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Harry Potter and the R63'd MalfoyDræcina Malfoid and Male Romantic Fantasies
I want to talk about the other major AI-driven development that burst onto the internet this week. RW Twitter has been having a tremendous time rewriting Harry Potter with a Rule63'd Tsundere Draco Malfoy, who eventually falls for Harry despite family upbringing, pureblood prejudice, etc. This intersects with the CW in several ways so I'm going to have to put it here, but despite that I think it's all been a tremendous amount of fun.
Some examples: Harry loses a bet and has to ask Malfoid to the Yule Ball, AI video version of various Malfoid images/writing.
I'm going to speculate on why I think this has caught fire now, but the thing I think most interesting is how pretty much all the Malfoid stuff I've seen is actually quite wholesome and earnest, and that it's a really interesting data point in the endless discussions around sex, dating, and love we have around here. The next few paragraphs are context for people who might've missed it; skim or skip them if you like.
This doesn't feel like it should be new. Harry Potter was one of the biggest fanfiction communities back in the day, and that community has already gone through and shipped pretty much everyone with everyone else, and I'm certain any given character in the books has been sex-swapped at least once. But this time we get a very right-wing chud take on the Wizarding World: 'our wholesome, blessed "Malfoid" vs. their godless, degenerate Fem!Draco' (as in that meme with the two kingdoms).
So why now? I didn't see the inciting event, but I think the ground has been fertile for something like this to crystallize out of the Harry Potter universe for a few reasons. Harry Potter seems like cultural ground ripe for squatting or recapture: through the 2010s and early 2020s it was so thoroughly associated with a certain type of NPR-liberal-quirk-chungus lefty, to the point that "READ ANOTHER BOOK" was a common RW dunk whenever political/cultural events were compared to Literally Wizard Hitler. Rowling herself was very much in lockstep with her progressive readership on pretty much every issue, but broke ranks with them on transgender issues, leaving the average progressive more than a bit unsure what to do with their fondly re-re-re-read collection of HP novels and their Gryffyndor scarves. The result, I think, is that it's something like an abandoned fort in the culture war - nominally held by the left but not strongly, because of the uncomfortable association with Rowling. On top of that, Harry Potter was one of the last big cultural forces that reached nearly everyone - the title reveal of one of the later books was a story worth printing in a newspaper on its own and bookshops had massive queues on release day. On top of that, the story and world don't hang together if you look at all closely, so it's a tempting target for fanfiction writers to reach into and change or fix. On top of that, there's the absurd casting for the new series featuring (to use the the most prominent example) Paapa Essiedu as a very urban-looking Professor Snape that makes it ripe for mockery from the right.
The result has been a lot of chaotic glee that Harry Potter is up for recapture and reinterpretation. Cedric Diggory becomes Chudrick Diggory, whose absurd musculature would require him to walk sideways through doors and transfigure his shirts on and off each day; Luna Lovegood seems like she'd cheerfully mention crime statistics without caring who was in earshot; and Snape seems to be either played straight in the Alan Rickman style or used as a vehicle to mock woke casting or urban norms and behavior. The chuds are rediscovering fanfiction from first principles, using it to poke sticks in eyes or roll back some of the idiocy of the past few years, and they're doing a lot of it with AI.
The online right's willingness to use AI to make media seems to me like it's going to become an increasingly valuable strategic asset that the left is not going to be as able to pick up (because anti-AI/anti-datacenter viewpoints are now part of the standard lefty package). Even before AI, memes have had very short lifecycles, and so having an AI-literate bunch of memers messing around means they are able to reinterpret and exploit memes much better while they're relevant. A competent right would be able to use these skills to improve general messaging and react better to moves in the wider zeitgeist - I think we saw a bit of this with the "Amelia" character in the UK, where a purple-haired radical in an anti-extremist "game" was discovered by the right repurposed into a waifu and used to drive some of the early Restore Britain messaging from outside the party.
"Malfoid" is also an interesting name for the character. "Foid" seems to have lost a lot of the hateful connotations that the original incel use carried, and gets a bit of use as an ironic term of affection similar to some of the wifejak memes from a couple of years ago. But "Malfoid" is not that at all. The name is a funny pun whose time has come, but her character is proud, competent, well-bred, told to consider half-bloods like Harry beneath her, but unable to completely extinguish her growing feelings for Harry as he grows in courage, skill, and daring into the hero of the series. It is the re-emergence of a romantic fantasy for men that we haven't seen for a long time: a woman who falls for a man just the way he is, because he's grown so much that she can't help it.
So, with all that context aside, let's talk about male romantic fantasies. It is extremely interesting to me that there seems to be very little goonbait in the Malfoid stuff I've seen, but a lot of the writing has hit a nerve for romantically starved men in the current sexual climate.
@kenzietuffon X, in the credits for an AIgen animation of Harry and Malfoid dancing at the Yule Ball, gives special thanks "to all chuds with sensitive hearts who still believe in love, despite it all". There's a sincerity in the writing that's very endearing, and the almost complete absence of smut contrasts it to the femgooner booktok slop that's been doing the rounds online (we've discussed e.g. Morning Glory Milking Farm in these threads before).@TheBrandonMorseon X put it very well, so I'll just quote his tweet verbatim:Another X commenter (
@Kit_Shicker) also deserves to have insight recognized:This certainly resonated with me and reminded me of my lonely years trying to find someone to love. An old reddit post I revisit now and then sums it up thus: "A man wants to be loved for who he is, not for what he does in order to be loved. [...] When he can finally let go of the crank he continually turns day after day in order to earn love and, even if only for a moment, it turns by itself to nourish him in return, that is when he will know he is loved." Malfoid is exactly this, but without the unhealthy "someone should love me the way I am, so I should never have to change", because that last part is replaced by Harry's growth. His growth earns the love because it's not done to earn the love. I've always hated the "men only want one thing and it's disgusting" accusations and I think they actually wouldn't truly hit a large proportion of actual men, but the number of cads and lotharios who seduce and disappoint many women through their interactions skew those perceptions. Sure, male sexuality also involves getting one's own rocks off from time to time, but for a man like me there's a big spot in my heart for some good honest love, and it's really interesting and gratifying to see that spontaneously re-emerge in the online cauldron.
If you want MOAR:
You've raised my interest, but do you have any specific recommendations? I like the idea of male-targeted female Draco but I had a quick look through the tag on ao3 and everything I've read so far seems to either be AI slop and/or written purely to mark territory; I've had trouble finding recent fics that are actually worth reading.
the x link in the op has this a list (mostly one-shots) https://x.com/DavidBenedict0/status/2106933294566883419
one of those seems to be a full-blown rewrite of the series, it's not bad so far but I'm only midway through the first book https://archiveofourown.org/series/6704161 It's also been a long time since I read the original series so I'm not always super clear on what is getting changed here. Obviously there is a big focus on Malfoid but at least in the Philosopher's Stone there is only so much you can do there.
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I don't, sorry. I think your best bet is going to be hill climbing through twitter authors who write stuff you like, and seeing whether they have accounts on AO3 etc or recommend people who do.
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I'm not going to quote this in full, but to respond to the general thrust: I think this is basically wrong on most counts.
When people say "men don't like Romance," they don't mean that men dislike stories in which romance happens. They mean that men (tend to) dislike the genre/meta-genre of Romance fiction. They're basically correct, and it's not because Romance as a genre hates men. Most men, as the robot that wrote the linked essay eventually works around to, enjoy stories in which the male protagonist (who is probably an audience surrogate) gets the girl, but these stories are virtually never about getting the girl and they're certainly not about the process of getting the girl. They're almost always stories about doing Manly Things, of which getting the girl is but one (and usually a secondary one at that).
Romance, by contrast, very much is about that. The central feature of the story is the relationship between the two leads, and whatever external conflicts they face are primarily about catalyzing the development of the relationship. This is why Romance is so flexible in its setting/stakes. You can have a romantic narrative about a meek woman being abducted by alpha douchebag werewolf aliens from the Andromeda galaxy or one about a Type-A girlboss visting her hometown for the holidays and helping to save the local bakery run by her nauseating wholesome high school sweetheart.
(There's probably a deeper point here about the difference in the romantic experience for men and women, but I don't really feel interested or competent to get into it)
Strong disagree. If you look at the media ecosystem of Japan (anime, manga, light novels, visual novels) you will see that there is very much a market for romance stories aimed at men, rather than stories for men that happen to include a romance subplot:
It's not really a professional niche in the West, but indie authors can see the demand is there, and write works to satisfy it.
According to the same subreddit his evolution progressed even further since then.
On a different note I'm not that sure all of the series you mentioned are aimed at (young) men.
Most of them are shonen (aimed at young men):
A couple of them are seinen (aimed at adult men):
My Dress-Up Darling and Komi Can't Communicate did come across to me as more female-oriented than not.
How? Not only are the stories told from the perspective of male characters, but those characters are completely unattractive to women. Tadano is a soft, unthreatening nice guy whose special ability is reading the room. Gojo is a fucking autist with zero sex drive who enjoys making dresses for dolls; if he was living in a less repressed society, he would be sucking cock in a gay bar, and he would be happy, instead of forcing himself to get hard enough to bang the retarded gyaru.
If you look at anime which is actually aimed at women, the main character is always a woman (unless it's yaoi) and the love interest has the usual characteristics you find in romance book boyfriends; tall, rich, abusive, playboy, etc. For example, in Candy Candy, Candy's love interest is Terry, the aristocratic bad boy of Saint Paul's Academy.
Well, I've not read the manga but I've seen the series and the bolded parts are plainly false. Either way, it all struck me as being targeted at female cosplayers and would-be cosplayers.
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I was going to say there must be some exceptions but I couldn't find any. I checked all of the villainess animes I watched recently and they are all nominally targeted at women. Whenever there's a significant opposite-sex romantic interest with the main character, the target audience is always the gender of the main character.
I shouldn't be surprised, this does follow fairly logically from human behavior, but I expected exceptions to be more readily available.
One exception would be An observation log of my Fiancée who calls herself a villainess. It is told from the POV of the main male romantic interest, but is still clearly a romance targeted at women.
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Except that ignores the large, anime-shaped elephant in the room.
There are a lot of manga and anime about romance aimed at boys and men. These titles have a male protagonist, usually more than a few love interests, and usually a fair amount of comedy and, occasionally, nudity, but they are undeniably male-aimed romance stories. The stories usually end (if they do end) with the protagonist choosing a single girl to start a relationship with.
Relatively recent examples include "Nisekoi", "Gotoubun no Hanayome", or "Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai". Older examples include "Love Hina" or "Ah! Megami-sama".
And that's not mentioning all the many, many male-aimed visual novels all about romance and relationships.
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To a large extent I agree with this, but I do think part of the reason men don't like the Romance genre is that it tends to be female-centered. Consider When Harry Met Sally, which is a romantic comedy that was arguably more male-centered. As I recall, it did pretty well among male audiences. That being said, yeah, as a man I liked Die Hard and Highlander a lot better than When Harry Met Sally. A basic hero story where the protagonist defeats the villain; saves the day; and gets the girl. In that order of importance.
Interestingly, When Harry Met Sally was primarily written by a woman, albeit with a lot of male input from Rob Reiner. When I think of fully male centered romcoms I guess I think of stuff like Crazy Stupid Love , which is really more of a buddy comedy than a romcom, and which was obviously written by a man.
I didn't see that movie, but I would probably nominate Garden State as a male-centered romcom. Which, as I recall, was written by a man.
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A lot of men do like ‘straight’ (or pure) romance. There are male fans of the Linklater ‘Before’ movies, there are plenty of men who watch heavily romance based anime or play games where romance is a central feature, for example.
Hell, I still love the first Twilight book. (The sequels were pretty trashy.) It's a great straight-forward romance with a genuinely creepy horror segment coming in at the end.
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(Sorry, I've been spamming a lot here.)
This reminds me a lot of Oliver Traldi on romance tropes. Specifically:
The more obvious read of culture and gendered tropes is that men do, and women are. But why shouldn't we reverse that? Men want what is; women want what does. We are all trying to live up to a standard set by the other.
Obviously all human beings are constantly in the process of both doing and being. They are inextricably woven together. But perhaps for men (I can only speak for my own sex) there is something both tender and liberating in knowing that we are valued for what we are, even when all our abilities to do fade away.
Because of supply and demand. Sperm are cheap, eggs are expensive. Women contribute value to a heterosexual pairing intrinsically, biologically, via their scarce reproductive resources; men must supplement their own intrinsic lack of value with something external. It's all a bit similar to asking "why do I have to be the one answering the questions at the job interview? Why don't companies apply to me, and I'll be the one interviewing them?" Because they have the money and you don't, silly.
Until the fundamental economic facts change, gendered tropes and expectations will continue much as they have hitherto, in perpetuity.
You are missing the point.
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This is a tiny nitpick, but, er...
Half-blood?
Is Harry even half-blood, by wizarding standards? His father James was a pure-blood from a good old wizarding family. His mother Lily was muggle-born, but was a wizard herself. Harry is the child of two wizards and therefore is surely pure-blood?
My rough understanding of the terms was that pure-blood means two wizarding parents, half-blood means one wizard parent and one muggle, and muggle-born means two muggle parents. Wiki tells me that the term is more restrictive than that and having any non-magical ancestors in your immediate family background removes you from pure-blood status, but as it notes itself, almost all wizards have at least a few non-wizard ancestors around somewhere. Is the muggle-born Lily too close for Harry to count?
The Malfoys are snobbish and old-fashioned and I'd imagine that, from their perspective, James Potter did something at best scandalous by marrying a muggle-born, so they can still dislike Harry. The Malfoys are, in canon, horrible people prepared to hate even pure-blood families if they think they're too sympathetic to muggles. The Weasley family is pure-blood, but they are poor and they don't act with decorum, so the Malfoys hate them too. One gets the impression sometimes that the Malfoys just hate everyone outside their ingroup, and blood status is just an excuse.
