[HPforGrownups] ACID POPS and Teenager Draco

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 157469

Neri:
Yes, well, that would kind of give things away, don't you think? But
you have to see that "nobody can help me" is totally OOC for Draco.

Magpie:
It wouldn't give things away, it would just put things in the story.  It's 
not like there's a mystery here we're wondering about Snape and Narcissa. 
In fact, if there is Snape/Narcissa going on it's the two of them who are 
acting OOC when they don't refer to it (except through author narration that 
fits the non-romantic but equally intense scene just as well)--and even more 
strange for Draco himself not to refer to it.

Draco himself is not acting OOC, he's reacting to new circumstances.  (Not 
that help has much helped him in the past--the character is perpetually 
disappointed in canon.) Things have changed for Draco, his storyline in HBP 
is all about isolating him so that he has to be alone with his thoughts and 
ultimately be able to learn who he really is and make a decision standing on 
his own (I got this far...they all thought I'd die).  In the story there are 
plenty of reasons give for this that are far more connected to the plot and 
things Harry can relate to than a minor love subplot.  Even Voldemort's own 
plan is designed to keep Draco isolated (for LV's own reasons): He's got to 
do it.  In the last scene Draco's literally surrounded by DEs who don't act 
because the Dark Lord says Draco's got to do it. And he doesn't ask any of 
them for help either, despite their not having an affair with his mother.

> Magpie:
> The character starts out feeling that it's important
> for him to do this and prove himself, and winds up paranoid and
> isolated with two almost-murders on his conscience.  Neither of
> those attitudes lend themselves to him going to Narcissa or Snape to
> make things right.  The almost-murders themselves, imo, have far
> more power to make him turn away from these two than any vague
> problems connected to Snape/Narcissa I can imagine.
>

Neri:
Not from Draco's PoV. From Draco's PoV Snape is a DE who would have no
qualms about killing Dumbledore to "steal Draco's glory", and Narcissa
is the one who told Harry in public that he doesn't have much time
left.

Magpie:
Yes, from Draco's pov.  Snape's being a DE who would have no qualms about 
killing Dumbledore should make him threatening to Draco as the year goes on. 
That's what's so compelling about Draco's storyline.  He's always claimed he 
was going to grow up to be this one thing--that he WAS this thing, and his 
whole childhood's been pointing towards that.  Now he's realizing he isn't 
that person and he's surrounded by adults who are and think he's one of 
them--he's beginning to realize he's in the enemy camp. He's spent so much 
of his life creating this persona of who he is that there's no one for him 
to talk to when he realizes he isn't that.

Neri:
It is also quite possible that Draco had heard something about
his mother's part in the Kreacher plot and death of Sirius. Draco has
no reason to be ashamed of Snape or his mother that he had almost
killed a blood-traitor like Ron Weasley and a Gryffindor girl like
Katie Bell. At most he should be ashamed that he had botched the killings.

Magpie:
I think the storyline is there to make you revise your previous thinking 
about Draco rather than your previous thinking about Draco being there to 
revise the storyline.  Both Draco's botching of the attempts and his shame 
at almost killing would isolate him from Snape and Narcissa.  He's not who 
he feels he should be, which is not who you think he is.

Neri:
In your version Draco's attitude towards his mother and Snape in HBP
is completely irrational.

Magpie:
Not irrational so much as emotional rather than strictly utilitarian.  Lots 
of characters in HP operate under similar motivations.

Neri:
 He was given a very difficult mission by the
Dark Lord, with a sentence of death on him and his family if he can't
complete it. He is offered considerable assistance from Narcissa and
Snape - the first his own mother and the second someone he liked a lot
for five years. And yet even when he is desperate enough to cry in
bathrooms, even after Snape saves his life, Draco wouldn't trust him
for help (and apparently not his mother, because if he had told her
she would have told Snape). The fact that his father is also in mortal
peril if the mission fails only makes accepting Snape's help more
logical and more urgent. So in order to explain Draco's irrational
behavior here you must introduce the Teenage Irrationality Factor.

Magpie:
I introduced the Draco Emotional factor. Most characters in HP have an 
emotional factor that is a bigger motivation than the logical thing to do. 
Of course, HP is also fond of "teenagers are idiots" being an important 
thing to remember.

Neri:
That is, you must assume that Draco being a teenager will make him
"want to do it himself" and "have problems with authority figures",
and generally act against his own interests even if it kills him and
his family. IOW you have to assume that an angsty teenager equals a
complete idiot. I don't see JKR falling for this clich.

Magpie:
In order to think that it comes down to just a generic idea of a teenager 
acting like an idiot and wanting to do things himself (both of which on 
their own are powerful motivators for actual teenagers) you have to ignore 
the storyline that the author actually wrote where this specific teenager is 
being motivated by a set of circumstances that encourage him to behave this 
way.  It's Draco's own self-realizations that isolate him more than anything 
else.

Neri:
In my version Draco has a rational reason to mistrust both his mother
and Snape. He has a rational reason to suddenly have problems with
authority figures. He feels betrayed by the important adults in his
life.

