LOVE POTION AND LOVE TRIANGLES, THE DIRE CONSEQUENCES FOR BOOK 7: A WRECKED TRIO, A DEAD GINNY AND A VENGEFUL DRACO

All quotes in the following are taken from the Bloomsbury standard editions.

This essay began life solely as musings on the ‘love triangle’ connections between Snape>Lily>James and their modern day counterparts, Draco>Ginny>Harry. However, following on from queries I have received on the Love Potion Essay, and taking into account Anise’s ‘metatext’ essay on the meaning of ‘love’ in the Potterverse, I have expanded and re-directed it. The question has often been out that my theory doesn’t stand up as ‘why would JKR make such a big deal out of fluffy romance issues – even if Love Potion was involved?’ This essay is now more focused on addressing why JKR ‘wasted all that time on romance’ in HBP, when ‘romance is just fluff – even love gone wrong Love Potions are just fluff’. Anise has tackled the topic from the metatext angle – the general meaning and significance of love in the Potterverse – as is my bent, in contrast I am hitting it purely from the practical side: speculating on what the Book 7 plot consequences are of ‘all that Love Potion fluff’, and showing that the ramifications are enormous and dire. In other words I believe JKR set up ‘that Love Potion fluff’ in HBP not as a waste of time/fluffy little divert, but because it is a structurally necessary set-up for major plot points in Book 7.

To summarize in advance: The consequences of the Love Potion mis-use by Hermione (and also Ginny) in HBP will be:

• That the Trio will fracture just when it is needed most, with Harry isolated from Hermione and all her necessary ability and talents (and maybe isolated from Ron too, if Ron sides with Hermione). This will thus weaken Harry in his task.
• Ginny will be endangered, leading to her death in Book 7.
• Draco’s response to Ginny’s death will endanger Harry even further. (Hey, I’m a Draco fan – you really didn’t think you were going to get away with ‘no Draco’ in my essays, now did you?)
• Things will right themselves between Harry and Draco and Harry will defeat Voldemort.

They essay may read oddly, as the Draco section is very long – as that section (dealing with the patterns of love triangles) was the original essay.

THE TRIO WILL FRACTURE

When the Love Potion truth is revealed the fallout will be utterly tremendous.

On a ‘national’ level. can you imagine the reaction of the WW to Hermione? - a Muggleborn drugging their precious Hero and 'leading a PureBlood girl astray'? She'll be vilified in the press - and Rita Skeeter will be right there handing out the blazing torches and the pitchforks, egging it all on for her own revenge against ‘Little Miss Perfect’. We have seen a reaction to the possibility of Hermione messing about with Love Potions before, in GoF (pages 444-445). Rita Skeeter is reporting allegations that Hermione used a Love Potion to get Harry as her boyfriend, Pansy is quoted: 'she'd be well up to making a love potion as she's quite brainy'. Hermione gets serious hate mail. She is nationally vilified. Ron is shocked by the thought of her messing with Love Potions, (‘you haven't been mixing up Love Potions, have you?'). Molly is cold/vindictive in her reaction to Hermione's supposed actions and freezes her out. She shows her displeasure by sending her a stingy Easter egg and then is cold to her/blanks her next time they meet.

I think the GoF incident shows in miniature some of the reactions we can expect to see writ large in Book 7. In GoF the 'news' is broken by Rita Skeeter, I expect Rita to take a big role in the Book 7 equivalent as she will have every incentive to blow the story up and keep it running, in order to finally get back at Hermione. The national response will be violently anti-Hermione. Indeed, we learn in Rita’s Love Potion article in GoF that 'Love Potions are banned at Hogwarts'. Does that mean 'illegal'? If so, then Hermione is in real trouble as she was 17 and 'of age' throughout most of the year, will there be jail consequences? Marietta's mum (a Ministry Official) will certainly push for the maximum against Hermione, in revenge for her daughter's face.

Whether illegal or not, they are banned at Hogwarts. Hermione may thus be expelled from Hogwarts (she would have to go back there if Harry rejects her from ‘the quest’). She is a Prefect, she ought to have set an example in responsible behaviour – she did not and thus the penalty will reflect that. Such an expulsion would chime with the reader, as expulsion is traditionally one of Hermione’s greatest fears. When you are expelled from Hogwarts, they break your wand – so if she is expelled she will be doubly vulnerable: out of the ‘safe haven’ of Hogwarts and no magic to boot!

On a personal level, we see that Molly was vindictive at even the possibility of Hermione messing with Love Potions. What will she do when she finds out she did do it, and ‘roped in’ her own daughter?

More importantly for the Trio, in GoF we see that Ron was disturbed at even the possibility of Hermione messing with Love Potions. He will have to adjust to the fact that she DID do it. What will he do? Stand by Hermione and leave Harry, or stand by Harry and abandon Hermione from the Trio? My guess is the latter. His strongest history is with Harry – if Harry is Molly’s spiritual son, then Ron is Harry’s spiritual brother. Ron loved Harry before he loved Hermione. Also, Ron knows full well how horrible it is to be on the receiving end of a Love Potion (Romilda Vane’s): he was ‘horrified’ and ‘devastated’ even following his short-term dosing (even though ‘nothing happened’ so to speak between he and Romilda). Ron is pre-disposed to be disturbed by the use of Love Potions, he has direct experience of how devastating it is to be on the receiving end of one, and he loves Harry like a brother.

