A slightly different spin on the future signicance of Draco Malfoy (SPOILERS)

[the_great_sphinx_42]

No: HPFGUIDX 67191

Warnings: this is long, and contains some minor OotP

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Okey-dokey. I've got a theory to share. 

There has been a lot of debate on Draco, the part he has had to play 
in the past five books, and where his character is going. I've read a 
lot of different opinions and am trying, like many of you, to balance 
what we've been told so far with JKR's penchant for totally shocking 
us. Some wonder if he will be "redeemed" and be important to uniting 
the school. Some wonder if he'll turn genuinely, actively evil and be 
important as a young Death Eater. And some wonder if he'll just dork 
around tying Harry's shoelaces together right through book 7. At 
various intervals in my thought process, I've believed all three are 
possible. Here's where my thought process has led me now... 

I'm thinking that Draco might well be important to uniting the school-
 because he turns actively evil. Bear with me- I have a lot of 
factors in reaching a fairly simple conclusion. Here they are: 

1) We know that Harry has, for the past five years, been rejecting 
anything and everything Slytherin. Draco has been, from the very 
first time Harry hears about it, representative of Slytherin. Some 
will disagree, but I think it's pretty clear that Draco is a leader 
in his House, and obviously quite popular. No small amount of 
emphasis has been placed on this. He is a prefect, the seeker, 
he "holds court" at the Slyth table, and the whole House quite 
literally follows his tune with "Weasley Is Our King". Many have 
posited, for this reason, that he is vital to any alliance between 
the Slyths and everybody else. 

2) A note on the state of inter-House politics: We can infer with 
some safety, because of the Sorting Hat's new song, that unity 
between Slytherin and the rest of the school will be important to 
ultimate victory for the side of good. We know that Harry and Ron 
both initially reject the idea. After Umbridge and her all-Slyth I-
Squad and Harry and his Slyth-free D.A., relations between the 
Slytherins and the rest of the school might well be at an all-time 
low.

3) We know from JKR's interviews that Draco and Harry will never 
unite to fight evil. She has also recently been quoted as saying, 
rather ominously, that she's worried about all the kids dressing up 
as Draco because (paraphrase) "you are all getting far too fond of 
Draco... the dark is coming". It may simply be that she was saying 
she doesn't think people should like Draco, but it could just as 
easily be a warning to not get too attached.

4) You'll notice that Draco has never said that he hates Harry. Harry 
says he hates Draco as early on as about half-way through SS/PS, but 
Draco does this cutesy "I don't like you, Potter" thing that has 
actually made a lot of people chuckle. The end of OotP, however, 
gives Draco a real, concrete reason to hate Harry. And I mean really 
*hate* him. It isn't a matter of being jealous or having had his 
pride hurt. It's not a matter of a schoolyard rivalry. It's not a 
Quidditch thing, or a House thing. It's not even just an issue of 
opposing political views. This is *personal* in a way that Draco's 
animosity towards Harry and his friends has never, ever been. I think 
any chance Draco might have had for either eventual redemption or 
even passivity were thrown out the door at the same time. I think JKR 
has tried very hard to make us see Draco as almost less than a human 
being for a reason- when he goes, the emphasis will be on the 
reaction, perhaps most particularly Harry's, instead of Draco's 
actual fate.

5) You'll also notice that Draco has held Harry's attention less and 
less as the series has worn on. Many have commented that Draco's 
efforts to thwart Harry and Co. seem quite silly now. He got little 
to no development as a character until the very end. A number of 
factors lead us to believe that Harry is quite beyond Draco now, and 
Harry has dismissed Draco, in his own mind, as any sort of serious 
threat. At the end of OotP, Draco is angrier than Harry has ever seen 
him and basically makes a death threat, but Harry just looks at him 
with "detached satisfaction". Later, Draco, Crabbe and Goyle try to 
jump Harry on the train, but get turned into slugs by the D.A.

6) Harry spends much of OotP very angry and not seeing very clearly, 
placing unfair blame and taking offense to everything. I'll go so far 
as to say he needs to be snapped out of it, even though much of his 
anger is justified. He is questioning a lot of his previous beliefs 
and has been shown- in spectacularly awful fashion- the danger of 
kneejerk reactions to some things and ignoring others. He is in a 
decidedly unheroic, unepic mode. 

