Rick Fox retweeted
In free nations, we investigate crimes to see who is guilty of them.
In communist tyrannies, they investigate men to see what they can be punished for.
Rick Fox retweeted
Part 3. My brainstorming sessions on how to drop in a female replacement for Draco Malfoy seem to turning into a sort of character workshop.
But I'm having fun.
We've talked about "Malfoid"'s basic character, why she falls for Harry Potter, and reimagined her father and his relationship with her.
But we haven't touched on an important part of making this whole story work: why does Harry fall for her?
It's not enough to appeal to Japanese "tsun-dere" tropes. That's just the name of a story convention. It might say something about why people like the story, but it doesn't make the story make sense, according to its own internal logic.
For that, we need to do some actual thinking.
Well, where does he come from? He's the unwanted foster child of a family that sees him as an unchosen responsibility and nothing more.
So, for the first few years of his life, he is resented, ignored, and utterly unloved by anyone.
So what does this do to a boy?
Rowling has a little bit of trouble with this one, because she has some pretty advanced women-writing-men problems. Understandable, given her history.
But an ordinary little boy, who is written as an actual boy, gets angry. Resentful. That's what Rowling couldn't write, because to her, a good man is a non-threatening man.
Now, this would impact Harry's character and story in a lot of ways, but since we are looking specifically at why he falls in love with the Malfoid, we must look first at their initial encounter on the train.
What she says to him isn't an attack. From her worldview (discussed in the quoted article), she's trying to help him. He's an important person, but he's not familiar with her world, so he has fallen in with the wrong sort.
Come sit with us, instead.
Come sit with the cool kids and the pretty girl.
Now, on one level, this is exactly what an unloved boy raised in a closet wants. Acceptance. To be treated as important.
But on another level, this is his first Hero's Trial. The boy who was treated like dirt can have status and be somebody. All he has to do is inflict the same rejection and contempt he experienced on his new friends.
Of course, he passes this trial.
And Draecena, or Lyra, or whatever name we wanna call her, doesn't take it well. She's vain, and not used to hearing the word "no".
In reality, it's her fault. She could have sat down beside him. Or simply said, "come with me for a while, I'll introduce you around".
But she doesn't see it that way, and so she does say something nasty. At this point, they become rivals. They have hurt each other's pride.
For her, it is the pride of a haughty heiress, who not only things she is better than everyone else, but that she must be, because that's her responsibility in life.
For him, it is the pride of a boy with nothing, loved by no one, who will therefore not tolerate the slightest insult.
But the import thing to realize is that he doesn't hate her and want nothing to do with her. Oh, no. Not a bit of it.
She's the popular girl. The wealthy girl. The pretty girl. And everything about her, everything she has, everything that has been given to her in life, tells him that she is loved in ways that Harry was not.
All the time she is envying him because he doesn't have to fit in, he envies her because she has somewhere she belongs.
He doesn't want nothing to do with her. He wants what she has.
He desires her, abstractly at first, then more concretely when puberty hits, but boys without mothers who love them will not chase girls. Their wounded pride simply will not sustain it. They want girls to chase them.
He doesn't want to hurt her. He wants to humble her. To make her accept him on his terms, not hers. He doesn't want to orbit her universe and petition for acceptance. He wants her to come to him, to admit with her words and actions that he is not, in any way, beneath her.
What do we covet? That which we see every day and cannot have.
He wants her to yearn for him, the way he does for her.
And as circumstances, and her hidden desires, repeatedly throw them together, small hints come to light that her feelings for him might not be just contempt.
Harry misses all of them.
Why? Not because he's stupid. Not just so the plot can happen. Not because they're too subtle to see. For the reader, they're pretty obvious.
No, he misses them because of who he is and where he comes from.
He grew up without love. And some part of him will always fear that he is unlovable. Of course Draecina Malfoy hates him. The Dursleys hated him, didn't they?
And she keeps saying she doesn't like him at all.
