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I originally f'locked this out of habit, but figured I might as well leave it open. We'll see how that goes...
I have read stuff since DH about how people liked the Malfoys in it because they were on their own side and not either side. It made me think about why I found this story disappointing.
It wasn't that I was disappointed that they weren't on the good side, I don't think. It was just that the story as told was imo too weak. It seemed like they skipped around from one emotional state to another as needed by the plot, for one thing. Their first scene is imo fantastic, but I think the set up of Lucius looking so wrecked and his family so terrorized kind of calls for them to either go down with Voldemort or do something decisive (and probably risky) to try to get out from under his thumb--not having them do six of one and half dozen of the other and muddling through. They start off in truly dire straights and I kept thinking they would just continue down that road, only to be faced with them looking a lot better later on. This is not the way JKR usually writes her characters throughout a book.
It's the muddling through that I realized was a problem for me. After the book I thought the Malfoys were characters who had the survival ability of cockroaches with absolutely zero survival instinct.
It's possible--very possible given Peter and other things--that JKR doesn't respect these kinds of survivors--rats and cockroaches, iow. I don't think it would be out of line to say that she seems to write Peter and the Malfoys as low-lifes, and she might associate them with the kind of animals that scavenge in garbage etc. and which are therefore less than noble (in the opinion of some--not me). I never get the feeling that she cheers on these kinds of people, so especially with the Malfoys she never makes them active. On the contrary, her version of a survivor (and here I'm not including survivors who are warriors who've lived through battles like Harry or Moody) is basically a coward, someone who's never confident enough to leave or defy anyone (unfortunately for plot purposes, they will sometimes actively make their own situation *worse*--just never better).
We first hear about Lucius in either book 1 or 2, and I think what we hear was probably the basis for the years of Cool!Lucius fics. Because we heard this is a guy who was one of LV's intimate circle, yet managed to get himself out of Azkaban by claming Imperius immediately after he disappeared. No wonder we thought he was possibly a badder dude than Voldemort--he was the kingmaker, the guy behind the throne who didn't go down with the ship, not bound by ideology. For some of us--me included--that's a cool thing to watch. The one time Draco really made me smile in DH was when he was fighting with the DE saying, "I'm Draco Malfoy! I'm on your side!" I cheered him on doing that--go get 'em, Draco! Naturally he gets punched for it. But that was the moment where I fleetingly thought I'd like to read about this character in a different universe.
I was watching a number of Film Noirs this weekend and in one Dana Andrews plays a detective who accidentally kills a guy he's interrogating. Even though it was a freak accident he knows he won't get away with it, so he tries to cover it up. He comes back to the apartment to find his partner searching the place, saying the guy must have gone out while Dana Andrews was "checking bars in the neighborhood." Now, another director might have let us know beforehand that the body was hidden in the closet all this time for suspense: Will the partner check the closet? Otto Preminger has Andrews check the closet himself so that we can see the body slumped inside. In the commentary, it's pointed out that this moment really puts us on Andrews' side *because he's so competent at covering himself*--he's taking this big risk, opening the closet while his partner is right there, and then he just says, "Nothing in there," shuts the door and gets away with it. It's great. It's different than making us identify with him because we fear he'll be discovered. We've crossed into admiring his skills in protecting himself and getting away with something.
With the Malfoys, we really never see that--and no, I don't consider Narcissa's one desperate lie about Harry being dead enough, though that's as close as we get. The Malfoys start the book on the chopping block--these slippery folks ought to be looking for an escape getting more and more desperate, imo. Instead, if we didn't know already, we see here more than ever that Slippery!Lucius never really existed. They can't act against Voldemort even to save themselves. They're not schemers or thinkers beyond "What will keep Voldemort happy in the short term?"
