#also that gallapod was ace as well

[wistfulrat]

i am....wildly invested in this convo. OP i hope u don’t mind others chiming in bc this resonates so much.

im constantly mulling over the unforgivable curses in the wizarding world vs. the anglican xtian theology around unforgivable sins, post-war penance, jkr’s ambiguous as hell justice/law systems, and the different types of drarry fics that choose to deal with redemption as a character’s relationship to change as opposed to proximity to baseline goodness. bc you don’t have to ascribe to religious conceptions of grace in order to tease out those themes in your characters. honestly? i meant what i said in this post, that a shit ton of transgressive drarry fic is interesting bc they’re essentially socratic dialogues set in a love story.

as in, i think a lot of drarry writers (which includes the down-and-out trope) whether religious or not, bc they are compelled by an inherently anglican-shaped text (hp canon), are constantly responding to questions about deservedness, absolution, and grace. the entire premise of the h/d pairing pulls two literary foils together and asks for a reckoning and reconciliation—a collision, an aftermath, and recovery. and i think drarry writers thrive in that tension bc they’re interested in human longings to be good, free, desirable, wanted, forgiven, respected, seen but not hypervisible, left alone but not lonely. or at least, those seem to be driving themes.

we can talk about moral event horizons all day but i think drarry at its most nuanced is not actually about self-flagellation and “earning the reader’s sympathies” — it’s about the contradictions that exist in all humans who do shitty things. down-and-out draco then, doesn’t even always need a morally upright harry to save the villain because it’s not about contesting human worthiness at all. the fic trope seems set up to push back on the idea that a human can move from deserving of humane treatment to undeserving of humane treatment in the first place.

flannery o’connor said, “there is something in us that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. the reader of today looks for this motion, but what he has forgotten is the cost” — she talks about the grotesque in southern literature, the christ-haunted south, and stories fixated on what many readers at the time considered ugly, irredeemable, fucked-up-beyond-repair characters. flannery’s writing focused on story arcs that humanized the worst of us by saying “yes, even they experience acts of grace and it is uncomfortable to witness that and you should wonder why you’re upset.”

now, as an indigenous woc whose people have been colonized to fuck and were almost wiped off the planet during WWII, like...of course i am hyper aware of that when im reading dracos characterization in fic. maybe it’s morally rigid or unfair, but i am looking for that rising and falling action anyway. that is not a xtian sentiment but an oppressed one. not because i need to be convinced of draco’s base humanity or goodness — but because rehabilitation comes at a personal and communal cost. i want to see that movement. as someone who lives in a place that was and is ravaged by war and militarization, i know that our relationships to oppressors are constantly shifting. our islands that were once carpet bombed and occupied by one imperial group were intermarrying with those same people only a decade later. how does that happen? on an interpersonal, communal, and cultural level? when does it become okay? the reality is, you can’t control human responses to that at all. the mess of post-war rebuilding for us was seeing that grace is as indiscriminate and random as violence. that anybody can receive and give it. that it’s not hinged on some arbitrary measure of morality — but it’s an experience that anyone can have. yes, even tragic posh racist shits who were indoctrinated by their fucked up parents.

and honestly? down-and-out draco is cathartic for that very reason. bc marginalized readers (or at least for me) want to see that in the fantasy world, there is a human possibility beyond repeating patterns of oppression. it’s not about wanting to make someone suffer gratuitously and publicly. mostly, it’s an escape into unreality: where a privileged people can be interested in real change, however unavailable that seems to be in real life.

Meta: Down-and-out Draco Malfoy in Drarry Fics

I’ve been thinking about the discussion of down-and-out Draco Malfoy trope in the bonus episode of GallaPlacidia’s Gallapod as part of the reflection on her Dad Says. Like a lot of thinking, because it’s probably my favourite Drarry trope?

I’m going to leave aside the parallels to history bits. I’m also going to leave aside where much smarter people than me have talked about how in the original HP series, forgiveness/redemption comes from a distinctly culturally Christian sensibility, because I think this is true AND that the trope also serves a narrative purpose in Drarry fics. 

So here’s the scene: it’s the aftermath of a Wizarding War that destabilized their entire society. If a fic begins post-War, that is sort of the background regardless of how many years it has been. In most fics, there are Death Eaters that are going straight to Azkaban, no question. The question becomes what to do with people who are DE-adjacent. Usually in Drarry fics, it’s a reparations payment, possibly probation or house arrest, sometimes a work project, the loss of the use of magic or a wand and possibly exile. That’s the justice part of it. 

Then there’s the social stigma part of it: people refusing to serve Draco in their shops, refusing to hire him and all the way up to vigilante justice. Harry Potter is a series that’s very much about good triumphing evil, so that is echoed post-War. JKR also wrote, intentionally or not, a very ruthless streak in Wizarding society even among “good” characters, so this is a little bit drawn out here. 

But I think, even if the punishment is wildly unfair, this takes care of the societal part of crime and punishment. Adult Harry is a narrative moral compass a lot of the time, but when he rejects some excesses of black and white thinking and is able to shift from suspicion to compassion or indifference to an appreciation for people’s ability to change, he brings the fic back to centre. 

Having evidence of a societal punishment in the world-building removes the burden from Harry to have to forgive Draco on behalf of everyone. It’s a matter of complicated, thorny, and often difficult interpersonal forgiveness but just that. They can grapple separately or together about what this means about the world they are in or in Draco’s case, may have been thrown out of.

But it also stops Harry, most of the time, from being the tool that metes out justice by himself. He is not the decider. There are times when he’s part of the apparatus of the Ministry as an Auror, but to my knowledge, it’s pretty rarely Harry’s choice whatever has come to pass even if he was able to testify at the Post-War trials.  

Sometimes other characters are able to make their peace with Draco before Harry can bring himself to. Sometimes other characters can’t believe Harry would forgive Draco at all. 

There’s a whole separate essay here someone could write about the fanon depictions of how that’s done and which characters are depicted as forgiving, whatever that may look like,  but this is long enough! This is just a few thoughts that have been rattling around my brain that got way too long!