Draco Malfoy Is Ever So Lame. Yet Sympathetic. And Dead, Too.

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 39083

I promised to weigh in on Redeemable!Draco, didn't I?

Yeah.  I did.  So okay, then.  Here it is.

-----

James wrote:

> After recieving the last (and my first) digest, I was quite 
> surprised about the desire of the members for Draco to change.  Why 
> should he, do we need him to?  I think a lot of this might be to do 
> with the Draco Dormiens, Draco Sinester and the latst in the series 
> of those fanfics (I may be wrong).

Welcome, James!

I don't think that Cassandra Claire's fics have very much to do with 
it at all, really.  Rather, I sort of suspect that Claire (like so 
many other fanfic writers) made the authorial decision to change him 
in the first place for precisely the same reason that so many readers 
feel such a strong desire to see him change in canon: namely, that as 
he is currently written, Draco Malfoy is a *profoundly* unsatisfying 
character.  

I further believe that the very things which make him so unsatisfying 
a character also serve as by far the most compelling argument for the 
belief that JKR herself may indeed have plans to force his character 
to undergo some form of change in future volumes.

There are two reasons that Draco doesn't really work very well for me 
as a character in his current state.  One of them is more emotional 
and meta-textual, while the other is more purely literary.  


Hana touched on the literary problem here, when she wrote:

> The other thing to consider when talking about character change 
> will be the final outcome of the book. . . . Could Redeemable!Draco 
> help further the plot?  Possibly, though not likely until near the 
> end of the last book.  I think Draco serves well as RivalPeer!Draco 
> and it seems to be a likely place to keep him for quite some time 
> regardless of what people would personally like to see.

I agree that this question is very well served by approaching it in 
terms of Draco's narrative function.  Where Hana and I disagree, 
however, is on the issue of whether Draco really serves very well as 
RivalPeer!Draco at all.  I don't think that he does, and I have a 
suspicion that dissatisfaction with this aspect of the text is 
probably one of the major factors leading to the popularity of 
Redeemed!Draco in both speculation and in fanfic.

As the story currently stands, Draco is indeed presented very much as 
Harry's rival, his peer antagonist.  That is his ostensible narrative 
function within the text.  And yet, he strikes me as far too *weak* a 
character to really fulfill this role in at all a satisfying manner.  
It therefore becomes difficult to avoid the nagging suspicion that 
perhaps Draco is *not,* in fact, really meant to serve as Harry's 
peer antagonist throughout the entire series at all, that perhaps JKR 
may indeed have some slightly different role planned for him by 
series' end.

I have been very surprised, in past Draco discussions on this list, 
to see that so many people seem to ascribe to him such a lot of 
power.  In a discussion of the so-called "train stomp" (the scene on 
the train at the end of _GoF_), for example, someone (UncMark, I 
believe?) expressed the belief that the Gryffindors' use of force 
there seemed justified because within the context of that scene, 
Draco's words could be read as a "death threat."  Similarly, I have 
seen people argue for Draco's gloat at the QWC as a veiled rape 
threat against Hermione, his wishing Hermione dead in _CoS_ as proof 
that he is surely capable of becoming a killer, and his attempt to 
sabotage Harry's Quiddich match by dressing up as a dementor in _PoA_ 
as "attempted murder."

These interpretations always amaze me, frankly, not so much because 
they ascribe such pure malice to Draco (although I myself don't read 
him that way, I am certainly capable of entertaining that reading 
without undue difficulty), but rather because they all seem to 
ascribe to the little putz such a high degree of competence, of 
*power.*

And that's really *not* a reading that I can bring myself to 
entertain, not even for a minute.  I simply cannot bring myself to 
perceive Draco as the least bit competent or powerful.  It's just 
plain impossible for me to read him that way because, as I see it, 
Draco is absolutely the opposite of powerful.  He is *weak.*  He's 
pathetic.  A total loser.  


