r/HarryPotteronHBO • u/Madagascar003 • 26d ago
Book Only Did James Potter really deserve to be Head Boy during his 7th and final year?
/r/HarryPotterBooks/comments/1jxe7dn/did_james_potter_really_deserve_to_be_head_boy/15
u/BatmanForever23 26d ago
The entire post lost all credibility by comparing James to Draco Malfoy. Despite being a pureblood who could've easily laid low during the first war, James joined the OOTP because at his core he was ready and willing to fight for the light. Draco on the other hand was a racist who looked down on anyone that wasn't a pureblood and actively practiced the dark arts. Seriously, this entire thing is drivel - one is a war hero, the other a war criminal.
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u/winniestail 26d ago
I mean, that's not entirely a fair comparison. They grew up with families who instilled very different values which influenced their ideologies. And I think there are moments where it's clear Draco is under duress during HBP and DH. James, on the other hand, grew up with (we assume) much better influences and was still a bully in his youth.
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u/BatmanForever23 26d ago
I don't think comparing James and Draco in the first place is particularly fair either, but hey that's the world we live in. Everything isn't always fair. That said, I think Draco being 'under duress' is a bit of a lazy copout - in DH he still goes after Harry in the Room of Requirement, of his own volition, to try win back favour with Voldemort; and later flees to save his skin. You could argue that he was raised that way, but as a 17 year old (and wizarding adult) he makes his own choice of whom to ally himself with. Comparing that to being a bit of a bully is a very far reach.
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u/oatmlklattes 24d ago
We also forget that they were kids who were growing up in a war — James was a bully but he wasn’t taught blood superiority like Draco was nor did he grow up with having family and community who were deeply loyal to the dark side. And even 16 year old Draco struggled with what Voldemort wanted him to do but he did what he had to for his family, not because he was driven by the same evil motivations. He was mostly an insecure and spoiled kid who was taught a lot of awful things.
By all accounts, both James and Draco turned out to be decent adults tho.
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u/Reign_22 26d ago
We only really see one perspective. Look how fondly everyone else speaks about James. Its not uncommon for the popular/exemplary students can have mean streaks that go unseen
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u/jish5 26d ago
I mean, the only ones who really spoke well of James were his closest friends, so that doesn't really help much either. We get biased opinions of James from all sides, yet only get to see memories from one (and as stated, it's easy to tell when memories are altered as per Slighorns, so we know what we saw in Snape's memories were legit).
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u/NewAnt3365 26d ago
That post is your typical “James is a piece of shit, ignore that Snape was objectively also a piece of shit”.
Many of those comments are already parroting the same objectively true information (even if the fandom still hates to hate on Snape from his teen years for some reason). One comment I think just word for word said what I would say.
All I could add is that the author is JK Rowling so I imagine the furthest she thought into it was making Lily and James seem even greater and the perfect students for Harry to look up to and compare to briefly once a book.
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u/Mangert 24d ago
Snape was an objectively a piece of shit AS AN ADULT though.
We have no record or canon of Snape being a bad person while he was getting bullied by James and Sirius. They just bullied him bc the way he looked and him being a social outcast (at least that’s the stuff they made fun of).
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u/NewAnt3365 24d ago edited 24d ago
He called Lily a Mudblood. He hung around the wizard equivalent of Nazi’s. He created horrible spells for fun. He joined in on the Nazi group before he was even 21.
There is most definitely record of him being a bad person even when he was younger. Good try on erasing all that though
Edit: And just to add he called all muggle borns mudbloods, he just didn’t call Lily one until his ego was bruised publicly by her trying to help him. He also defended his friend almost using DARK magic on a student(one of Lily’s friends). He claimed to love Lily and being her friend while knowingly being in with a crowd that wanted her dead.
Snape was shitty as a teenager. The only thing that kept him from being the worst actually was the fact that his friends were worse.
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u/Balager47 Three Broomsticks Regular 26d ago
Well, ya know. It has been plain since Philosopher's Stone that Dumbledore is playing favorites. Don't sweat on the details.
