Draconia Malfoid And The Fanfic Debate

I really haven’t followed the Draconia Malfoid internet meme. More than simply “Draco but girl”, she seems to be her own original character. Her defenders from both allegations that it’s just a way to for straight guys to get hot for Draco Malfoy…or something and those actually trying to sexualize the gender replacement do their best to keep the character pure, make it more of a love story between her and Harry Potter by recreating the original book into an alternate universe. In that universe Draconia and Harry build a connection that affects the story…somehow. Look, I don’t follow the official Harry Potter material. I certainly don’t know how this story differs beyond Harry’s rival is a tsundere now. So I’m not here to specifically discuss that meme, though the video below will be.

Said video comes from the Real Life Fake Wizard on YouTube. In a recent edition of Friday Night Tights, one of the Nerdrotic podcasts, the topic of Malfoid came up, given how huge the meme is. The only one who understood it and took up its cause was Shad Brooks, who posted the above AI music video to his pop culture discussion side channel Knights Watch. So in this video, Wizard and Brooks go over the Malfoid sensation, how the main practitioners keep the ship of original and famous characters clean, and why the pairing has caught on with a huge part of the Harry Potter fandom.

If that doesn’t interest you, then continue reading after that. The video also makes general fanfic discussion at the back half of the 49+ minute video, and that’s what I really want to focus on.

Nowadays we tend to use “fanfic” to describe officially produced adaptations where everything is changed. That’s an inaccurate use of the term. Here at BW I’ve been using “brandfic”. They like the brand and maybe the base idea, but hate everything else and toss as much of it out as they can get away with. They like using popular names to tell the stories they really want to tell, but there is no “fan” here. That’s why in the past I’ve referred to those who did change ideas to serve their tastes without massively altering the core concepts of multiversal continuity as the “bad fanfic brigade”. Emphasis on “bad” because fanfic isn’t bad by existing. If it was, I’d be in trouble. You’ll find fanfic in the BW prose archive on this very site.

I can’t speak to Harry Potter’s romances in the book or movies. Maybe the TV show will fix those. I will say that outside of the odd “mature” image and screams that this is about wanting to “bang a teenage girl” I saw in the X-Twitter trending list on this topic, most of the images were sweet, silly, or romantic. I’m not sure when the universal agreement was that Harry and Draconia had four kids, two of each, but this has been a uniting factor unusual even by my limited understanding of memes. Seems pretty harmless to me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same people insisting this was about a teen girl were the same ones who thought the surrogate father/daughter bond in Pragmata was also pedophilic.

As for the “slashfic” angle…odds that the actual slashfic community already shipped Harry and male Draco are pretty high. Most slashfic I see are either gay or toxic…or both. Not all of it goes as far as the “Reylo” group that shipped Rey Palpatine and Kylo Ren so hard they wanted Adam Driver to leave his wife and newborn son to hook up with Daisy Ridley as if the two actors had that kind of real life chemistry–and some would say the two characters didn’t, either, but that’s a whole other discussion. I saw a skit once where a girl was trying to do a crossover fanfic with her favorite sci-fi characters and her friend kept pushing to make it a gay orgy slashfic. The point was to say that slashfic wasn’t some crime against the characters and was just for fun, but the framing made it seem like NOT doing a slashfic, which the first girl was trying to do most of the skit, was a bad thing. She didn’t stand up for the story she wanted to tell and gave in to her horny friend. Slashfic on it’s own isn’t horrible. It’s when they try to force it into canon that I want them to go away.

This nontroversy has also led to a general discussion of fanfic, which is what I wanted to write about but the article would have been too short. I’ve heard and read people saying that instead of focusing on this they should focus on making original characters and stories rather than someone else’s IP that you can’t make money on. That was never the case with any fan work prior to this. Some people don’t aspire to be writers or filmmakers or professional comic book artists. They’re just doing it for fun or they had a story they wanted to tell but wasn’t looking to be some big successful author or creator. Some people paint for fun, play music to relax, or play sports with their friends, and have no interest in turning professional. I only want to be a professional storyteller so I can be paid to tell stories. I have a lot of ideas in my head for both original characters and my own new characters. I could do Superman and Captain Yuletide and be happy with both. I don’t think it has to be one or the other.

Additionally, there is fanfic that got turned into original stories. Watchmen started out as Alan Moore wanting to grimdark the Charlton Comics heroes that DC had just purchased, and was force to make original characters when DC realize that would be a bad business decision and ruin new characters before they could be used. As original characters, however, they thrived and are still popular today. You take on a fanbase when you take on existing and popular characters. Another famous example is the 50 Shades franchise. The first novel was Twilight slashfic turned into some BDSM thing or something. It’s a franchise I care less about than Harry Potter. Writing fanfic in general can be good practice to hone your writing skills before making that leap, and what if you end up getting a gig on an existing series?

This is one occasion where this is harmless. Draconia Malfoid seems to be a full replacement for Draco Malfoy, complete with understandable alterations (at least as Shad and a few other defenders I’ve seen explain it), lacks the usual connotations of the gender swap that happens in official stories, and the base seems to be pushing for romance between the two leads rather than wanting to get it on with girl Draco. I’m not into it, but it doesn’t bother me. Fanfic has its positives. I make a Transformers fanfic series to fix what I see is problems with the origin of the robots in disguise, and there are people who try to “fix” bad productions out there in the internet by showcasing how they’d do it, which is one of the projects I’ve been trying to work on for myself. It’s nice to see fanfic used for good instead of the usual evils of storytelling. We need more of that. I haven’t seen it as of writing time, but I’m curious what J.K. Rolling herself thinks of Malfoid.