When it comes to a choice between siding with Hermione or siding with Harry on an issue like this, if Ron has to pick one or the other, he will pick Harry.

Will it come to such a choice? Yes, I think it will. I think that when the truth comes out Harry will reject Hermione. Put yourself in his place – a friend Date-Rape drugged you and gave you to someone you don’t fancy, how do you feel about your ‘friend’ when you ‘come-to’, however well-intended they claim to have been? Me? -I’d want to kill them, but I’d settle for excising them from my life and never seeing them again. It’s not only a sense of disgust Harry will feel, but also outrage that Hermione set herself up to smugly decide what was best for him, and then impose it upon him. She may only have dosed him twice, once at The Burrow and once at the pub (with the majority of the effect coming from the whack on the head), but that is not the issue – the issue will be that she did it at all. How can Harry trust her ever again? He is the person who equated Love Potion with the Imperius – an unforgivable curse – he is not going to easily forgive Hermione for what she did.

Harry will coldly excise Hermione. He won’t even go CAPSLOCK – we’re past CAPSLOCK Harry now; the Harry who could make himself keep dosing Dumbledore in the cave is a much colder boy whose Slytherin side is coming to the fore. CAPSLOCK is a hot Gryffindor rage. Instead, Harry will freeze her out. Indeed, whenever he looks at her now and thinks ‘ forced dosing’, he’ll recall Dumbledore in the cave and project all the horror of that onto her too.

So, one consequence of the ‘Love Potion fluff’ is that the Trio will fracture. This will leave Harry horribly weakened in his quest, even if he still has Ron, as in canon and in JKR interview it is established that the boys NEED Hermione – they need her knowledge and her talent and her logic. Without her they would never have got to the Stone in Book 1 – they are going to be in similar situations in Book 7, only this time with no Hermione to back them up. If JKR set up the Trio as a meta-person, with Harry the Hand, Ron the Heart and Hermione the Head, then that meta-person is about to be given a lobotomy.

Love Potions are not funny and are not fluffy and are not romantic. They are not something JKR has ‘wasted her time’ in writing, as ‘they won’t have consequences for the plot’. They are already proven to have dire consequences in canon. Without a love potion, Merope could not have had a child with Tom Riddle Senior – that child was Lord Voldemort. In canon, the love potion really is ‘the most dangerous potion in the room’ (Slughorn, Potions lesson, HBP).

In the Wizarding World it would seem that Love Potions are no big deal, the Twins sell them, Molly giggles about making one when she was a girl … but from GoF we see that when one is purportedly used on Harry, attitudes change and things become much more brutal. Furthermore, in canon Dumbledore regards them as serious, Harry equates them to the Imperius, Slughorn regards them as dangerous; JKR is thus telling us that Love Potions aren’t really ‘fun’. Indeed, as the author she visits the ultimate authorial sanction upon Merope, the one girl who we know exploited a Love Potion to ‘get her man’, - JKR killed her. Which brings us to another plot consequence of Love Potion use …


GINNY WILL DIE

In HBP I believe Ginny is foreshadowed by Merope, and what happens to Merope in the end? – she dies. In JKR’s interview Ginny is tagged as ‘the new Lily’. What happened to Lily? – she died. As ‘Harry Potter’s Girlfriend’ she is set up as a target for Voldemort, who will grab her to use as leverage against Harry. IMO this is foreshadowed in the HBP Harry/Ginny breakup when Harry says (HBP page 602):

“Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to. He’s already used you as bait once, and that was just because you’re my best friend’s sister. Think how much danger you’ll be in if we keep this up. He’ll know, he’ll find out. He’ll try and get to me through you.”

(Anise’s note: I agree that Merope foreshadows Ginny. In fact (although not a lot of people have picked up on this,) Merope could actually be seen as Ginny’s shadow-self, as the kind of person Ginny might have turned out to be if her life and family circumstances had been completely different. Certainly, we have the intriguing parallel that Merope seems to be one way when we first see her (shy, incompetent, non-verbal,) and is revealed to actually be very different, just like Ginny.)

Even when the Love Potion scandal breaks, she will still be a target as there will be confusion as to what was real and what was not. In any case, Harry’s character is such that he would feel compelled to save her as he would paradoxically feel guilty that she was in the mess partly because of him – plus he’s a hero and ‘saving people’ is his thing. I think she has made herself an obvious target and that when DE attack comes, she will be weakened by the fact that Harry’s rejection of her (following the Love Potion reveal) will have left her, like Merope and Tonks before her, drained of her powers by the emotional shock of the rejection.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN GINNY IS CAPTURED/DIES?

