with him.

Carol, wondering what Lily thought when she found out (no doubt
post-Hogwarts) about her future husband's midnight adventures with a
werewolf