It absolutely makes sense. Malfoy was always written as a character who was forced by his upbringing and overbearing father to play a role of the Slytherine chosen one. He battles with this role until the final showdown where he was tasked to kill Dumbledore and failing to do it for moral reasons. Later he and Potter even protected each other, their relationship grew to something like reluctant respect.
Having Malfoy as a female love interest absolutely fits the overall story, it only deepens Malfoys rebellion against his supposed destiny by romantically attaching herself to Potter after Dumbledore killing. The reluctant respect can be easily turned into romantic relationship with only a few nudges. Female Malfoy feeding information to Potter from the inside of Umbridge cabal or Deatheater world would make the story more interesting and believable, with Potter or Hermione being able to make more planned and informed moves, possibly even willingly falling into "traps" in order to protect Malfoys double agent identity. It also changes the "dumb luck" aspect of Harry surviving many of these things into a story, where he has more agency and where he willingly choses to do it for good reasons.
Plus it is not as if Potter and Ginny was some huge thing anyways, she was absolutely unimportant side character except for the forced plot of the journal possession - which I think would make more sense for female Malfoy anyways. Having teenage romance playing some part in the story would make sense to most people. Moreover it would turn the story more into Romeo and Juliette style of story, where both Potter and Malfoy were manipulated by powerful wizards like Voldemort and Dumbledore in their generation war, and their story could turn into carving out something for themselves by finding their own independent path refusing to play stooges for either side - especially when they both realized that they were only pawns to be turned into shaheeds of this wizard conflict. Plus in the end it would turn Malfoid into a true heir of Salazar Slytherine - by refusing to be manipulated and being in that independent mindstate, in the same way Potter is the heir of Gryffindor thus explaining why the Slytherine exists as a house. It would be interesting way to develop the story.
In fact it is Ginny who is the romantic slop content, she is enamored by Potter due to Quidditch and his fame and by gratitude after he rescued her from being possessed by the journal. Female Malfoy falling in love with Potter is much more nuanced story as she would experience real character growth while being crucial to making the plot make sense. For instance by female Malfoy figuring out the secret of Elder Wand licensing rules from imprisoned Ollivander imprisoned in Malfoy estate and passing that knowledge over to Potter would make a lot more sense in the final battle.
The more I think about it, the more I like this fanfiction. There are for sure many other areas where female Malfoy would improve the book immensely.
Luckily, in our society, male bodies do not necessarily fight (drones and guns do) and male bodies do not necessarily work (computers and robot arms do).
This is absolutely not the case, often espoused by people who are far removed from physical realities of stuff. Yes, the final deathblow is dealt by a drone or a bullet, but there are people operating those drones and guns. Women have hard time even filling up a pistol magazine as it requires certain strength. Light infantry backpack can weight 50 to 80 pounds of weapon, ammunition and other equipment such as mortar shells or electronic equipment. Tank crew of 4 has to spend 8 manhours of maintenance for each hour of operation of the tank, they need to drag heavy equipment such as repairing tracks, help with refueling and loading ammunition etc. And that is for peacetime, during field operation they have to do it all without specialized equipment, sometimes with minimal or no sleep and under constant threat of ambush. One of the best strategies to defend against drones is to dig, which requires shovels and dedication to create tunnel network. There are still people who crawl into small spaces to remove debris from a clogged pipeline in order for things to work. Roofers in Arizona work at 100 degrees Fahrenheit / 38 degrees Celsius walking on 160/70 degrees roof to do their job. Women would literally die of heatstroke doing such a job.
And we are not even talking about other intangibles, such as men easily sliding into a hierarchical organization, following orders and spontaneously creating new hierarchies in case of change. Or how men are "interested in" crucial jobs as they innately draw satisfaction from such a thing. Imagine the latest story: an amateur astronomer discovered new exoplanet by analyzing raw data from previous experiments using Claude. What is the chance he is a man as opposed to a woman? Of course he was a man obsessed by perfecting some strange niche area of research. You may think of it as a stupidity, but the same goes for every endeavor - a man who proposes some improvement on the spot how to better dig into a frozen land, how to move supplies, how to use new AI technology to guide drones to hit Russian tanks etc.
Male bodies by themselves provide huge advantage in physical world. But male minds and social behavior is equally - if not more important in this manner.
georgioz
4d ago
Sure, but in this sense men have duty to protect the tribe. They will be conscripted and send off to war as we now see in Ukraine or Russia and as it happened many times last century during world wars and other conflicts. Do women have duty to marry and have children? In fact do they have any gender specific duty at all?
georgioz
5d ago
Sure, that is one way to look at it, although I would not say it is just female mode of power. This is a classic techne of power: create byzantine rules and then apply them selectively whenever you want to arbitrarily punish somebody. There is the classic quote by Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Joseph Stalin's NKVD: "Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime."
I AM bought in on the idea that the crushing of funding for various NGOs and similar government agencies
I just want to note how nonsensical this sentence is on its own. It is incredible how the very acronym for non-governmental organization is now tied to government funding and nobody bats an eye. And it is not just USA, it is the same in EU and everywhere, NGOs are now openly used as vehicle to support government policies at best and vehicles for corruption and nepotism at worst.
The word NGO itself is used for deliberate equivocation and propaganda, as if government is crushing private charities - by not giving funds. By the way, the same language was used by Harvard president Randall Kennedy in his latest debate against Crowder, where good professor likened Trumps funding cuts to "extortion". It is like the classic beggar vs rich man joke:
A rich man goes to work and notices a beggar on the street. Taking pity on him, he pulls out a $100 bill and hands it over. The beggar thanks him profoundly.