Draco Malfoy Is Ever So Lame.  


As Harry's rival, he starts out with a number of advantages that are 
clearly meant to reflect Harry's own situation.  Harry is an orphan 
who has been raised in utter ignorance of his own culture; his 
personal strengths are courage, grit, resourcefulness, resiliency, 
and plain old-fashioned virtue.  Draco is therefore, and quite 
properly, established right from the start as having the 
corresponding and contrasting advantages.  He's a mass of social 
privilege, his family is wealthy and powerful, he is highly 
knowledgable about the wizarding world.  He is also shown to be 
dishonest, cowardly, cunning, snobbish, and a bully.

Well, okay.  So far so good. 

But then the whole dynamic just falls completely to pieces for me.

For one thing, Harry ends up trumping nearly all of Draco's 
advantages right from the very start.  By the end of PS/SS, there's 
just nothing left to Draco's advantages.  He's lost each and every 
one of them.

Whatever status Draco can claim as a Malfoy is *nothing* in 
comparison to Harry's own fame within the wizarding world, and as we 
see in the very first book, Draco's family connections and influence 
just can't compete with the kind of patronage that Harry receives by 
simple virtue of being who he is.  In spite of what he is obviously 
hoping at the beginning of PS/SS, Draco does *not* in fact manage to 
get the prohibition against First Years keeping their own brooms at 
Hogwarts waived for him.  But Harry does -- and furthermore, he even 
has somebody *buy* him that broom even though as it turns out, he 
isn't really a poor orphan boy at all.  He's a *rich* orphan boy.  A 
*very* rich orphan boy.  He doesn't even have the disadvantage of 
poverty to contend with.  

At Hogwarts, Harry gets Dumbledore as his mentor, with McGonagall and 
Hagrid both stepping in to help play that role as well.  Draco 
gets...well, he gets Snape.  Snape, who is actually spending a huge 
amount of his time and energy protecting *Harry.*

Draco's entire childhood spent immersed in the culture of the 
wizarding world doesn't help him all that much either.  He does seem 
to be a reasonably competent student, but if he ever surpassed Harry 
when it came to practicing magic at all (and I think it clear that by 
this point in the story-line, he no longer does), then he never had a 
strong enough advantage to make very much of a difference.  And of 
course, Harry's ally Hermione has always had him beat on that count 
anyway.

Nor were all of those years that Draco spent practicing his flying 
skills sufficient to counter Harry's own innate and savant-like 
talent.  Harry himself acknowledges that Draco is very good with a 
broom.  But Harry's better.  

And on and on it goes, throughout four entire volumes.  Draco just 
can't do anything right.  He is profoundly ineffectual, and not a one 
of his purported advantages actually helps him at all.

The Malfoy wealth doesn't help Draco.  Harry regularly trumps him in 
the ever-escalating broom war, and even when Draco has a temporary 
advantage in having the better broom in _CoS,_ he still loses.

The Malfoy influence doesn't help Draco.  Lucius does manage to get 
Dumbledore ousted from power for a very short period of time, true, 
but he only winds up being himself then ousted from the school's 
board of governors.  Just about the only thing that the Malfoy 
influence has ever accomplished for Draco was to get Hagrid's pet 
hippogriff slated for execution.  Draco can't even manage to get 
rid of Hagrid *himself.*  Not even through helping to out him as a 
half-giant can he manage to get rid of the man.  All he can succeed 
in doing is nailing one of Hagrid's *animals.*  And even then, 
Buckbeak escapes.

