Why I Hate James Potter

Why I Hate James Potter by Lily Evans

Many people here at Hogwarts have often wondered why it is that James Potter and I do not get along. Well, until this year, anyway. Now they just wonder why I hate him, considering what an idiot he makes of himself, trying to impress me. Well, I'm going to give you my reasons.

James Potter is, quite simply, an immature prat. Even if the rest of you were too busy laughing at his pranks and admiring his physique to notice, I did. The Slytherins are our classmates, not our natural enemies. And even if they have been nasty to us in the past, that is no reason to sink to their level, much less past it. Some of the things that Potter and his friends think are so very funny are actually downright cruel. How would any of you liked to have been Severus Snape in that incident a year ago by the lake?

But that is just one of the reasons that I dislike him. After all, I could think the same of Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew or even Remus Lupin for that.

The reason I absolutely refuse to consider dating James Potter is also quite simple - he has no respect for the girls he dates. I've seen just a few too many ex-girlfriends of Mr Potter's nursing cruelly broken hearts when he tired of them.

But why I hate him - or seem to, anyway - I've always had trouble figuring that one out.

It's something in the way that he seems to stand for everything I'm not... the popular, charismatic hero of Gryffindor, the gutsy Seeker with a total disregard for rules. It's in the way he never seems to study for anything, and yet he still always beats me in Transfiguration. It's in that cheeky-as-Hell and guilty-as-sin smile he's taken to shooting me when he and his friends pull pranks on the Slytherins over breakfast, just because he knows I can't do a thing about it.

Not much really gets to me, but somehow he always knows how to manage the trick. It's almost like he's playing a game, like he wants me to be annoyed at him so he can make a show of trying to "win me back."

Truth be told, James Potter scares me, just a bit. He's so far removed from the world I come from, and so different from what I'm comfortable with. He's wild, unpredictable, and more than a little attractive, although it's really a shame that he knows it. It's not that I can't see where the attraction is, I can. I just don't want to be attracted to him. He's not safe.

Sometimes I think that I really do like him, and that I should just give in and date him. But then he goes and does something I hate; he'll hex a Slytherin just because he can, or he'll flirt shamelessly with younger girls, even though he has no interest in them, or something else that just seems heartless.

I think it's fairly clear now that I have no intention of showing this to anyone else, not that I ever really did, and I swear that I'll tear it up and burn it when I'm done, so I think it's fairly safe to say what I've been avoiding from the very beginning, the real reason under all these excuses.

I hate James Potter because...

Because I don't want to love him, even though I do.

-Lily Evans

~*~

Lily laid down her quill, sighed, picked up the barely dry parchment that she had just finished writing, and tore it carefully in half. She tore the pieces again and again, into smaller and smaller fragments, until it would have been near impossible for anyone to have ever pieced the whole of the message together again.

Then she picked up the pieces, walked over to the fire, and tossed them all in. There were so many pieces that she never noticed when one of the slightly larger pieces fell to the floor, and as a result she never went back to retrieve it.

es Potter because...

don't want to love him, even though I do.