It never occurs to him that she says it with increasingly shrill desperation. It never occurs to him that she says she wants to avoid him, but she always seems to be around.
And he has absolutely no idea why his scarves keep disappearing.
He won't take the hint. He won't pick up the dropped handkerchief. He won't chase her the way pretty girls expect to be chased. Because a boy who has never experienced a mother's love can never bear to risk rejection.
He nicknames her "Malfoid", and it sticks. And she would rather die than give the slightest hint of how hard she cries into her pillow that night.
The next day, she hides a Strong Toad in his locker.
All he would have to do is face down her pretended scorn. Offer her one kind word. One gesture. And she would melt into his arms.
But he can't.
He may be the big hero in public, but in his heart he's just as broken as she is.
To have the love of the girl he desires, he must grow up and become a man. He must stop looking to the world, or to her, to heal the injuries that are uniquely his.
He cannot, must not, must not try to break Draecina's spirit so she will love him unconditionally. Unconditional love is for children alone, and it is not her fault that he will never experience it.
It is not her job to make it up to him.
It is Tom Riddle, not Draecina Malfoy, who deprived him of a mother's love.
And as long as he doesn't see that, he will keep fighting her. But she isn't a vicious dog, biting at him for no reason. She's a scared kitten, hissing and clawing because she is afraid... her heart is bound to a man who offers her no patience and no mercy.
He will have to rise beyond his own pain, accept that it will never heal, accept that he still has responsibilities beyond it.
Accept that is it only her job to love and support him, not to give him back what cannot be given, because time only flows one way.
Just as she will have to take a leap of faith to be worthy of him, to offer her heart without certainty or deniability, he will have to catch her before she falls. To bear her claws until her fear subsides and she can love him without lashing out in a desperate need to protect her heart from the man who holds it.
She's not a monster. She's just a girl.
Replacing Draco Malfoy with the "Malfoid", Draecina sends ripples through the whole edifice that Rowling built.
It's how stories grow.
Build one corner, and that corner makes you ask the questions that help you build another.
If you replace a cardstock bully with a prideful and complex debutante, who yearns for forbidden things, and must eventually choose between her family, her heritage, her entire world, and the boy she loves, then this fills out the next part of the story by making us ask "why?"
Why does she fall in love with Harry Potter?
That answer depends on what she wants. And what she wants depends on where she comes from.
And both these questions ultimately wind up at her father. Because a little girl learns about men, and about love, from her father.
Now, it would be easy to declare that Lucius Malfoy is to be a cold, vicious, domineering, hypocritical, selfish, and abusive man.
And therefore loving Harry Potter becomes an act of defiance. Becomes that tired old trope of kissing the motorcycle hoodlum to piss off daddy.
But that's not love. That's daddy issues. And daddy issues will not change a girl. They will not carry her though the fire. They will not make her a hero.
We can do better than that.
Try the opposite. Lucius Malfoy's creed and values, repugnant though they are to our original author, are deeply and sincerely held. He does not believe in elites merely because he wishes to be one of them.
He believes that the gifted, the talented, the blessed, are needed by the world, and their privileges come with a price of responsibility.
So he has raised both his children with love, holding back nothing that it was in his power to give. But he has raised them for a mission in life, and never made his expectations anything less than clear.
Draecina is to spend her childhood and teenage years preparing herself to lead. And she is to marry wisely, to preserve and improve a bloodline that is precious to the world.
Now we know both why she falls in love with Harry Potter, and why she is terrified to admit this, first to herself, then to others.
Harry Potter, you see, has all the traits of an attractive boy, courage, competence, athleticism, popularity, the respect of children and adults alike. He is always the main character, and a heroic one at that.
But he is also a rogue. A scamp. A mischief maker. He does not do as he is told. He acts of his own accord. And in so doing, he always seems to end up saving the day, to wild applause.
How could she not admire him? How could she not yearn to be part of his little band of troublemakers, sneaking about at night and breaking the rules?