The Malfoy political savvy *might* have helped Draco, but in fact it 
doesn't, because Draco seems determined to ignore every single piece 
of political advice that his father ever gives him.  He has been 
advised to mask his dislike for Harry Potter -- and so, naturally, he 
blabs his hatred of Harry to the entire school.  He is advised 
to "keep his head down" while Slytherin's basilisk is on the loose -- 
and so, naturally, he makes an utter spectacle of himself in front of 
the entire school by gloating over the monster's predations, thus 
leaving himself open to suspicions of being Salazar's heir himself.  
And does anyone really think that Lucius Malfoy would be pleased, if 
he ever heard about Draco refusing to stand for Harry at the end of 
_GoF,_ or worse, insulting Cedric Diggory's memory on the train?  
Somehow I rather suspect that these actions, too, were probably 
undertaken in blatant disregard of parental admonition.  For all of 
his "my fathering," Draco really isn't even a very *loyal* son.  
Strategically and politically speaking, he is a moron.

>From his sorting into Slytherin, we are presumably meant to assume 
that Draco is supposed to at least be *cunning.*  But he isn't very.  
His "midnight duel" scheme at the beginning of the first book was 
indeed a nice little bit of Slytherinesque planning, but from there 
on out, it's just been all downhill for poor old Draco.  None of his 
subsequent plans to get Harry in trouble have worked out very well at 
all.  When he tries to spy on the Trio, he gets caught.  When he 
tries to turn the student body against Harry, his successes are very
short-lived.  And that "dressing up like Dementors" scheme was just 
plain lame (how on earth did the Slytherins *ever* imagine that 
they'd get away with that without getting themselves in loads of 
trouble and losing their House points?) Even when he is actually in 
the *right,* as in _PoA_ where (whatever one thinks of squealing as a 
general practice) Harry really *was* in Hogsmeade without either 
proper permission or any really compelling excuse for having broken 
the rules to be there, Draco's ratting him out still does him no 
good: Harry is rescued by Lupin.

The only times that Draco manages to be even the slightest bit 
successful against Harry are those times when he has a far more 
experienced adult ally helping him.  He does indeed manage to cause a 
bit of mischief in Book Four -- but only with the aid of Rita 
Skeeter.  He does manage to discomfit Harry in the Duelling Club 
scene in Book Two -- but only because Snape is there helping him 
out.  (And again, Harry's adult allies are far more powerful, in the 
long run, than Draco's.)  Left to his own devices, Draco really can't 
seem to do much of anything, really, other than pick on poor Neville 
Longbottom in the corridors.

Draco has no real strengths and no real advantages.  He doesn't even 
seem very happy with the strengths that he's *supposed* to be playing 
to: his response to the accusation in _CoS_ that he has bought his 
way onto the Quiddich team -- surely a perfectly appropriate 
Slytherinesque thing to do -- is not one of smug satisfaction, 
but instead of shamed fury.

I don't even really believe that he's at all popular, although I know 
that many people have come to the opposite conclusion.  Marcus Flint 
does indeed go out of his way to protect him, as do Crabbe and Goyle 
on a regular basis.  Pansy certainly seems to care for him.  But is 
he really all that much of a House leader?  I don't think that he 
is.  His own year woud seem to lack any male students of strong 
enough character to contest his role there, but the House as a whole 
certainly doesn't follow his lead.  They're happy enough to snigger 
at his jokes, but when push comes to shove, as at the end of _GoF,_ 
we can see just precisely to what extent the rest of House Slytherin 
is willing to close ranks behind slippery old Lucius' idiot son.  
They're, well, not.  Not at all.  Not in the least.  They're on their 
feet for Harry at Dumbledore's closing banquet.  The only people 
willing to follow Draco's lead in remaining seated would seem to 
be...Crabbe and Goyle.

It's just plain sad, is what it is.  Draco just doesn't have very 
much in the way of strengths, while his weaknesses are legion.  He is 
a coward, both in terms of his visceral response to immediate peril 
(the Unicorn-blood-swilling Quirrell in Book One, Buckbeak in Book 
Three) and in terms of his lack of longer-term resilience.  He does 
not bounce back well from traumatic events: after being ferret-
bounced by Fake Moody, even the mere mention of the man's *name* is 
enough to make him blanch.  He can't control his emotions very well.  
He loses his temper; he speaks when it is unwise for him to do so; he 
can dish out verbal abuse, but he can't take it.  

