#then give all mentions of goyle's stupidity to crabbe. oh well too late haha

[seriousbrat]

i think that regarding crabbe and goyle it’s also important that we meet them when malfoy’s offer of “friendship” is still fresh. in book 1, things haven’t gotten as multifaceted and political, and so malfoy is introduced to be the minor antagonist at school. having henchmen, for lack of a better word, establishes this easily, especially in contrast to harry and his two best friends that he values. having henchmen that harry couldn’t name three things about cements that it is malfoy coming at the trio, not an equally balanced antagonistic interest. additionally, malfoy’s friends/friendships are portrayed as flat, transactional, and sycophantic because his offer of friendship needs to be and remain extremely unappealing to harry. “here’s malfoy and his interesting and dynamic social circle (of which he still remains the leader)” doesn’t serve that function as well. obviously by the later books we do want and need to see that complexity, and by then crabbe and goyle were already set as being lugs. but i agree completely — i wish we’d gotten more going on for them. the side characters on the whole of the series are so much more complex, though those characters are also mostly introduced later. and it is a let down that their fathers are named but utterly irrelevant

Absolutely, I think it's a purposeful contrast with the trio. It's very similar to Dudley's friendship with his gang, which is pretty clearly a type of friendship that Harry does not want. In HBP when Harry overhears Crabbe questioning Malfoy's orders to guard the Room of Requirement, he says ‘I tell my friends what I’m up to, if I want them to keep a lookout for me,’ which is a pretty good comparison. And I think in the final confrontation between the trio and Malfoy's gang in DH, this difference becomes more apparent than ever when the trio risk their lives to save Malfoy and Goyle, whereas Crabbe turns on Draco, nearly kills them all, and ends up dying to his own spell.

But yes, I agree that it works alright in the first book to establish Malfoy as an archetypal antagonist for a kid's book, and the opposite of what Harry would want in a friend, which is Ron and Hermione. Like I said haha, I think JKR just kind of had to stick with it after that, at least she managed to wring a bit of interest out of Crabbe in the end.

Also yeah, the fact that their fathers are named in the graveyard feels kind of like JKR was searching for names that could have been Death Eaters and just decided to use those two, then never wanted to use them again. The only time they are brought up again is after the Quibbler interview in OotP, and Crabbe Sr is present at the Dept. of Mysteries, but it would have been neater for Voldemort to name Yaxley or the Carrows, who are much more relevant later-- it's likely that Yaxley and the Carrows weren't characters at that point. There are hints that Theodore Nott was originally supposed to be more important/has some kind of backstory we never find out about, like Dean Thomas. But even so I think Nott sr.'s single line of dialogue (‘My Lord, I prostrate myself before you, I am your most faithful –’) and Theodore's expression of "distaste" while watching the Thestrals gives them both so much more colour than the Crabbes and Goyles haha.