This is where Draco comes in and I merge in large quantities of text from my original ‘love triangles’ essay.

I believe there are links and patterns between a Snape>Lily>James triangle and a Draco>Ginny>Harry triangle, events from which for the ‘new’ triangle will fit right into the Love Potion consequences. I expound the original triangle, relate the ‘old’ characters to the ‘new’ and extrapolate events forward to predict, based on what happened to Snape/Lily/James, what might happen to Draco/Ginny/Harry. The essay becomes much more detailed form here on in, as it was in ‘the one I did earlier’.

THE SNAPE>LILY>JAMES TRIANGLE

In summary I see the Snape, Lily, James triangle as one of deep unrequited love from Snape to Lily. Lily in turn loved James, who loved Lily back. James despised Snape on general principles though he probably had no idea what Snape felt for Lily. At some point in their school history, Snape and Lily may have actually been friends/study partners/close, but whether they were or were not is irrelevant to the matter of this essay, what matters is that Snape loved her. Upon leaving school, Snape turns Death Eater and in that role reports the first line of The Prophecy to Voldemort, inadvertently setting Voldemort to go after Lily. Snape realises this and switches sides, turning spy to try and reverse the damage/protect Lily. She dies anyway.


SNAPE>LILY>JAMES: EVIDENCE FROM OoTP: Like a lot of other people I first sensed hints of this in OoTP during the chapter ‘Snape’s Worst Memory’ (page 567) when Harry peers into those memories Snape ‘pensieved off’ from his own mind in order to defend them from Harry during Occlumency lessons. In this section Snape and James leave the exam hall in close proximity to a gang of chattering girls (page 566):

‘a gang of chattering girls separated Snape from James’

The girls go and sit by the lake. James sits not far away and it is presented that Snape sits not far away from James, although in fact this means that he too has chosen to sit not far away from the girls (pages 567 and 568). Lily is one of the group of girls at the lake, a fact which emerges when she defends Snape against Sirius’ and James’ attack:

“Leave him ALONE!”
James and Sirius looked round. James’ free hand immediately jumped to his hair.
It was one of the girls from the lake edge. She had thick, dark red hair that fell to her shoulders, and startlingly green almond-shaped eyes – Harry’s eyes.
Harry’s mother.’

Lily forces James to back off Snape:

“LEAVE HIM ALONE!” Lily shouted. She had her own wand out now. James and Sirius eyed it warily.
“Ah Evans, don’t make me hex you,” said James earnestly.

James lets Snape out of a curse-bind but Snape then turns on Lily:

“I don’t need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!”
Lily blinked.
“Fine,” she said coolly. “I won’t bother in future. And I’d wash your pants if I were you, Snivellus.”

The whole scene is written, and then viewed by Harry, as referring to Snape’s relation to his father but actually it tells us a lot about Snape in relation to Lily. My take is that Snape followed Lily out of the Great Hall and down to the lake – Harry and the reader simply assume he was following James or just trailing about aimlessly. Lily saves Snape, but he turns on her, (probably out of humiliation) and flings the M word (plus, in reality boys do snap at girls when they are trying to get a girl’s attention and have failed through other means). Lily blinks in surprise at Snape’s attack – IMO ‘Lily blinked’ is shorthand for a shocked surprise, which indicates that NEVER BEFORE had Snape used that word on her when obviously she and Snape did to some extent know each other (they may have known each other quite well, indeed Snape may have been ‘that awful boy’ whom Lily knew and of whom Petunia speaks of, OoTP page 34). That Snape snapped a horrible insult at Lily was actually what made it ‘Snape’s Worst Memory’. From a casual reading it would appear that it was Snape’s worst memory because of the James/Sirius attack, but I don’t think that can be the case as Snape and the Marauders had a history of conflict, indeed when Snape is first attacked (page 569)

‘Snape reacted so fast it was as though he had been expecting an attack’.

He had been expecting one, because he was used to it. This incident was just one of many, the differentiator was his snapping at Lily. He calls her a Mudblood for the first (only?) time: Snape’s worst memory was his momentous falling out with Lily.


SNAPE>LILY>JAMES: EVIDENCE FROM HBP: The Snape, Lily, James triangle occurred to me vaguely from the above, but did not interest me greatly until it leapt into 3-D from events in HBP.

In HBP Harry learns that it was Snape who was the spy at the door who reported the first line of The Prophecy back to Voldemort, and thus – in Harry’s eyes – was heavily responsible for the death of his mum and dad. Harry has it out with Dumbledore (pages 512 and 513). Dumbledore says:

“Professor Snape made a terrible mistake. He was still in Lord Voldemort’s employ on the night he heard the first half of Professor Trelawney’s prophecy. Naturally he hastened to tell his master what he had heard, for it concerned his master most deeply. But he did not know – he had no possible way of knowing – which boy Voldemort would hunt down from then onwards, or that the parents he would destroy in his murderous quest were people that Professor Snape knew, that they were your mother and father -”
Harry let out a yell of mirthless laughter.
“He hated my dad like he hated Sirius!” …
“You have no idea of the remorse Professor Snape felt when he realised how Lord Voldemort had interpreted the prophecy, Harry. I believe it to be the greatest regret of his life and the reason that he returned - ”
… “Professor how can you be sure Snape’s on our side?”
Dumbledore did not speak for a moment; he looked as though he was trying to make up his mind about something. At last he said, “I am sure. I trust Severus Snape completely.”