Furthermore, on the two occasions when we have seen his behavior when 
he's not putting on a front for Harry and his friends -- the 
Knockturn Alley scene and the Polyjuice scene, both in _CoS_ -- he is 
sulky, petulant and whiny.  His tone in those two scenes isn't really 
reminiscent of Snape at all, regardless of the way that the text is 
always encouraging us to draw a generational parallel between 
the two characters.  Really, if Draco sounds like anyone at all in 
those two scenes, then I'd have to say that person would be Peter 
Pettigrew, whose sulky and petulant tone when he speaks to Voldemort 
in _GoF_ actually strikes me as remarkably similar to the way that 
Draco speaks whenever he doesn't know that Harry is observing him.

Just about the only striking personal strength that I do see in 
Draco, in fact, is a certain degree of wit.  His jibes are usually 
pretty unamusing, true, but then sometimes he is capable of a really 
nicely dry sense of humor.  His running commentary on Hagrid's 
abysmal Care of Magical Creatures class always makes me smile, and I 
thought that his choice of the Densaugeo curse in his impromptu duel 
with Harry was really very clever.  But even his humor -- when it 
succeeds in being funny at all -- is still the sort of humor that 
derives from weakness, rather than from strength.  His constant 
carping in Hagrid's class is ghetto humor, really: it's the wit of 
somebody who knows perfectly well that he is powerless to change his 
situation.  Hermione, similarly trapped in a class that she 
absolutely detests in _PoA,_ has the opportunity to walk away.  Draco 
doesn't have that option, so he gripes instead.  And while the 
Densaugeo curse was indeed a very clever bit of word play, in the end 
it only serves to draw attention to Draco's weakness: his envy and 
resentment over Harry's position as Triwizard Contestant.  Even Draco 
at his best is still *weak* Draco.


As a reader, therefore, my reaction to Draco in his narrative role as 
Harry's peer rival is primarily one of intense *frustration.*  It 
just doesn't seem right to me.  It doesn't work.  It's not a fair 
enough contest.  Draco strikes me as so hopelessly outclassed on 
every conceivable level that I simply can't take him at all seriously 
as Harry's peer antagonist.  Harry already has him licked on all 
fronts, as far as I'm concerned, so if that's really all that
Draco is there to do, then what on earth is the *point* of him?

This is my primary reason for finding the notion that ultimately, 
Draco might have some *other* narrative function to fill to be not 
only highly convincing but indeed very compelling.  I think it clear 
that Draco *must* change.  Either his narrative function itself must 
change, or something about his power level or his competence will 
have to change.  Because as things now stand, I just don't see how 
JKR can possibly make PeerRival!Draco work for another three whole 
novels.  

But if Draco is in fact *not* really supposed to serve the function 
of Harry's peer rival forever, if JKR actually does have some other 
plans for him, then what could that plan be?

Well, there are a number of possibilities.  One might be that in the 
end, Draco will actually serve less as Harry's rival than as a 
cautionary tale about the spiritually degrading effects of envy.  I 
can easily see him becoming quite a pathetic figure of evil by the 
end, lost in a wash of hopeless resentment, causing trouble through 
small and petty acts of betrayal, sneakiness, and recourse to bigger 
and more powerful people than himself: Snape meets Pettigrew.

The "how bad is Voldemort?  *Ever* so bad!" scenario which James 
suggested is also a possibility, I suppose, as is the filicidal 
version -- Draco dead at Lucius' hands.  We did get all of that 
parricide in Book Four, which does sort of make you wonder when 
filicide might rear its ugly head as a running motif.

And then there's Redeemable!Draco.  Ah.  Good old Redeemable!Draco...