7) The Snape issue. Dunno how, but he's got to be important to how 
all this plays out. He's the Slytherin HoH, Draco's favorite teacher, 
and the only Slyth we've ever been given reason to believe possesses 
any redeeming qualities. I thought it was cute that Snape called 
Draco 'Draco', when he has never called any other student by their 
given name. Additionally, the scene with the Pensieve and Snape's 
memories of MWPP gives us- and Harry- some very interesting insights. 

So, all told, we have a number of things to consider. How does 
Harry's general attitude affect things? How will Draco's desire for 
revenge assert itself? There is the question of whether or not JKR 
would really have given all this face time to a character, especially 
making him the son of one of Voldemort's followers, only to dismiss 
him as unimportant? (Even taking into account that JKR hates Draco, I 
believe, as she hates few other characters.) And, perhaps most 
importantly of all, how the heck can school unity be achieved? 

Well... maybe Draco is actually, thematically, more important than we 
have been led to believe; maybe he is at the very heart of the 
unification issue. It'd be easy to guess that Draco and his threat 
might be important to book 6, and then we are rather craftily 
directed to dismiss that idea, just as Harry does- but I'm not sure 
we should. Basically what I'm getting at here is that I think Harry 
needs to be disillusioned about his enemies just as he has been with 
his friends/allies/idols. It has been discussed (and discussed, and 
discussed...) at length that the Slytherin=Evil thing *cannot* be 
right. I've said it before- I don't think a woman sensitive enough to 
feel sorry for Dudley, which JKR has said she does, can mean for us 
to end the series believing that one-fourth of the school is 
uniformly bad from age 11 and the rest uniformly good or at least non-
evil. Harry sees it that way right now, and I think a vital part of 
his continuing emotional maturity will be in seeing that it's not 
true.

Interrupting myself here for a moment:

I suppose it *is* possible that JKR really does see all the 
Slytherins as being every bit as one-dimensional as she depicts them, 
and I suppose it's possible that she thinks Harry is right for seeing 
them that way- even though it still looks to me like an alliance will 
have to be formed somehow. If that is the case, I can only wish that 
she were as feeling and perceptive about "bad people" as she is 
about "good people". Tremendous effort has obviously been put into 
making our heroes multi-demensional and possessing of both positive 
and negative traits. I sit back in awe of the emotional complexity of 
OotP, even while I lament that a lack of fleshed-out villains may 
keep these books from being held in even higher esteem than they are. 

Now back to the theory: 

I should note that I can't even guess at the particulars. But- after 
all this mess, here's my actual theory- I'm wondering if what happens 
with Draco (I'm thinking of maybe a spectacular form of self-
destruction, probably in book 6 and possibly involving Voldemort, 
while attempting revenge) might be what motivates Harry and Co. to 
recognize that their Slytherin "enemies" are not in fact static, to 
realize just how important school unity is, and to make them seek to 
achieve it. This would allow for Draco-as-symbol-of-Slytherin, but 
Draco himself would not have to change. He has a behavioral pattern 
of not learning from his mistakes. Or, maybe more to the point, he 
has a long history of letting his emotions, particularly anger, over-
ride whatever good sense he has. 

This does not address the build-up for at least one showdown between 
a Malfoy and a Weasley, either Arthur vs. Lucius or Draco vs. Ron. 
Arthur vs. Lucius makes the most sense to me, given the mythological 
angle- King Arthur killed an evil Emperor Lucius. But that has been 
complicated by Lucius's sojourn in Azkaban. What happens with Lucius- 
whether he and the other DEs do a jail break or whatever- will likely 
be important. I'm wondering if Draco's attempt at revenge might not 
include Ron. It might be counter-productive to the school unity angle 
at first, but I can see Draco trying to strike at Harry through Ron. 
In his typical arrogance, seeking to kill two birds with one stone, 
so to speak. He knows, from the Triwizard Tournament, that Ron is the 
thing that Harry would most miss. Would Draco not see that as an even 
trade?