This was the key passage for me; I interpret it thus: JKR throws us off the scent by having Harry refer Snape’s actions to James, when actually they are about Lily. Snape turned spy to protect Lily because ‘the remorse Professor Snape felt when he realised how Lord Voldemort had interpreted the prophecy … the greatest regret of his life and the reason that he returned’ was certainly not because of James – he did hate James, but he loved Lily. When directly asked: ‘Professor how can you be sure Snape’s on our side?’, Dumbledore knows why, wonders if he can tell Harry – ‘Dumbledore did not speak for a moment; he looked as though he was trying to make up his mind about something’ - and decides not to tell (no surprise why, can you imagine Harry’s reaction?). Dumbledore knows why Snape can be trusted (Snape loved Lily) because Snape would have had to tell Dumbledore that to get him to believe that he had turned spy in the first place, plus Dumbledore is a Leglimens himself (all those HBP references to Harry feeling as though he is being x-rayed by Dumbledore): Dumbledore looked into Snape’s heart when Snape told him, saw the emotional truth, and believed him.

The above has been gone over by other posters on FAP, what I was able to add to the FAP debate was the following.


SNAPE>LILY>JAMES: EVIDENCE FROM JKR IN HER MUGGLENET INTERVIEW:

We have JKR’s words on the matter from her Mugglenet interview:

ES: Was James the only one who had romantic feelings for Lily?
JKR: No. [Pause.] She was like Ginny, she was a popular girl.
MA: Snape?
JKR: That is a theory that's been put to me repeatedly.
ES: What about Lupin?
JKR: I can answer either one.
ES: How about both? One at a time.
JKR: I can't answer, can I, really?
ES: Can you give us any clue, without misleading us [Emerson misspoke; he meant “without giving too much away”] --?
JKR: I've never, to my knowledge, lied when posed a question about the books. To my knowledge. You can imagine, I've now been asked hundreds of questions; it's perfectly possible at some point I misspoke or I gave a misleading answer unintentionally, or I may have answered truthfully at the time and then changed my mind in a subsequent book. That makes me cagey about answering some questions in too much detail because I have to have some leeway to get there and do it my way, but never on a major plot point.

Lupin was very fond of Lily, we'll put it like that, but I wouldn't want anyone to run around thinking that he competed with James for her. She was a popular girl, and that is relevant. But I think you've seen that already. She was a bit of a catch."

First off, JKR admits point blank that there was at least one other person who had romantic feelings for Lily. It is immediately put to her that Snape had feelings for Lily - and she evades answering that, which is suspicious in itself. Then she gets hit with 'Lupin' as a suggestion and says she can't answer. She says she can't answer either for Snape or for Lupin. Why can't she? Because having REFUSED to answer for Snape because she was covering something up (which, IMO, is in effect what she did) she then can't turn around and blithely answer on Lupin (in which case I think the answer would be 'no') because it makes it glaringly obvious that she had been hiding something on Snape.

Then we have a long bit about the nature of her answers. Her final paragraph though - having had a slight pause to consider and re-direct the conversation (which presumably is why it is set out as a separate para on Mugglenet) bangs on about Lupin, but note that she does not in any way mention Snape. What I think she is doing here is steering the conversation onto Lupin/Lily and well away from Snape/Lily because on she is on safe ground with Lupin/Lily: there was no Lupin/Lily. The very fact that she is willing to talk about Lupin/Lily is what indicates that there was no Lupin/Lily, when in contrast she is not willing to discuss Snape/Lily as there, I believe, she has something to hide.

I think Snape loved Lily, realised he had put her in the firing line on Voldemort by blabbing on the Prophesy, switches sides in an effort to save her, but it is all for nothing: she dies anyway. Worse still, she dies because despite all Snape’s efforts, despite that fact that he’s risking a hideous death every day if LV catches him out, Lily dies because of (to Snape’s mind) Sirius Black and James Potter. Sirius blew the secret keeping because he chose to tell Wormtail (there is no evidence that Snape ever knew Wormy was a spy, so he couldn’t warn DD on him), hence Snape blames Sirius for Lily’s death. To an extent he also blames James too. To Snape’s mind, James was at Godric’s Hollow and failed to stop her being killed; never mind whether that’s a reasonable attitude (it isn’t), it is Snape’s attitude. From Snape’s perspective, Snape sees himself as the better wizard in comparison to James (in HBP James used Snape’s own spells against him, Snape was the better spell-man), Snape will always believe that had he been at Godric’s Hollow as Lily’s husband, and not James, then he could have put up a better fight/been smart enough to get them all out. Once again, nevermind whether Snape is reasonable to think that – we’re not talking about reason, we’re talking about love – that is Snape’s attitude.