Cindy wrote:

> If someone wants to make the case for Redeemable!Draco, I'll always 
> listen, of course.  But I can't make any promises that I'll sign on 
> for a tour of duty.  ;-)

Well, okay.  I'll give this a shot, if you like, although I doubt 
that I'll succeed in convincing you.  ;-)

I'm not going to list all of the places in canon that can be read as 
evidence of Draco's ambiguity here, because, um, I think that Heidi's 
probably already hit them all -- and if she didn't actually hit each 
and every one of them this time around, then she surely did the last 
time around, or the time before that.  At this point, I imagine that 
she's probably got a little list saved somewhere.  I can't possibly 
compete with Heidi when it comes to Draco apologetics; I'm not even 
going to try.  

Nor am I going to list the extra-canonical factors that I think 
contribute to Redeemable!Draco's canonical plausibility here because 
I already went through all of those (as well as the similar arguments 
of the opposition) in message #34802.

Instead, I'd like to argue the case on slightly different grounds in 
this post.  To my mind, by far the most compelling arguments for 
Redeemable!Draco are as follows:

1) Draco is far too weak a character to serve very well in his 
ostensible role as Harry's peer antagonist.  It is therefore tempting 
to consider the possibility that his ultimate narrative function must 
be something else.  A redemption scenario is the most logical, 
obvious and instinctive idea of what that something else might be.

This one I just covered above.


2) Draco reaps a good deal of reader sympathy due to both 
the "Sympathy For the Devil" and the "Hurt-Comfort" phenomena, both 
of which JKR has shown herself more than capable of combatting when 
it comes to other characters in her books. She does not seem to be 
even *trying* to combat them when it comes to Draco. This suggests 
that she may well have reasons of her own -- such as planning a
more sympathetic role for him in the future -- for wanting the reader 
to retain the ability to view this character with a sympathetic eye.  


I do feel that Draco has been written in such a way as to encourage a 
good amount of reader sympathy, something that cannot be said for any 
of the series' other villain characters.  Voldemort is not written as 
a sympathetic character in the least.  Pettigrew is even less so.  
Crouch Jr. isn't either, and neither is Quirrell, and neither is 
Lockhart.  Sure, SYCOPHANTS like me often do find these guys 
intensely sympathetic, but the general readership absolutely does 
not.  The general readership *does,* however, tend to sympathize with 
Draco -- it's an incredibly popular and wide-spread reading -- and I 
can't help but feel that if JKR honestly didn't want for so many 
people to read him that way, then she made some *very* serious errors 
of judgement in how she chose to portray him in canon.

For one thing, she never lets Draco win.  Never.  Not ever.  what few 
successes he has are both short-lived and do no permanent harm, while 
his failures are often overwhelming.  He can't whip Harry in 
Quiddich, and he can't win the House Cup for Slytherin; he can't get 
his least-favorite teacher fired, and he has this unfortunate 
tendency to wind up at the end of the novels in some state of 
embarrassingly abject defeat.

And that is sympathetic.  It's sympathetic because for the most part, 
people prefer to root for underdogs and losers, especially ones who 
have pluck and always get back on their feet again no matter how many 
times they're knocked down.  We *like* the existentialist Sisyphean 
hero, doomed to failure and yet still gamely struggling on against 
all odds.  

Of course, Draco Malfoy is not designated "Underdog" by the text 
itself.  The text itself defines him as a mass of privilege.  But the 
*meta-text* -- the unspoken body of genre convention and literary 
trope that readers cannot help but hold in mind while they read a 
work of fiction -- designates him quite clearly as the Underdog of 
the piece.  As readers, we know perfectly well that Draco cannot 
win.  Even little kids get this about the way that the books are 
structured: it is fundamental to the genre that Draco's never going 
to get to win.  He is the designated loser of the books.  He's always 
going to be thwarted; the deck is hopelessly stacked against him; the 
very authorial *voice* has it in for him.  And yet, even though he's 
utterly trounced at the end of each book, there he is at the start of 
the next one, still plugging away at trying to make life difficult 
for Harry, even though he's not really very good at it and never 
manages to get away with it, in the end.