Still, I notice that in Philosopher's Stone, when Malfoy first meets Harry, he is polite at first and tries to invite Harry into his own, 'superior' social circle:
Harry then stands up for Ron and this appears to sour their whole relationship, but the point is that Malfoy knew who Harry was, presumably therefore knew of Harry's ancestry, and yet clearly made this invitation for Harry to hang out with him and enter his company. He does this while also verbally attacking the Weasleys, whose blood is impeccably pure, so I think there's more to the Malfoys' mindset than just "pure blood good, muggle blood bad". It's all wrapped up with class, wealth, behaviour and deportment, and so on.
I am yet to imagine how Rowling would have been able to drop a "quadroon" line in her book without being sacrificed on the altar.
There's fan fiction that makes Harry Potter more adult (well, as much as possible under the circumstances) for the purposes of drama, but now I want to see it as an adult comedy.
"What? You're muggleborn..ish."
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Dumbledore calls Harry a half-blood in Order of the Phoenix:
Okay, good catch. I didn't remember that line.
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The wiki article claims that to be pure-blooded, no parents nor grandparent can be Muggle, Squib, or Muggle-born. The last term indicates two Muggle parents, not just one. (and note that "Squib" means this isn't just about blood). Harry, thus, with a muggle-born mother, is not pure-blood, nor will his children be regardless of mother.
As for Draco attempting to befriend him... Harry Potter's a legend, "The Boy Who Lived". Malfoy is, quite reasonably for a Slytherin, attempting to enlist him on his side. Overlooking his parentage is just realpolitik.
My impression is that isn't really a formal definition of the term. It's not as if there are laws that label people in one category or the other. In practice I suspect that there are central cases of pure-bloodedness (i.e. both sides of the family are magical nobility going back to generations), and central cases of muggle-ness (just as obvious), and that everywhere in the middle there's some room for negotiation.
Harry has good breeding on his father's side, but his mother's is questionable. James Potter was presumably seen as slumming it or as being a little scandalous, by the standard of the old families, by marrying a muggle-born. However, if Harry behaves well, wins the respect of the old families, and also marries well, that could be overlooked - especially if there is political advantage in having Harry on-side, since he is generally perceived as a hero. His mother's muggle-born status is probably not enough by itself to use against him, if he moves well in pure-blood circles, but if he does not behave well (as he does not canonically), then you start whispering about how that muggle blood on his mother's side is telling.
In practice I suspect a lot about blood purity is post hoc - if your ancestry is mixed (and almost all wizards' ancestry is mixed; 100% pure-bloods are a small, incestuous elite, and muggle-borns are rare), it's up to what you or those judging you choose to emphasise.
I agree. The Harry Potter series is more about plot and relationships than about world-building. Which is fine, it would be extremely difficult to construct a magic school story which is entertaining, lengthy, and takes place in a detailed and consistent universe. Perhaps Bran Sanderson could pull it off.
Sanderson could have never made Harry Potter. His magic systems are tight and limited in scope by necessity. He could make a magic school story, but it would be much more like an engineering academy or military school, where people try to push magic to its limits, than it would be the whimsical Hogwarts.
I basically agree with this. And different people have different preferences, of course. I myself enjoyed Harry Potter but I did find some of the magical contrivances to be annoying, especially time travel.
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I honestly think the Sanderson approach is overrated. You do not have to write a novel series as if you're writing an RPG sourcebook. Vampire: the Masquerade needs to define exactly how vampire powers work; Interview with the Vampire does not.
I'd agree that Harry Potter as a series would be improved if the magic was less obviously ad hoc, and if there were less in the way of magical powers that appear only once, could obviously solve whatever problems the heroes run into in the future, and yet are rapidly forgotten, but I suppose I think that's more of a plotting issue than a worldbuilding issue. We don't need to know exactly how the magic works for the sake of the story.
I think it's a matter of taste, basically how nerdy the reader is.
For me, it's definitely a negative, with time travel being the worst offender. That being said, another poster pointed out that in many ways, Harry Potter really is about world building, it's a beautiful world, you just have to squint a bit.
I myself prefer the Honor Harrington series.
Wasn't that me?
Yes, I thought that was an insightful comment. I should have linked it but I was too lazy.
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... silly Irish stereotypes. "My father told me all the
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I picked up on that too, and I'm looking forward to discussing it with a Harry Potter fan friend tomorrow.
But if all it takes is one wizard-wizard generation to wash the bloodline clean, it really seems confusing to consistently get mad about. Hermione's a Mudblood, but she marries pureblood Ron, so her kids aren't, and... that's good enough for the blood purists? Whatever harm the purists think Mudbloods are inflicting on the wizarding world, they "assimilate" by the standards of blood purity in a single generation, so it's purely temporary.
Now if you told me this was just incomplete JKR worldbuilding, I'd believe it, but if we're trying to make this all make sense, it seems like the number of Muggles in your bloodline over time is what they'd be worried about.
As per here, I suspect that in practice it's somewhat inconsistent, and depends on whether it is advantageous in a given context to emphasise one's ancestry.
I think the relevant part here, in narrative terms, is that Malfoy clearly attempted to be friends with Harry. As it happens Harry immediately cottoned on to Malfoy being a jerk, but from Malfoy's perspective, he knew that Harry was a hero, that it would be politically and practically useful to have Harry on-side, and that Harry, though with good wizard ancestry (esp. on his father's side), was raised by muggles and therefore ignorant.
The passage I quoted is the first time Malfoy knows he's talking to Harry, but as it mentions, they had met earlier in the robes shop, though at this point Malfoy didn't know who Harry was.
Malfoy tries to make conversation, and seems to be, from his perspective, trying to be friendly? He throws in that question about ancestry, so blood does matter to him, but hearing that both Harry's parents were wizards is enough for Malfoy to assume that this boy must be a pure-blood like him. However, Harry rapidly gets the impression that Malfoy is a snob and an entitled bully, especially from the way Malfoy talks about 'servants'. I think it's telling that Malfoy asks Harry's surname before he even asks his first name.
The interpretation I took from these two initial meetings is that Harry Potter is pure-blooded enough for Malfoy to potentially accept him as a friend, and both conversations make it clear that Malfoy would be willing to have Harry as a friend. However, the way that Malfoy talks about other people is enough for Harry to immediately realise that Malfoy treats other people with contempt, and is cruel to those he thinks are 'below' him. Harry instinctively sticks up for his friends and defends the little guy (perhaps due to his own past, being bullied at school and picked on by Dudley), and indeed this loyalty will go on to be one of Harry's greatest virtues.
Random addition, I'm sorry, I'm thinking about Harry Potter now and I'm in full-on literary criticism mode.
Gryffindor and Slytherin are generally presented as each other's opposites, and Harry and Malfoy are the archetypal Gryffindor and Slytherin, respectively. We are also told that courage is the Gryffindor virtue, and ambition is the Slytherin virtue. This is never pointed out to us explicitly, but it occurs to me that, in the world of the books, Harry and Malfoy are both characters who are totally lacking in the other side's characteristic virtue.
It's easy to notice that Harry's signature virtue seems to be passivity, obedience, or lack of ambition. Since Rowling is on Harry's side, she tends to also present acceptance and passivity as one of the primary virtues. Consider how in Philosopher's Stone, Harry is able to see the location of the Stone in the Mirror of Erised, whereas no one else can, because Harry alone does not want the Stone for anything. Other people see themselves doing things with the Stone, but Harry, who only wants to find it and not use it, sees himself finding it. Throughout the series as a whole, Harry follows Dumbledore's instructions obediently, and he is generally pretty bad at taking initiative himself. When in situations that would require him to take the initiative, he tends to either sit around waiting for things to happen (cf. Goblet of Fire and even worse in Deathly Hallows), or to do what he thinks Dumbledore would want him to do (cf. Dumbledore's Army). When characters ask him what he would like to do after graduating, he tends to stammer a bit and be unsure, as he does not seem to have given it any thought. In the parable of the Deathly Hallows, with the three brothers granted wishes by Death, the two brothers who want to use their wishes to accomplish things fail and die horrible deaths, whereas the third brother, who wants to do nothing except hide, is the 'good' one; and Harry inherits the third brother's cloak, and his power of invisibility. The climax of the whole series is Harry's death in the Forbidden Forest, a scene which involves Harry obediently following prophecy, accepting death, and letting it happen to him. Harry is a person largely without ambition.
Meanwhile the most noticeable character trait Malfoy has, aside from his snobbishness or his bullying nature, is his cowardice. This almost becomes a virtue in the final few books - Voldemort and the Death Eaters try to recruit Malfoy into their army, or have him carry out important duties for them, and he always hesitates. Malfoy is afraid to actually hurt other people. It's not that he's selfish, or that he's primarily afraid to be in danger. In Deathly Hallows, for instance, Malfoy would definitely be safer, in Malfoy Manor, if he just positively identified the heroes. But he doesn't. In Half-Blood Prince, he is entrusted with a crucial task for the villains, but dilly-dallies, makes excuses, and ultimately is too squeamish to go through with it. The dramatic climax of the book is Malfoy hesitating, afraid to commit a murder. But he never becomes a hero either. He is too afraid to join them as well. The heroes save his life in Deathly Hallows but he's still unable to bring himself to join them. Just as Harry suffers a basic lack of ambition, Malfoy suffers a basic lack of courage.
In some ways that makes Malfoy one of the more interesting characters in the books, to me. Rowling could have written him as a two-dimensional villain, and she didn't. In the first book Malfoy is, like Snape, a red herring - he's nasty so he seems like the villain, but he isn't. But as the books go on, we can tell that he has actual virtues. Rowling herself writes "There is, after all... some unextinguished good at the heart of Draco."
I think the crucial chapter for him is chapter 31 of Deathly Hallows - Malfoy intervenes to stop Crabbe and Goyle from killing Harry, Crabbe betrays him and sets the room on fire, and Harry goes to save Malfoy and Goyle:
I notice that, facing certain death by flame, Malfoy's first instinct is to grab the unconscious Goyle and try to drag him to safety. Malfoy could then drop Goyle and just hang on to Harry, but he holds on to his friend, unwilling to leave him to die. Once they all get out, Malfoy's immediate thought is for Crabbe, and he seems to be in tears. He seems to feel this way even though Crabbe had just turned on him. That tells me that Malfoy is not entirely a horrible person. He cares about his friends and responds empathetically, even when he could let go and save himself.
Malfoy's problem isn't that he doesn't have a conscience. He does. It's that he's a coward. He's a fence-sitter - in theory he believes in pure-blood supremacy, but he doesn't have the stomach for what Voldemort and his minions would do to secure it. He seems to realise that Voldemort would destroy everything he cares about (as does Lucius, by the end), but does not have the courage to stand against him.
Anyway, when I make this analysis, it seems pretty clear that what Harry and Malfoy need to do is learn from each other - or at least, learn from the house opposed to theirs. Harry's ability to accept what is necessary is to an extent a virtue (a better writer than Rowling could make something kenotic out of it), but if it were tempered with ambition, if Harry had more sense of purpose and initiative, he would be a better hero and a better man. Likewise I cannot help feeling that Draco Malfoy, if he were given more of a spine, could also perhaps be a good man.
Whether you wrote a genfic about a Harry/Malfoy friendship, or M/M slash, or M/F romance with a Malfoid, I think there's potential there. A dramatically compelling friendship or romance should have something that each partner offers the other. A partnership in which Harry can encourage Malfoy to be braver and more principled, and Malfoy can encourage Harry to show more initiative and ambition, seems like it might bring the best out of both of them.
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There seem to be only what, ten thousand wizards in all of Britain, and they all go to school together, so asking for someone’s last name probably returns a value you have heard before.
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idk man, it's kinda weird to uphold a magically trans'd 13 year old as a shining example of wholesome trad right wing romance.
Let's be completely real for a moment. If men as a collective were interested in heartfelt romance stories -- with an "almost complete absence of smut", no less!! -- then they would simply be producing and consuming more of that type of content, given their ample opportunity and ability to do so. As opposed to, you know, creating and sustaining the entire video pornography industry. People vote with their feet. (I say all this as a man who actually prefers words to images; but I'm aware that I'm an extreme outlier in this regard and my preferences don't match the male norm.)
All that being said, romance fiction for a straight male audience has existed for decades in Japan, they're called visual novels, and funny enough a lot of the more celebrated ones do follow the general outline discussed in the ShamashAran post you linked ("boy meets girl, and then the world comes after them").
As I understand it, Malfoid is not in-character trans. The idea of Malfoid is that the character of Draco(nia?) Malfoy was always female in this universe.
In that context, I mean, Harry Potter is famously kind of conservative if you think about it. Harry Potter is a story about a boy discovering that, unbeknownst to him, he was born into aristocracy, and inheriting a full ride to Eton or Harrow. He is then trained in and formed by these traditional, elite, European institutions, displays exceptional loyalty to them, and fends off and defeats a populist revolt led by a strongman.
Add in the romantic fantasy and is this not a fantasy about a better world, associated with the past? One of benevolent authorities, traditions, and meaningful struggle to defend something good? In some of the fantasies the OP links, the role Malfoy plays is to uplift Harry - to, however sharp-tongued she may be, encourage him to dress well, practice his manners, and generally become a worthier man.
You don't see how any of that could be interpreted as wholesome trad romance?
Does this work? The Death Eaters are mostly old aristocratic families, right?
It's more like Harry takes a side in a conflict between nobles, but one of Voldemort's most significant tenets is getting the Muggle "common people" out of the wizarding world and ruling over both, so I'm not sure he can claim the common man on his side.
