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Notes -
The US Department of Education just posted Malfoid slop:
"There's Magic in Learning"
https://x.com/usedgov/status/2115069815505203483
Or rather, there is Magic in Yearning, Make Romance Great Again, am I right? …
Two weeks ago @KingOfTheBailey had an excellent post about the trend:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3960/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/486219
I want to note three things two weeks later:
Original:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L5g-17uLO90
AI Anime versions:
Kind of sloppy but neat:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=g6jjXAASi_Q
Better animated, but very Korean:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4mkZ8jEYySo
For example this illustration of Dracina casting a peacock as patronum is striking:
https://x.com/CaboVT/status/2106491934818853274
And was then canonized in this AI Battle of Hogwarts scene:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y6tAajsc9PY
And then discussed how a (male) peacock can sort of make sense as a representation of Harry for Dracina.
Then there was first an illustration of Harry/Dracina fighting Voldemort together with the same wand:
https://x.com/Aurondarklord/status/2106975585507418609
Which sparked this AI scene:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VgfNf79t3oo
I don't care how cheesy or juvenile or klischee it is; narratively it just makes sense: Draco is the rightful owner of the Elder Wand, we have the redemption arc of Slytherin and Voldemort is defeated (again) by the power of love. Could this not be done with a male Draco? Why not a good old fashioned friendship? One argument I read was that women often see rivalry as sexual dominance (e.g. the gay romance in Heated Rivalry) and so Rowling couldn't work out an honorable defeat/submission of Draco to Harry. So a Harrys + Dracos male friendship would actually need a more extensive rewrite than a female tsundere Dracina being in love.
Anyway, now that the US government involved (Hello fellow kids!), doesn't that mean the ship is sailed and the trend run its course into being old and uncool?
Not necessary, I want to officially register my prediction that with the start of the HBO series (December 25, 2026 (Christmas Day)) AI is good enough (or will be good enough in coming years) to replace Draco scenes with reimagined Dracina scenes. There will be alternative Malfoid-episodes which can be torrented.
Okay, I find this genuinely dispiriting.
Part of what was appealing about the whole Malfoid trend was the explosion of creativity in fan art (i.e. real fan art, drawn by actual humans), and fan fiction. There's a whole online fan artist space that likes to jump on trends, they jumped on this one, and they produced a lot of really sweet material. Moreover, though arguably some of it was politically inflected, for the most part it was apolitical. Cute girl, everyman hero, they get together. It was fun. I'm in favour of romance stories for boys.
It's frustrating for a bunch of highly politicised jackals to jump on that and try to appropriate it, especially when they're doing so with low-effort AI garbage.
Even just in-character, presumably part of the appeal of the Malfoy character and family is that they're meant to be aristocratic and traditional - hearkening back to an older, better way of doing things. They're also meant to be elitist; they have high standards, and so part of the story is the everyman studying and measuring up. Every part of this premise seems like it should cut again populist botslop.
I realise I have no power to accomplish this, but what's in my heart is an offended, "Get this rubbish off the internet. Now."
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.
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.
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