And you know, it's really hard not to sympathize with that.

This phenomenon, which sometimes goes by the name "Sympathy For the 
Devil," can be fought.  There are specific things that authors can do 
to keep their readers from sympathizing with the villains on the 
grounds of meta-textual rooting for the underdog.  JKR knows what 
they are, too: she uses them all the time when she writes about 
Voldemort.  Voldemort is also doomed to failure, but that fact 
doesn't suffice to reap him very much in the way of reader sympathy 
for a number of reasons.  For one thing, he's truly monstrous.  For 
another, he doesn't show us very much in the way of real emotional 
vulnerability.  And finally, his temporary victories are permitted to 
have long-term consequences: even when he loses in the end, he 
succeeds in doing real, lasting and permanent damage to those who get 
in his way, or whom he uses in the pursuit of his goals.

None of that applies to Draco.  Draco *is* portrayed as emotionally 
vulnerable, and in the end, none of his nastiness ever really amounts 
to very much more than an irritant for our heroes.  Any damage that 
he does is always undone by the end of each volume.  No particular 
effort is being made to counteract Sympathy For the Devil when it 
comes to Draco, which does sort of make you wonder whether part of 
the reason for this might not be that the author herself really 
doesn't *want* for him to forfeit all of that nice reader sympathy 
that he gets by virtue of being marked as the designated loser.  
Indeed, perhaps she wants for him to retain that sympathy.  And if 
she does, then it's tempting to think that the reason she must want 
it that way is because she plans on eventually giving him some type 
of sympathetic sub-plot.

Another way in which the authorial voice often seems to be 
encouraging readers to view Draco in a sympathetic light lies in the 
disparity between what the narrative simply *tells* us, and what it 
actually *shows* us happening right in front of our proverbial eyes.  
In fiction, what the reader actually sees almost always carries 
more weight than what the reader is merely told, and the more 
immediate and sensory this information, the more convincing it is.  
For example, things about character that are conveyed through that 
character's own dialogue tend to be more convincing than information 
that is conveyed by means of a narrative backstory.  If the two come 
into conflict, then the reader will usually choose to "trust" the 
dialogue.    

In the Harry Potter books, the more immediate and sensory information 
about both Draco and House Slytherin often seems designed to undercut 
the more overtly stated narrative message.

In the first book, for example, JKR tells us that the Slytherins have 
won the House Cup for years and years running.  The Gryffindors, we 
are informed, are therefore the Underdogs.  Really, they are.

But what we actually see *happening* over the course of the books is 
Gryffindor taking the cup again and again and again, and Harry always 
winning every Quiddich match in which he is pitted directly against 
Draco, and all of the other houses uniting behind Gryffindor, and 
Dumbledore's infamous "dissing the Slyths" scene at the end of PS/SS.

This is the reason, I think, for the prevailing notion that there is 
a strong bias against House Slytherin.  The narrative voice tells us 
that this is absolutely not in fact the case.  But everything that we 
actually see happening before our very eyes conveys a slightly 
different message. 

Similarly, what JKR tells us at the end of _GoF_ is that Draco, 
Crabbe and Goyle look to Harry "more arrogant and menacing" than ever 
before.  But what does she show us?  What do we actually see?

What we actually see is a smirk that quivers.  

We also see a somewhat fumbled and even (to my mind) faintly 
hysterical-souding insult, followed promptly by the most summary and 
effortless dispatch imaginable.  The Slytherins don't even seem to 
have thought of reaching for their *wands* before they manage to get 
themselves hexed into unconsciousness by five opponents, two of 
whom are older than they are and who also attack from behind.  And 
then they get stepped on.  While they're unconscious.

