One for Sorrow

I wonder if it's just a damn shame that OotP shows, once again, how hard it is to predict Draco's reaction to anything because his reactions seem to so often depend on the plot. I mean, after 5 years of "My father" this and that you would think we would know how devestating this would be and how. N_A was a great example of that--when Lucius was killed you didn't know exactly what potterstinks would do, but you were waiting with baited breath because how he felt about his father before was so clear. But in canon Draco's reactions to everything seem so often brushed aside or made into nothing, almost as if the author doesn't want to give him real feelings sometimes. So, like, in CoS Lucius is kicked off the school board or whatever and we just hear Malfoy wasn't quite walking around like he owned the school so much. It's just given to us as another reward for Harry. We don't get any real sense of how this affected him, how he understood the situation.

So I feel like there's always this possibility that the books will hit the reset button with Draco yet again and what seemed like such real emotion in the stairway scene will be replaced by cartoon mustache-twirling or just not given any respect. So maybe the difficulty in writing slash that uses this is that it shows how little Malfoy's been fleshed out, even when it comes to the most important relationship we know that he has. Fanon!Draco, after all, completely skips this issue by, as was said above, making Draco hate Harry less, not more, and having him not love Lucius. Where Snape was allowed to become more interesting by showing us more flaws and vulnerabilities so far JKR seems determined to keep Malfoy made of cardboard.