In the context of wizards, I think we're meant to read Voldemort as engaging in a kind of fascist politics of purification - unite all the 'true wizards', blame everything bad on a scapegoat minority (muggle-born and muggle-sympathisers), and then pursue a larger project of conquest and expansion. I think populist is a reasonable word to use for that kind of politics.
It's just a little confusing because whenever Voldemort got in power, he was mostly ruling through fear and seems to have done little to nothing to get the general wizarding populace on board. He got a few power-seekers and harnessed the existing bureaucracy, but wasn't pursuing the "common wizard" at any point I can see.
How small can your "true wizards" group be relative to the general population before you can't call it populist anymore?
Could just be Rowlings' inability or choice not to "get" how the template for her big bad, the austrian painter got into power. In the simplistic view its all jackboots and black lightning raining from the sky and misery porn tinged with mud and rain, the big bad can't have gotten the populace part of populism through delivering or claiming to deliver to the masses what they wanted, it must have been pure-violence from the beginning to the end.
It's possible she's trying to make that case, but I think it's more that she's presenting magic as such a huge force multiplier that you can just have a very small number of people ruling over the masses. While teamwork certainly helped against Voldemort, in the end it was mostly just about out-magicking him, not "the people rising up and overthrowing tyranny".
Voldemort's plan seemed to be "I can kill anything you can organize against me" and while that might not have worked against an army, the wizarding world doesn't seem capable of fielding one.
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It kind of works. The Death Eaters ally themselves with many of the outcasts of wizarding society like giants and werewolves.
Considering how scandalously Hagrid's half-giant ancestry is treated, and the way Umbridge talks down to the centaurs, and the things Dumbledore says about the lie of the Ministry of Magic statues (which depict all the other sapient magical races looking up to wizards), I think it would be possible to reframe Voldemort as a populist getting all of the hated rabble and dregs of society onside along with a handful of elites, and revolting with them.
I do wonder about the werewolves and giants that sided with the Death Eaters. Even if they enjoyed "being themselves" during the war, surely they understood that there was no way that a blood purist group would ever give them a good deal once the war was actually won. Like, the Malfoys might be willing to do an alliance of convenience with Fenrir Greyback, but it's kind of hard to imagine them ever accepting or tolerating his existence long term after a victory.
It's a classic high-low alliance. The outcasts and dregs of society will be kept outside and used as enforcers- a better deal than polite society usually gives them.
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They might just have been desperate for even allies of convenience. Very risky, but not unheard of.
"Japan Forms Alliance With White Supremacists In Well-Thought Out Scheme"
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In the very funny fanfic Seventh Horcrux there's a recurring bit where characters reference Voldemort's horrifying agenda of blood and terror "... except for the Werewolf Rights Act, that was very progressive, and...
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This is a great point I forgot about, probably because we don't really see much of those groups or get a feel for how big they are. Harnessing the oppression of groups that the current government doesn't favor is a lot more like a populist movement than how he was interacting with the other wizards.
I guess the monstrous groups figured any port in a storm: infighting in the wizard government would give them more freedom to do whatever they wanted, and even if Voldemort wasn't interested in keeping them around, he's got a much more ambitious project to work on in conquering both worlds, that might give them time to get out from under the wizarding boot and be ready for when he finally comes for them.
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Certainly the Death Eater vision is pure-blood wizard supremacy, but they appear to have been flexible enough to recruit other magical races by promising to elevate their status, or give them revenge on their traditional enemies, or something similar. I doubt the Death Eaters ever intended to treat werewolves, giants, vampires, etc., as equals, but useful allies are useful allies, and I could see the werewolves going for that deal. From the werewolf perspective, you know all the wizards look down on you anyway. That's your default. The Death Eaters share the prejudices of their fellows, but they also offer you potential power and a chance to strike back at some, if not all, wizards.
I would not be surprised if Greyback or his fellows intended to betray Voldemort at some point in the future. In the short term, though, they seem to have shared a common enemy.
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usually internal / Watsonian logic of these sort of fics is more like alternate history where the respective canonical character is replaced with a suspiciously similar character with different sex (or other life circumstances), not a story about a magical HRT.
That requires disengagement with the extremely obvious subtext that they're making the well known male character into a woman so it's impossible not to read a Trans* angle [Unless you engage with narrative fiction at an extremely obtuse level]. Equivalent of the "This young girl is actually a 3000 year old demon that appears to be a young girl" logic that anime pedophiles use extremely dubiously. Compare with reactions on this board to Black recastings of Lord of the Rings and so on.
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Romantasy is a minor hobby of mine so I have a lot of thoughts about this. Romantasy is, essentially, the live literary genre in America today. Outwardly you get these viral romances every few years or so (Fifty Shades of Grey, Heated Rivalry, Fault in Our Stars, The Notebook, Twilight, etc.) More esoterically however these romances shape the literary world in invisible and hidden ways. (Everything is edited and audited by women now and I have good reason to suspect that a lot of female authors are male writers on a penname.)
I highly recommend everyone finding a romantasy they can stomach and giving it a go. They're fun because they're so simple and cliched that you can read what is nominally a several-hundred page book in a couple of hours. Get an airport book or pick up some schlock from a local free library on your next neighborhood walk. The more they make you groan and cringe the better. The point is that the genre is supposed to be extremely cliched, it's not supposed to be good, and that's what makes it work. The cliches reveal something deeper about how story and archetype work, like Jung. The more they try to be "good" the less they say because the writer is chafing out of embarrassment out of what is a natural form. I like McDonalds, I think a lot of fancier burgers are worse burgers, the burger is supposed to be casual, it's not supposed to take itself seriously.
This is a common complaint about Harry Potter and I think it misunderstands what makes Harry Potter good.
Generally a "story and world that hang together" are bad things. The desire for a world where everything makes sense is fundamentally a nerd's preoccupation. The real world itself usually doesn't have a story and rules that hang together. It's extremely realistic for a story to work this way, the apparent inconsistency means it's generally tapping into something deeper. Tying the lore together with more- and more-consistent rules actually makes everything worse because they were never needed, it's like plastering a beautiful country highway in billboards. All the extra signs that communicate more (more is better right?) detract from what was actually good in the first place (Harry Potter is whimsical and magical).
Take Time-Turners. A consistent feature of Harry Potter discussion for twenty years has been that Time-Turners don't make sense. Time travel introduces all sorts of what-if scenarios (why didn't they use Time-Turners to prevent Voldemort's rise?). Time travel works inconsistently with the already-established magical lore of the series. It especially "doesn't make sense" to give time travel to a thirteen-year-old girl merely so that she can study more in school. It really doesn't make sense if you think about it for two minutes.
But really, it's all fine, it doesn't matter. Everything that "doesn't make sense" happens "off-screen". Within the story, nobody treats the existence of Time-Turners as invalidating the setting. Harry doesn't meditate on how he wishes they had Time-Turners to solve their problems, Dumbledore doesn't give a wink-and-a-nod remark to the reader about how you'd be foolish to consider using Time-Turners to solve all your problems. Those things would actually make Harry Potter worse, they would self-ironically acknowledge the problem. When, actually, Time-Turners only have these problems in your head, not in the actual world of the story. So you can just as easily invent other explanations in your head. Make up whatever you want. They're extremely dangerous and regulated technologies and nobody uses them because the consequences are unpredictable. They gave one to a teenager because they're basically safe in extremely limited applications like studying more classes. Maybe they've done it before, maybe they have a list somewhere of safe applications and they do this all the time. Maybe most people don't even know about them. Whatever. It doesn't happen on-screen so it doesn't matter, you can fill in the gaps however you want. Having a real explanation in the story itself would make it worse.
It's like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Famously, the characters don't see anything until the audience sees it, which is how you have scenes where they're visually stunned by the sudden emergence of a graveyard out of the landscape that realistically they would have seen on the horizon half an hour ago. That's the logic of how a story works. When Time-Turners are on-screen, they don't cause any of the problems that people imagine they must cause. So there must be some explanation, it happens off-screen, who cares. It's fun to watch Harry and Hermione go back in time.
It's all goonbait. Malfoid is inherently goonbait. The trend might not revolve around tentacles and bugged-out ahegao eyes or dirty sexual fantasies, but it is essentially all slop.
A common theme I keep hearing is that Malfoid "fixes" problems with the original Harry Potter. But who said that Harry Potter needs fixing?
For example, I've heard many say that the Malfoid romance fixes the original series' lack of dramatic romance. Who said the original series needs that? I've heard that Malfoid and Harry could unite in the finale and stop Voldemort together, or that Malfoid could be Harry's "reward," or that Malfoid allows the ending to have a dramatic climax of romantic love. Why does the finale need any of those things? Harry Potter is already about love, he dies in the embrace of his dead family, he sacrifices himself for his friends. If you add a romantic interest in, it completely changes the emotional valence, and therefore the symbolic logic, of the ending and thus the entire series. It's a matter of taste if you like it better that way I suppose. But it's not deeper or richer, it's actually simpler. It sacrifices the deeper kinds of love depicted for the cheap dopamine of Big Hero Romance. It's the big neon lights of plotting and style, supersize me, let's add explosions and Michael Bay. There's a deeper reason Malfoid fans draw from the well of anime -- anime is an explosive medium of emotions made simpler and larger. That's inherent to cartoons as compared to live human beings. Everything is flattened into the 2nd Dimension and made more expressive at the same time.
This shift is the emotional and stylistic analogue of goonbait. It doesn't matter if artistically everyone is wholesome and chaste. Emotionally, Malfoid is porn. It's cartoonified. It serves exactly the same function as a Romantasy novel to actual romance. You simplify real human complexities to romanticized archetypes to satisfy a human fantasy. It's porn.
As another example, I've heard many say that Malfoy lacks a redemption arc and so Malfoid adds something necessary. Well... Malfoy already has a redemption arc. Three times (by my count) he refuses to participate in the evil that's asked of him. (He refuses to kill Dumbledore; he abstains from identifying Harry in Malfoy Manor; he flees when Crabbe and Goyle confront the trio in the Room of Requirement over the Horcrux.) Additionally, his family also backs down from the ledge, at the final climactic moment, after Voldemort has "killed" Harry, in the scene with Draco's mother Narcissus. She examines Harry's "corpse," asks him if Draco is alive, and covers up that Harry is alive. The symbolic logic here is that the Malfoys have collectively long been over their head and regret, in some capacity, their evil deeds. For all this they are rewarded in the finale by happily reuniting, all alive, allowed to participate in the final festivities. This is in fact a kind of redemption, and it's very realistic to how someone who has done a lot of bad things might finally back away at the brink from true evil.
This is all extremely important thematically and symbolically. Harry beats Voldemort in the end because the Elder Wand recognizes Harry as its master, because Harry beat Draco and Draco "beat" Dumbledore. The ending only happens because Draco backed away from true evil. Some people complain that this is a simple plot contrivance just so that Harry can win somehow in the end. But thematically it's very consistent with one of Rowling's big themes, which is that sympathy for evil doers is a path for their own redemption. It happens over and over again in Book 7. Harry acquires the locket by sympathizing with the neglected Kreacher. Harry's life is saved by Wormtail's moment of hesitation, which is symbolic repayment from when Harry once saved Wormtail. Harry resolves the final mysteries through finally sympathizing with Snape when he descends into Snape's memory. Dumbledore practically beats the reader over the head with this idea over and over again throughout the books, and it comes through in the finale which is only possible because of Harry's sympathy for Draco.
But the Malfoid fans want something more than this. They want a pornified heel-face turn where Malfoid gets to have a Big Damn Moment where she explicitly becomes good. They want Malfoid to stand up and renounce evil, or help Harry somehow in the finale, or declare her love and turn against Voldemort. And on paper that sounds better because it's more explicit and direct. But it basically changes the meaning of the entire story, it changes the symbolic logic of everything that preceded it, it emphasizes "Romantic Love" in the formula "Love Conquers All," which is essentially the same story every other story in the world is already telling.
Is it better, is it worse? That's a matter of taste. But Malfoid doesn't merely add, it changes the entire story, because it's goonbait, because it's porn. The whole thing is goonbait.
Which is to say: it's a fantasy! Malfoid is a male fantasy. It's a fantasy exactly because it reifies an idea of love that is very unrealistic and very attractive to men today. They want to believe that there is a woman out there who will transform herself into the man's mirror image. She loves you so much that she's willing to leave her family, her house, her friends, her ideology all for you. She loves you that much. She's a perfect vessel and receptacle for your personality, she's submissive and breedable. (Yes, I'm identifying a narcissistic element here.) This is an extremely old male fantasy.
But Rowling already gave Harry Potter a romantic interest that is (in classic feminine terms) much more realistic. Harry falls in love with Ginny. Ginny, who was there in the background all along, who comes from a family that gave Harry a lot of succor and support, who was always a natural fit for Harry even when he didn't see it that way. Ginny is, in fact, a recurrence to Harry's mother in the same way that Harry himself is a recurrence to his own father. Ginny is not a male power fantasy, so maybe that even makes it a bad romance -- many including apparently Rowling herself wish she had set Harry up with Hermione instead. But Harry's romantic interest in Ginny is at least realistic, and is not emotional pornschlock. This wasn't something people wanted twenty years ago, but it seems like a very common desire today, for reasons that are probably understood by anyone here who has tried and failed to date in the interim.
Besides that, I think Malfoid is cute enough and I'm enjoying some of the Potter resurgence. But I'll allow myself to be labeled a fanboy and declare that actually nobody is doing it better than JK Rowling did in the first place. Because she actually had an extremely dialed-in idea of what how to tell a story and what people want.
