La! I love these boys and all their many many issues. It's cool too when you think of all the DEs who *don't* say oh shit. I mean, Lucius has probably said it many times on one level, but not in a moral sense. Barty Crouch is just begging for more.

I recall with a shudder those stories in which Draco is just pretending to be friends with Crabbe and Goyle, or was forced by his father into all his behaviour. Removing vital details about a character from the equation... I've never understood why the authors don't write about someone else, since they wish to create a different character from the ground up.

I wonder if people don't sometimes want to build the character from the outside in. Like, they see some things that are superficially cool and just want to go with that instead--then it's more about explaining away the other stuff, not making it power the whole character.