There is finally video of James and Lily’s wedding on the Internet!

Over the past two years, we’ve been covering the Lily Evans fan film series here at Hypable: Lily Evans and the Eleventh Hour, Lily Evans and the Stroke of Midnight, and Lily Evans and the Moment of Truth. The films are by Apple Juice Productions, a group of geeky women who have taken this chance to shine a spotlight on the women of the Marauder era.

In the spring, they crowd-funded the final installment in the series, all about James and Lily’s wedding — happily, they raised the money, and the film (which has been available to backers since June) is now up on YouTube for all to watch.

Lily Evans and the Magic Hour is a different beast from the previous installments: it was funded by fans, and is very clearly fan service. There isn’t really much plot or conflict, it just does exactly what it set out to do: provide video of the James/Lily wedding, utilizing these specific versions of the characters that we’ve come to appreciate over the past two years.

It’s like those fluffy fanfics about your OTP’s wedding day — brief and not really life-changing, but a refreshing bit of positivity amid diving into grandiose sagas of good-vs-evil.

As we’ve come to expect from the fine witches at Apple Juice Productions, there is a lovely attention to detail — here, in the form of references to James and Lily’s first meeting on the Hogwarts Express. Their vows are the emotional crux of the film, creating a backstory for James and his father out of whole cloth, which sets up some heart-wrenching dramatic irony.

The cast is the same familiar folks from Stroke of Midnight, with the addition of a cameo by Frank Longbottom. It’s great to see how James (Jon Rose) and Lily (Amanda Taylor) have developed their chemistry over the series, and are completely believable as the smitten couple.

Lily Evans and the Magic Hour is written by Amanda Taylor and directed by Sarah Caldwell. It’s a perfect sendoff for a web series that began life as a very unassuming four-people-in-a-room video, and through the passion of both its creators and its fans has become one of the definitive portrayals of Lily and the Marauders in the Harry Potter fanon. One needs look no further than the comments on the YouTube video to see how much this version of James and Lily has meant to people.

It’s ironic, yet wonderfully fitting, that the final installment of a story that’s been all about teenagers worrying about a war is wholly devoid of any mention of said war. This showcases one of the strengths of the Lily Evans series: its very deft balance between having its characters be consumed by the war, but not to the exclusion of life’s simple joys.

In Eleventh Hour, Lily and the Marauders came to the conclusion that something as trivial as Sirius’ birthday is worth making a fuss over even as Voldemort’s power grows. In Stroke of Midnight, we saw the Marauders discussing Star Wars on their way to dueling practice. Magic Hour, in its brief running time, takes place entirely in one of these cute happy moments that’s found amid the darkness. Knowing what we know of the Potters’ fate, they deserve an unconditionally happy wedding, and a Happily Ever After between the ending of this series and the start of the Harry Potter series.

And on a meta level, in 2018, perhaps we too deserve nothing more or less than a fluffy James/Lily wedding in a fan film.

What did you think of the latest installment of the Lily Evans series?