Ironically, I actually think the strength of Harry Potter as a series is, fundamentally, its worldbuilding. The actual story of Harry Potter is not particularly impressive - the relationships between the core cast are messy and unsatisfying, and Rowling mostly fails to tell a compelling seven book narrative. The first few books are pretty good, but those books are mostly mystery stories, presenting the reader with a series of clues buried in amid exposition and worldbuilding.
Harry Potter has very good worldbuilding, but it's not the kind of worldbuilding that, pardon my language, autistic nerds like. The magic system in the series clearly has no rules, for instance, and things that any RPG player would immediately notice as game-breaking, like the Time Turner, enter and exit the narrative without explanation.
What it does do, however, is brilliantly create a sense of place. The main character of the series is Hogwarts, and Hogwarts is a very evocative setting - the magical castle with its interior constantly shifting, the quirky and colourful professors, the four thematically-aligned houses, and so on. I think readers really engaged with and fell in love with the setting. That's why it provoked so much fan fiction - the setting is a great place to tell stories, and the main characters are thin and archetypal enough that they can easily be shuffled around that setting to tell whatever story you like. The events of the story can be changed, and even the genre can be changed (obviously there's a ton of romance fanfic), but the setting, the world, is what makes it feel like Harry Potter.
Compare also the vast popularity of prequel fanfic - James, Lily, the Marauders, young-Snape, and so on. You can remove the actual story of Harry Potter and swap out all the characters and it's still magic, and people still want to read about it and write about it. Look at relationship tags on AO3 and notice the popularity of Sirius/Lupin, James/Lily, Regulus/James, or even Marlene/Dorcas, the latter being two names casually mentioned as coming from Harry's parents' generation but otherwise never described. The setting is doing all the work.
Or consider Hogwarts Legacy - popular game, used Harry Potter really well, but set in the 19th century. Avalanche Software correctly realised that the important thing about Harry Potter is the school, not any particular students or any particular events in the story.
In this light, the defense I'd make of Malfoid would be - okay, obviously it's boys and young men indulging in a romantic fantasy. There's ultimately nothing wrong with that. The last I checked girls and young women thirsted for Malfoy for decades and no one batted an eyelid. Maybe Malfoid is an Edward Cullen figure, but that's okay. For that matter nerdy guys have been writing fanfic about attractive girls in Potter for just as long.
Anyway, once you accept that this is male romantasy, I think it makes good use of the IP. Hogwarts Castle is a romantic setting, and the premise here - everyman hero plus well-bred, snobby perfectionist - is a perfectly solid one for a romance. I think it works fine.
It doesn't 'fix' anything with Rowling's series, and I think that's a silly way to think about it, but who says it has to? It's just a story idea that some boys like. Good for them.
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I love the books and I agree with you that there's nothing wrong with Harry Potter's worldbuilding being vibes-based — it works well for the story Rowling is telling. Since the plots are functionally mystery novels, the spells and mechanics introduced in each book are mostly there as devices to further the book's plot and add whimsy and wonder. That said, it makes Harry Potter as a franchise rather poor ground for extended media like Fantastic Beasts, since the barebones worldbuilding comes back to bite it when trying to tell a different type of story. The world is built around Harry and his journey through school and can't support much else built on that edifice (besides fanfic writers reimagining rules to make more sense).
Kind of. There is some real criticism in that, romantically, Harry is essentially written as a woman. Things that JK Rowling would find desirable in a man are things he likes, and things that give her the ick give Harry the ick. When Cho Chang cries in the tea shop, Harry is disgusted in the same way a woman would be to see a man she likes bawling in front of her. With Ginny, Harry doesn't notice her as a romantic prospect until she starts dating around and demonstrates her romantic viability, which then makes him interested. He is overall extremely passive when it comes to romance, and shows zero interest in using his status as Quidditch star and Chosen One to get attention from women. At risk of generalizing the sexes, these are all extremely female-coded characteristics. Everyone on the internet now having (to put it lightly) a greater awareness of how men and women differ romantically meant it was only a matter of time before this part of Harry Potter got some serious examination under a new cultural lens.
I don't disagree that Rowling gave him something but it never sat right with me how he and the Slytherins were written throughout the series in general. For a series that makes so much importance of love and understanding, having 1/4 of the student body be cartoonishly evil cartoon bullies feels incongruous. Hell, most Slytherins aren't even allowed to be good-looking — the majority are described as ugly chuds with the appearance of gorillas, even the girls. The artistocrats among them are invariably shown to be sniveling bullies who hide behind their wealth and have no shred of character. There was so much room to do more with these characters. Slughorn is a much-needed counterexample (I always liked Phineas Nigellus too) but he feels like the only good one in a sea of evil cartoon racists. So yes, while Draco does get to show he isn't irredeemably evil, that's pretty much all he gets, and that is very disappointing to me. He and the Slytherins are one of the aspects of the story most ripe for reimagining.
Bringing it back to Malfoid, these elements combine to have a lot of people feeling that yeah, maybe it would have been really cool if Malfoy was a tsundere with an anime enemies to lovers plot (Malfoy is also very female coded to begin with!). Is it a male fantasy to convert the evil girl to your side by being that virtuous and irresistible? Yes, definitely! I'd say there's nothing wrong with that, let's push to see even more of it in our media. Rowling has said herself that Ron-Hermione was done as her own wish fulfillment, so there's already precedent here.
Women get to have their most insane fever dream billionaire vampire hockey player fantasies available for $15 dollars on a shelf in every airport general store, in the featured display in every Barnes and Noble, and in a dedicated aisle in every Target. There is a genuine demand for the male side that is unserved by media that doesn't come from East Asia (because many women find it to be gross and, as you said, everything is edited and audited by women now). Malfoid is a fun trend, but has some real merit to it, and I hope it shifts the media landscape at least a tiny bit.
It makes some sense that Slytherin is structurally chuddish (though most of them just don't seem to give much of a shit beyond general teenage tribalism up until they're put to a choice by Voldemort's takeover of Hogwarts).
If you want character, there are already two houses dedicated to that, and one catch-all house in Hufflepuff for people who are mostly just chill about things.
There's a constant influx of Muggleborns yearly (and we have no evidence they perform worse than wizards), and it's quite clear that there are a lot of talented aristos and purebloods who simply don't care to hate on them and are just fine climbing the shared status hierarchy. We see two generations of purebloods - James and Sirius have the bluest of blood - weeding themselves out of the Slytherin gene pool because they simply don't have a problem benefiting from Muggleborns.
Slytherins are the equivalent of Roman patricians who never made their peace with plebians becoming Senators, and so lost out on a bunch of talent and marginalized themselves.
Somewhat fucked up given JKR's other points on stereotyping, but makes some sense.
I agree, from a Watsonian perspective, it does make sense. Slytherin is written as rotten to the core with no redeeming qualities. Blood purity is shown to have no impact on a wizard's power since it's a heavy-handed metaphor for class in Britain, so their focus on it makes them look stupid. It's not even the case that they fell from grace or lost their way over time, as their founder was demonstrably just as evil if not more. They would attract only dumb brutes and the few elite sociopaths who use them for power.
Out of universe... making Slytherin all of those things was a deliberate choice. The story would have really benefited from the gang making a Slytherin friend down the line, possibly in Dumbledore's Army. Even in the later books, when Rowling seems to have misgivings about casting an entire fourth of the people in her world as irredeemably evil, none of the Slytherin students choose to stand with Hogwarts when push comes to shove.
Interesting to think about the counterfactual, but at the end of the day these started out as children's books, and struggling single mother Rowling probably didn't have much room for empathy for British aristocrats when she wrote them.
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Despite in-story protestations otherwise, the Houses are basically Good, Evil, Nerds, and Plodders. With a few exceptions.
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I just read this scene last week to my 8 year old, and you are wrong. In this scene Harry feels confused, not disgusted. He is confused the same way that countless men have been confused when their woman starts crying for reasons they can't understand. And Rowling is not subtle about this confusion. There is a full 5 page dialogue between Harry and Hermione where Rowling clearly spells out how Harry and Cho are misunderstanding each other and this leads to confusion. Ron at the end even says: "Hermione, you should write a book" because women are confusing.
He is confused in this scene, yes, but there are plenty of other lines that support Harry feeling disdainful about Cho crying, or explicitly thinking of Ginny favorably because she does not cry, which brings to mind the obvious comparison.
From Order of the Phoenix:
And in Deathly Hallows:
To be fair to Harry and to Rowling, the scene in the tea shop was a complete minefield and I'm not saying it's unrealistic for him to have had no idea what to do.
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Isn’t the Harry Potter worldbuilding issue something that’s pretty easy to retcon with ‘the viewpoint character is a teenager’?
"Pokémon descriptions make no sense." -> "Yes, pokedex entries are made by a 10 or 11 year old child. This is how they perceive the world."
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For the most part yes, but it falls apart when the heroes start fighting for their lives against death eaters. Once it is life-and death with the fate of the world on the line, and with the protagonists having finished their education and being native to the wizarding world, they should be expected to use any tool at their disposal. As should their opponents. The tension and the stakes invite people to think about what opportunities are available. But the worldbuilding can't handle this. There is simply no good reason for why the trio, and Hermione especially considering her genius, continue to use the same tiny selection of spells.
Overall the deadly hallows still works though. Where the world really starts falling apart is in the cursed child.
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Not especially. The narration is third-person limited, sometimes omniscient, which lends more objectivity to the events in question. Oftentimes the world is explained to us by an adult, usually a teacher, or is something we just see as a direct part of the narrative. The latter is impossible to dismiss as being from an unreliable narrator without dismissing the actual events of the story as being unreliable, which most people would prefer to not do. Plus, there there is a whole slew of infamous Rowling tweets from the mid-late 2010s where she gives baffling explanations that 'resolve' worldbuilding snags, which makes it harder to dismiss the book depictions as a teenager's inaccurate understanding.
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Comedies end in marriages because a marriage is a synthesis between two opposing forces. Harry marrying his friend's younger sister might be realistic but it's not plot-dramatic. It's ok, Harry Potter didn't go with a synthesis between the villian-side and the hero to create catharsis. The catharsis ultimately happened by a synthesis of the younger generation with the older. But a synthesis between the two opposing sides is more cathartic in general, so the Malfoid thing is understandable to me.
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Ooh that’s interesting. Would you say there’s anything noticeably different about the content of the works of the suspected imposters? Do they write for an explicitly female audience and follow all the expected tropes and story beats, or is there something in their works that makes them seem more gender neutral / more from a male perspective?
When you read enough of them you start to notice clear patterns and differences between how men and women write stories. Broadly speaking: Men tend to subordinate emotional states to the plot; women tend to subordinate the plot to emotional states. Male plots have a beginning, middle, and end. Female plots are episodic.
I think it's helpful to think of symbolic logic like a vanishing or focal point point. In artistic imagery, many parts of the image converge on one point over the horizon, the vanishing point. This focal point might be occupied by an object or view being emphasized. A vanishing point might also be empty space. But, fundamentally, there is a "center" that allows us to understand the center, the periphery, convergences and divergences. Literature works the same way. In literature, the meaning of a work converges on some idea or ideas. The symbolic logic of a story might even point toward some conclusion that is unstated in the text itself.
Look at Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam". Everything converges on one point, the image of God reaching his outstretched hand to Adam's slackened hand. We could write forever about every possible interpretation of every element in the composition: God is clothed and Adam is naked; Adam and God are both reclining in the same direction, down to Adam toes mirroring God's; God's celestial chariot is in the shape of the human brain; etc. etc. etc. But obviously the center is about the connection between God and Adam, the hand outstretched and the hand slack, everything is oriented toward one point. If you want to "understand" The Creation of Adam, you have to interpret everything in reference to that one point.
(Well, you don't have to, you can do whatever you want. But my contention is that this is essential to cognition, it's what "meaning" means at all. The Creation of Adam is understandable as more than a collection of random colors and atoms in space, it has a shape, it has a form. These are not just culturally arbitrary constructs, they can be as objective as 2 + 2 = 4. Maybe a future culture won't understand long flowing gray hair to be an obvious sign that this is God. But the symbolic logic is inherent in the painting independent of the culture that observes it.)
Look at Rothko. Rothko's painting tends to be extremely abstract, I won't pretend to draw deeply specific forms out of it. Rothko unlike Michelangelo could be described as "random colors and atoms in space". But they aren't random, at least, that's not how cognition works. There's still a sense that putting everything together draws out a form that has some kind of meaning. I'll use "Multiform No. 9," since it's on Wikipedia and I can quote directly:
You can stand in front of Rothko and feel something, abstract colors and shapes converge on something. Maybe you feel boredom, maybe your interpretation of feeling and sense is vastly different from mine. But the process of how to interpret something are still a one-to-one match for cognition itself. It would be coherent to argue, for instance, that Multiform No. 9 is a portrait, because the lone black shape in the center is starkly different from every other shape, and that this individuation is essentially personhood as such. Whatever else we want to say about Multiform No. 9 can be put aside as flimsy and therefore unimportant here, but this is basically how interpretation works, which is how thinking works.
(A similar idea is that any piece with a sharp horizontal division between upper and lower halves is essentially showing the horizon or the sky. Consider Rothko's "Orange and Yellow". That's the basic shape the sky make when you try to reduce it to a kind of essence, the contrast between the ground and the sky. It's such a strong pattern that anything shaped in two pieces starts to become "the sky," even if there's no literal reason why this should be so, even if you make the colors so unlike the actual sky. Similarly I seem to remember a photo going around after the war in Ukraine broke out that deliberately saturated a field of wheat against the sky until it was yellow and blue like the flag -- because that's what those shapes mean, it's as inherent as Bouba and Kiki.)
