Draco

[cel.shaded]

No: HPFGUIDX 177400

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "prep0strus" <prep0strus at ...> wrote:
> Look, I know the Nazi/Hitler analogy is played out, but I think many
> people feel that this is what JKR was going for, and so it’s not my
> personal analogy, but hers, when I say… how do the people who identify
> with Draco see themselves? 
> 
> I mean, does anybody say, ‘Yeah, I was rich and spoiled.  I was mean
> to poor people.  I was racist and prejudiced and wanted people to be
> killed.  My dad worked for Hitler, and I couldn’t wait to work for him
> too.’
> ~Adam(Prep0strus)

I felt compelled to comment on this, because it just so happens I was
trying to figure out how to redeem Draco quite recently. I mean, he
has been redeemed, but I have never quite gotten around to explaining
why I am so cursed fond of the character, even though he is admittedly
a Dudley with more cleverness, and different forms of power. And why I
have gone to such great lengths to mark out all the reasons his name
should be cleared in accordance with his acts in DH.

I don't think there is much to admire in him, for starters, and
admiration is key to sort of relating to a character, because there
must be some good in them that you aspire to. But (if you could call
it admiration!) I suppose there is something good to say that Draco
has perseverance.

He never wins, ever. In the long run, Draco is resigned to the
has-beens pile, those who won in the short term but were ultimately
defeated by the Main-Character-Upon-Whom-All-Blessings-Are-Heaped. But
does he go home and cry to his mummy about Harry? No, he jumps right
back up after a few days (after crying to his mummy?). If nothing
else, we can all silently applaud he can doggedly pursue his own
agenda, even when he ought to have quit long ago.

And he has not been depicted as a thoroughly hatable character. Low
and unworthy of adoration and petty and arrogant and so on and so
forth, but he has never been Evil. What he did in HBP was admittedly
rather Evil, but it was tempered by the fact he didn't really want it,
he just didn't want to get caught with what would happen if he didn't
do it; his motivation for LV's cause seems to be mostly fear for
himself. And I suppose, in his very, very, very tiny way, he rebels.
Sort of. Just enough to shout out to us that he IS Redeemable!Draco,
and we should not condemn him yet. 

He's still vaguely familiar, sort of an unpleasant person you've never
gotten to know. He could be evil, or he might be evil and something
else, too.

& also, during the first four books (perhaps the fifth, too) he was so
supremely pettily Evil and one-sided in doing so my Reading Radar
picked up an anomaly. I mean, there were tiny flashes of
vulnerability, but throughout he was generally the Draco Harry refused
to befriend on the train. And he is not an important enough villain to
be one-sided, or lesser-enough that he can be relegated to a handful
of adjectives. Draco is much more important than Ernie, but I find
Ernie a bit more two-sided than Draco, with his pomposity, changing
alliances . . . So something's up. The way Draco is positioned in the
novel just makes it feel it would be a desecration if JKR did nothing
more than make him a tiny villian who can't even win. (Besides, he is
a failure at a villian! He can't get one definitive win that can
withstand time.) He is not Harry's enemy, and hasn't really been set
up like that throughout the series. He's more like Harry's schoolboy
rival.

You can feel sympathetic to Draco, I think, because you can't really
be angry at him. Or hate him, the way you can Voldemort or Snape if
you were all for Snape the Traitor after HBP. And since he really
never wins enough to be the top dog, and never is evil enough to be
respected, or nice enough to be liked, he just kind of flows to the
middling ground of being someone to sympathize and sort of
patronizingly comfort.

—Cel, who hopes she did not ramble too much to be entirely useless.