And when she is just a bit older, with early puberty bringing on thoughts of boys, how can he not represent the one thing she has been told she must not have, as the price of all her privilege?
Passion.
She doesn't want to sit in a parlour, silent save for a loudly ticking clock, and make awkward conversation with a series of well-bred boys who have been ushered into her presence for the sake of their race-horse bloodlines.
She wants to feel. She wants to run barefoot in the rain. She wants the school's handsome and popular rogue to kiss her and tangle his fingers in her hair.
But she is terrified.
Too terrified to admit her feelings even to herself. And when she cannot avoid that, too terrified to act on them, hiding away from the boy she desperately yearns to follow after, pushing him away with words of scorn so that no one will suspect, then seeking him out only to fight with him, because if they are fighting, then at least he is looking at her, and anything is better than his absence.
Why is she terrified? Of what? Of who?
Of her father.
Not of his scorn. Not of punishment. Not of his hard hands, for he has never struck her and never would. He has never shown her anything but love.
And this is the cruelest trap of all.
She is terrified of disappointing him. Daddy's girl cannot bear the thought of losing his love. He can never know who she has chosen to love, because then his patient, quiet disappointment would force her to choose.
And she cannot.
Every day she is tortured by guilt. She is a Bad Girl. She has been given everything, had every advantage, and still she cannot put her heart into the small measure of responsibility that the world asks in return.
But while she cannot bear to choose Harry Potter over her family, or her family over Harry Potter, her choice is already made, and it is inevitable, because she has chosen him over any suitor that their quiet, thoughtful calculations of bloodline and political advantage could ever bring to her door.
This is why she taunts him for his "low-class" behavior, and seeks to part him from "the wrong kind of friends". Because she harbors the fantasy, impossible though it is, that he, Harry Potter, the boy who holds her heart, can somehow become, be accepted as, one of the elites, as defined in the rules of her world.
It's impossible, of course. He's a half-blood. Sure, he has power and skill in his own right, even fame, but for a child of the Malfoys? Never.
So she yearns for him, succumbing sometimes to temptation and pulling him near, only to drive him away again as she is wracked by guilt and shame.
She cannot choose him, cannot commit to her love for him, until she begins to see that her father, following his beliefs, has made reckless choices with dire consequences.
Until she begins to think the unthinkable... that her father, the lordly, infalible Lucius Malfoy, might be wrong.
Oh, not wrong that some people are better than others. She believes she is one of the elite, deserving of privilege, and she will believe this to her dying day.
No, her father is not wrong about the order of the world. He is merely wrong about how those elites are to be discovered and known.
Harry Potter, in the final dark days before the war, has shown his nobility. He is one of the elite, whether her father can see it or not.
That is the moment she can say, in the privacy of her own head, I love him. I love him, and the question is not, was never, whether he is worthy of me.
But whether I was worthy of him.
She does not know. But she must try. She must run to his side, to stand with him, fight beside him, to add her strength to his in the hour of greatest need.
To declare to the world that she chooses him, to declare it even without knowing, in that moment, if he will choose her in return.
A leap of faith.
Because she has loved him, but up to this moment, she has loved him selfishly, making her feelings of love, of being in love, more important than him.
So now she must declare what she hid, without protecting herself, heedless of risk.
It is not sacrifice itself, but choice to sacrifice, willingness to sacrifice, that calls the power down.
(That's how I'd write it, anyway.)
Rick Fox retweeted
If there’s anything Brazil has taught us over the last four years, it’s that Leftists will rig elections, call themselves defenders of democracy while they’re doing it, hijack the courts after they’ve won, use them to convert the country into a soft dictatorship, and then arrest their political enemies, ban free speech, and attack social media platforms they can’t control in order to guarantee that they never lose power ever again.