Uh-huh.  Yeah.  "Menacing." To Harry I'm sure that they really did 
seem that way. He has his reasons for viewing them in that light.  
But to many readers, I think that it comes across as more purely 
*pathetic* than as anything else, and it's hard to imagine how the 
author could not have anticipated that the scene would be read that 
way.  

I mean, come on!  You just do *not* describe a smirk as "quivering" 
unless you want readers to interpret the smirker's internal state as 
highly ambivalent.  You just don't.

Finally, the text often seems to me to actively encourage the reader -
- or at the very least its adolescent female readership -- to not 
only sympathize with Draco but also to find him slightly erotically 
appealing, by the mere virtue of showing him getting physically hurt 
so very often.

Oh, come on now!  Don't look at me like that.  You all *know* what 
I'm saying here.  It's the old "Hurt-Comfort" phenomenon, is what 
this is, and we all know about it, even if we like to pretend that we 
don't.  

What "Hurt-Comfort" comes down to is the fact that women are just 
plain Bent, and adolescent girls even more so.  They *like* to see 
male characters suffer, so long as they do so with some degree of 
manly dignity, because it turns them on.  Male vulnerability garners 
their sympathy, and it also kind of excites them.  They like 
it.  No one ever wants to 'fess up to this, but it's true.  Just look 
at the characters most often fixated upon as drool-worthy by JKR's 
adult female readers, will you?  Lupin.  Sirius.  Snape.

We all know what's *really* going on there, don't we?  Are we all 
grown-up enough to admit it?  All three of those characters have 
erotic appeal primarily because they all *suffer* so much.  Lupin's 
kindness wouldn't alone be sufficient to make him so sexy; it's all 
of that exhaustion and illness and emotional damage that really 
nets in the fans.  Sirius without all those years spent in Azkaban 
wouldn't have nearly the following that he has.  And Snape...well, 
it's all that angst that does it, right? 

Female readers are almost always attracted to male characters who get 
hurt a lot.  They just are.  And Draco does get smacked around a 
*lot* in these books.  He gets ferret-bounced and hippogriff-slashed 
and pimp-slapped and seriously hexed.  And that's just the sort of 
thing that female readers -- and particularly adolescent girls -- 
really go for.  It's why they think Harry's so sexy too, I'd 
warrant.  It's because they're twisted little FEATHERBOA wearers, 
each and every one of them.

And JKR must know this.  She *must.*  I mean, even Draco himself -- 
who's really rather stupid, honestly -- is hip to this dynamic.  Just 
look at how he responds to Pansy in _PoA,_ when she asks him if his 
arm hurts.  Draco knows the score, all right.  A macho "nah, not 
really, don't worry about it" just isn't going to win you any eros 
points from an adolescent girl, unless there's one heck of a wince 
accompanying it.  And Draco knows that.  To get the adolescent girls 
crushing on you, you have to be hurt...yet still doing okay with it.  
But not *too* okay.  Not really okay down deep inside.  Just 
marginally okay.  Okay for now.  Okay, but tottering dangerously on 
the cusp on not really okay at all.

Yeah, I think that JKR knows what she's doing with that one.  I think 
she knew full well that all the adolescent girls were just going to 
swoon in guilt-ridden sadistic crush-mode the second that she smacked 
poor Harry with all of that Cruciatus in the graveyard, and I think 
that she knew exactly what she was doing when she started beating out 
her tune on that "Harry can't cry" drum, too.  I think that she knew 
what she was doing when she gave us poor pallid haggard prematurely-
grey Lupin, and I think that she knew what she was doing when she 
told us all about Sirius' haunted Azkaban eyes, and I even think it 
possible that she might have had some inkling of what she was up to 
when she kicked Snape's emotional legs out from under him for just a 
second there in "The Egg and the Eye." 

So what gives with Draco, then?  Why *does* the author seem to want 
to hurt him so much?  Ostensibly, it's to give us all a bit of "Just 
Desserts" satisfaction, but is that really all that's going on?