Look at Catcher in the Rye. This is even more complicated and it becomes hard to say anything serious about a few hundred pages in just a few sentences. But Catcher in the Rye is a pretty easy case for exposing some of the machinery of how symbolic logic works. The central image of the book, so central that it becomes the title, is the "Catcher in the Rye". Holden Caulfield imagines himself catching children running through a field of rye before they fall off a cliff. It's hard not to interpret this as concerning innocence and protecting the innocence of children. And so it forms part of the evidence for the interpretation that Holden Caulfield might have been sexually abused -- even though there's nothing in the text that explicitly says any of this. It's a kind of vanishing point that converges out of frame.
I have detoured far away, forgive me, but now I can get back to stereotyping men and women.
Male logic tends to converge on one symbolic point. Female logic tends to converge on several different points (which is the same as saying it might not converge at all).
The structure of all romance plots is fundamentally the same: Will they or won't they? Two people meet, they encounter obstacles and fall in love, then they get together.* That's the story. Once they are happily together the story is over, there's nothing left to tell. A lot of romances might add some B plot so there can be a bit more to flesh out (Romeo and Juliet therapy-talk confront their parents ). But fundamentally the story is the shape of the relationship, because it has to be.
Look at The Notebook. Boy meets girl, they fall in love. Then they overcome some obstacles (they break up, they lose touch during the War, girl becomes a woman and is engaged to someone else, they reconnect, she runs away, etc.). But fundamentally the story ends when they have overcome all obstacles to truly consummating their relationship. In fact, the story is really contained within a framing device where they're both old and she has dementia and he is trying to remind her who he is. But symbolically it's the same thing: their love in the past resolves symbolically at the same time their love in the present resolves.
Look at "Red, White, and Royal Blue". This was gay romantasy schlock that got a big-budget Netflix adaptation (Umma Thurman was in it). Essentially, the son of the President of the United States and a prince of England fall in love after being forced into diplomatic work together. Enemies-to-lovers, classic schlock. Naturally it has to be kept secret. They break up, they get back together, they overcome obstacles, etc. etc. Emotionally, the romantic arc ends when they are discovered by the public, they confront the prince's homophobic Queen Mother (grandmother), and they truly, finally, come together. Happily Ever After!
Well, no, the story continues. The movie adaptation leaves off there but the book does not. The book is full of a continuing B-plot concerning the upcoming 2016 Presidential election. The president, the protagonist son's mother, is the first female President, a Democrat, and she runs against this brash political Republican outsider who is not even pretending to not be an expy of Donald Trump. Throughout the book the protagonist works on his mother's re-election campaign and is convinced, against all odds, despite what everyone else tells him, that Texas could finally flip blue. So the end of the novel comes not at the end of the Will-They-Or-Won't-They, it comes at the end of the election when the protagonist's mother wins re-election after Texas flips blue. This codicil has virtually nothing to do with the core romantic plot of the novel, which is ostensibly the whole purpose of the story being told. But I'm sure it's very emotionally satisfying and cathartic to the probable readers of "Red, White, and Royal Blue," who probably near-unanimously want their American politics-themed romance to include an emotional victory for not-Hillary Clinton.
If it wasn't obvious from my characterization, The Notebook was written by a man, and Red, White, and Royal Blue was written by a woman.
I find this pattern to be fairly consistent: Male stories converge on one symbolic point. Female stories converge on multiple symbolic points, which is the same as saying they only converge emotionally.
As a final example, consider The Lord of the Rings. Famously, it is a story full of many twists and turns, stories-within-stories, poetry, odd-ends, etc. etc. The ending of The Lord of the Rings isn't even when the Ring itself is destroyed, as the plot continues for a good while longer up until the Scouring of the Shire: The four hobbits return home and find home overrun with evil, which they then purge. It might be said, isn't this a separate story, isn't this just like the end of Red, White, and Royal Blue? But I would argue that it's not, the arc of The Scouring of the Shite recapitulates the arc of the rest of The Lord of the Rings as a whole: men saving a fallen world. The symbolic logic of The Lord of the Rings, in fact, is consumed with the world more than the characters within it. Because the world is a vehicle for God, the world is vast in service to emphasizing the will of God. It's the story's vanishing point: God is basically never discussed at all, and yet the story doesn't make sense without Him. All the sub-stories and tangents, which otherwise don't have a purpose, in fact reflect exactly what Tolkein wanted to say -- the world is mysterious and vast because there's a higher order in it.
So I'm not just saying that women are more emotional or that their stories have tangents or that girls are yucky and gross and they have cooties. I'm saying that their stories converge as emotional experiences, not as logical stories.
For some other examples of this: Saltburn, Tales of Genji, Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, Anne Carson's poetry, Willa Cather, Triumph of the Will, To Kill a Mockingbird, Twilight. Even Harry Potter, which is a very well-plotted story with a great deal of symbolic coherence, has that damned epilogue so we all know how to feel after all.
Somebody else could probably adduce examples of very male plots that don't appeal to women at all because they don't cohere emotionally in a way women find satisfying. Master and Commander?
I've written a lot here now (far more than I intended to), but hopefully this answers the question. I find this difference between men and women to be very consistent, even when it's hard to put into words, even when specific examples can be found going both ways. But men and women write very different stories, I think it's been very easy for me to train this sense by reading romance novels. And when you have a strong-enough sense of it you can look at airport romance novels written under pseudonymous pennames and you can say, if it walks like a man, and quacks like a man...
*(The small percentage of romance stories that don't end happily are usually born of the author's need to feel that they are writing something "serious," that romance is somehow beneath them.)
This was amusingly illustrated by a pasta that’s decades old now. It even features alpha widowhood and political cuckholdry from quokka’d do-gooders:
Below is the result of a writing assignment given by an English professor from the University of Colorado. A “tandem story” was to be written by two students, one male, one female.
The story was to be compiled in alternating paragraphs via email, with CC’s to the professor. There was to be no communication between the writers aside from each successive email. The story would end when both participants agreed a successful conclusion had been achieved.
Rebecca (PINK) Gerry (BLUE).
THE STORY:
(first paragraph by Rebecca) At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.
(second paragraph by Gerry) Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic, tea-drenched bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to GeoStation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
(Rebecca) He died almost immediately. But not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who ever had feelings for him. Soon afterward, Earth stopped pointless hostilities toward the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read online one morning. The news simultaneously excited and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no cell phones, no Internet to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at the beauty around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.
(Gerry) Little did she know she had less than 10 seconds to live. The wimpy peaceniks who’d pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for hostile empires determined to destroy the human race. Just hours after the passage of the treaty, alien ships were on course for Earth with enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. Their lithium fusion missiles entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, was rocked by the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized poor, stupid Laurie.
(Rebecca) This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent geek.
(Gerry) Yeah? Well, my writing partner is a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. "Oh, shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other FUKING TEA??? Oh no, what am I to do? I'm an air headed bimbo who reads too many romance novels!"
(Rebecca) Asshole.
(Gerry) Bitch!
(Rebecca) FUCK YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!!
(Gerry) In your dreams, ‘Ho. Go drink some more fucking tea.
(Rebecca) I hate you. Don’t ever talk to me again.
(TEACHER) A+ I really liked this one."
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The real world 100% has rules that hang together. You just don't run into them as much. And nobody is demanding Harry Potter rules for interpersonal relartionships, where the rules don't hang together. They want rules for the magical equivalent of "if the store is 100 feet away, why are you taking an airplane there?"
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I like your Harry Potter takes much more than I like your Iran takes.
I generally agree with you about the nature of the Potterverse, but one of the reasons people get wrapped up in the illogic, and the "shipping," is that the books made an awkward transition from "children's series where we can accept that magic is whimsical and fairy-tale like and doesn't need to make sense" to "YA series where people are starting to have adult relationships, the story is increasingly metaphorical, and the world is starting to look silly." Thirteen-year-old Hermione being given a Time-Turner so she can take more classes is funny. The Time-Turner is a MacGuffin. Seventeen-year-old Harry fighting wizard Nazis and being threatened with torture and death makes you wonder why he (or Hermione) isn't thinking about Time-Turners.
Rowling is a good author. The sense of wonder, the aliveness of the wizarding world, the investment in characters, is why HP became huge despite neither her world nor her prose being better than many other authors writing in the same playground. But she's very much an author for whom "numbers aren't real" and "worldbuilding isn't a thing," and that means when the audience gets older and starts thinking about the inconsistencies, well, they realize that the Wizarding World only works if you don't think about it too much.
Getting back to Malfoid, I agree that this is gooner slop, even if the visual presentation is chaste. Harry marrying a nice girl next door isn't good enough; gooners don't want a quiet girl next door, they want a hot blonde badass who's pretty and feisty and kind of bitchy but will become submissive and demure (but still sexy) for you... only for you. It's the flip side of the woman who fantasizes about the rough bad boy alpha who reveals his tender squishy heart only for you.
I am kind of surprised to see you praise romantasy, as hereabouts it's often criticized for being basically literary porn for women. Now, I am a literary snob (no, not really, I like Dungeon Crawler Carl and Harry Potter), but I'm also a literary gourmand. I'll try anything. I've tried romantasy. Have yet to find one that didn't bore me or strike me as execrably bad writing. I tried to read Twilight back in the day. I didn't hate it, it didn't give me girl cooties, it just... bored me. You say the bad writing is the point, and maybe that's true (romance has always been a very formulaic, mass-produced product), but I don't know why I'd want to suffer bad writing and boredom if I am not the target audience getting dopamine hits from an enemies-to-lovers alpha story written like a fourteen-year-old's first fanfic.
Basically everybody enjoys fantasies, it's a matter of taste which are yours. You read enemies-to-lovers because the fantasy is that there's a love so powerful out there waiting for you that you could be actively fighting it and you'll still get the girl. You read Twilight because you want to be whisked away by the rich billionaire vampire who's dark and troubled but you can save him, etc. Really the archetypes are all the same, over and over again, there aren't that many unique fantasies. Maybe you're personally romantically satisfied or just not interested in romance plots, but no matter, there are lots of kinds of fantasies. I would loosely, for example, call The Martian a kind of fantasy: your life that has been overlooked becomes important when you are thrust into a dangerous and dramatic situation, which your competence is capable of solving. It's a hero fantasy. There are hero fantasies, love fantasies, persecution fantasies, etc. etc. I advocate the romantasy because they make it really easy to see the machinery at work, and there are so many of them you can probably find something to your taste.
Call me crazy but I think it's the same idea: fantasy is inherent to narrative, narrative is inherent to cognition, and that's how we understand history. News and current events are just stories, and we understand stories in heroic terms. Everything is hero-worship, fantasy is cognition.
I am not sniffing at romances (or romantasies) because I don't understand the allure. I understand the allure. Of course everyone has fantasies, whether they are romantic, power fantasies, competency-porn, or whatever. What I mean is that every romantasy I've ever looked at is just so badly-written, and has so little plot beyond "Which bad boy alpha fighting over me shall I choose?" (I mean, I guess in some of them the chick is also a bad-ass fairy assassin or something, but that just makes it more badly written) that I cannot enjoy them. I feel the same about romance in general, though I've read a couple that were enjoyable enough, despite being very formulaic. Do you recommend any romantasy that would actually stand on its own, with good plot and prose in its own right, beyond serving up female wish fulfillment?
Without getting too serious (and off-topic), I don't quite understand your point here, because you seem to be saying that your Iran takes are fantasy and hero-worship, which I am pretty sure is not what you meant. I mean, I get that you literally worship Trump as a hero, but are you saying that framing all events as a fantastical narrative of good and evil is how you think we should understand the world? Rather than messy conflicting narratives where facts exist but are hard to discern or agree upon?
So I understand what you mean when you say I "worship" Trump, so I can talk in these terms, but I want to be clear that my appreciation of Trump is quite rational, bound up in specific material reasons, and that the only person I worship is Jesus Christ.
That out of the way:
What I'm saying is closer to, "we already understand events as fantastical narratives of good and evil". That is, essentially, how cognition works, our sense of good and evil is bound up in every judgment we make, all the time, everywhere. And you can say, ok, but life is messy and facts are hard and everyone is shades of gray. (Which is more or less what I think too.) But you still have a sense of good and evil, you still have the ideas as such. Nobody is ever really a nihilist. (Nihilism is essentially a death-wish, it is a failure of life, of life-spirit. Life, abundant vital life, wants to expand.) And especially in memory the nuances wash out and everything shades toward black and white. Because that's how cognition works.
What I am asserting when I assert that Trump is winning in Iran is not just the object-level claim that Trump is winning in Iran. (Which I also think is true.) I am staking my position that this is how everyone will eventually understand it. Modulo all the shades of gray or whatever caveats you want to add. I don't think I'm saying anything all that complicated. I could reach into more complicated explanations here, but thankfully Trump has already given us an analogue in Venezuela. After the Maduro raid there were a lot of people skeptical that it would work, that it had worked, and given that events are still in progress it could go any number of ways. But also anybody who bought stock in "Trump is right" is way up nine months later.
When I say, "Trump is Naruto," what I mean is, this is essentially how history is going to remember Trump. Everything gets simplified and reified in historical memory and "time makes more converts than reason". It would have sounded equally crazy to anyone in 1864 if you had said similar things about Lincoln. Lincoln was extremely controversial in his day and a lot of people thought he was an idiot. But if you sat in 1864 and believed that the war was going well and was going to be won, it's really easy then to understand that Lincoln would become a hero. Even before his assassination and the myth-making that engendered.
