Draco the Chessman

I don't really do predictions, but I've been thinking over what we've got to work with coming into HBP. That is, I think JKR as a writer plays fair, walking that line between giving you enough to figure things out and yet not giving you enough to insure you do, if that makes sense. Hurtling into the last two books, I get the feeling we've been given a lot to work with if we knew how to interpret it--which magical things might come into play, for instance, and more importantly, I think we've gotten to know the people on the chessboard.

See, I tend to think of most of the supporting characters (really, everybody but Harry) as chess pieces who are carved in interesting ways, but are important to look at in terms of their position on the board and what their move is. I don't actually play chess, so I may not be able to talk about this intelligently, but what I mean is that just as different chess pieces move a certain way and can move no other, so do I think we've been shown how the characters in HP move and so can be expected to move in future. The surprises we get about characters do not come in the form of new moves, but in us seeing what they were doing all along. For instance, throughout PoA Peter Pettigrew is described as a sweet but incompetent guy who worshiped MPP. But in the Shrieking Shack, iirc, Lupin and Sirius are able to rip him apart for "always" being the same, sucking up to somebody powerful and hiding behind him. It's not that Peter changed--in the Pensieve he's doing just that. It's that his friends weren't correctly understanding what he was doing when they knew him.

This, btw, is why I don't understand fears that Neville is this generation's Peter. Neville's move has been pretty clear from book 1: he has courage. He is generally timid concerning himself and puts up with a lot of personal abuse, but is prone to wild, reckless acts of bravery to protect his friends, family and house. GoF shows us that Neville's position on the board is more interesting than we thought, but his behavior is fairly constant. I feel like further revelations about characters are probably similarly foreshadowed in earlier books, although with some we may not be able to see the consistency until we get more information. When we do get that information, I think it will incorporate any odd moments the characters had that didn't fit with what we previously thought. (I suspect if we were reading MWPP's era Peter would be generally accepted as that bumbling nerd who worshipped the others, with people skimming over little things that didn't fit.)

Anyway, naturally I wonder how Draco will be used in future, having never understood the idea that Draco is the one character with no place on the board who will spend the endgame lying on the rug under the coffee table, having been knocked off by a careless elbow because he wasn’t interesting, ( so here I am thinking about it-last Draco babble before HBP I guess! )