Jily

"I wouldn’t go out with you if it was a choice between you and the giant squid"

- Lily to James, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Jily is the het ship between James Potter and Lily Evans from the Harry Potter fandom.

Canon
Lily's relationship with James Potter was initially a volatile one. They first met on the train just before the start of their first year at Hogwarts, where Lily was angered by James' and Sirius Black's mockery of her best friend, Severus Snape. Although James was a popular student and a talented Quidditch player, well-liked by most, Lily considered him an arrogant bully and treated him with contempt. This was likely motivated partly by James' hostile relationship with Snape, and partly by his bad habit of hexing innocent students just for fun. By his fifth year, James started to have romantic feelings for Lily, and would show off to try to impress her, without success. She refused to accept his many invitations to go out with him until their seventh year. It seems that, by that time, James had "deflated his head a bit" and stopped hexing people "for the fun of it". She eventually began going out with him and fell deeply in love with James. The two joined the Order of the Phoenix after graduating, in addition to getting married and having one child: Harry Potter.

Lily loved her husband, James, dearly as proved when Lily screamed James' name on seeing James being murdered by Voldemort when he entered their house. Her patronus takes the shape of a doe, while her husband's is a stag.

Fanon
Jily is a popular pairing in the Harry Potter fandom and its most notable rival ship is Snily. Jily shippers usually point out that while James changed for the better during his school years, Snape changed for the worse as he joined the Death Eaters. Most fanwork of Jily takes place during their school years, although there are also AUs where they survived.

Children
Harry Potter Harry James Potter (b. 31 July 1980) was a half-blood wizard, the only child and son of James Potter and Lily Potter (née Evans), and one of the most famous wizards of modern times. In what proved to be a vain attempt to circumvent a prophecy that a boy born at the end of July 1980 could be able to defeat him, Voldemort attempted to murder him when he was a year and three months old, shortly after murdering Harry's parents as they tried to protect him. This early, unsuccessful attempt to vanquish Harry led to Voldemort's first defeat and the end of the First Wizarding War. One consequence of Lily's protection is that her orphaned son had to be raised by her only remaining blood relative, Petunia Dursley, where he was neither welcomed nor nurtured, but would stay alive, at least until he was seventeen years old. As the only known survivor of the Killing Curse up to that point, Harry was already famous before he arrived at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Fandom
AO3

DeviantArt
 * jily tag on DeviantArt
 * James-x-Lily fanclub on DeviantArt

Fanlore

LIVEJOURNAL
 * on Livejournal

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