What about the ship of Draco/Hermione, how do you feel about their popularity in fanon? Would they make sense to you?
i was wondering if someone would ask me about them. to put it simply, i hate that ship. have always hated it, will always hate it. never understood the appeal.
draco malfoy is a character who had a palpably tragic life in many ways; spoiled and raised in an influential house of xenophobia and racism, there was basically no route for him in life other than the one he took. he was proud to join the death eaters—and once he was there, he began to realize he didn’t have the stomach for killing at all.
following that was his questioning of his beliefs of blood purity/racism, which was very important. he was in over his head and his defection was something the book needed, both in heart and in plot. draco is, absolutely, an important character, and i empathized with him later on in the last books.
but to ship him with hermione during their days of school is to completely rewrite his entire character. everything i’ve ever seen of dr*mione has been essentially a complete fanon fabrication of him—and hermione too. she couldn’t stand for injustice, racial bias, and was often very hurt by the prejudice she faced as a muggle born. she hated draco.
is it really shipping the two characters if you rewrite their deeply opposing, deeply definitive morals to make them compatible?
i’ve never totally understood that about fandom. i can see how different characters and ships help us realize things about ourselves and how/why we project onto characters is deeply personal, but again, if you have to change the entire crux of their character, are they really the same?
rewriting a character’s history and personality to fit a fanon narrative is an important experience, especially for young girls looking to express their creativity and see themselves reflected in literature.
i applaud people doing that—but again, that would be a fictionalized version of a character’s canon behavior. it’s your character now, not the original. doing that to say, draco, isn’t really shipping the book version of dr*mione imho.
this is the character who refused to touch hermione when she had to hand him something in class because he was so damn racist. if you’re approaching it from when they’re older and draco has been working on unwinding his deep-seated racism, that’s fine and i don’t really have an opinion on that. but young draco was incredibly cruel to hermione and often deliberately destructive.
i kind of made a veiled comment about them in my last hp post, when i touched upon the nature of “opposites attract” and the tendency for it to be used as a justification for a ship that otherwise has no real plausibility. that trope only works when their personalities are a balance to one another’s. hermione’s idealism for equality doesn’t balance out draco’s modus operandi of blood purity because that requires hermione to “change him.”
overall—jk rowling openly borrowed from a lot of nazi history to make her points about the death eaters. it wasn’t even specifically about systemic racism, it was literally about eugenics. as a jewish child, i was terrified of draco and his family, who were clearly modeled after an affluent, german nazi family.
i related to hermione so much and always saw her as a jewish stand in for myself, both in her physical description and the prejudice she faced. i saw in draco the type of people who allowed genocide to happen.
did draco move away from it? yes, and as i said above, i really really appreciated that in the books. but was he a good romantic partner for hermione of all people? no way.
