James Potter ( Harry's dad) - what an odious character

[shoppingbagsundereyes]

Reading the Order of the Phoenix with ds and really struggling with what a nasty bully Harry's dad is. Does he redeem himself in later books?

If you look on the Harry potter Wikipedia thingie it says all their dates of birth.

Oh yes can totally see David Tennant as Peter Pettigrew! He definitely looks a bit ratty.

OP just be warned the themes get darker and more complex in the final 2 books, I think the 5th is the first one that steps it up a bit, but you might want to put those two on hold for a bit.

I always thought that too about James Potter. I never really saw why people admired him.

Even if he was a decent bloke in adult life he was a terrible bully in school and didn't apologise for it.

He reminds me of a bit of a Danny character, to be honest.

I also have mixed feelings about Sirius, but at least you can understand why he turned out a bit nasty sometimes with being in the Black family.

I know I'm always in the minority with ages and HP, but might I suggest that 7 is way too young for The Order of the Phoenix?

Sorry to lower the tone, but have you seen this ?

I don't think James was all bad, as a pp has said we only see what happened through Snape's eyes.

But James wasn't really a bully we see two incidents from Snapes memory (who couldn't have been at all biased!) the storyline goes that there was mutual hatred between the two!

That Snape also loathed James and took every opportunity he could to jinx James.

And let's not forget James saved Snapes life once.

They didn't used Lupin as a secret keeper because voldemort tried to recruit as many werewolves as possible.

The friendship with Peter as well also reinforces that (despite not liking Snape) he wasn't actually a bad bloke, Peter may not have been "cool" like Sirius and Lupin but James took him in nonetheless, cared about him, trusted him, taught him and treated him like a brother. If Snape wasn't so obsessed with the dark arts he's not really that different from peter.

I'm sorry, I just do not get the Harry Potter dissecting. They are mediocrely written kids' books, peopled with two dimensional, inconsistently written characters.

If your looking for any kind of cohesive psychological backstory for any of them, then you're going to be sadly disappointed.

Umm Bullying was pretty much ignored in the 70s BTW! From my recollections parents didn't have much idea what was going on in children/young people's lives.

Most children's literature is full of very very worrying families.

Moomin, I never understand why people like you post on these threads, if you haven't nothing constructive to add then why join us?

I think what you need to bear in mind is that JK is presenting a very damaged world. During the time of Voldemort's first ascendancy there is widespread fear and suspicion. It is explicitly stated that there were many killings and disappearances. It is evident too from the description of the imperius curse and it's aftermath that this was a time of great betrayal. You really didn't know who you could trust and the murder of the Potters sums all that horror up. In the run up to this time, when Lily and James et al were growing up, the tensions that allow Voldemort to thrive are likewise brewing nicely. So James and Lily and Sirius etc are children of their time. Raised not to trust widely, to be defensive, to be fighters and be defiant. Growing up with loss and the fear of loss ever present.

No wonder he's not a ray of sunshine. That's how Harry is actually an immense contrast because unlike James, Harry is raised in physical hardship and some degree of emotional neglect but not in fear. It isn't until the end of Book 4 that Harry actually has to live with fear - with seeing what can befall the people he cares about. One rather has the impression that that was something James and his contemporaries lived with for years. Sirius and Lupin are prepared to kill Peter. That's their first plan not their last. You can argue that when the ghost of Lily and James tell Harry they are proud of him they are meaning because he isn't like them. .

X posted with moomin.

The HP canon is not great literature but I think you're being very harsh and tbh rather ridiculous in your assessment and dismissal.

I don't get MNers' obsessions and fascinations with pushchairs, shoes, and TOWIE. So I don't post on those threads.

Ahem, anyway....DD and I are rereading them all at the moment (she is 10, and whilst we read the whole lot between her 7th and 8th birthday, I did skip bits IIRC the first time around) and I have another timeline query.....when Hagrid leaves Harry at the Dursleys, he is on the motorbike lent to him "by young Sirius Black". Next we hear of him, he is in Azkaban and we all think briefly he's a baddy.

At what point did it all come out that (supposedly) SB was in cahoots with Voldy? For him to get lobbed into Azkaban?

FWIW I agree that they are badly written and the characterisation is not excellent.

They're bloody brilliant though and have kept me and dd enthralled for years.