And we don't know yet how Trump's story is going to end. I think that's the most consequential thing of all, because the ending of a story tells you what it means. So nobody actually knows what any of this means really. But, at the same time, when history looks back on 2026, they aren't going to say, "Trump bombed Iran but his CIA report said not to except I don't believe in the CIA report but it still maybe cost him the midterms but we don't know the counter-factual because incumbents always lose their midterms." They're going to say: Donald Trump; Vladimir Putin; Xi Jinping; Elon Musk; Superintelligence; Starship; Golden Dome. They'll say, Trump started preparing the American economy for war, which is something I see evidence of every time I open the papers but I don't see anybody thinking of in those terms. They'll say, 2026 is when Artificial Intelligence became Superintelligence, and they'll understand that the entire world was changing and it happened under Donald Trump. I am of course betting that AI is going to change the world and everything in it. I'm also betting that people will eventually understand how badly Iran was beaten, because that's what I think happened.
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And here I was, having only vaguely heard about this "Malfoid" thing, and assuming it's because Draco Malfoy as bully (as opposed to Draco Malfoy as in-over-his-head Death Eater) almost entirely acts like a queen bitch abusing social connections rather than engaging in more "manly" bullying himself (there was the Remembrall back in book one, and... I can't actually think of much else?).
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Do Pern and/or Mercedes Lackey count as "Romantasy"? Presumably at least the latter's 500 Kingdoms series would.
You could probably call it that nowadays, in the same way that a lot of stuff that wasn't originally "YA" is now called that. I've read very little Mercedes Lackey, but my recollection of the Pern books is that the romance subplots were mostly pretty light, not the primary running theme.
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Damn what a good summary of Harry Potter and some of the things I love about it and it's message.
What Romantasy would you recommend checking out? Might be a good way to get some of my foreign language hours up?
To be clear, I'm using the term "romantasy" even though my personal tastes are for romance with zero fantasy. I much prefer romances with basically zero fictional elements. The logic of the story all hinges on people talking to each other and resolving emotional conflicts. This to me is the whole point of the genre. (Although, again, the logic of the romance is inherently fantastic, it's all a fantasy, and the fictional fantasy plots about werewolf zombie witches all ultimately reinforce the logic of the core emotional fantasy. What you like is a matter of taste.)
I'm not sure there are really any stellar recommendations here. Half of the appeal of the genre is that there is so much slop that you can read whatever tickles your fancy, and I think you can knock most of these books out in a few hours even if they seem much longer. Emily Henry? Kate Spencer? Casey McQuinston? B.K. Borison? Treat it the way you'd treat going to the zoo or the theater, and if you hate the zoo you'd probably go at least once a decade just to see what it's up to, right?
The high-quality romances are all either quite old (Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice) or romcoms. When Harry Met Sally, Crazy Rich Asians, Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc. The key in all cases is the same, which is understanding that the romance is an emotional fantasy. I.e., in When Harry Met Sally, the titular characters actually meet three times at different phases of their life before they even maintain a relationship as friends. What does that matter? Well, in your life you meet so many people, sometimes for a brief moment, maybe you make a bad impression, maybe it's the wrong time. Ah, but true love, if someone is your true love life and the universe will conspire to put you together, you can't screw it up. You're destined to fall in love. Which is essentially the fantasy at the core of all romance novels: each subgenre and type is just an elaboration on a particular kind of obstacle that commonly frustrates your romantic endeavors.
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I watched the linked video and Malfoid kind of reminds me of the Amelia meme that blew up in the UK a few months back.
Maybe the fantasy is to have a girlfriend who is slender, attractive, and anti-woke.
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There is already a male romantasy genre, but it's called Harem Fantasy and considered a very low-status sub-genre of the already rather niche Progression Fantasy.
Male-POV strictly monogamous romances with a HEA were more popular in the Regency and Victorian eras, but fell off by the 1950s, as romance became mostly for women and men were more interested in the (fantasy) world shown to them by the likes of Hugh Hefner. There's probably a 2rafa-style argument to be made here, something-something sexual revolution, but yeah, these Malfoid stories are touching a chord with guys who want a waifu and not a harem, I guess. (These kinds of stories are much more common in Japanese manga and anime.)
Isn't it commonly accepted wisdom that men predominantly respond to visual stimulation as opposed to women?
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Is Progression Fantasy still "niche," with Dungeon Crawler Carl breaking containment?
Mushoku Tensei is vastly superior along every conceivable metric--except the Overton Window metric where it matters that Carl is safely asexual while Rudeus is a practicing polygamist.
DCC is LitRPG, which is another sub-genre of Progression Fantasy. Yes, DCC has dramatically expanded the audience for both, but I have yet to see a harem fantasy hit the mainstream. Would be hilarious when/if it does. I can only imagine the CW discussion points it will spawn.
Tenchi Muyo.
Does Tenchi ever get to have sex with any of the girls? If what I remember is correct, he has the biggest case of blue balls in the galaxy.
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Eh, I think you are reading too much into it. Tsundere girls are a common archetype because it works. Malfoid is just a transplantation of a bunch of generic anime high school tropes into another familiar setting of an elite British boarding school of magic.
What I found surprising was the backlash against "cosplayers" trying to capitalize on the trend. The same kind of people that slurped up lazy 2B cosplays (white wig, blindfold, tits, ass) are now calling half-naked women trying to entice them with blond wigs and green fingernails "slutbloods" and encouraging each other to block them.
Yeah, but here it seems to work surprisingly specifically, improving the themes and making the plot progress more seamlessly.
Harry grew up unloved, so "the girl who claims to hate the protagonist can't help carpet-bombing him with hints to the contrary and yet he still doesn't believe them" is more plausible than it is in some tsundere stories. The Malfoys end up with actual reasons to oppose Harry, so before the classical tsundere "romantic conflict because she's got personality issues" story can outstay its welcome there's time for an even-more-classical Romeo-and-Juliet "romantic conflict because the world is tearing us apart" story to step in.
Dracina gets to be a less flat character, with more conscious-vs-subconscious personality aspects conflicting in earlier books and conscious ones conflicting in later ones. Perhaps more incidentally but just as importantly, expecting to have (or at least to hint at the possibility of) a future romance would have led any writer to slightly soften some of the one-dimensional-villain writing that made Draco's later redemption feel more contrived. We should have gotten to see a glimpse of Draco's boggart; we wouldn't have been allowed to miss seeing Dracina's.
Making Dracina less one-dimensional and more vulnerable-seeming makes us think more about the "good guys" hostility to her; e.g. the cruelty of the professor in book 4 becomes more of a decent clue and less of a comic gag.
Harry becoming unable to write her off makes Dracina more interesting as a red-herring villain and as a real villain. Harry gets an antagonist who isn't just the obvious person to fight with, but someone with whom later fights feel more and more like a tragic mistake on one or both sides.
Dracina can get a better backstory, with Lucius' conscious "girl dad" doting vs subconscious "no male heir to carry on my name" disappointment making her awful combination of ego and insecurity more natural and more sympathetic, and adding to the internal "trying to look strong while feeling weak" conflict that was already in Draco. Dracina gets multiple potential great sources of quiet or overt external conflict with Lucius, from pride vs loyalty earlier ("Daddy always wanted me to look for a strong match, and this awful annoying boy is famous and successful...") to love vs loyalty later ("I'm actually drawn to him, but now Daddy says he's from a worthless family and Dumbledore's puppet!"), which gives her another challenge to her internal conflict with her loyalty to Lucius.
A bunch of the most-quoted Draco lines gain a little more subtext as Dracina lines (attraction or attempts to impress, rather than just envy and insecurity), and a few things (Harry refusing to take Malfoy's hand in book 1, "Scared, Potter?" in movie 2) become perfect setups for later callbacks.
Harry starts out literally charming a female snake in book 1, and ends up metaphorically charming one by book 3 or 4.
We get more of an inside view of Slytherin and the Death Eaters, and so more opportunities to see what really can drive people to evil, not just cartoonish villainy.
Harry gets a new source of conflict with his friends, who (once he can bring himself to admit actual attraction) are likely to think he's just deluded by hormones to believe a Malfoy might not be a lost cause. This can also give us a much better source of conflicts with Ron, so we don't have to make Ron become weirdly and off-puttingly jealous and paranoid.
We get a much better candidate for a devastating betrayal in book 5 than "Cho's friend whose name nobody remembers", and the betrayal's consequences can be devastating on both sides.
Harry gets a romance with a partner who's actually interesting after book 2, and with more serious external conflict being what keeps them apart, instead of just lukewarm attraction. He gets a partner who doesn't start out star-struck by him and whose eventual attraction can feel less superficial because she's consciously trying to fight it. He gets a partner who challenges him more, pushing him to be more masculine and faster than in canon.
We get a mirror to compare and contrast with Severus-and-Lily, adding to the suspense of Dracina's redemption by reminding us that "redemption but only after an irreparable loss" is a possibility.
Dracina gets a proper redemption arc, with a goal worth her doing the work to redeem herself rather than just Draco's realization that he got in over his head and needs to weasel out of it. We're put in a position to sympathize with Dracina more before her internal conflict in book 6 ramps up, making us care more about how it's tearing at her soul, not just about the impacts of whether Voldemort has an extra pawn or not.
Harry defeats Voldemort via "The Power of Love" again, at least on the meta-level this time, now with a different type of love. Way better than "ha ha you didn't pay close enough attention to the rules about the SuperWand". On the allegorical level, the serpent that was trying to seduce humans with Knowledge and Immorality instead gets defeated thanks to Eve's rejection.
A loving Harry-Dracina marriage crossing the lines of the Slytherin and Gryffindor feud does much more to establish a "happily ever after" epilogue than Harry and Draco seeing each other at the train station and not fighting, or Harry telling his kids that Snape wasn't so bad after all.
I love weird fan theories, but I haven't seen a "that's so incredibly juvenile and stupid ... wait, why does it actually make so much sense?" moment in popular media since the "Darth Jar Jar" post a decade ago.
It's at least interesting that the (hetero) romance angle would play out somewhat differently if you gender-swapped Harry instead. But I don't follow fanfic, maybe that's been done before.
Fanfiction.net lists ... are they kidding me? over 800,000 Harry Potter works? ... so I have to assume that every possible gender swapped romance has been done at least a dozen times before.
I do wonder whether "gender-swapped Harry instead" would have been an even better series overall, if that had been Rowling's canon rather than fan fiction. It would be a big help for some of the "women writing men" problems problems that @Lewyn points out, if those problems didn't apply to the protagonist who occupies most of our attention. I think there are some gender asymmetries that would make a Draco+Harriet romance creep me out way more than Dracina+Harry, but maybe that would just mean I'm not the target audience; Draco+Harriet probably could have made the Twilight/50-Shades crowd go wild.
JK was notably surprised and disturbed by how many young women went feral for Draco. On Archive of Our Own, the most prolific pairing for Harry Potter is Harry/Draco at 88,629 fics. Most of these are BL, but I'm sure there are a few popular ones with a female Harry. In my experience, it's more common to see female writers/readers self-insert with Hermione or Daphne/Astoria Greenglass. Draco/Hermione is the third-most prolific AO3 pairing at 48,858 fics.
She did start writing well before Twilight started showing us the left side of the female id bell curve, much less 50 Shades of Grey.
The two major artistic reactions to Anne Rice style "sexy vampires" were the Buffy/Angel series (exploiting but subverting the trope), with around 10 million total viewers tops, and the Twilight series (taking that shit to 11!), with around 25 million readers and twice that many movie viewers. Despite its lesser success, I'd give Joss Whedon a lot of credit for trying to show young women that falling for a much-older dark-triad-sociopath-type guy is a tragedy at best and a travesty at worst, but, well, you know.
If Buffy was trying to subvert it, it did it really badly. When Angel went evil without his soul, that explicitly was because he lost his soul, not because Angel as a person was otherwise bad. You could say that metaphorically it shows that Angel was bad, but the text is contradicting it. And then you had Buffy with Spike, which was even more blatantly not subverting it.
Also, the Vampire Diaries did pretty well.
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If you love weird fan theories, take my Frozen theory:
The movie works just fine if you tweak the famous "Hans betrays Anna" scene just a little. You don't have to change anything before that scene, and you can change only a little bit after, like maybe one or two lines of dialog after, and it still is coherent, but improves the story 100%.
The change is this: Hans actually kisses Anna and nothing happens. Because Hans is a nice guy but true love is something that takes time and sacrifice to develop. Then Anna passes out and Hans genuinely thinks Elsa killed her.
Then the rest of the movie just stays the same. This works better because the Hans betrayal came out of nowhere, and it helps cement the theme that love is more than infatuation. It fits so much that I believe it was actually made this way, then an exec said there had to be a villain, and so they redid one scene to frame Hans as malicious and called it a day.
Ha! That's almost the same as my head-canon improvement. Hans isn't an actually-nice guy, but he's not pure evil, he's just as desperate as you'd expect of someone raised with wealth and a nominal title but expecting to inherit jack squat. He rationalizes that "I'll marry Anna and act like I love her" is still a better outcome than would otherwise befall a girl so sheltered and naive, and although he's not too surprised when his kiss confirms that this doesn't actually count as love as far as the spell is concerned, he still tries to monologue to Anna about why he's not a bad person for all of it.
I'd been thinking that he could do a more evil turn at that point, like "you're doomed anyway, so I might as well lock you in here and not be dispossessed in the process", but I like your "Hans genuinely thinks Elsa killed her" idea better. Except... does that allow the rest of the movie to stay the same? My kids have all thankfully outgrown it so I haven't seen it in forever, but I could have sworn the ending required Anna to be conscious much longer to go out and confront Elsa herself.
The next scene with Anna has Olaf finding Anna freezing to death on the floor with closed eyes. Olaf comes to Anna's rescue by starting a fire in the fireplace to warm Anna up.
Olaf says, "Where's Hans? What happened to your kiss?"
Anna says, "I was wrong about him, it wasn't true love."
Kind of a muted reaction to him giving an evil speech and trying to kill her! But it makes perfect sense in the context of my proposal.
