#anti james potter should be called anti classist jerks

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I doubt James changed that much tho. Sirius said it himself—he only deflated his head a bit. A bit yeah. And stopped hexing other students. Who wasn't Snape. So maybe he matured slightly. But his entitlement, arrogance and skewed sense of nobleness stayed. He still thought he was THE MAN for fighting in a war. I can only see his parents dying having a genuine impact on his personality change. Nothing else much. He only became more tolerable for Lily.

He didn't even have to change much, to be honest, since she was already kind of attracted before. And she had just ended her friendship with Snape. I don’t know; there were a lot of external factors that might have influenced their relationship and the reasons it started. Not because James became a great guy. Maybe Lily was just lonely. Scared because of the war and her muggleborn status. Charmed by James. Impressed by his slight change. Validated by his values too. A few shifts in circumstances can work wonders.

My problem with using Lily as an excuse to show that James changed is that I don't think using women as a moral compass for men is morally acceptable, because it denies women the possibility of being morally questionable, having depth, or being morally gray. It denies them the ability to be people, reducing them to those sanctified figures typical of patriarchal imagery, like the Virgin Mary or Beatrice in The Divine Comedy. Those ethereal beings placed on the highest pedestals who are not human but divine concepts to be attained. And I'm sorry, but I find that incredibly misogynistic. It's putting the responsibility of reintegrating men into society on women, an extension of motherhood that goes beyond children, imposing the task of reforming toxic masculinity as if we don't have enough to deal with with our own issues.

So, sorry, but I don't buy that rhetoric. To believe that a man has changed, it’s not enough for me to know he got a girlfriend and that she’s a good person. I’ve known many amazing women who dated literal pieces of shit. One of my best friends, who is an incredibly capable, efficient woman who’s worked really hard in life, has a boyfriend that none of her friends can stand because he's literally an idiot. And he hasn't stopped being an idiot just because he’s dating someone decent. To believe a character has changed, I need to see it. There must be proof. You have to show me, not tell me, which is the first damn rule of writing. And no one shows me that James Potter changed. All I have is what his friends say, clearly conditioned by being his friends and accomplices in his behavior, and the fact that he married a woman who was supposedly a paragon of morality. But that doesn't prove anything to me; it’s not convincing. It’s not enough.

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I hate to be the one to say this, but there’s no way Lily Evans was a feminist. I honestly doubt she even knew what the concept meant. Let’s be real—no self-respecting feminist would want to be anywhere near a guy like James Potter, not even within a ten-kilometer radius, much less marry him. I’m not the one saying it—Simone de Beauvoir is.