Draco...Interesting?

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 176986

Katie:
> I have noticed that many of the same people who like Snape and 
find 
> him fascinating also like Draco and deem him a fascinating and 
> complex character.
> 
> Now, I am a Snape fan, and I DO think he is one of the best 
> characters in the books. In fact, he reminds me of Falstaff, in 
that 
> he sort of grows out of the boundaries of his own story. 
> 
> However, I do not remotely feel that Draco is that kind of 
> character. I think he's pretty stiff and one-note, actually. Far 
> from being fascinating, I think he's a very common little ferrety 
> troublemaker, the kind of boring hum-drum bully that appears in 
many 
> books and films. Unlike Snape, who has some real internal 
conflict - 
> Draco has none. He swallows all the crap that his parents have 
> taught him hook, line, and sinker, and like all bullies - he's a 
> wimp, deep down. I mean, he's perfectly willing to kill DD to save 
> his own neck and his family's, but when he's actually confronted 
> with fighting anyone, he immediately backs down. He's not even 
> really evil - which might be interesting - he's just a boring, run 
> of the mill bully. At least, IMO. 
> 
> So, I guess this is a plea to all those Draco fans - why? Why is 
he 
> so interesting? I'm not trying to be obnoxious - I really want to 
> understand the fascination. Especially since so many other Snape 
> fans seem to be Draco fans, as well. Thanks! Katie

Magpie:
Well, it's kind of hard to defend something that's personal taste. I 
like him more than Snape, so there you go. I guess just to answer 
your own concerns to give how it comes across to me:

Katie:
Unlike Snape, who has some real internal conflict - 
> Draco has none. He swallows all the crap that his parents have 
> taught him hook, line, and sinker, and like all bullies - he's a 
> wimp, deep down.

Magpie:
Well, that's a conflict right there, being a bully who's deep down a 
wimp. I don't see that his swallowing what his parents say makes him 
not conflicted. To me that partly is the conflict: he buys it, and 
yet it's completely untrue, and ultimately he learns that when 
everything comes crashing down and isn't what it promised to be. I 
personally don't have a problem with all wimp characters--I like 
Draco more because he's so unsuited to be a bully and so winds up 
just getting himself beaten up over and over. He's a completely 
powerless character who tries to find ways of giving himself power 
and he wins me over with it. 

Katie:

 I mean, he's perfectly willing to kill DD to save 
> his own neck and his family's, but when he's actually confronted 
> with fighting anyone, he immediately backs down. 

Magpie:
On this, no and no. He's not just perfectly willing to kill DD to 
save his own neck and his family's--if he was that he'd have killed 
DD. I think he yearns to kill DD because it's supposed to be a 
heroic and manly thing to do--this is how he's going to restore his 
family's dignity and save his father etc., but he's tripped by the 
fact that he's actually a normal person who isn't a natural 
murderer. He backs down from fights sometimes but not others--if he 
backed down all the time he wouldn't get beaten up all the time. 
Sometimes he sticks to it far longer than he should. More often than 
not he's bringing everything down on his head and provoking people 
when he's outnumbered (sometimes even by older people)--if he backed 
down he'd have a far easier life. Though he certainly can back down--
but again, that doesn't always bother me in a character. He's so 
lacking in power and lives in a universe where power is everything. 
And he represents everything the author seems to think a person/boy 
shouldn't be, so he gets me with that too. I'm kind of a Cheerleader 
for the Damned with this character.

Katie:
He's not even 
> really evil - which might be interesting - he's just a boring, run 
> of the mill bully. At least, IMO. 

Magpie:
I personally don't feel that making him really evil would make him 
more interesting--I'm not that interested in Tom Riddle once it's 
made clear he's just really evil and a sociopath. I don't care about 
Amycus. I like Luicus more as a screw-up than as a smooth evil 
operator. Crabbe doesn't come across as that much more fascinating 
to me because he's the evil one. I think being born into a society 
(the DE society) that awards true evil while actually being a run-of-
the-mill regular person who has to suppress parts of his personality 
*just* to be a run-of-the-mill bully (well, really, not even that--
Dudley's a far better bully and far more run of the mill because 
he's not highly strung and on the verge of a breakdown most of the 
time) is interesting. 

So why do I find him interesting? I like that he's this hysterical 
nutter stuck in the situation he's in, which imo is interesting in 
himself. Not only is he destined to be proven wrong in every way, 
this dark lord's coming for him--Voldemort's return is worse for 
Draco than most other characters. I think Draco is a tragic 
character because he wants to be so much more than he is and doesn't 
realize he's already more than he wants to be--because he aspires to 
all the wrong things. Not only does he aspire to be something that 
is a bad thing to aspire to be, aspiring to be that makes him 
completely weaken himself so that he's not even as much as the 
person he could be. 

I had always hoped for the kind of story we got in HBP so I was 
pleased with that--I was totally disappointed when I realized that 
JKR is rather essentialist in the way she writes characters, so that 
putting a character like Draco through the wringer doesn't result in 
the character really growing or getting stronger. To me that 
unfortunately made him seem rather artificial in the last book, like 
all the themes brought up with his story in HBP were a mistake, lie 
a by-product of the elder wand. Or like the natural resolution to 
the story doesn't happen. But up until then--and a lot of the way 
through DH--his story remained totally interesting to me. He's still 
my favorite character. And I didn't think Snape turned out all that 
interesting, frankly, either in the end, so of the two of them I no 
longer automatically think Snape has so much of an edge. They're 
both conflicted--most of Rowling's characters are built around a 
central conflict. I don't know how exactly you see Snape or how you 
find him that interesting, but I'm sure there are plenty of people 
who would disagree.

-m