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This is just a simmer moving to a boil in real time. There’s been a slow yet consistent push against the onlyfansification of cosplay, especially amoung the old guard who remember before it got ‘popular’, and thus, something to exploit.
Is it maybe a plausible explanation that it's the female character designs themselves in games and anime series that are generally skimpier than before?
I wouldn't think that is the case, no. Fanservice has been a constant element of games, often used as a point of criticism against them. After all, this is an actual advertisement for a western game from over two decades ago.
...you probably don't want to open that link if you're at work, just fyi.
Granted that you're right, it seems one of two phenomena is at work here, or a mixture of both: the attitudes of the female cosplayer subculture are themselves changing, or there is a process of E-thot entryism taking place there.
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Every few years, a new cohort discovers that anime character archetypes like "tsundere" are genuinely psychologically appealing and not just memes. That's how Doki Doki Literature Club got so popular, people had to play through a couple hours of earnest dating-sim writing before they could get to the horror part.
Do these anime character archetypes "exist" in any meaningful way? I've watched a few animes. Every tsundere I can think of is a ridiculously two-dimensional caricature who is less "female opponent placed in opposition to the main character who can't help falling for him anyways" and more "woman who falls for MC immediately but occasionally is mad about it." Seriously the character writing in these shows is absolutely atrocious.
"Anime did it already" Yeah? Where? Is its execution completely embarrassing? Do the women act like 4-year-olds in adult bodies or like actual people?
Looking at reddit's favorite tsunderes, the two I recognize are Kurisu Makise and Vegeta (lol). Kurisu is like a 4/10 character at best, vaguely human in a show otherwise populated by caricatures but mostly uninteresting. If that's the #2 I have no interest in what Japan has to say about character archetypes generally. We may as well be coming up with this archetype from scratch.
I'm the furthest thing from a feminist btw, just hate bad writing.
Anime is often fun exactly because the emotions and characters are exaggerated. I personally think Vegeta works quite well in the context of the story he is a part of. But there are Tsunderes who act more normal, or have well-written reasons for acting standoffish.
Senjougahara from "Bakemonogatari" is one such. Her aggression is part of the initial mystery and her character is explored well in later episodes.
Fern from "Frieren" is much more subtle and "realistic" in her tsun. She is simply young, proper, and inexperienced. She doesn't know what to do or how to categorize her feelings and so she unwittingly ends up hurting the boy she loves.
"Kaguya Sama Love is War" satirizes the trope but also uses it very well as the story goes on. All the caracters start out as 2-dimensional parodies then slowly become more fleshed out as the story progresses.
All that to say: If you think all anime is surface level slop, you haven't given it the chance it deserves. There is some great storytelling mixed in with all the surface level wish fulfillment.
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It's a real thing, I could link you a wikipedia article, tvtropes page with hundreds of examples, or find one of countless discussions of it online, but you can probably find those yourself easily.
Looking at the list, Asuka Langley is the ur-tsundere who codified the archetype (in the same way the Rei Ayanami is the ur-kuudere) and is easily the best character in Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'd say Rin Tohsaka from Fate is also great.
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Damn, what is this slander. Love is War is a great anime with decent multi-dimensional characters, both the protagonist and the deuteragonist are Tsundere's. I'm glad this list included Damien Desmond form Spy x Family, who is a great rare male tsundere. Idk if I'd consider Eris Greyrat to be a tsundere.
Yeah some tsundere's are bad caricatures because some writers are bad writers who depend on tropes to be entertaining. It does not make the character archetype nonexistent or poor.
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I would agree with this. I'd argue that though there isn't a ton of pornography of Malfoid from what I have seen, the trends popularity is still largely driven by it being a hot blond in a schoolgirl outfit rather than anything story related.
The rest, as you say, is just standard tsundere stuff
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More evidence of the wholesomeness of the trend, no? 2B's design is not exactly subtle and eminently lewdable, obviously intended as coomer bait, so uh, objectifying her is acceptable and even encouraged - I'll be the first to defend Automata's story but it's largely irrelevant as far as lewding 2B goes. Whereas the lust for Malfoid (whose "design" doesn't really exist, but can be trivially imagined as fairly chaste given the standard of dress in Hogwarts) stems more from the proverbial heart-boner than the more traditional kind, as the OP describes.
Thus, cosplayers aping the aesthetics of 2B are judged (and accepted) immediately on their uh, visible merits since that's the schtick of the character, whereas the visual appeal of Malfoid seems largely incidental (since it's fanfiction, most of the appeal lies in the
headcanoncharacter dynamics), and women appropriating it are seen as missing the point at best, and vainly exploiting men's genuine bellyfeels at worst.More options
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I think it's the first time fanfiction has really pierced into some of these circles, and AI makes a rather attractive blond.
Yes, it's funny to see based RWers get one shot by the most saccharine AO3 romance.
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"Clever kids in Ravenclaw, evil kids in Slytherin, wannabe heroes in Gryffindor, and everyone who does the actual work in Hufflepuff."
Comically unflattering image aside, I feel like Vance, Kushner, Hegseth, Issacman, and a bunch of others in the MAGA coalition would actually embrace this characterization.
Salazar Slytherin and the Sorting Hat seem to disagree about whether sufficiently ambitious halfbloods like Tom Riddle, Severus Snape and Harry Potter belonged in Slytherin. The Hat would absolutely have sorted Vance into Slytherin, and unlike Potter I don't think he would have objected.
We don't see a healthy House Slytherin in the books, but ambition and family pride are virtues and a healthy community of people who possess them is entirely possible. If it worked anything like the Muggle one, most of the work of building the Wizarding British Empire would have been done by Slytherins.
Then clearly Salazar Slytherin was a better man than any of the people in the house he founded.
I think that one of the major points of conflict in the first quarter of the 21st century is the discrepancy between credentials/purity and ambition/competence.
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I think we see a glimpse of it in Professor Slughorn, who uses healthy ambition to motivate his students to work hard and reach far.
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One of the big criticisms of Harry Potter has always been that the world would be much more interesting if the houses were not simply divided into Heroes, Evil racists, Autists, and Socialites. Rowling clearly tried changing this in the later books and spinoffs, but the baggage of the earlier books made it hard to accept without having it feel like a retcon. And her attempts at this mostly made the houses appear more homogenous, as opposed to exploring positive aspects of ambition and negatives of heroism and self sacrifice.
I too would be interested in children's literature that sees ambition and pride as virtuous traits, rather than sinful ones. All too often, the hero just lucks into a position of power due to reasons outside his control. A story about someone who wants to be a hero and earn the recognition of the people, and whose best friend/rival takes great pride in his family would be refreshing. I realize writing this that I just described Naruto, but I challenge you to find me a western book that does this.
Andrew Clements is a children's author who wrote books where kids had entrepreneurial spirit, which is about as good as it gets regarding ambition being a good thing.
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Well, the book was originally intended for tweens, you can't even say it's YA.
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I recently finished the book Fathers and Sons and found myself amused by the way Turgenev described three different young ladies (each quote taken from a different part of the story):
For being three different characters, these sure are all the same character. Clearly Turgenev had a type. (An archetype!) But it's probably also the type that many (most?) guys have. And in 19th-century literature, characters could just exist as that archetype without needing to justify it.
Whereas in the context of modern media — post-postmodernist but still poisoned by the subversions of postmodernism — it seems like the archetype can't exist without justifying it somehow. When I see quotes like this:
…I'm strongly suspicious of whether that's actually the reasons why the character is appealing vs being the necessary rationalization baggage for the modern reader, so that they can accept the character as "realistic". And it seems like the necessary rationalizations are getting ever more elaborate, where now you need to borrow a whole media franchise's backstory and then additionally rewrite a good chunk of its content further.
All this is to say: Turgenev comes across as quite horny, but his writings are still probably healthier to consume than whatever the internet is doing.
What's the archetype here, the young coquette who machine-learned that a certain kind of awkwardness that comes naturally gets her male attention? That would be fair enough for the Turgenev paragraphs, but I don't really see it in the female Malfoy samples, unless you want to lump together any and all forms of non-self-aware romantic behaviour (I think even saying "affection" here would be reading too much into Turgenev as quoted).
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Your Nitter link doesn’t work.
Harry and Malfoid dancing at the Yule Ball
Working nitter instances
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I love this. It’s sort of gooner slop, but it’s also unexpected and wholesome (though the art is too, I’m mainly referring to the surrounding vibes), like wplace…and we’re finally getting some popular right-wing art! Even though it’s like every other fanart except from an “evil” franchise, it’s progress.
(I didn’t read the fanfic, I just saw the drawing that started it and spinoff drawings. I also don’t think most of them were AI-generated, anyways I’m still not convinced AI art is as good as even lower quality human.)
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My issue is that, narratively, gender-swapped Draco Malfoy doesn't make any sense as a love interest for Harry.
There is definitely a male fantasy that a nice lady will fall in love with you for no reason at all, because girls and boys falling in love with each other is just a thing that happens naturally, no further explaination required. It took me until I was about 20 years old to realize that this isn't true. A lot of the stories you linked come off as quite juvenile. I suppose it functions as decent romance slop for teenagers.
I’d say this is more of a universal human fantasy rather than a gendered one. Who wouldn’t want their ideal partner to just fall into their lap? Almost every romance novel for women will at some point include a remark along the lines of “out of all the gorgeous women that the billionaire could have chosen, he decided on little ol’ me, for reasons I cannot fathom!”
It’s just that these sorts of sentiments have a particular kind of significance when they’re being expressed by the male side because men are, frankly, expected to put in more effort across a wider variety of metrics if they want to obtain an appropriately sociocultural-status-matched partner.
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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.
I agree with this to a large extent, but I think there would be a downside which is that it would make the romantic relationship much more central to the overall plot of the series.
Consider other hero's journey type stories, for example Highlander. As is typical in the genre, the hero ultimately defeats the villain; saves the day; and gets the girl. In that order of importance, I would argue. People who like hero's journey type stories, I strongly suspect, prefer it if the main focus of the story is the hero's efforts to save the universe and his conflict with the villain. I think it's the same reason why romance, as a genre, is less popular among men even though there are lots of male-oriented stories which contain an element of romance.
Can you imagine Die Hard if the focus of the movie was the relationship between John McClain and his wife? It might still be a good movie, but it would be a very different movie and much less appealing to the sort of people who like Die Hard.
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.
It doesn't have to make the relationship the main focus of the story, but it would definitely (in my opinion) take oxygen away from the Hero's Journey story and transfer it to the Romeo and Juliet story. Readers will wonder a little less about "How will Harry Potter defeat the bad guy without any help from his mentor" and a little more about "Will Harry make it to the airport in time to catch Malfoid before she moves back to Los Angeles and what will her parents think?"
I suppose you could play it like James Bond and just make the girl a shallow character who is so drawn to the hero that she abandons her loyalty to her faction. But even that (in my opinion) would take away from the hero's journey.
Reader's will not wonder about that, as in the OG books Potter defeated the bad guy be sheer cosmic luck during all occasions. But I had similar discussion about how Hermione and not Potter is the true hero of the story.
Looks like I missed a good discussion a few months ago and I don't want to reopen it with a long rejoinder when the moment has passed. But reducing Harry's victory to "cosmic luck" is a fundamental misreading of the story. Harry Potter begins, in the first place, with cosmic luck; the entire chain of conflict is set in motion by a prophecy, and Voldemort's response to it, and schemes laid out before Harry was born. That's how plot and narrative work, the battle isn't in swords or spells or mechanical hyper beams, the battle is between symbolic forces. Harry isn't the hero because he studies hardest but because he exemplifies friendship, loyalty, bravery, sacrifice, and love. Suggesting that Hermoine is the hero because she does more of the spells and plans while Harry is saved by providence is on the same plane as Vivek saying that Americans need to replace prom queens and jocks with engineers and physicists.
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I haven’t read Harry Potter recently but it’s not like your best friend’s slightly younger sister having a crush on you is at all unrealistic. Is there an indication that she’s mostly after his fame?
Best friend's little sister and little sister's best friend are two of the softest targets in school age romance - both in RL and fiction, although a 16yo dating a 14yo is probably taboo in today's climate even if you aren't implying under-age consumation.
The former is generally fine among those who are permitted to date in the first place.
As for the latter, may I present My Hero Academia.
"In today's climate" obviously means in the West. Anime is a completely different world; the Japanese have been largely isolated from wokeness due to their incompetence at learning English.
Oh no, I mean the West too. Most of the women complaining about it also have their hand down their pants at the same time, and the only people that don’t understand that are, naturally, men in their teens.
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In the early books she is very much just a fangirl with a crush. But she matures as she gets older, and their relationship by the end is one of equals. As would be expected given the series' feminist undertones, the male main character would not want to be with someone who considers herself inferior.
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Damn. Now you made me want to read that story as a real fanfic.
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Yeah, I don't think anyone's making a real story here. Although if you're a Death Eater trying to foil (or turn!) Harry Potter, a cutie Slytherin honeytrap would have been a better way to go than anything the canon Slytherins came up with.
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Ok I read the first story linked. I am confused but how is this RW? Race-mixing is bad and should be avoided especially when the pure-blood is female and not the pure-blood colonizer boy mixing with muggle female variety. AOC being infatuated with Elon Musk is RW fan-fic.
Honestly these stories seem very LW coded to me. This is very LW coded that the person on the right can’t help but fall in love with the other because they are like “good and funny and virtuous or something”:
“Malfoid was brought up from birth to hate everything about Harry, but despite everything in her corner of society pushing her to despise him and see Harry as a foe, she can't help but love him because he represents something her side of the wizarding world could never show her; honest love and a relationship not based on how useful someone is - which was one of the core themes of the books anyway.”