That is why Snape has an implacable hatred against Sirius – not so much for their schoolboy days, but because he sees that Sirius killed Lily (seeing his supposed deliberate betrayal as worse than James’ mere failure). That was why he was so keen to kill Sirius/bring him back to Azkaban in PoA, in his mind he was avenging Lily.

Snape loved Lily, he never loved anyone else, and she’s dead. And part of him knows that part of it was really his fault and he has to live with that every day. He also knows that when she died, if she recalled him at all it was as someone who hated her, and now he can never have the chance to apologise and tell her how he truly felt.

Other FAP posters (most notably HarpieLady) have noted that Snape is aggrieved at Harry because he has Lily’s eyes in James’ face (canon). HarpieLady argues that every time Snape sees Harry he is plunged into the painful recognition that Lily chose James over him as her husband, after HBP we can add that he is also plunged into the pain of what happened to Lily and the pain of his role in it.

As an extra from myself, I have looked into name-meanings and learned that Lily ultimately means ‘majesty’ (that is the meaning of the flower) and James means ‘usurper’. A usurper is someone who steals someone else’s rightful place on a throne; as Lily is ‘majesty’ it would appear that at some level James knocked aside someone else so that he became her boyfriend/ husband: Snape?

As an aside I’m going to throw in something that has been wiggling away at the back of my mind. In HBP (page 178) we are told:

“Yes, it’s a funny little potion, Felix Felicis,” said Slughorn. “Desperately tricky to make, and disastrous to get wrong.”

Pointedly, we are not told what the disastrous effects are of getting it wrong. Well, what do you imagine the most disastrous thing could be if you were desperate for some good luck? I imagine that it would be to effect the opposite – that you were hit by a run of bad luck instead, maybe even a lifetime of it. Snape has had a desperately unlucky life – a tragic life – everything he tries to do right goes wrong, up to and including Lily’s death and then having to publicly murder the only person who ever trusted him: Dumbledore. (And yes I do believe Snape and DD had previously agreed, much against Snape’s will, that Snape would kill DD if it came down to it in order to save Draco and himself). I think there’s a chance that as a teenager Snape tried to brew up some Felix Felicis in order to skew the odds in his favour and ‘get Lily’; I think he brewed it up incorrectly (after all, it is ‘desperately tricky to make’) swallowed it, and that the result was a disastrously unlucky life. This would neatly reflect the Hermione/Ginny/Harry interaction and outcome as laid down in my Love Potion theory: Hermione and Ginny respectively used/took advantage of a potion to get things to go their way – and in Book 7 the results are going to be disastrous for both of them.


SNAPE>LILY>JAMES: THE EFFECTS/OUTCOMES

This has already been gone over in the previous section really, but to encapsulate it here:

• James saves Snape’s life. Snape sees no reason to be grateful.
• Unrelatedly, Snape unwittingly betrays Lily and endangers her life
• Snape strives with might and main to reverse the effects/save her/protect her.
• His efforts are in vain as those who were supposed to protect her, her friend and husband, failed in their duties. Sirius betrayed her location and James failed to defend her.
• Lily dies.
• From Snape’s angle Lily died because of something James did, or did not do.
• He consequently hates Sirius (even when he finds out her betrayed her by accident), and he hates the dead James. In this, Harry’s quote from HBP is spot on: “He hated my dad like he hated Sirius!” Snape did hate them both, and for the same reason: to his mind they killed Lily.
• James and Lily are dead, Snape is left living a life of bitter tragedy.


THE LINKS BETWEEN SNAPE AND DRACO, LILY AND GINNY, JAMES AND HARRY.

Here I establish that the new generation are the equivalent of the old players.

HARRY REPRESENTS JAMES. Not even worth going into is it? How many times have we been told that Harry looks like his father/is like his father? Harry is James.

GINNY REPRESENTS LILY. Well, the red hair is the least of it. She’s also technically Harry’s girlfriend (see my Love Potion essay for an explanation of my use of the word ‘technically’). Plus, most convincingly IMO, in her Mugglenet Interview JKR simply tells us she’s the Lily-equivalent:

ES: Was James the only one who had romantic feelings for Lily?
JKR: No. [Pause.] She was like Ginny, she was a popular girl.

JKR had no reason whatsoever to drag Ginny into the answer – except if she wanted to tip the reader off to the connection. Even if the tip off was not her conscious intention, then it’s still quite clear that in JKR’s mind Lily and Ginny are equivalent.

DRACO REPRESENTS SNAPE AND ALSO … SOMEONE ELSE. Re representing Snape, this is stating the obvious I know, but let’s state it anyway. As far back as PS the connection is established (page 97), Harry is dreaming: ‘Malfoy turned into the hook-nosed teacher, Snape’. Page 144, Harry says: “I hate them both, Malfoy and Snape.” Most pointedly on page 217, Dumbledore says of James and Snape when they were at school:

“Well, they did rather detest each other. Not unlike yourself and Mr. Malfoy. And then your father did something Snape could never forgive.”
“What?”
“He saved his life.”