And with that power they will construct an inverted hierarchy that places troons, third worldists, criminals, drug addicts, and mentally ill lunatics at the top of the social pyramid, all while acting like they’re fighting for equality and just being a heckin’ decent human being.
1. They get to be nice to Harry, a kid they both like and one that actually needs the map to have a chance to go to Hogsmeade.
2. They get to pick on Ron by not giving it to him (and he wouldn’t use it as well anyway).
3. They know Ron will still get the benefit of it because Harry has it.
Win/win/win
Rick Fox retweeted
So... Snape is official a black incel from a broken lower class family with an abusive deadbeat drunk father who was obsessed over some white girl and got lynched by all his white classmates... reminder that they looked at all that and chose to make him black...
Why do they never think this shit through!?
Jasper Talbot and Hannah Chinn have been cast as James and Lily Potter in HBO’s ‘HARRY POTTER’ series.
(hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-…)
Rick Fox retweeted
You know what threw me off when I watched The Wicker Trailer?
When The Husband and I first became parents, we took a look at Squirmy, wept out of love, and got to work making ourselves better people for this new life.
When Wicker's Lead made life (arguably buying a person for labor and participating in slavery) she pursued it out of her wants, her needs.
She could have sought out companionship with someone from the village, given and received equally.
Beyond the ickiness, there's just a selfish core to it. And there's enough of that on TikTok for free.
Rick Fox retweeted
I love the whole "Malfoid" thing, I really do. And i'm not even the target audience. I've enjoyed writing it, and its totally unleashed my muse.
I've been thinking about why the whole Malfoid fanfiction phenomenon is doing so ridiculously well, and I think I've figured something out.
Men are absolutely STARVING for good romance. Plenty of women, too, I guess.
Not pornography. Not harems. Not some elaborate sexual power fantasy. Romance.
Two people who who are confused by their feelings, who make mistakes, who struggle to understand one another, and who slowly, awkwardly, sometimes painfully fall in love.
You know. That thing human beings have been doing to each other for thousands of years. In story form.
Somewhere along the way, the publishing industry decided that men don't like romance. (xitter.cf/ShamashAran/status/210…) The alternatives everyone's been offered for the past couple of decades have been, to put it delicately, a radioactive dumpster fire.
On one side, you've got male-oriented harem fantasies where every woman within a fifty-mile radius is aching for a sexual encounter, in graphicly written detail.
On the other, you've got the darker corners of romantasy, where the height of romantic fulfillment involves being kidnapped, abused (physically, mentally, or both) or literally raped by a seven-foot-tall monster with the emotional maturity of a malfunctioning garbage disposal.
I'm sitting here thinking: CAN TWO PEOPLE JUST FALL IN LOVE WITHOUT SOMEBODY GETTING RAPED OR DEVELOPING A HAREM?
Apparently that's too much to ask.
This brings me back to Malfoid. Here's a huge set of stories written by many different folks, about two fundamentally decent people, raised in very different worlds, struggling with their feelings, their prejudices, their loyalties, and their expectations. Neither is perfect. Neither always knows what they're doing. Sometimes they're absolute idiots.
They have something, and we get to watch it develop in story form.
The romance isn't about sexual conquest or domination. It's about vulnerability, trust, affection, and the terrifying realization that another human being has become extraordinarily important to you.
And people are eating it up. Which brings me to my theory.
Malfoid has caused a false vacuum decay in the quantum field of romantic literature.
For decades, we've been trapped in a metastable state where the publishing industry insists that men don't want romance, and male readers have been conditioned to believe there isn't any romance worth reading. Now, comes along comes a wholesome little love story about two emotionally constipated school-age British wizards, and suddenly the entire field collapses into a new, lower-energy vacuum state.
The resulting energy release is absolutely catastrophic. Instead of gamma radiation annihilating the universe, we're getting seventeen metric gigatons of YEARNING.
Turns out men didn't hate romance.
They just wanted something worth falling in love with.