The only thing a little similar on the right is Vance and Usha. But in that case we are marrying off our lowest class pure blood to an elite foreigner of money and ability. Still Male taking female.
RW Potter fanfic is like Voldemort winning.
Harry is the self-insert, so his identity and traits barely matter to the interpretation. The story reads as "(You) should pine for hot blonde pureblood women", not "hot blonde pureblood women should get with filthy impure men". In a properly SJW view, suggesting that Harry should prefer female Malfoy over a hypothetical overweight black Hermione itself is problematic - there's a reason why it is generally said that (mixed) Barack Obama choosing to marry (fully black) Michelle was a tactical move.
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I did the unthinkable. I googled it and visited the first SEO pumped article from the slopfotainment sector of journalism. This article from Cybernews (other recent publications include an incisive story under the headline "Female AI agents paid less than male agents for the same work") suggests everyone is interpreting the situation correctly according to their assigned roles.
Explains enough for me. Artist makes fanart, posts it to Bluesky, and the progressive community demands recompense, because JK Rowling and her "wizard books"-- we don't say their actual names. Artist apologizes there, but also posts or had already posted the character to X dot com, the site for bad people, and eventually deleted their Bluesky account after it took off there.
If the character wasn't a dark, right-wing incantation she would have the support of Bluesky, which I imagine as containing a high density of people who enjoy, produce, and/or masturbate to fan art/fiction. It is a very progressive space as I understand.
So it’s only right-wing because it violates two stupid taboos, no?
A more charitable leftist could interpret it as pro-trans since, you know, it’s literally a male turned into a woman. But the left seems to believe charitability will destroy them, ironically in cases like these: the idea that embracing a “dog whistle” leads people down the slippery slope of hyper-reactionary ultrafascism, when I’m confident their rejection of a wholesome concept shifts the average person far more to the right than co-opting it themselves. What other commenters have described as “taking the bait”.
Exposing and violating stupid taboos is one of art’s purposes. Enough to make me appreciate this otherwise fan-shipping slop…or in other words, enough to give me an excuse: another of art’s purposes is to disguise and launder the artist’s and viewers’ kinks into polite society. But I think that’s nothing to be ashamed about, because Freud was onto something: much of human’s thoughts and actions revolve around love and sex, so a world without any sex appeal isn’t relatable or realistic, it’s missing something from our world. “Degenerate” (to me) art is not such because of its sex, no matter how weird and extreme; it’s when the sex is out of place and it doesn’t have much else, i.e. when it doesn’t stand on its own ignoring sex appeal, which Malfoid does.
Did it violate taboos?
You're doing more work than everyone else and in some measure doing the work for them. As I understand, sex swaps between characters is not uncommon among fanfic communities which seemingly host an overrepresentation of trans individuals.
The reasoning behind 'Malfoid as a right-wing monster', if any was necessary, was constructed post-hoc. What happened was not reasoning, but a group of people impressing their beliefs. That intersected with and was accelerated by negative polarization once the meme jumped platforms. Harry Potter boycott stories break containment only sometimes. These types boycotted a Harry Potter video game a couple years ago as I recall, but there doesn't appear to be a strong general taboo against enjoying Harry Potter. If you're the kind of person who thinks there should be a strong taboo then you take the chance to enforce your beliefs when the opportunity presents itself. Normally, the Bluesky Post->Mad Children->Artist Apology cycle of outrage or taboo enforcement ends at the apology stage and remains contained. In this case, the meme was embraced by X which allowed its development. The conflict expanded from intra-community policing to inter-tribal conflict.
I even doubt the fanfiction community on Bluesky, specifically, polices the production of Harry Potter fanart with any consistency. The reason I say so is because I know one very progressive lesbian (i.e. not a "TERF" sort) who will enthusiastically and unabashedly tell you about her interest in Harry Potter fanfic including the "degenerate" sort. She does so with self-awareness and good humor. She's of a tumblr age, before JK Rowling was persona non grata, and apparently doesn't care much about the associations above.
I don't consider myself equipped to significantly contribute to the eternal Pornography or Art? debate. As a personal judgment, sexy cartoon fanart often appears more functionally pornographic than artistic, especially in cases where the artist is catering to a fetish. That is art with impact and intent, it says something about the nature of ourselves, but if I were to take it seriously as art it feels cheap. The depictions I saw here looked like fairly wholesome Chinese Cartoons whereas Harry Potter fanfiction people can be absolute freaks.
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I like to think that it's not RW. It's just the first time in a while we have some entertainment that is not explicitly political. It's just a horny/love story (from an IP that the left won't touch anymore). This is politically/CW noteworthy, even if the content isn't RW.
No self respecting rw would make work about HP when they could explore middle earth—a true RW IP
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There are elements present that the left generally distances itself from. The unapologetic appeal to a male fantasy. Malfoid just being a girl with conflicting feelings, with no attempt at female empowerment. That the boys are different from the girls on a fundamental, possibly biological level. A boy acting like Malfoid would be ridiculed (or at least a very different character), but she gets away with it because she is a girl.
It is rightwing in the sense that it does not attempt to be part of the leftwing political movement. Although personally, I would not ascribe it to any ideology in particular. The broad appeal indicates that people like it regardless of their political leanings.
It’s right-wing for blue-sky. It’s not the actual right-wing. It introduces an idea that it’s ok to be pure blood. It’s ok to have a male character who’s been in a weight room.
It’s basically what’s center-left now and old Clinton neoliberalism worldview. HP of course is very hard to rewrite in a right-wing frame because it’s a left wing story.
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Almost anything that isn't obviously left-coded is right wing. If you look through Wikipedia articles about entertainment products, you'll find that the "Critical Response" section often consists of little more than describing the ways that the book/show/movie/game violates left-wing taboos or is insufficiently active in pushing a left-wing message. It is the moral obligation of art to advocate for a progressive world, and this is partly because progressives ascribe great power to media to shape society for good or ill. Most of politics is, in this view, about managing perceptions, and reality will follow later.
I think I get the RW bit a little bit. Harry Potter is loved by left and center left. Where those communities interact HP is on the RW side of their aisle. I myself am not a fan of HP. I fall completely outside of their Overton window. HP is not popular in the true RW of society so when I see art of this sort I find it still very LW coded.
I also never really understood why Rowling got so much hate for being anti-Tran in ways I felt were normal. As a writer she was a LW-Icon which made her a traitor to the cause when she broke any left wing taboos. I myself could never generate that kind of hate because I am “one who can not be spoken to”.
I never realized that “He who can not be named” was a core left-wing belief until now and just thought it was some writing device she put in the books. But it’s actually very on point for Reddit and perhaps even the inspiration that anyone who’s not left-coded like us must be removed/banned. I of course am unpersoned on Reddit.
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It portrays a woman loving a man.
Yeah, having had a chance to think about things, I think it's basically that simple. More specifically, female Malfoy caters to the desires of straight men. Straight men like the idea of meeting a slender attractive woman who is attracted to them. According to the progressive worldview, straight men (especially straight white men like Harry Potter) are supposed to serve women -- not be catered to.
I think that any kind of Harry Potter fanfiction or fan art which changed the story so as to cater to straight men would get a similar reception.
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TIL Taylor Swift is right wing.
https://cdn.slate.fr/uploads/store/drupal_slate/how-taylor-swift-became-a-nazi-icon-body-image-1463775383-618x441.png
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It's just a matter of time.
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The RW believes woman are capable of love?
Correct.
I think the right believes women need strong limitations on sexual rights and cultural traditions preventing let’s call it sluttiness or their love will end up being temporary. Basically need to do something like putting them in a burka.
Tom Brady getting dumped would seem to be the leading brand of this belief.
So I do not think it’s a RW belief that women are capable of love.
Honestly I can’t tell if this entire post is sarcasm.
HP in a RW fanfic wouldn’t asks out a girl because “he lost a bet”. He would asks to the dance the girl he wanted to asks to the dance because he’s aggressive and pursues what he wants to pursue.
The right believed mostly what the old time feminists believed - that a woman in charge of her sexuality also bears responsibility for her actions and outcomes. Most of the edgelordiness online is just backlash to the change of no means no to yes means yes to yes means no four years later after the fact.
And do you know what is the most red pilling event of them all - to see a woman you hold dear return for 18th time in her abusive relationship "because I love him" after she was beaten up regularly. The pure red hot rage that you can't save someone from their own stupidity.
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I'm lost... Let's pretend your portrayal of rightwing beliefs is accurate, how does it show they believe that women are not capable of love? Does saying "it's a bad idea to put a married guy to inside a harem for a night" mean I believe men are incapable of love?
It's 100% sincere, and I think it's plainly visible that the more progressive our sexual mores have become, the less anyone talks about love, and we now got to the point where BlueSky is having meltdowns over fanfics where a girl falls in love with a boy.
That's silly. Right wingers don't believe all males are at all times manly men manily doing manly things, or even that they should strive for that.
They're having meltdowns over fanfics based on the works of She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
Left wingers love stories where a girl falls in love with a boy. Most romance (including "romantasy") is very left-coded. The girl may be a Strong Independent Woman who can outfight five times her dainty elfin weight in Navy Seals, but they are still fundamentally about a girl who falls in love with a
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No, Voldemort was a degenerate obsessed with his own personal immortality; he was just using the mudblood stuff to get support (though when he was just half-blood Tom Riddle he believed it)
Well in my view it’s hard to make HP RW coded unless RW coded is the center-left being RW versus blue-sky people.
HP is leftist porn where you create a Nazi to fulfill the lefts desire to punch a Nazi. To do anything that’s RW is a huge story flip that would involve the hero not being Harry Potter.
Yes, HP is left wing and yes Voldemort was Nazi-inspired; of course he was, that's the modern incarnation of evil. But Harry himself wasn't particularly lefty, he was mostly interested in solving his personal problem with Voldemort. The left-wing paragon role was left to Hermione. How to do a right-wing version of the story would depend on what "right wing" you want. An American 'gun nut' right wing wouldn't actually be so far from canon, except for the major changes that you'd have to have Dumbledore be an outsider, and throw Hermione out on her ear. Traditional European blood-and-soil would be difficult to do without replacing half-blood Harry, of course; perhaps Neville Longbottom could be the hero.
Harry potter and the second amendment is a meme for a reason.
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It was less left wing at the time because that was the time of George Bush and the neoliberal uniparty.
If you rewrote HP to be RW you would make a better Voldemort and he would win. Or you would make Voldemort more like a third wordlist similar to LOR and make HP as protecting the shire type thing.
No. Right wingers have been cast as evil for so long they accept it, but a really blood-and-soil right wing Harry Potter would make the right-winger the good guy. Getting further from canon: a pureblood Harry, for instance, with Voldemort being the champion of the odds and sods. Of course not everyone on the good side would be a pureblood, but the lessers would know their place and would admire Harry for his purity.
I won't say "British right-wing thought never gave a shit about blood purity" because I'm sure there are exceptions, but it's a good approximation to the truth. The British aristocracy, and the trad-right that wished to preserve it with its power and privilege intact, were unusually lackadaisical about blood purity compared to other similar aristocracies.
Under the British rules, Harry Potter is a legitimate Potter and inherits the status of the Potter family regardless of Lily Evans' Muggle-born status. Rowling's Malfoy understands this immediately - he sees Harry as a member of his class who is betraying its values by socialising with oiks (i.e. the Weasleys). So does the Sorting Hat.
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I've always wondered if FarCry 5 could've been improved by remaking the story along these lines. The church being a haven for the rejects and the downtrodden, just like Jesus intended, but still ultimately evil and wrong, an antithesis to the racist and small-minded rural Montana, with the Deputy achieving victory and peace by synthesizing them together, chapter by chapter.
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The only thing we actually see harm pureblood families is association with Voldemort. The ones that go extinct are because of him, he preserves nothing.
It's almost too on the nose that, as his enemies start to finally get a bead on how to kill him, Voldemort becomes occupied taking pleasure in bullying the aristocratic Malfoys and putting their only living heir in mortal danger.
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It’s been a long time since I read Harry Potter, because I was in middle school the last time I read them.
But I don’t remember the characters being much like you’re describing. I remember Luna as being someone who was probably fairly moonbattish rather than a right wing Twitter enthusiast, although I suppose she’d be sharing schizo conspiracy theories(not racist ones in particular) there. Not crime stats. Malfoy came off as a true believer who got in over his head- and there were lots of those in the books. Mcgonnagal came off as a very serious career teacher. Etc, etc.
That's because I was trying to describe how the other characters have been reimagined in some vignettes as the chuds have played with the supporting cast. I'm sorry if I was unclear.
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While there's no doubt that ai slop has been shoveled onto this trend, from my twitter the most prominent and load bearing works in this trend have been created by human artists.
Not sure what fraction of this trend I'm being fed by The Algorithm, but in what I've seen at least half of the images are AI-generated, 100% of the videos are AI-generated ... and very little of the writing is AI-generated. This could be pure selection effects. Nobody can stage a filmed video or draw an animated video fast enough to compete with generative models, so the models are all we get, but the best artists can still keep up with AI-created still images, and the best writers are still significantly better than AI writing so the latter doesn't go viral.
There was one exception I saw. Nearly 2000 likes so far for the first part, IMO deserved (for that part), but the process was basically "human outline, human+AI prompting, AI first draft, human editing".
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Yes, that is true. My point is that the ability to ideate on the setting is being accelerated by AI. Both that it lets people make new media but also that it's probably more impactful to certain viewers when you can also present images, videos, and comic versions of the writing at nearly the same pace. I remember reading warnings against asking ChatGPT to generate an image of potential kids from one's photos because you while you know how reproduction works from biology class, you still might not be ready for what you see when you see it presented in an image with your face.
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