James and Intent

[dumbledore11214]

No: HPFGUIDX 186976

Carol:
<SNIP>
And just a note here: It's probably not the best idea to base our view of a
character on what other characters say about him or her as opposed to that
character's own words and actions (and even those can sometimes be deceptive).
The good comments about James are balanced by the bad ones, not to mention that
James's friends and admirers were either unaware of what he was up to on
full-moon nights or sharers in his mischief.
<SNIP>

Alla:

As I said upthread, I totally understand why people would want more of good James, but I also disagree that it is not *the best idea* to base the interpretation of the character on comments of other characters.

Canon is closed, and I do not see anywhere in the books that comments about Good!Adult James were counteracted as mistaken.

I mean, really if Lily's comments about James as toerag should count as judging James' character (and I think they should), I also think that her marrying him and the way she talks about him in her letter to Sirius also should count as judging his character.

I certainly do not think that the opposing interpretation is worth any less than mine, but mine is also based on canon, even if it is what other characters *say*. To **me** it is enough, but I totally get why for some people (or many people) it is not.

And I also wanted to add it somewhere, so this seems as good place as any about another reason why I totally buy reformed James. Well, of course as an aside  I never thought of him as totally bad guy in school and believed that his interactions with Snape are at least in part based on his hatred of Dark Magic, so it is not like I have to buy the transformation from horrible James to great James, however I certainly think that he did bad things in school as well, so I did think that he needed to grow up.

So anyway, I think of James as good guy because I think of Harry as good guy and no, I do not think Harry has his best features from Lily and worst from James. I think kids inherit a lot of character traits from his parents and I think a lot of good in Harry is from James too.

It is the same reason why I was not in the slightest bit surprised by Molly's display of magical power in DH. I always knew she is very powerful witch, the fact that she is a mom of Charley and Bill showed me as much.

And basically to me, since I think that Harry is basically a good guy with a lot of admirable qualities (and some bad too of course), his parents could not be bad people, to me they just could not. Flawed people, yes, but to me, not bad at all.

JMO,

Alla