Okay, so recently, an anon asked me why I ship this pairing. This is what I told them:

“First of all, I trust JKR enough to believe that she knows her characters well enough to know how they would feel about each other. It’s canon, so I ship it. That’s the short, simple answer. However, there are all of these other little (but actually ridiculously huge and important) reasons to ship these two characters.

I’d just like to quickly address the fact that I know James was a jerk/bully/downright asshole. I know this, and I totally agree that there is no excuse for his behavior. However, I think it’s clear that something must have happened to him. For Lily to even consider being with James, he would’ve had to change drastically. And she ended up marrying him, so I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t the same James Potter that we actually got to see in the books.

To me, though, even when he was a prat of a teenager, there was always something inherently good about James. He may have been a bully, but there was never anything… dark about him, like there was to Snape. To me, James was never just your average bloke. I mean, one of his best friends was a werewolf. The other came from a family of notoriously dark witches and wizards. And still the other was somewhat of an outcast who didn’t fit in anywhere else. James Potter is far from shallow. Not to mention, he doodled Lily’s initials in the margins of his papers. When was the last time you saw a teenage boy do that? I never have. And, in my opinion, that really just shows the depth of his feelings for her; that she was, quite simply, always on his mind. Lily was never just some “conquest” to James.

And, because you can’t talk about Jily without also mentioning Snily, I just need to say that, honestly, Jily has just always made sense to me. And Snily never has. Because, remember, while Lily was alive, Snape was not a good guy. At all. He was fascinated with the Dark Arts while at Hogwarts, and he went on to become a Death Eater after. In my mind, Lily isn’t the type of person to hold a grudge against someone for something they’d done if she truly believed that they had changed. I think it makes sense for her to forgive James in the books, but not Snape. She was alive to see James change right before her eyes, but it took her death to finally transform Snape’s mind and heart.

Ultimately, James humbled and changed himself for Lily, and that’s something that I will always respect and admire. Because, when you really think about it, that’s not an easy thing to do. In order to change yourself, you have to first be willing to admit that there’s something that needs changing. I think that James finally took a hard look at himself, and had to confess that he didn’t like what he saw; that, if he stayed the same, he really didn’t deserve Lily. There’s nothing trivial about James’s transformation; it was difficult, frustrating, and I’m sure that, at times, he felt like it was hopeless. But you know what? The thought of being with Lily got him through it, the thought of even being close to being worthy of her. And it was so incredibly worth it.”

Submitted by heteronsexual.