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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:
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.
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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