IMO this latter cements the connection both between Snape and Draco, but also between James and Harry. As an aside: ever since I read the above I have been waiting for a situation in which Harry will save Draco’s life: given what happened at the end of Book 6 and the new sympathy Harry feels for Draco, now more than ever I believe it will happen in Book 7.

In CoS ‘Draco Malfoy, who was Snape’s favourite student,’ (page 140) is chosen by Snape to represent him in the Dueling club example-duel against Harry (pages 144 –145). In effect, here Draco is the ‘junior Snape’. In OoTP (page 575) Harry is remembering how his father dangled Snape upside down for fun and imagines that not even Fred and George would do that ‘not unless they really loathed them … perhaps Malfoy, or somebody who really deserved it …’, hence Harry equates Snape with Draco (though interestingly to Harry’s mind Draco is obviously NOT someone who ‘really deserves it’, as the key word is OR). In HBP we’re given another dream connection again (page 427): Harry’s dreams were broken and disturbed by images of Malfoy, who turned into Slughorn, who turned into Snape ….’

Both Snape and Draco are good at Potions, I think that Snape sees Draco as similar to himself in his ‘potions style’ which is why he is his favourite pupil. In OoTP, Snape remarks to Harry: “You have no subtlety, Potter,” said Snape, his dark eyes glittering. “You do not understand fine distinctions. It is one of the shortcomings that makes you such a lamentable potions maker.” In other words, both Draco and Snape are subtle, and understand fine distinctions.

In HBP Draco is revealed as having the makings of a highly able Occlumens (like Snape), so much so that he is able to ‘keep out’ Snape when Snape is trying to raid his mind (pages 302 and 303).

As an aside I will say that although Draco is likened to Snape, and is like Snape in some ways, he is also unlike Snape in a lot of other ways and I believe that difference will affect the outcome for the ‘new’ triangle. This dichotomy is summed up in Sirius’ comment to Harry in OoTP (page 590): “James and Snape hated each other from the moment they set eyes on each other, it was just one of those things, you can understand that, can’t you? I think James was everything Snape wanted to be – he was popular, he was good at Quidditch – good at pretty much everything. And Snape was just this little oddball who was upto his eyes in the Dark Arts…”

The ‘hate at first sight’ thing reflects Harry and Draco (although importantly it was NOT hate at first sight, only after Harry soundly rejects Draco does their enmity begin), but interestingly the list of everything ‘Snape wanted to be’ is pretty much a list of attributes Draco has. Draco is popular (in Slytherin House), he is good at Quidditch (if Harry is the youngest Seeker in a century, then making Seeker in second year might actually mean Draco was the second youngest Seeker in a century), he is smart in class. Draco amuses his peers, for example in OoTP (page 189) he ‘holds court’ at the Slytherin table, on page 233 he is ‘surrounded by his usual gang of Slytherin cronies. He had clearly just said something highly amusing because Crabbe, Goyle, Pansy Parkinson and the rest continued to snigger heartily …’ and ‘the rest’, you’ll note, not just the three we are used to hearing of. Even as a young boy, a second year in CoS, he was charismatic and confident enough to have fifth year Slytherins laughing at his jokes (page 76):

“Be careful Weasley,” sneered Malfoy. “You don’t want to start any trouble or your mummy’ll have to come and take you away from school.” He put on a shrill, piercing voice. ‘If you put another toe out of line -”
A knot of Slytherin fifth years laughed loudly at this.’

Draco is possessed of a social ιlan which both Harry and Ron lack. When the taciturn and uncommunicative Krum arrives in GoF (uncommunicative because he lacks social skills) Krum goes to sit at the Slytherin table. At that time Ron was crassly shouting across, trying to get Krum to sit with Gryffindor, in contrast when Krum sits down near Draco of his own accord, Draco quietly leans across and begins talking to him – I take this to be Draco socially folding him in to the table and trying to make him feel at ease. Snape was ‘part of a gang of Slytherins’ (GoF page 461) but Draco leads his gang. He is the star, not a bit-part player. He is not the direct equivalent of Snape, he is Snape as Snape wanted to be.

Draco has high verbal facility – he is witty and his insults are often cruelly amusing (well they make me laugh anyway!). This is in direct contrast to Harry, who is often silent in response, whereas Ron (for all that he is true, loyal, devoted and brave – he is, come on, admit it, he IS) cannot rise above lumpen, school-boy name calling of the ‘shut it Malfoy’ variety.

