#bc i v firmly disagree w the notion that the wizarding society is patriarchal

[padfootastic]

Your point about how others would view Lily and Lily’s friendship made me think of something. We learn in DH (the chapter where Snape gives his memories to Harry), that two of Snape’s friends used Dark Magic on Mary MacDonald (McDonald? I don’t have the book in front of me and I can’t remember the exact spelling) and Snape just brushes it off as a joke, but this conversation happens in private, so nobody else would know that Lily has issues with Snape’s friends and their activities/morals. Lily later mentions a Mary when she comes back down after he plans to stay outside the Gryffindor common room, so it’s presumably the same Mary. It made me think, what would Lily’s other friends (she’s with a group of girls in SWM and she says none of her other friends can understand why she still talks to him) and her dorm mates think of her continued friendship with a guy who is also friends with two people who attacked their other dorm mate?

see this is something i wonder quite often!!!!

while im not often a fan of equating anything irl with anything in fiction bc it messes w my escapism, i do end up looking at irl examples to contextualise how things might work in the WW. and i keep thinking of someone who knowingly and uncompromisingly hangs out with someone who is basically seen as scum, in all way, while at the same time snubbing the popular kids of a particular group—and i’m gonna be honest, i don’t see it ending that well for them.

there’s a couple more dimensions to this as well. privilege and inequality is layered, right? lily’s a girl snubbing a guy, for once, and if i set aside my theory that Sexism Doesn’t Exist in the ww, it changes things a little too. james is popular, well liked, and an overall good guy by everyone’s measure. to see lily loudly and, often nastily, rejecting him might create this perception of a lofty, arrogant girl with aspirations ‘beyond her station’. not saying it’s right ofc but it happens often enough irl—‘she’s just jerking him around, who does she think she is?’—that it’s a possibility.

there’s, of course, the whole blood purity angle. lily is a muggle born and if i juxtapose irl behaviours to the ww, i think most wixen could be divided into two categories. the outright bigots who want to exterminate/remove/subjugate the muggleborns and the liberals who won’t really say it out loud but hold similar beliefs, either due to culture/tradition/history. they’ll never do anything to actively help the MBs but will always side w their brethren sort. the former would obv use any excuse to decry a loud, confident muggleborn like liky whereas the latter would be hemming and hawwing about how ‘don’t you think she’s a little Too Much? maybe she doesn’t know our traditions—why would she reject james potter? he comes from such a distinguished family, he has all the right qualities…really, i’m not against, them, ykno but if i were here, i would not do that—and shit like that. she definitely loses out on the social hierarchy aspect with respect to james.

and there’s the other thing, like u mentioned. what do the kids themselves think? here’s a muggleborn who’s apparently smart enough to gain certain professors notice and admiration, who comes to school breaking implicit social norms by hanging out with snape, goes on Not Caring about it, publicly rejects & insults the popular guy(s), all of this while presumably doing what is needed to justify/explain her friendships & actions AND navigating a new world as an outsider.

i think even one of those things might’ve led to some form of social exclusion/ostracisation but together? idk man. it really doesn’t seem likely that she had a smooth sailing lol

oh there’s also. the fact that all her disagreements with snape were in private (which makes sense considering they were, ykno, between the two of them) but if she was (possibly) defending him in public but disagreeing in private, then that creates more problems, no? because everyone can see that she’s ok with him but not the other side and that would just lead to more Not Fun things for lily imo.

there’s also the whole angle of ‘what next?’ what happens after she cuts things off with snape? because from everyone’s perspective, the only reason she does so is because he calls her mudblood. because she got personally hurt. not when other muggleborns were being targeted, not when snape was being a dick to people not her—how would her roommates, mary macdonald, feel?

so yeah, so many thoughts around this whole thing lol it’s just fun to imagine. there’s more i was thinking of about AU scenarios where james gives up on her and she’s basically all alone after the swm scene but i cut it off because it was getting unnecessarily long lmao

if u read it til the end, have a cookie bc idk how u managed 🍪🍪🍪

#sorry this ended up way too long for anyones interest 😭😭😭 #my apologies if u didn’t want a weird socio-political analysis of something we have barely any info on lol #the gender thing is something i added for the sake of neutrality lmao #i don’t actually believe it tbh #bc i v firmly disagree w the notion that the wizarding society is patriarchal #it’s not really rooted in anything canonical but i’ll still defend it to death lol #to be clear i’m not like. bashing lily here or anything at all for once #i’m just trying to explore a what if situation where wixen dynamics were similar to irl ones #and how she would be perceived by others #(keeping in mind these are teenagers who are notoriously thoughtless short sighted and cruel) #pen’s asks #i accidentally typed penne asks just now and lowkey considering keeping it lol