This goes on every single day for a week, and the beggar is absolutely thrilled. But the next day, the rich man doesn't show up. He doesn't come back the day after that, either.
Finally, after a week of being gone, the rich man walks by again with $100 in his hand.
The beggar stops him and asks, "Where have you been all week?!"
The rich man smiles cheerily and says, "Oh, I finally took my kids on a vacation!"
The beggar glares at him angrily and yells, "With my money?!"
I've talked before about how a lot of rape-culture controversies arise because under a consent-only view of rape, and a criminal legal standard of intent mens rea, you can run into the scenario in which there is a rape, but there is no rapist. A woman feels that she did not give consent, or that she was coerced into giving consent; but the man feels that she did give consent, had no intent whatsoever to have sex with her against her consent or to coerce her consent, and would have stopped within a reasonable interval after consent was withdrawn. This is a common disjuncture.
That is because the consent based criteria such as FRIES is absolutely stupid and make rapists out of people who would not be such under any rational standard. Whenever your wife wakes you up with her hand on your dick, she technically raped you. Whenever you have glass of wine during dinner with your GF and then hop on it, you are raping each other. Under this definition millions of people commit rape every single day.
I am not sure what people want. We have a society where Aella can write succesful blogpost about birthday gangbang with detailed flowchart of how many men did what to herself and fluffers she hired. And we pretend that not only is that a normal thing, but she and Scott Alexander and rest of their depraved butt magic sex cult then promptly rage against "conservatives" and prudes who are disgusted by such practices, which I think includes majority of the population.
We live in this crazy world where people have "rights" do do such depravities, which in practice means that you actually have duty to defend such a behavior. And yet somehow you are supposed to be selectively upset based on some technicality. Imagine that Aella was in some manic episode, she was given some drugs beforehand and in fact those dozens of men she invited actually raped her. Or even vice versa - that any of those men had some drink before and thus did not have full capacity to withdraw consent and were raped by Aella or whatever. In fact I am absolutely sure that something like that happened in practice, that is the way this depraved game is played. The same goes with porn which is at the same time protected by 1st amendment, widely consumed and yet from time to time we have some story about how this whole industry is one huge meatgrinder of souls where all participants numb their senses with copious amount of drugs, psychiatric medication and alcohol. So again, at the same time you should be on the side of Larry Flynt against People, and also at the same time you should be outraged on command whenever some sob story comes from a porn actress. It is just stupid and unworkable position.
In the end I don't care. If I was absolute monarch, I would line everybody involved in that Cornell shit including Jane Doe on local plaza and gave them punishment of 30 lashes as a form of justice. I would also fine each of them $50k for inflicting this stupid shit on unsuspecting public, who all collectively lost uncounted quintillions of brain cells by being forced to witness all that stupidity. Case closed.
I don't think it has to be necessarily "central". Even now we have a book from the standpoint of Potter , and then there is some knowledge dump either at the end of the book or as part of story progression for "grand reveal". It is very similar to Sherlock Holmes stories, only with less breadcrumbs.
In the alternate universe we can have a relationship between Malfoid and Potter limited to couple of pages of interaction and some new stories of her exploits. It does not have to take much of the books, she is still a double agent and they may have very few times where they can have genuine conversations. A moment stolen under cloak of invisibility or after Potter rescues her from Fiendfyre after psycho Crabble underling declined her authority and indulged his violent tendencies inside Roome of Requirements. Imagine the pivotal point of the war where Harry uses Elder Wand licensing properties to defeat the Dark Lord. In the books it was explained by ghost of Dumbledore to Harry after the fact. In this new narrative this could easily be done a few pages of inside story of Malfoid using her guile to talk to Ollivander who would explain it to her and she could pass it over to Potter.
You could easily play it out as ongoing courtship and gradual gaining of respect - which the book does anyways. It is not a full romance novel where Potter takes Malfoid on a ball or whatnot. It is gradual warming of their relationship, with a payoff at the end after defeat of Voldemort where Potter and Malfoid embrace each other in front of the whole school, thus revealing what really happened. Only with a couple of passages leaving breadcrumbs so the infodump would not be so grating. E.g. imagine that Malfoy's mother Narcissa learns that her daughter conspired with Potter against Voldemort. It would make her turning against Voldemort and protecting her daughter more believable, it is not just some emotional fart, it is a rational decision to change her mind as even if Voldemort wins, her daughter and probably her whole family would be executed for high treason.
This would also show how reign of terror of Voldemort is inefficient and self-defeating ideology, as it can turn the most stalwart supporters into opposition due small things, like during Wu Guang uprising where a general decided to start rebellion because even smaller infraction of failing his orders due to rain meant forfeiture of his life. Similarly for Narcissa she would immediately know her daughters and whole family life was forfeit the moment she learned her daughter conspired wiht Potter. Her decision to save him would turn from some random action of mercy into an action of calculated preservation, her move against her husband would be more believable as she would not dare to tell him in fear of Voldemort learning the secret via Legitimens, this turning her rebellion against her husband into genuine act of protection of her daughter and her husband. There are other parts, for instance Malfoid could be a prodigy at occlumency exactly as male Malfoy, who was able to resist Snapes Legitimens powers. In this very same book Potter even tracks Malfoy through map and tries to revel secret plot of her trying to pull off the plan to bring Death Eathers into Hogwarts. Malfoid could explain to Potter the Reign of Terror that grips many families into obedience and they could move forward, in a sense she could even be his Occlumency mentor or whatnot.
There are many such possibilities by having Malfoy as romantic interest and turned into Potter's side of the story.
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