Rick Fox retweeted
Can't wait to see the sequel where a man's anime body pillow comes to life and she's prettier and better in bed than every other woman in town.
“Wicker” shows just how suffocating marriage can be—and asks whether the institution is simply incompatible with love, @fhill_official writes: theatlantic.com/culture/2026…
ALT An Anti-Marriage Marriage Movie
Rick Fox retweeted
Snape in almost every scenario in the Malfoid-verse
Three of the most powerful wizards alive, hiding in a hedge, crying over a student romance.
#Malfoid #HarryPotter #Yearning #MalfoidFever
Rick Fox retweeted
You know, call me a Doylist but I think part of the issue here lies with Rowling, and a plot thread she’s working out that doesn’t always have the practical implications that she wants.
Because mostly everyone’s right: Ron has horrifying robes because the family is poor, which is part of his insecurities and indicative of a number of ongoing plots within his family. Goblet of Fire, after all, is also the book where the Twins seriously consider blackmailing a powerful individual for investment capital and Percy makes a fool of himself trying to impress his boss, setting the stage for his fall out with his parents in Book 5. Ron’s dress robes, as minor a problem as they really are in the grand scheme of things, are a reminder of the material lifestyle his brothers are all trying to escape. And because Ron is fourteen, he doesn’t have the perspective to sit down and go “hey at least I’m not an orphan like Harry here.”
But if you stop and think about it for a moment, why did the robes in question have to stay the way they were bought?
Think about it: Molly is a lifelong champion of domesticity and the household arts. She’s very good at at least one physical domestic craft (knitting). What are the odds she doesn’t know any sewing spells, particularly with seven children to clothe on a budget and the attendant necessity to mend any rips and tears in clothes that children acquire?
Molly also knows what’s going on at Hogwarts this year before Harry and his fellow students do, as Arthur and Percy both work at the Ministry and the latter has probably been working on the last-minute details of the tournament for the past few months. She almost certainly knows when Ron needs the robes by, and it’s not immediately after he arrives at Hogwarts.
So wouldn’t the practical thing to do be to say, “Don’t be stupid, Ron, of course I’m not letting you go out like some out-of-sorts time traveler. I’ll modify the neck and cuffs after the lot of you are out of my hair and send them along in a few weeks?” People alter second-hand clothes all the time; it should be the obvious step to take. Even Ron managed to take the lace off, although he didn’t do it well.
But the point was to drive home how poor the Weasleys are and how the children feel encumbered by it, rather than to apply an ounce of common sense to the problem. And I think that one’s on Rowling.
I need assasssin Arthur to turn Ron into a incredibly competent badass between books 4 and 5.
"Some of them begged. Some of them offered me money. None of them knew what I really wanted. And even if they did, they wouldn't have given it to me. That would require them to stop being what they were-Monsters."
"Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to keep monsters at bay is to be a bigger, scarier monster."
Rick Fox retweeted
"You'll take care of Goku, right?"
The thing that appeals to me the most about the Sectum Sempra scene is that it is fully within Harry’s character. Harry is someone who looks before he leaps. He is thoughtless and bold.
Most of the time this is a good thing for him. He rushes in where angels fear to tread. He is heroic even when it will cost him.
But a good hero’s best trait is often his biggest downfall. This would be one of the best possible ways to address that because it is so extreme.
So much of the content surrounding Malfoid has lost sight of Harry’s character. Some of this has been improvement to me in making him a more confident version of himself. A lot of it has made him blander, I think in typical romance fiction’s tendency to make the protagonist easy for the reader/watcher to imagine as themselves.
But Sectum Sempra strips that blander version away completely. It demands Harry be himself and it denies those who want a blank version of him to self insert into.
Sectum Sempra forces Harry to confront himself and do what Malfoid usually should do with him. He needs to ask for forgiveness. Whether or not she believable does so is up to how good the writer is.
You’re on the far right if you don’t want your home, place of business, and/or monuments destroyed.
I wish this were hyperbole.
