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Agreed. The fun from Malfoid IMHO came from seeing repressed creativity burst forth, and highlighting a male romantic angle that has been underappreciated in recent years. Government agencies trying to ride everyman trends is just cringe.
I mean, fundamentally it's just Dramione for men, isn't it?
It reminds me a bit of a comment (a tweet, I think? or maybe Tumblr?) I saw once describing a gender-flipped Twilight, where an everyman, maybe slightly schlubby, self-insert protagonist meets a hot goth vampire chick who is inexplicably into him and fights a similarly hot wild werewolf chick for his affections, and male replies going, "Oh my gosh. I get it now."
Malfoid feels like that but for Dramione or Zutara or any of the other famous 'bad boy' ships with screaming female fandoms.
I don't think the "inexplicably into him" angle is inherently important for Malfoid. It might be more common in magic-dick VNs, but one of the oldest male romance plots is:
And this is basically Malfoid's character arc. It's no coincidence that most interpretations make Harry much cooler than he is in the original. He can be harangued by the pureblood princess, but he cannot be cowed by her.
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I don't know much about "Dramione," but I do think that Malfoid is a compelling male fantasy -- the idea that a hot chick from the other tribe/side/etc. is into you. As I recall, this was part of the fantasy regularly portrayed in James Bond movies.
(Of course it doesn't hurt that Malfoid is coded conservative. I think a lot of men are tired of the very common trend of women being into progressivism.)
FWIW I would see such a plot as a bit too on-the-nose. Which is probably part of the reason I find Twilight to be a bit cringe, and the same thing about many James Bond movies.)
Anyway, at the end of the day I think you've touched on the main reason why Malfoid is controversial: It tweaks the Harry Potter story in such a way as to cater to male desires in a compelling way. For a lot of men, that's great. For feminists, that's a big problem -- things are supposed to cater to women, not men.
Well it’s supposed to be on the nose and self-indulgent, it’s a sexual fantasy.
I think the issue is that male sexual fantasies and power fantasies usually get bundled together.
There's no male power fantasy in the flipped version of Twilight so it comes across as self indulgent even for fantasy. Unless you count Bella smelling so goshdarned good vampires want to eat her (I don't) or her inability to be impacted by magic (I guess)
The male version would be closer to Wanted with some tweaks. You get good at something - perhaps due to an unearned genetic legacy) and after a lot of blood and pain, you get to kiss Angelina Jolie. Because those are the sorts of men who do that.
(Wanted itself is partly a subversion - Angelina Jolie isn't suddenly into some.random schlub - but the skeleton is there)
I’d say that what saves the Twilight-style of fantasy (“powerful people are fighting over little ol’ me, my goodness”) from being purely fluffy and self-indulgent is that an internal psychological conflict replaces the external conflict for mastery and power. That internal psychological conflict could be anything ranging from a simple fear of literal physical danger, to more abstract concerns about how one relates to one’s own agency, one’s own sense of dignity, etc. There’s usually a “hitch” somewhere, some sort of internal tension between acceptance and reticence. So the two types of fantasies are actually more structurally analogous than they appear. It’s just that in the Twilight-style fantasy, the struggle is harder to see (for an external observer) because a lot of it happens in the MC’s internal monologue.
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Self-indulgent, yes. On the nose? I would say that's a matter of taste.
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Dramione is different though, in terms of the intensity of what's going on. I refer back to my post about Manacled (now Alchemized, earned over a million sales in one year as its own original story): https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
Description of the original fanfic:
Draco is the High Reeve, Voldemort's right hand man who killed Dumbledore 1v1 with some Peruvian Darkness Powder and a killing curse in an ambush.
You can't read Manacled anymore and in truth I didn't finish it. But what was going on there was immeasurably less wholesome than Malfoid. Malfoid is mostly about romance, cuteness, tsundere love, reimagining scenes from the books, adding some new lore where the power of love actually contributes to Voldemort losing at the end.
