#sorry this was SO LONG but i've been holding onto this blog post foreverrrr and i've had so much to say about it (obviously)

[superfallingstars]

Oooh I’ve been trying to find a good reason to bring up this (quite critical, but very interesting) blog post I read awhile ago about how the series “grows down with Harry” – meaning, how the overall tone of the series gets darker as the books go on and Harry gets older – and how this tonal shift unintentionally recontextualizes some of the elements of the earlier books. The author focuses on the differences between how Fred and George are framed in the earlier books vs. how the Marauders are framed by OotP to prove this, and points out how some of the twins' behavior is pretty dark:

The Twins do too many horrible things for me to list them all, but they are consistently depicted picking on those younger and smaller than themselves, usually, but not always, members of their own family. The most persistent victim is Ron. The Twins start with childhood ‘pranks’ (they give him an Acid Pop that burns a hole through his tongue, and try to get him to make an Unbreakable Vow that would probably have killed him) and continue into adolescence; they destroy his confidence when he becomes part of the Gryffindor Quidditch team so thoroughly that he can’t play properly until they’ve left the school. Their position as classic bullies who always ‘punch down’ is summed up by a conversation in book six, where Ron admits anxiously that ‘I’d better pass my [Apparition] test first time… Fred and George did.’ His older brother Charlie failed, but ‘Charlie’s bigger than me… so Fred and George didn’t go on about it much.’ 

Within the framing of the earlier books, these seem like harmless fantasy violence and classic sibling fights. But when violence is treated so seriously in the later books, these actions take on a more sinister tone. Though as we'll get to, not everyone's violence in the later books is treated seriously...

Like @neverenoughmarauders points out, that passage about Harry trying to rationalize James's behavior by comparing him to Fred and George is really interesting, and it speaks to why discussing morality in this series is so fraught (hello, never-ending Snape vs. Marauders discourse):

Reflecting on Snape’s worst memory, Harry compares his father’s behaviour to that of the Twins, and thinks that he ‘could not imagine Fred and George dangling someone upside-down for the fun of it.’ This positions the Twins as harmless pranksters and James as an exceptional bully. However, even though the intention of this paragraph is clearly meant to underline how bad James’s behaviour is, Rowling can’t quite stop there; Harry goes on to think, ‘not unless [the Twins] really loathed them… perhaps Malfoy, or somebody who really deserved it…’ Here, in a nutshell, is the moral sinkhole at the heart of the Harry Potter series. We know, by book five, that the Twins do things that are this bad all the time. As it happens, they bully people that Harry knows and likes, so even this doesn’t quite work out, but Harry admits here that this behaviour would be OK as long as it’s directed towards somebody who really deserved it. Unfortunately, in the world of Harry Potter, you ‘deserve it’ if you are Bad, and you are Bad because you deserve it. The Twins are Good, so they can’t be bullies, no matter how they treat other people. (emphasis mine)

I think this Good vs. Bad dichotomy explains so much about these damn books, lol (hello, never-ending Snape vs. Marauders discourse!). I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with writing a story like this – it's pretty much a staple of children's media – but when you start determining some characters' morality on the basis of their actions, and others' morality by the Side They Were Assigned To When You Introduced Them, then yeah, things start to get messy.

But why make James so complicated in the first place?

As an aside: I’ve been thinking about why Snape’s worst memory shows James as so cruel, when it sits so uneasily with the rest of the text, and when Rowling clearly isn’t interested in exploring the long-term ramifications of Harry’s discovery. By book six, James is Good again. The answer, I think, is that Rowling is, as ever, focused on plotting. Snape’s worst memory exists in the text as a clue, as something we can go back to when we discover, in book seven, that Snape Loved Lily. It’s not really meant to upturn everything Harry knows about his father. Snape’s worst memory is Snape’s worst memory because he argued with Lily and lost her friendship, not because of James’s bullying. Of course, what we also have to take away is that, for Snape, being humiliated, hexed and stripped in front of the school wasn’t the worst of his memories, because it simply happened too often.

So the author says that this chapter is so messy because JKR is unconcerned with the moral questions that her own text raises. James's behavior is simply not the point. But if that's true, then this scene poses a massive problem for those of us who are actually interested in the Marauders as characters and are trying to come up with Watsonian explanations for why they act the way they do!!!!

...Which I suppose was the whole point of the original post that I massively derailed. On that note, let me briefly address that:

I agree that Fred and George seem a bit more careless and showy than (how I imagine) the Marauders, if only because the Marauders had loftier, more specific goals (make a magic map of the school, become Animagi, etc.) and were likely more secretive about their biggest transgressions (as previously mentioned: the map, the invisibility cloak, Remus being a werewolf).

As for their, er, darker behavior, I think they likely saw themselves the way Harry saw Fred and George – as just having a bit of harmless fun. Maybe it was a nice way to blow off steam from working on their more complicated endeavors (!). I imagine their behavior was also shaped by rising political tensions and the looming war, with everyone becoming more entrenched in their respective beliefs and quicker to jump into a fight. Finally, there is one other element to the bullying that has no equivalent in the twins' story – James's romantic rivalry with Snape. (Come on, it's a coming of age story, they were both aware of the other's feelings toward Lily, and were 100% competing to demonstrate their masculinity.) So I think that overall, even when the Marauders engaged in petty pranks like the Weasley twins, they did that for different – and decidedly darker – reasons.

Anyway, that went in a thousand different directions, only to land on "JKR is a bad writer sometimes," which is basically the ultimate cop out, but also kind of true.

I'm so relieved we share similar opinions on The Marauders vs Fred and George! Every time I read an elaborate multi-step plan to dye Slytherin's robes red or something, I'd think "this feels off!". I try to find a middle ground in my imagination, because being a magic school, every day bog-standard mischief has got to look at least a little bit whimsical - and James and Sirius earned themselves a reputation of troublemakers somehow. But imagine they'd be more likely to get into trouble exploring the limits of the castle and its magic (not sure if you consider Cursed Child as semi canon, but trying to get out of a moving Hogwarts Express is a good example), and they'd be really smug about knowing how to get around the forest or the best spot to swim in the lake, but not that interested in cheering and applause from the great hall tables for doing some spectacular display of magic. The fact that the most advanced magic they achieved for their age (becoming animagus!) was a well kept secret has got to say something about their type of showmanship. But much like Fred and George (maybe even better), they'd 100% be in charge of throwing parties.

Yeah!! I agree, I definitely think they were darker in tone than Fred and George. Their public stunts seemed to be centred around hexing random students and they were definitely willing to be fairly vicious about it-- they were to Snape, and Bertram Aubrey's head swelling sounds comical but it probably wasn't for Aubrey-- so I don't see why they'd restrict themselves to silly harmless pranks of the sort F&G would pull. I never like reading fics where they have pranking wars or whatever haha.

And you're right that their greatest achievements were kept secret from everyone. They were defined by their secrets! The password-protected Marauders Map, the Invisibility Cloak, their Animagi status. Even their inside knowledge of Remus's condition is what I feel brought them together in a new way.

I almost feel like the times they got into trouble was out of carelessness or cockiness. They obviously didn't mind getting in trouble for attacking other students and the times they got caught sneaking around they were probably being reckless. Nobody ever figured out the map, the cloak, or that they were Animagi while they were at school, so they were careful when it counted.