I do think that's Rowling's point, probably--many of Voldemort's followers are essentially people in an abusive relationship who can't leave--though she's not really getting into that psychology either. When the Trio shows up at the Manor Lucius and Narcissa are eager to turn them over to "please" Voldemort. But for me it's still a letdown that their imprisonment just kind of ends. Narcissa lies to Voldemort yeah, but frankly, imo, who cares? This is a story about kids so what the hell is up with somebody's mother making things better? It's fine for Harry's mum to save him when he's a baby but Draco spends a whole book in HBP sticking out a bad situation only to become more of a baby than ever in DH, and Narcissa's calculated moment of defiance isn't about survival so much as the short-sighted act of a desperate mother. (Short-sighted only because she just wants to get in to get to Draco; it's not a gambit for some wider agenda.) That seems to be all she stands for: Mother-love. There's nothing particularly Malfoy about it, imo.
It's hard, because obviously the writer can do whatever she wants, and presumably she *wanted* to have the Malfoys reduced to this, wanted them to survive without picking a side except each other, thought this was somehow enough of a "collusion" with Harry to let them wander off as confused about their position as anyone else. I know the obvious answer to anybody who thinks they should have been acting more in their own defense is that they were confused by fanfic and wanted them to be cooler than they ever really were. (And I'm sure there are many who will claim it was absolutely brilliant of JKR to do it this way and anything else would be painfully "unrealistic.")
But I assume these people (like all JKR's characters) are doing what they do, are being who they are. They started the series having slithered out of destruction, they end it the same way. Ever "slippery," they switched sides at the last moment. Only given the way it happens, it leaves me thinking: How do these people continue to survive? It's apparently not because they have any particular skill or cleverness for survival (on the contrary, they're kinda bad at this stuff), it's more just that they seem to have some sort of magical protection from the god of their universe--even if that god is never going to let them learn from their near-misses ever.
Somehow I keep thinking of that scene b/w Dumbledore and Snape about Draco's killing him, and Snape says "Why don't you just let him do it, then?" and Dumbledore twinkles and says something like, "Oh, I don't think his soul is quite so damaged yet" or something like that. I wind up thinking that's the answer to their whole storyline, that the author!god just twinkled and said, "Oh, I don't think their soul is so damaged--it amuses me to let them live." It's like we wind up with a story that to me seems like it could have been an actually compelling subplot and instead it's purposefully not.
I have read stuff since DH about how people liked the Malfoys in it because they were on their own side and not either side. It made me think about why I found this story disappointing.
It wasn't that I was disappointed that they weren't on the good side, I don't think. It was just that the story as told was imo too weak. It seemed like they skipped around from one emotional state to another as needed by the plot, for one thing. Their first scene is imo fantastic, but I think the set up of Lucius looking so wrecked and his family so terrorized kind of calls for them to either go down with Voldemort or do something decisive (and probably risky) to try to get out from under his thumb--not having them do six of one and half dozen of the other and muddling through. They start off in truly dire straights and I kept thinking they would just continue down that road, only to be faced with them looking a lot better later on. This is not the way JKR usually writes her characters throughout a book.
It's the muddling through that I realized was a problem for me. After the book I thought the Malfoys were characters who had the survival ability of cockroaches with absolutely zero survival instinct.
It's possible--very possible given Peter and other things--that JKR doesn't respect these kinds of survivors--rats and cockroaches, iow. I don't think it would be out of line to say that she seems to write Peter and the Malfoys as low-lifes, and she might associate them with the kind of animals that scavenge in garbage etc. and which are therefore less than noble (in the opinion of some--not me). I never get the feeling that she cheers on these kinds of people, so especially with the Malfoys she never makes them active. On the contrary, her version of a survivor (and here I'm not including survivors who are warriors who've lived through battles like Harry or Moody) is basically a coward, someone who's never confident enough to leave or defy anyone (unfortunately for plot purposes, they will sometimes actively make their own situation *worse*--just never better).
We first hear about Lucius in either book 1 or 2, and I think what we hear was probably the basis for the years of Cool!Lucius fics. Because we heard this is a guy who was one of LV's intimate circle, yet managed to get himself out of Azkaban by claming Imperius immediately after he disappeared. No wonder we thought he was possibly a badder dude than Voldemort--he was the kingmaker, the guy behind the throne who didn't go down with the ship, not bound by ideology. For some of us--me included--that's a cool thing to watch. The one time Draco really made me smile in DH was when he was fighting with the DE saying, "I'm Draco Malfoy! I'm on your side!" I cheered him on doing that--go get 'em, Draco! Naturally he gets punched for it. But that was the moment where I fleetingly thought I'd like to read about this character in a different universe.