Draco is good-looking, both implicitly and explicitly in canon (and also, IMO, in JKR’s own words). It is established in PS that: ‘perhaps it was Harry’s imagination, after all he’d heard about Slytherin, but he thought they looked an unpleasant lot.’ Not only in their natures but in their looks it seems, as Harry gives negative ratings to the Slytherin’s looks whenever he can, (e.g. Pansy is pug-faced, Millicent looks like a hag, Theodore is weedy and stringy, Marcus Flint has a look of ‘trollish cunning’) but never once in six books does he comment on Draco’s looks negatively – and if he could have he would have. If we assume that Harry takes ten ‘looks-points’ off every Slytherin he meets just on sheer principle, (and probably 20 off Draco’s case) the fact that he STILL cannot call Draco ‘ugly’ is testament to the fact that Draco is at least 10-20 points above average in the first place. Draco is a good-looking boy. We have this explicitly in HBP when (page 423) Kreacher describes Draco as:

“Master Malfoy moves with a nobility that befits his pure blood,” croaked Kreacher at once. “His features recall the fine bones of my mistress and his manners are those of -”.

Kreacher regards Bellatrix Black as his mistress (she would have been the rightful heir of the Black Estate were it not for Sirius’ will), it is canon that even Harry thinks Bellatrix Black is intrinsically a good-looking woman. IMO, even factoring in Kreacher’s slavish devotion, Draco is good-looking as note that when Kreacher says those things, Harry does not snort with laughter in disagreement but merely says: “Yeah, we don’t need to hear about you being in love with Malfoy.”

Importantly, IMO JKR herself tacitly admits in her Mugglenet Interview that Draco is good-looking. She is on one of her ‘don’t fancy the bad boy’ speeches, when she says: “I'm trying to clearly distinguish between Tom Felton, who is a good looking young boy, and Draco, who, whatever he looks like, is not a nice man.” If she wanted to squash the ‘Draco is Hawt’ tendency, then she could have done it right then as it was the ideal moment, she could have quite easily said the equivalent of ‘actually, Tom is good looking, but in the books Draco is ugly, or certainly plain at best’ and we would have had to take her word for it. IMO she doesn’t say it because she can’t – she is writing Draco as good-looking, explicitly so by HBP, and I think his canon good-looks may raise themselves as a concrete issue in Book 7; if his looks didn’t have a point, she wouldn’t be building them up in Book 6.

Draco is tall: on page 596 of HBP Harry notes of Crabbe and Goyle, ‘hulking boys though they were, they looked oddly lonely without the tall, pale figure of Malfoy between them, bossing them around.’

Draco is attractive to girls – Pansy behaves like a groupie and he is often followed by not just her but a ‘gaggle’ of Slytherin girls. During the train scene at the start of HBP, Pansy is in girlfriend-mode, he has his head in her lap and she is stroking his hair ‘as though anyone would have loved to have been in her place’. He leans back into her with the utter confidence that she will be receptive. Furthermore, on page 386 of HBP Harry sees Draco escorting two teenaged girls (really Crabbe and Goyle). He evinces no surprise whatsoever that Draco has two girls with him, and even says to Ginny: “So, I wanted to know how come he’s up at the castle with a couple of girlfriends while everyone else is down here …’ Note that in Brit-speak ‘girlfriend’ has one meaning: date. It does NOT mean a friend who is a girl. Harry sees two girls with Draco and is not remotely surprised to see it and indeed assumes they are his ‘dates’ – two at once indeed.

Draco comes from a rich aristocratic family with the arrogance to match, he is tall, good-looking, capable of being cruelly witty, has a drawling voice, is attractive to girls (though he has a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude to them, witness Pansy on the train HBP), he is good at sport, is popular with his (Slytherin) peers, is known and to some extent feared throughout the school, is good in class and has a certain cold core to him. I, you and a thousand fanfickers before us have already spotted the resemblance to another member of the Black line, the ‘someone else’ whom Draco also represents: Sirius.

Go and read the ‘Snape’s Worst Memory’ flashback, inputting the name ‘Draco’ instead of Sirius, and you will see that it reads seamlessly, the two characters are virtually the same; the only difference is that the reader is ‘set up’ to like Sirius in this scene and to approve of him – approving attitudes and behaviour as ‘cool’ purely because he is Sirius, whereas if Draco had been the actor it would be ‘bad’.

With the false-start efforts at friendship in PS that went quickly awry and turned to enmity, I view Draco and Harry as a potential Sirius and James who blew up on the launchpad. Were Draco and Harry able to get past the bitterness between them (which Harry is beginning to do anyway) then they would be the cross-house cornerstone of what JKR referred to in her Mugglenet Interview as an unopposable, unified Hogwarts:

“If only they (the Houses) could achieve perfect unity, you would have an absolute unstoppable force, and I suppose it's that craving for unity and wholeness that means that they keep that quarter of the school (Slytherin) that maybe does not encapsulate the most generous and noble qualities, in the hope, in the very Dumbledore-esque hope that they will achieve union, and they will achieve harmony. Harmony is the word.”

