James Potter

[cmwinters]

The thing that jumps out at me, IIRC, is that somewhere it is stated that Mad-Eye Moody never used the AK and always brought in his Death Eaters alive. It was a real testament to his character that even though the Ministry has authorized the use of Unforgivables, he still didn't use them. I think that this could have been a common element across the Order, and that many others, including James, would have taken their cue from Moody.

This is in Goblet of Fire, when the kids go to meet Sirius in the cave, and he says that Mad-Eye received special dispensation from the ministry to perform the Unforgiveables. Then Sirius says "I'll say this much for him; he always brought them in alive, if possible". So Moody undoubtedly DID use the Killing Curse, but tried to avoid it if at all possible.

If he did use that curse, the repercussions would be *huge*, and that's a big undertaking.

I'm not so sure the governmental repercussions would be that big; by that point, nearly everyone was in a state of constant terror. If James had killed, say, Rosier (James didn't, Moody did, but let's not worry about that for the moment) and James was able to demonstrate either that Rosier was Marked or was attacking James' family, he'd probably have gotten away with it.

But I absolutely agree that the rest of the Order would have taken their cue from Moody.

I agree with Megan. She sketched the Marauders very accurately, in my opinion. Even though James was definitely NOT your model student as far as pranks went, still I think that some of the nastiness can be attributed to Snape's biased point of view. And I don't blame Snape for that, I really don't.

Except for Lupin and Black don't do anything to correct this assumption. And according to Jo [*], the Pensieve memories don't show a point of view, they show it from a dispassionate third-party perspective. Harry came to the conclusion that James was a prat all on his own.