Sirius went after Peter when he realised what he given up the Potters, he knew he would be thought a traitor as only James, Lily and Peter knew they had swapped secret keepers, Peter didn't give him the chance though, he cut off his own finger and blew the street up and transformed into a rat so everyone thought that Sirius had killed him.

I don't know why he didn't get a trial though, they could've used vertisam, checked his memory, his wand - Dumbledore knew how close James and Sirius were, even Bellatrix and Barty Crouch Jnr had trials.

Hogwarts isn't really a great school, the ministry of magic seems to interfere a lot - the students couldn't be protected from Umbridge because of Fudge, there are trolls, basalisks, death eaters in disguise! I thought it was odd that Dumbledore let Harry take part in the tri wizards tournament seeing as though he needed him alive until all the horcruxes were taken care of - he didn't seem to be keeping a very close eye on things, he left him totally alone in the maze. I cried when Cedric died!

The timeline is something like:

Voldemort turns up and blasts Potters in to pieces then has the curse rebound

Dumbledore and other order members are alerted. Dumbledore must have been thinking Sirius has betrayed James but clearly didn't tell Hagrid. Hagrid meets Sirus and inherits his motorbike. He goes off to get Harry and deliver him to Petunia. Meanwhile Sirius (gone fairly desperate with grief and anger and the only person who knows the truth) goes looking for Peter, blasts him and is captured.

So it's simultaneous situations.

There is reference to the post death eater period being one of dodgy justice. Sirius is VERY LUCKY (or not) that the Aurors didn't kill him. They had orders to kill not capture after all.

Ah, OK.

The Triwizard tournament (indeed virtually all of the GoF) is a yawnfest.

I read recently that JK was struggling with that book and didn't know how to take the story forward and I think it shows. The tournament idea itself was clumsy enough, but then Harry mysteriously getting his name in the jug was ridiculous. And all the other teachers and ministry bods would just have gone "er, this is obviously a put up job to either get him killed, or further elevate his mythical status so we're not having it".

But instead they all went "OK, fair do's"

I really liked Neville in the last two films, and Luna. I wonder why they didn't end up together, Neville says he's mad for her but they marry other people. I wonder why they broke up. I wanted Harry and Luna to get together.

The 'mad for her' reference is in the film only and represents a bit of wish fulfilment on the part of the scriptwriter to have everybody neatly tied up. Neville shows a lot of leadership and bravery in the battle but it's towards all his DA colleagues not just Luna. Harry and Luna is a non-starter I'm afraid. She's too off the wall. Harry needs exactly what he gets - somebody grounded but feisty. Somebody who will probably grow up exactly like her mum - loving and terrifying.

GoF was the one she was on a tight deadline for and was really stressed about it. She apparently refused to work to a deadline after that, and the subsequent books took 2 or 3 years each to write whereas book 4 only took 1 year.

I think I could believe the fact that it was a magical contract and it's impossible to break a magical contract so the games had to go ahead with the extra contestant. However surely they would have made the challenges easier (not so deadly! Dragons FFS!) or the contract would have been invalid anyway because none of the participants knew about the "fourth school".

Harry and Ginny were right. I agree with the recent interview with JK where she says that Ron and Hermione aren't suited, though. Great high school romance, terrible marriage! I hated the way all of the papers reported it as though she had said Hermione would be better off with Harry. She didn't say that at all. Surely the main female character is allowed to marry someone other than one of the main male characters?

Just for the sake of continuity though, I could see them marrying quickly after the war because everyone else was and perhaps Hermione was feeling a bit sad about the loss of her own parents - it never said if she was able to reverse the memory charm, but I'm guessing not, as most times a memory charm was reversed in the books it went wrong. I'm sure Mrs. Weasley and all the older brothers would have accepted her like family and it would have felt quite a wrench to deliberately move away from that. But I can imagine that the cheery front she presents in the epilogue was hiding some marital strife behind closed doors. I bet she posts on mugglesnet Relationships forum "My husband is so annoyingly laid back about everything and leaves all of the housework up to me. My MIL is obsessed with me having a million children and thinks that a woman's true calling is to be a great cook and matriarch. None of them understand my muggle childhood and sometimes I feel so trapped!"

The wizarding web. They probably have an actual world wide web network. They send messages to each other using spiders.

I thought he was just there as a background to Harry. Lily and James were always SO one sided- she was the good side and he was the rakish devil side, both of which we can find in Harry. He's not a real character to me, James.