#i loooooved this ask (clearly haha) ty<3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[jilyesplz]

I'd love directors thoughts on -

“You don’t care what anyone thinks of you. You’re funny—you always have been, even when it drove me nuts to think it...you’re the most loyal person I…”

She saw the instant he realized she was crying. She felt it when he reached for her, hand trembling before she shoved it away. She heard it in the way his voice hitched, in the desperation that laced between the cracks in his anger when he said, “I don’t know what that means.”

Whew ok toughies…below the cut :)

So I have a lot to say on quote 1 that I want to wait on, but for now….I pulled these compliments from Lily’s keepdown letter + Jules’s in-character asks, because I wanted them to be things that i knew TLAT Lily loved, as well as just being true. Yeah, she doesn’t want to do this, but she’s Lily, so if she sets out to compliment someone she’s not gonna half-ass it. But I also wanted them to feel a little disjointed, a little less-than, just not quite getting at The James Potter Phenomenon, because this isn’t a moment of real intimacy, it’s manufactured by this woman whose philosophy about human relationships is really, really different than Jily’s.

Re #2…Double whew. 

Okay, so I really really really wanted the hate me/like me Jules snippet in this chapter, because it (and the SWM snippet, but that’s in 3) were the reason I decided to give them this fight (also because I’d never written a real jily fight before! How’d I do lol) but for a long time I thought it wouldn’t work because (1) either James had to think she hated him, which seems super unbelievable with their characters, or he’d pretty much have to figure out she had feelings, and that wasn’t how I wanted that to happen; and (2) I just couldn’t see a world where TLAT James could react that cavalierly to Lily crying (and presumably to making Lily cry). This solution came out of trawling Jules’s in-character blog answers at 4 am lmfao—it kept standing out to me in J’s answers that when he calls Lily insane, what he means is that he doesn’t understand her, and it drives him absolutely spare (and turns him on so fucking much) because he’s a genius. He understands everyone.

On that note, the fight was originally going to dig a lot deeper into James’s frustration/bafflement/hurt over why Lily didn’t tell him about Carlotta rigging the thing. My personal fav of the bits that ended up on the cutting room floor came out of that:

“But I told you to chuck Harper!”

“I’m not like you, James. I can’t just…do what I want to do.”

“What I—what I want to?!” His hands clenched on nothing. His eyes raked over her face. “I never do what I want to!”

But I digress. The point is, James is so used to not understanding her, he’s so convinced that Occam’s Razor doesn’t ever work with Lily and she’s completely incomprehensible to him, that it just doesn’t occur to him to use process of elimination to say ‘well, since I have months and months of friendship to go on and also she’s Lily and she doesn’t hate anyone, ipso facto she must like me.’

Also, in his defense, he didn’t know she was crying, or even really that she was hurt, until she turns around and looks up at him and he’s hit in the gut with Big Bad Emotions (on top of his existing Big Bad Emotions and very inconvenient arousal) that don’t make logical thinking any easier. Her tears make him horribly sad, because he hurts when she hurts, and angry, because Lily in pain makes James want to tear castles to the ground, and desperate, because he doesn’t know what he did wrong, because he has never understood (because Lily has never admitted) how much power he has to hurt her. Which, for the record, goes both ways.