Manacled starts off with Hermione being tortured by Umbridge, getting blinded, spending months and months in solitary confinement before getting some rapey Handmaid Tale plagiarism and then being actually raped, all the while trying to kill herself and failing. Then I gave up because I liked gigachad Draco a lot more than mopey depressed Hermione and the morbid fascination wasn't enough to go through all this suffering and the world's most pathetic protagonist.
I guess Manacled is at the extreme end of Dramione (but it was also super duper popular, vastly more popular than Malfoid). Fans translated it into 20 languages, including Welsh. A million sales for this 1000 page tome (now with the HP characters and Handmaid Tale plagiarism expunged), a genuine NYT bestseller.
So to an extent Malfoid is Dramione for men. But there's a really significant gap because there is no extreme end of Malfoid, I've not seen Malfoid gruesomely tortured, raped, blinded, imprisoned, trying to kill herself.
I don't think that story is representative of all of Dramione, which is an incredibly prolific genre all by itself.
In the abstract I don't think Dramione and Malfoid would be mirror images of each other - if nothing else, heterosexual male sexuality and heterosexual female sexuality are different, and I find it plausible that female sexuality is, in some contexts, 'rougher' or 'nastier' than male equivalents. Teratophilia, as far as I can tell, is predominantly female, for instance, whereas you don't have to poke male sexual fantasies too hard to find that, beneath the surface level of porn, big-breasted bimbos, etc., there are some softer yearnings there.
And of course, on top of that, fan artists on Twitter, Pixiv, etc., in 2026 are just a different demographic to the teenage girls on the internet in the 2000s who made Dramione such a big thing that it propelled fan fiction authors into real publishing careers.
I don't think it's this clear-cut. I think the ratios are simply different. There are women that complain about being choked and spanked. There are women that complain their hookup stopped when they asked him to. There are men who get their kicks when they can order their girl to do something she hates. There are men who cannot imagine threatening a woman even in jest.
But the supply of men who can dish out the right amount of dominance without scratching the proverbial mirror is severely constrained. Even if the surveys are wrong and there are as many dom men as sub women, in practice there are fewer: some end up with criminal records, some have massive superegos that don't let them express themselves.
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I'd caution that the male-audience equivalent of emotional-guro exists and reached similar levels of dedication at times, even if it never had quite the same following when it comes to scale.
That seems a lot tamer to me? It seems to be mostly about adventure and typical light and happy pony stuff albeit in Fallout, so with gnarlier things mixed in too.
I only read the plot summary and skimmed a few chapters though... I guess Fallout is a pretty nasty universe. But you can have a story with cannibalism and rape and heavy things in it and still have it be relatively light, depending on how the tone is established.
It gets pretty dark, even compared to New Vegas as inspiration. Littlepip isn't depressed and mopey, but gruesome torture, mass murder, loss of limbs, both individual and systematized rape, suicide in both the 'to avoid something worse' and 'deep depression' senses, race war, children being forced to fight each other to death, pacifism being tested and broken, so on. It's a surreal tone because it's intentionally contrasting the initially-bright setting and a messianic protagonist with what that actually means and does under stress, but it's definitely still a dark and increasingly dark one.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=rculB4m7_tw
Btw the book is real, Stephanie Meyer had fun with her story and gender swapped everyone. The ending is a bit different to contain the story in one book.
https://www.amazon.de/Life-Death-Reimagined-Stephenie-Meyer/dp/0316505455
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I don't agree, because Malfoid requires two character journeys before they can become a couple: Harry has to complete his hero's journey and become someone competent (and not just doing it for female attention) and Malfoid has to have her prejudices break down because they are increasingly incompatible with her growing respect and affection towards Harry as he grows.
Whereas in the case of Dramione or Zutara, Hermione and Katara are already great, and it's only the bad boy who needs to reform? That's a fair comment. That's also one of the issues I have with something like Twilight - minimal character growth is required.
In general what I want from a romance story is for both characters to have an arc, where they grow and change in order to fit together better. In that light I think I'll agree that Malfoid has more potential than these comparisons.
I suppose that's also part of its appeal. It sketches out an alternative character arc for Harry, and since the default, canon arc for Harry is disappointing in several ways (in particular, yes, he never seems to take the initiative or truly grow up), there's a real need for an alternative.
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