I don't know.  But I do wonder about it sometimes.  

For one thing, if you want to make a male character suffer and yet be 
absolutely certain that no reader will be the slightest bit tempted 
to get any erotic charge out of it, then there are certainly ways to 
do that.  The author can stave off "Hurt-Comfort," and JKR herself 
seems to know exactly how to do it.  She does it all the time when 
she writes Pettigrew, who no matter how much pain he might be 
compelled to endure throughout _GoF,_ no matter how vulnerable he may 
be, nonetheless never *once* derives the slightest bit of erotic 
frisson from any of it.  That's because the author goes to great 
lengths to describe his suffering as simply disgusting, and his 
vulnerabilities as just plain pathetic.  She works really *hard* at 
that.  Similarly, she knows exactly how to handle my boy Avery in the 
graveyard to make his own little bout of Cruciatus merely blackly 
humorous, rather than either sympathetic or at all appealing.  

So why can't she do the same for Draco?  She doesn't even have 
him "scream" when he gets attacked by Buckbeak.  He's certainly 
acting like a great big baby, but at the same time, the verb that she 
actually chooses to use for his line there is "yell," which is a lot 
more macho then her usual "shrieking," to be sure.  And while 
Hermione may take a great deal of pleasure in mocking Draco for his 
fearfulness in the wake of the ferret-bouncing incident, the way
that JKR actually chooses to describe his behavior in the immediate 
wake of the incident is really remarkably sedate, given that she's 
dealing with a character who is supposed to be such an absolute 
coward.  He picks himself up off the floor, and he's flushed and 
dishevelled.  But he doesn't even whimper.  This is really *not* the 
way to go about writing a character whom you wish to discourage as an 
object of some erotic interest among your female readership.  It 
really isn't.  

There are very simple ways to discourage such readings.  But when it 
comes to Draco, JKR isn't using them.

All of which does, to my mind, beg the question of just what JKR's 
intentions towards this character really are.  If she doesn't want 
people to read him as sympathetic, then why on earth does she keep 
pulling her punches with him?  She *could* take action to combat all 
of the built-in sympathy points that Draco is racking up in the 
text.  She certainly has shown that she knows how it's done. She 
knows how to battle Sympathy for the Devil, and she knows how to nip 
Hurt-Comfort in the bud.  She has *shown* that she knows how to do 
these things.

But when it comes to Draco, she's not doing them.  In fact, in some 
places, the text even seems to be actively *encouraging* all of those 
so-called "subversive" readings of his character.

It's certainly curious, and it does make me feel somewhat more 
sympathetic towards the notion that perhaps Draco is indeed being set 
up for some narrative function other than that of pure antagonist.  I 
don't really think that Redeemed!Draco is necessarily all that likely 
an outcome.  But I do think that it is rather more plausible than it 
might at first appear.



One thing that I do feel fairly certain of, though?

James wrote:

> Draco!Corpse anyone.   

Yes.  I will happily take a helping of DeadDeadDead!Draco.  Because
you know, there is not one character in the entire series who strikes
me as having "Doomed To Die In Book Seven" stenciled across his 
forehead quite so blatantly as Draco Malfoy.  He's ducking the 
vulture droppings even as we speak.  Whether he's getting a last-
minute redemption or not, whether he's going at his father's hands or 
Harry's or Voldemort's or even his own, whether he will wind up 
spending the next three volumes irritating me by being a profoundly 
unsatisfying (IMO) foil to Harry, or whether he will finally be given 
something a bit more interesting to do with himself, whether he will 
degenerate into a pathetic whining SYCOPHANTic villain's sidekick, or 
whether he will finally get something on the ball and manage to do 
something *right* (or at least manage to do something *wrong,* but 
with some degree of competence) for a change, whether he's going to 
outlive his father or not, that is one thing that I do feel sure of.  
 
He's dead, James. 



-- Elkins