I was watching a number of Film Noirs this weekend and in one Dana Andrews plays a detective who accidentally kills a guy he's interrogating. Even though it was a freak accident he knows he won't get away with it, so he tries to cover it up. He comes back to the apartment to find his partner searching the place, saying the guy must have gone out while Dana Andrews was "checking bars in the neighborhood." Now, another director might have let us know beforehand that the body was hidden in the closet all this time for suspense: Will the partner check the closet? Otto Preminger has Andrews check the closet himself so that we can see the body slumped inside. In the commentary, it's pointed out that this moment really puts us on Andrews' side *because he's so competent at covering himself*--he's taking this big risk, opening the closet while his partner is right there, and then he just says, "Nothing in there," shuts the door and gets away with it. It's great. It's different than making us identify with him because we fear he'll be discovered. We've crossed into admiring his skills in protecting himself and getting away with something.
With the Malfoys, we really never see that--and no, I don't consider Narcissa's one desperate lie about Harry being dead enough, though that's as close as we get. The Malfoys start the book on the chopping block--these slippery folks ought to be looking for an escape getting more and more desperate, imo. Instead, if we didn't know already, we see here more than ever that Slippery!Lucius never really existed. They can't act against Voldemort even to save themselves. They're not schemers or thinkers beyond "What will keep Voldemort happy in the short term?"
I do think that's Rowling's point, probably--many of Voldemort's followers are essentially people in an abusive relationship who can't leave--though she's not really getting into that psychology either. When the Trio shows up at the Manor Lucius and Narcissa are eager to turn them over to "please" Voldemort. But for me it's still a letdown that their imprisonment just kind of ends. Narcissa lies to Voldemort yeah, but frankly, imo, who cares? This is a story about kids so what the hell is up with somebody's mother making things better? It's fine for Harry's mum to save him when he's a baby but Draco spends a whole book in HBP sticking out a bad situation only to become more of a baby than ever in DH, and Narcissa's calculated moment of defiance isn't about survival so much as the short-sighted act of a desperate mother. (Short-sighted only because she just wants to get in to get to Draco; it's not a gambit for some wider agenda.) That seems to be all she stands for: Mother-love. There's nothing particularly Malfoy about it, imo.
It's hard, because obviously the writer can do whatever she wants, and presumably she *wanted* to have the Malfoys reduced to this, wanted them to survive without picking a side except each other, thought this was somehow enough of a "collusion" with Harry to let them wander off as confused about their position as anyone else. I know the obvious answer to anybody who thinks they should have been acting more in their own defense is that they were confused by fanfic and wanted them to be cooler than they ever really were. (And I'm sure there are many who will claim it was absolutely brilliant of JKR to do it this way and anything else would be painfully "unrealistic.")
But I assume these people (like all JKR's characters) are doing what they do, are being who they are. They started the series having slithered out of destruction, they end it the same way. Ever "slippery," they switched sides at the last moment. Only given the way it happens, it leaves me thinking: How do these people continue to survive? It's apparently not because they have any particular skill or cleverness for survival (on the contrary, they're kinda bad at this stuff), it's more just that they seem to have some sort of magical protection from the god of their universe--even if that god is never going to let them learn from their near-misses ever.
Somehow I keep thinking of that scene b/w Dumbledore and Snape about Draco's killing him, and Snape says "Why don't you just let him do it, then?" and Dumbledore twinkles and says something like, "Oh, I don't think his soul is quite so damaged yet" or something like that. I wind up thinking that's the answer to their whole storyline, that the author!god just twinkled and said, "Oh, I don't think their soul is so damaged--it amuses me to let them live." It's like we wind up with a story that to me seems like it could have been an actually compelling subplot and instead it's purposefully not.
