What Do You Love About Drarry?

What do you love about Drarry?

This ask has been sitting in my inbox (and wriggling around in my brain) for some months. Others have answered it, very eloquently, and I didn’t know that I had more to say. But I do. Thanks for asking.

I love Drarry because of how completely, and how instantly, the characters transcended their original narratives. How the community finished reading Deathly Hallows in July 2007, said “hmm,” closed the book, and promptly started tagging fanworks with EWE (Epilogue, What Epilogue?).

Because we all saw that epilogue for what it was: the kind of future that we might imagine for ourselves in grade school, doodling the name of our cutest classmate in our notebook and making up names for our kids. Or the kind of future some parents would write for us, where we marry their friends’ children and never leave our hometown and never disappoint or surprise our elders.

But my hunch is that most of us, here in this space, have lived lives where we scrapped our own pre-written epilogues.

Whatever that has looked like for each of us — whether we came out, or got divorced, or left our religions, or had the baby too soon, or never had the babies, or have climbed mental health mountains, or picked a path less pristine — we chose different things to believe in.

I’ll be honest: I rarely return to the books that started it all. By now I know them enough. They live a bit in the same mental spaces as my own childhood. I love my childhood because I desperately love the smaller version of me who had so much to figure out! She was trying so hard and learning so much. But I don’t spend undue time reliving the particular traumas that got me here.

And most of the guides I trusted back then, who tried to shape me into a particular ideal of what my future should be? I have left them behind. It’s complicated. I could feel bad that their investment in me did not pan out the way they hoped, but I don’t owe them who I am becoming.

Likewise, I love these kids that went to magic wizard school and went through unspeakable horror, often at the explicit maneuvering and brainwashing of their elders. I observe the ways in which they were manipulated and shaped to have certain futures.

And then I free them from their author. I let them grow up to be something different. The child I was recognizes the child they were, and then together we agree to go forward to messier, wider, more true stories.

I think this is why I can keep reading & writing Drarry even as their original author spirals into hateful existence. To me it’s like the “okay, well then, I’m your mom now” response to a disowned trans kid or a pregnant sixteen-year-old.

We collectively see these (fucked up, and for good reason) characters and say, “okay! Well then, we’re your authors now. Get in. We've got places to go."

💗

9 ½ Days || by @magpiefngrl​

         Summary:            

After the events at the Manor, Harry and Draco find themselves stranded in the countryside with a broken wand and Death Eaters on their tail. This is the story of an uneasy truce, featuring faerie forests, seaside caves, Romani camps, kind old ladies, and a shared bed in an attic. Or how two boys fell in love in the midst of a bloody coup.

This fic was so beautiful and I can’t possibly gush about everything I loved, especially because everyone should read it for themselves! The uneasy alliance between Harry and Draco and watching it blossom is magical. I wanted to draw something from this scene later in the story, and it was quite the challenge because I don’t usually draw rocks. Drawing a whole ass cave was rough, even with using the Serpentine cave as reference. The dick sheets were an important detail and I’ve never drawn so much cock in my life lol, it was good practice though ;)

William Shakespeare, from “Henry V”

Ron sighed deeply. “I know. So many things make sense now.” “The whole of Year Six, for example…” “The Potter Stinks badges… What a cry for attention.”

From “The Miseducation of Draco Malfoy” by @magpiefngrl

common room :]

It’s complicated. Perfect, I love complicated.