Draco Malfoy - fact and fiction

draco malfoy

JK Rowling - if you’ve been living in a Harry Potter free world - has created the ultimate Harry Potter fan site and it’s filled with new bits and pieces about the World of Harry Potter. (Pottermore, if you’re curious. It’s really quite awesome despite the fact that it’s twice sorted me into Ravenclaw.)

This Christmas season, she’s been releasing a new tidbit every day. Today’s was about Draco.

As I’m writing slash about Harry and Draco, this really excited me because I’m digging in deep to the extended canon to flesh out the characters. Granted, I’m ignoring the epilogue to some point, but there’s still stuff going on around Harry that does hew close to the epilogue.

I get that JKR is upset that so many people like Draco and romanticise him, create relationships between he and Harry, and generally think he’s completely renounced his old life.

BUT in saying some of the things she chooses to say in the new piece published today, she’s kind of fuelling the idea that maybe he can change. That he is particularly damaged. It’s that pain that gives life to my version of Draco.

Rephrased from Pottermore (mostly because I can’t lift it from the site and I don’t want the copyright infringement Dogs to come after me) with added commentary by yours truly:

The ability to feel pain is an essential part of humanity. Draco’s ability to compartmentalise / deny pain and suppress inner conflict may have really fucked him up, which makes it easier for him to be the bully JKR portrays throughout the books.

While Draco can be a bit of an arsehole, JKR writes him as a person of ‘dubious morality’. Then she goes to say that Draco is not concealing a heart of gold and won’t ever be besties with Harry. She goes so far as to say he becomes a watered down version of his father and that his wife doesn’t hold the intense hated of Muggles that Draco grew up adopting and partially discarding.

The wonderful thing about fan fiction, and the alternate universes that comprise our fictional worlds, is that we can take an aspect of a character and expand upon it, or change it. I know that Draco’s always going to be a Malfoy, that he may not ever like Harry although he is civil to him in the original epilogue, but why can’t I take that damaged person and play with him?

I know she’s possessive of her characters - and I totally appreciate it - but it bothers me that she needs to keep going on and on and on and on that she hates how people view Draco.

If anything, it makes me push harder to really flesh out and bring to life the damaged side of Draco. (Sorry, JKR.)

Four hundred plus pages and over one hundred thousand words (in the sixth draft alone) and I think I’m close to capturing it.

Editing’s going to be a bitch.