Things that you wish were in the Harry Potter novels

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 192029


> Alla:
> 
> Well, no, I did not dream nor did I care about Draco learning to become a hero. I would have laughed my head off if I would have seen him saving the day. I did however thought that the message about him learning that he is not a killer was as subtle as hitting the reader over the head with the baseball bat and accordingly that he is not cut out for Voldemort. I expected that to go somewhere. To me, this went nowhere.
> 
> 
> Pippin:
> > But Dumbledore didn't promise him that, did he? What he told Draco was that if he was willing to do a good thing now, then others would help him and his family, despite knowing  what he'd done in the past, and might do in the future.  
> > 
> > And that came to fruition in the Room of Requirement. Draco refused to be rescued until Goyle could be saved, too.  Would he have had the strength to make that choice if Dumbledore had not worked so hard to convince Draco that his choices mattered?
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Actually yes, I think he would have made this choice even if the Tower never happened, to me dramatically the two accidents were not connected. I never doubted that he considered Crabb and Goyle his friends, or maybe I did over the years, but not now.
> 
> I thought that he learned *something* on the Tower as to how to treat his enemies. And when push came to shove, he was being a typical Slytherin, he did not even have a strength to say that he did not recognize the Trio. One decisive action he did not manage.

Pippin:

It wasn't a viable option. 

What was he supposed to do, pinch his fingers together, assume a mystic expression and say, "These aren't the kids you're looking for?" <g> 

Ron and Hermione aren't in disguise. Draco has to know who they are.  So would anyone else who's even moderately familiar with the school. Draco knew Ron for a Weasley the first moment they met, all those years ago.  

 But he doesn't have to say so, and he doesn't. He says it could be them, which doesn't tell Bella and Lucius anything they don't know already. Say it can't be them at all, OTOH, and the next step is clear -- someone will get Hogwarts on the fire to find out who they are if they're not Potter, Granger and Weasley. No good. 

> 
> Pippin:
> > And would Harry have worked so hard to save Draco and Goyle if Dumbledore had not convinced him, by example, that Draco was worth saving? And if Draco had not been saved, Narcissa would not have helped Harry. Then what?
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Thats exactly my point - if Draco was not saved, Narcissa would not have helped Harry. Instead of character arc driving the plot, Draco was just another plot point used in order to get from point A to point B (or C or D), what happened to him was IMO pretty much forgotten.

Pippin:
I suppose you could see Draco as simply rudderless, buffeted this way and that by the plot as if he were a wizarding Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. But it's hard to see how a rudderless Draco winds up in the Room of Requirement trying to capture Harry. And yet, if Draco has come to believe that malice is not worth killing for, why is he there at all? Yet JKR makes it clear that this is Draco's choice, so it must be important. 

It's not a typical Slytherin action -- the  Slytherins have gone. It's not a typical DE action either. It's clear that whatever Draco is after, he's not trying to win glory from Voldemort. JKR has hit us over the head with that. Not only with Draco refusing to identify Harry but with his obvious revulsion at the death of Charity Burbage, his reluctance to engage in torture, Bella's contemptuous aside that she doesn't think Draco will be up to killing Scabious, and so on. 


But if Draco doesn't want his classmates slaughtered, what's the one thing he can do?  He can deliver Harry to Voldemort before Voldemort breaks into the school and kills everyone inside it, and Harry too, of course. 

It's still a selfish action, in that his classmates might prefer to die defending  Harry. It's more about not having to watch people die than about wanting to save them. But it's not the action of a person who's trying to be evil, IMO. And it's not about only wanting to save his Slytherin friends, because they've gone. 

Draco has come a very long way, IMO, from the boy who invaded Harry's compartment at the end of GoF, and gloated about how Ron and Hermione would die with all the other Muggle-lovers and  mudbloods. 

Now about unity...

Of course the hat prefers unity to tolerance. Who wouldn't? Unity feels great, tolerance feels like work. And being tolerated isn't much fun either. But unity, as Dumbledore said, can only come when hearts are open and aims are identical. 

Oh, a semblance of unity can be achieved by excluding some people and enforcing conformity on the rest. But only a semblance of friendship and trust will result. It didn't work any better for the Marauders than it did for the Death Eaters.

 So I wouldn't say that JKR forgot about unity, she just showed us that true unity will be a lot harder to achieve than we thought.  Meanwhile, though tolerance is hard work, a tolerant society is a lot more pleasant to live in, not to mention safer. 

 Draco on the platform hasn't exactly become open-hearted or made his aims identical with the Trio's. We can't even be sure that the Trio themselves are as open-hearted or their aims as lofty as we might like. Plenty of people have wished that JKR would give us some assurance about that.

 But that's wish-fulfillment, not reality. I'd have liked to see Harry open his heart to a living Slytherin. Instead JKR asks us to take it on faith, (or rather Harry asks Albus to take it on faith)  that he would. That is much harder to believe, but that's the point about having faith in people. It's not faith if they've proved themselves. 

  I think we can say Draco grew to be a far better person than Lucius ever was.  And who knows what Scorpius might be, if people will have the courtesy  not to assume he can't be better than his father was? 

Pippin