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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:
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.
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?
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