Magpie:
So a major emotional trauma like Lucius going to prison isn't enough of a 
reason for Draco to lose faith in his former authority figures, but he can 
lose faith in his former authority figures based on a feeling that Snape 
loves Narcissa?  Seems to me you've got the exact same story, only you 
prefer Draco to be motivated by a modern domestic teenager cliche rather 
than the cliches of epic tales.  I think my motivation fits what's written 
far better.  One of the things you seem to see as proof for your motivation 
is that it explains away any thing that seems like a fundamental change in 
Draco as a character.  I think the whole storyline is about a fundamental 
change in Draco as a character.  He's not only reacting to outside 
complications, he's left alone with himself--his true self--for the first 
time.

Neri:
He's afraid that his mother and Snape have reasons of their own
in helping him, that they might be manipulating him. He suspects that
they are conspiring together against his father, who is in jail so
Draco can't contact him. Maybe he even has suspicions that they
somehow engineered his father being caught and jailed. Maybe he isn't
sure to whom he even wants to be loyal - to his mother or to his
father. He is angry and jealous at Snape. In short, in this version
Draco is an angsty teenager with real, rational reasons to act like an
angsty teenager. We have just been told that Hamlet is one of JKR's
favorites readings. Don't you see the parallels?

Magpie:
Parallels to Hamlet are already there without the use of the adultery thread 
of the plot--that's there to get Hamlet to his dilemma.   Hamlet's 
suspicions about his father's murder are in the actual text.  In HBP the 
story is that Lucius was put into prison due to the events at the MoM and 
there's no hint from Draco or anyone else that they think Snape or Narcissa 
had anything to do with it--or how they even could have anything to do with 
it.  Narcissa herself is loyal to her husband, lashing out at Bellatrix when 
she suggests Lucius screwed up.

In order to make Draco's fear "rational" you had to invent more and more 
details for your own plot that aren't in the text.  Instead of proving the 
main thing you need to prove (that Snape and Narcissa are having an affair, 
or Draco thinks they are, or that Snape likes Narcissa) you've assumed it's 
true that Draco suspects them and then invented further things that Draco 
feels because of that.  And yet none of this is in the story.  Draco has a 
long conversation with Dumbledore at the end of the book about his 
motivations and none of this comes up at all.  Nor does it get hinted at in 
the conversation between Snape and Draco or Draco and Myrtle--there's the 
three major conversations Harry overhears and JKR forgot to put the story in 
any of them.

Frankly, the story JKR wrote is just plain better.  Draco's not a spoiled 
brat who likes people to do things for him but now feels his Mummy has been 
plotting against him and his father because she wants to marry his teacher. 
He's always aspired to stand on his own--this storyline is foreshadowed way 
back in PoA when, in the one conversation where Harry and Draco almost 
connect, he says if it were his family Sirius Black killed, he'd want 
revenge.

If Draco's been betrayed by a family member that family member would be 
LUCIUS.  The one whose claims about what it was like being a Death Eater 
were completely false, the one who got himself arrested, the one who got 
Voldemort focused on killing Draco to begin with, the one who didn't prepare 
Draco for what he was going to face.  The one whose place he's got to take. 
Draco has been betrayed by the adults in his life, but not by Narcissa 
fooling around on Lucius.

Sydney:

This is a bit beside your point, but I would just like to revel in the fact 
that HBP was a *bonanza* for every Snape fan and Draco fan I used to think 
were a bit over the top.

Magpie:
Oh god, yes.  I'd been wailing for exactly this type of storyline for Draco 
for years and was completely shocked when it actually happened.

Sydney:
Snape and Harry though are the central characters of the whole shebang, at 
least theirs is the central relationship.

Magpie:
Yup, and Lily is beginning to seem like the last missing link, since 
everything else has come back to Snape, now that he was the eavesdropper. 
We got the connection/life debt to James back in PS/SS.  It makes sense that 
we'd get the romantic connection of Snape/Lily, if it exists, after Harry 
himself has grown up.  Snape/Narcissa has no bang for Harry--or even much 
for Draco without retroactive explanations for how it made him somehow think 
Narcissa got Lucius put in jail and is now trying to get Draco killed 
because of it.

Sydney:
Introducing some overwhelming passion for Narcissa
at this stage-- a hitherto unsuspected character flaw--  would be beyond 
weird.  It's not 'more compact' than Snape/Lily-- it's extraneous to the 
main action of the books, so it's all dangly and appendix-y.

Magpie:
Right--where as Snape/Lily goes right back into the flaws we already know 
are his downfall.  He lost her to James, he got her killed, he couldn't save 
her, he called her a Mudblood.  If Snape loved Lily he chose to let his hate 
win.  If Snape loves Narcissa he's actually been surprisingly good about the 
way he's handled it, hasn't he?  It seems far more Snape-ish to hate the son 
of the woman he loves with another man than to be the far better father 
figure he's been to Draco.

-m