#I just. look fucjing frail now

[321sluggie]

mentions of weight loss in tags

[pigeonesq]

HP musings

Listening to the aftermath of Slytherin Quidditch team losing to Gryffindor in The Order of the Phoenix, even now after a 100 reads and 13 years, my reaction is still so extreme. As in, driving down the motorway, hand over mouth, wanting to turn off the stereo and chuck my phone out the window, going OMGOMGOMG Malfoy shut the fuck up you fucjing fuck!!!!!

In fact, this round of listening to the audiobooks has really reminded me of just how spiteful, petty and malicious Malfoy really is and how much we all romanticise him in fanfiction. (Look I can’t even call him Draco I’m so angry with him right now.) Even giving him the excuse of being spoilt and immature, I can’t imagine anyone who gets that much pleasure out of causing pain can grow up to be what he is in 80% of the fics I read.

His and Harry’s animosity is just too entrenched. I know it all becomes insignificant in the wake of Voldemort, but after Malfoy knows that Harry has seen him fail, be humiliated, be on the losing side of the war, failure upon failure and humiliation, after all that mortally wounded pride of his which was monstrously inflated to begin with, his frail frail ego - would he ever even go near Harry?? Let alone date him?

It sounds like I’ve been reading Gryffindor propaganda but it’s not just Malfoy.

I think if you end up finding fanfic and reading and reading and reading it, your perception of characters get gradually eroded until you’re left with an extremely altered version of canon. I’ve found book Harry to be self-obsessed while being embarrassingly un-self-aware, (to the point where in Umbridges lesson’s I’m ready to punch the wall out of frustration,) impatient, rude, angry but also quietly sensitive to other’s feelings and very empathetic. Yeah you can call that first stuff being a teenager, and it’s stuff you grow out of, but really I know a lot of adults like that and in Cursed Child those faults hadn’t been sanded down and polished. Harry was being punished for them, hard.

I also forgot about Ron. In so many fics he’s cast as the steady, comic, have a pint in the pub friend. (Even, dare I say it, in the CC.) He and Harry nearly always have this solid, robust friendship, but they never seem to explore each other or talk with enough emotional depth. It’s all very pat on the back mate type talk and I know, I know in the books they’re kind of like that too, but we get to see so much more of Ron’s complexity. He’s contradictory and he’s a dick, argumentative but kind, but also a fucking moron. There’s so much to him to explore but I wonder if that is also the reason why I’ve rarely read a successful fan version of him. He doesn’t fit nicely into any of the boxes.

Draco does. Draco is redeemed. He is emotionally unavailable but ridiculously silly, socially upstanding yet a sexual deviant, he pushes and pulls Harry back and forth, provocative, repulsive and alluring, basically super-interesting, romanticised and often merely superficially complicated. But Ron is - awkward, messy, ordinary and far more realistic.

I wonder if it is because the fandom have basically created Draco’s character out of the mean skeleton of what we’re given of him in the books. The blank canvas-ness of him is what attracted me to write about him after all. You can really interpret him however you want.

Ron on the other hand is all there in all his gloriously unglamorous detail. Writing about him would be like attempting to paint a marshy forest or rows of terraced houses instead of the surface of a distant planet. I don’t know. Maybe I just havent found those Ron fics.

Brb reading Drarry