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

[dumbledore11214]

No: HPFGUIDX 124419


Elkins:
huge snip


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.


Alla:

So, I was rereading some of the Elkins' posts ( the bit of reading 
which I strongly recommend to anyone) and decided to ask a 
question,which kind of bug me ever since I read "Draco Malfoy is 
Ever so Lame.Yet Sympathetic and Dead" ( message 39083)for the first 
time.

I cannot help but nod my head in agreement as to general idea of 
hurt/comfort and why I love certain characters . :o)

Absolutely, the more pain they endure the more I like them. Sirius 
is a very good example, Harry - definitely, Lupin, even Snape.


But  I cannot see any of it, or almost any of it in Malfoy 
character. I cannot see any "dignified' suffering after he has his 
encounter with Buckbeak - I only see pathetic lying in the Potions 
class to make Ron do his work for him.

I  just don't feel Draco's pain at all. For the most part all that I 
feel is disgust. I feel like he is pretending, but not really 
hurting I suppose. Harry's hurt from cruciatus is real, Sirius' pain 
from Azkaban is real, even Snape I can imagine carries some guilt, 
pain, whatever, not Draco, though , not to me.

Is it because his ideology repulses me? Probably, but then again - " 
bad boys who could be redeemed" usually work quite well for me.

Is it because I identify with Harry so strongly? But I like Snape ( 
honestly I do :o)), even though he , IMO, hurts Harry significantly 
more than Draco does.


The only time in the books when I kind of felt Draco's pain, sort of 
was at the end of OOP, when he blames Harry for putting Lucius in 
prizon. I kind of sensed real feeling behind that, but it definitely 
not enough for me to expect Redeemable!Draco.


Can somebody explain to me,why while I understand hurt/comfort 
phenomena quite well, it does not work for me on Draco?

I snipped Elkins' work quite significantly, but definitely read the 
complete one. :o)


Alla