Draco as Student

[Tandy, Heidi]

No: HPFGUIDX 17135

At Magda's request, I'm sending a (slightly edited) version of my offlist
reply, for further discussion, unless people are so completely bored with
draco and want to talk about Harry instead, given that it *is* Harry
Fortnight!

Personally (IMHO (in my humble/honest opinion) I think that JKR did as much
to show draco as being ranked high in class marks as she did to show that
dean's a good artist -both topics merit about 2 lines...but only one is
universally accepted...

> I don't think so.  If Draco is Number Two (or for the sake of
> argument even in the Top Ten), then there would be references in the
> books to Draco in the library or dragging twenty books around like
> Hermione does.  There is nothing to indicate that he is anything more
> than a regular student.  

And there's nothing to indicate that he is a regular student either. Someone
is number two, and another eight people are also in the top ten, and there's
no descriptions of any of them. Either way, they're assumptions based on
canon, not pure canon itself, as I said in my first post. They're *all*
reasonable assumptions, but neither is more reasonable than the other. 

> 
> > If Lucius is the type who
> > thinks that anything less than number one is meaningless and
> > useless, then he could slam Draco for having lousy marks when the 
> > only problem with them is that they're not better than Muggle-born 
> > Hermione. Otherwise, why would
> > he specifically criticise Draco for being beaten by Hermione,
> > instead of saying something like "And so many mudbloods got better 
> > marks than you...."
> 
> Any textual backup for this?  Does Lucius anywhere think being Number
> One is the be-all and end-all?  He's got a eugenics obsession but
> other than that...

The closest I can come to textual backup is that Lucius compares Draco's
marks to Hermione's - and she is the top of the class (well, for first year,
at least - it says so in canon (although actually, we don't *know* that she
is in the later years - and in 2nd year, when exams were cancelled AND she
missed a lot of classes, being petrified, she may not've been) but it's a
reasonable conjecture based on what hermione tells harry that Professors
McGonnagal and Flitwick said about her marks). For all we know, she isn't
the top in 3rd or 4th years, for example if Snape is downgrading her in
potions or if she lost points in her average third year because of
Divination. 


> > His place on the quidditch team *might* have been bought because of
> > age, but not skill. 
> 
> It was bought because of first-class, top-of-the-line racing brooms.
We're using *because of* in completely different ways. I'm using it to show
why the brooms were necessary. You're using it to show how the brooms got
him onto the team. 
It's a little confusing & mix-ish
 
> 
> > I haven't seen him relying on Snape to keep himself out of trouble
> > - if he really could do that, then Snape would've at least tried a 
> > way to get Draco
> > out of that forebidden forrest trip back during first year.
> 
> No teacher would interfere with another teacher's detention
> assignment.  Snape wouldn't have tried.
Why wouldn't he? The closest one would come to textual evidence for this
would be Hagrid's statement that Draco had to take the punishment assigned
to him - but it doesn't mean that if Snape wanted to keep him out of the
forebidden forrest, he couldn't've gone to Minnie and asked for Draco to be
reassigned to gutting frogs or something