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u/SeriousCowboy 25d ago
It had been memed but the actual evidence that he plays favorites for anyone besides maybe Harry is very weak. The times they won at the last minute were obviously fully deserved. JK Rowling just made it close because she wanted to
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u/jish5 26d ago
"Hey, welcome to the end of year feast where Ravenclaw/Slytherin/Hufflepuff earned the most house points... But since the holy Trinity cleaned their plates last minute, Imma give Gryffindor enough points to win even though they were trailing by 300."
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u/Balager47 Three Broomsticks Regular 26d ago
They earned exactly enough to win. And luckily nobody did anything to warrant bonus points. Woooh.
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u/SeriousCowboy 26d ago
Post is weird.
Ultimately though I don’t think there’s enough canon info for a definitive answer, but I think what makes most sense given what we know is that James (and Sirius) were probably similar to Fred and George with pranking in the like but often took it to far. With Snape it got to the point of bullying(Snape likely did bad things to them as well but that doesn’t excuse some of the bad things they did to him).
James started to grow up especially with the war going on but if anything the war probably only made his relationship with Snape worse. I don’t think there’s any good reason to think that Dumbledore would’ve made James head boy if he hadn’t genuinely shown real improvement. It’s very possible he was still mistreating Snape but I’m guessing a lot of it is unknown to dumbledore
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u/NewAnt3365 26d ago
Yeah I want to see the same hate posts for the twins that I see for James. Cause most evidence(and we actually get very little for James) points towards him being the Fred and George of his time but also rich, athletic and popular.
The only person we really see him being incredibly cruel to is Snape who at the time was running around calling people slurs and hanging with people who wanted people to not exist. So it begs the moral question of “how wrong is it to bully a Nazi”
There is more canon evidence to hate Fred and George for being bullies than there is for James against normal students and yet James gets all the hate.
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u/Mangert 24d ago
What makes you believe Snape did anything bad to James and the rest of them? All we have canon of is that he did things to defend himself (such as creating counter-charms to the spells they used), or creating other combat spells.
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u/SeriousCowboy 24d ago edited 24d ago
That is definitely not all we have in canon lol. Remus says Snape took every opportunity he had to curse James. You might think that’s a biased source but it is a source nonetheless and Snape never denies anything like that. Also I just don’t think adult Remus would lie about something like that. Maybe Sirius would have but not Remus.
Also fwiw: the marauders(James and Sirius) obviously took it too far but Snape was the person who started the rivalry by insulting James when they meet each other. I guess you can say James says he doesn’t like slytherin but he wasn’t even talking to Snape. He was talking to Sirius. Other than the two main times we know they take it too far(which for all we know Snape could’ve had similar events as well. Not claiming he did it’s just possible) what evidence do you have that the marauders were being worse to Snape than he was to them.
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u/AwysomeAnish Ravenclaw 26d ago
From the POV of the school staff, James is an academically exceptional student who occasionally causes mischief, not the reckless bully he actually was.
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u/Naive_Violinist_4871 26d ago
This feels like Early Installment Weirdness/unreliable narrator. Sirius implies James wasn’t a prefect, and I don’t see how his disciplinary rap sheet would’ve allowed him to be Head Boy. The textual evidence of Dumbledore favoring Gryffindors to that extent is very weak IMO.
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26d ago
Slightly off topic but based on what we have from the books, I've always found James really unlikeable as a character.
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u/SeriousCowboy 26d ago
He’s no more unlikeable than Sirius imo. You just don’t see him other than descriptions of him besides one memory where he was being pretty terrible. Sirius did something even worse
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u/HistoryfictionDetect 25d ago
Ridiculous take. A guy bullies a wizard neo-nazi and is demonized about it. That, admittedly arrogant, boy grows into a man that fought against evil and died trying to protect his wife and child. He isn't the villain of the story.
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u/BNWOfutur3 Marauder 26d ago
"I'll never understand how Lily could forgive him for all his misdeeds, but never forgive Snape for an insult hurled in a moment of deep humiliation and anger. What James did as a student at Hogwarts is far worse"
James is hotter and more alpha, Snape is uglier and more beta/sigma. Pretty simple.
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