In that quote she implicitly states that an unstoppable force positively requires Slytherin co-operation. By extension Harry and Draco (each being the key representative of their respective House) must achieve some harmony between them. The potential still remains for both boys to combine to make an unstoppable force. Indeed, if JKR’s theme of House Unity is to come to fruition (as I believe it will), then the two lads (as tokens of their Houses) have GOT to ally with each other. This element is important if the ‘new triangle’ is not to end in the outright, all-encompassing disaster of its predecessor.


THE DRACO>GINNY>HARRY TRIANGLE

One thing that has always bothered me about Draco/Ginny is that I can see Draco  Ginny, but I’ve never been able to see any Ginny  Draco. There is a fascination there from Draco to Ginny, but as with Snape/Lily it is not returned (though I am more than willing to listen to the Draco/Ginny experts on this). For her part Ginny has been stuck in hopeless crushdom on Harry for the entire book cycle (see my Love Potion essay), a so-called ‘love’ which is in actuality one sided and not returned. For his part Harry, in HBP, was increasingly fascinated by Draco. Admittedly I think his Draco-obsession was triggered by the cause of his Ginny-love (a love potion triggering, as stated in canon, infatuation and obsession), but yet it is the case that at around the time of Dumbledore’s funeral Harry seemed to settle at a previously unrecognised level of ‘concern’ for Draco that would thus appear to be genuine because that was when the drug effect was wearing off.

This triangle is thus not the same as the Snape/Lily/James one, where Snape loved Lily, Lily loved James, and James loved Lily in return. Here, Draco is obsessed with Ginny, Ginny is obsessed with Harry, and Harry has some sympathy for Draco.

EVIDENCE THAT GINNY IS OBSESSED WITH HARRY: see my Love Potion essay and her behaviour in the entire book cycle re Harry.

EVIDENCE THAT HARRY IS NOT TRULY OBSESSED/IN LOVE WITH GINNY: see my Love Potion essay and his behaviour in the entire book cycle re Ginny (there is no behaviour).

EVIDENCE THAT DRACO IS OBSESSED WITH GINNY:
Once again, I’m preaching to the converted but …

EVIDENCE FROM CoS. at Flourish and Blotts Draco is immediately aware that Ginny has ‘feelings’ for Harry, while her own family and Harry himself seem completely unaware: Draco is far more keenly aware of her feelings than anyone else. During the Valentine’s card incident the reader, and Draco, know that Ginny is there, her hair is like a beacon, he must know she is there. Draco then does what James did – shows off in front of girls, ‘girls’ being Ginny. In taking Harry’s diary he rags on Harry and insolently cheeks Percy (a Prefect), but then Harry gets the diary back. Draco is thus shown up in front of Ginny and does, in effect, what Snape did at the lake: he takes his humiliated anger out on the girl in whom he is interested, a girl he knows is in turn interested in the boy who just bested him. Draco’s instant and vicious reaction to Ginny is one of the very few occasions when in canon ‘he was looking furious’, usually he controls any fury down to two pink spots of colour in his cheeks. He ‘yelled spitefully’ at Ginny: “I don’t think Potter liked your Valentine much”. This is the anger of a boy who has been watching a girl a lot, and who is livid when his effort to ‘show off’ and get her attention backfires on him. IMO Draco here may not even be aware that he is interested in Ginny, but he is.

EVIDENCE FROM OoTP. Here people have disagreed with me in the past, but I believe that in OoTP there is evidence that Draco is interested in Ginny as I believe Draco let Ginny win in the ‘Bat Bogey’ fight. I believed it before HBP came out, and I believe it even more so now. Draco is a boy who, in canon, mere weeks after the ‘Bat Bogey’ shoot out, kicked the hell out of Harry in the facestomp trainfight. For the reader, two years may have passed between OoTP and HBP, but for the characters only six weeks (the duration of the British school holidays) have passed. Draco out-fought and out-thought Harry in the train compartment – Harry, a boy who has taken on Voldemort, a Basilisk, Dementors, a troll, and sundry Death Eaters. Furthermore Harry had every advantage in the train compartment: surprise, invisibility, he had his wand ready in his hand, he was poised to attack, and … Draco thrashed him. Further evidence of Draco’s ability to fight effectively was that at the end of OoTP at the DoM battle we see Dolohov, a Death Eater, use the Tarantallegra in battle; JKR thus sets it up retrospectively as a kick-ass spell knowing that Draco had already deployed it, aged 12, in the CoS Duel against Harry. This is the same Draco who got beaten by Ginny Weasley at the end of OoTP? I think Ginny only won the Bat Bogey shoot-out because Draco wasn’t trying to beat her. Shades of: ‘Aaah, don’t make me hex you Evans’. We are told that Ginny is ‘powerful’ but what does that mean? McGonegal is a powerful witch to be sure, but does that mean she’s good in a fight? Molly is no doubt powerful in her own way, but good in a fight? Powerful does not necessarily equate to ‘capable’ when it comes to battle. Hexing is one thing, but hexing under pressure in mid-battle with high stakes is quite another. Despite that she is ‘powerful’ we are actually shown TWICE that Ginny is ineffectual in a ‘pressure’ combat situation. In the DoM battle she goes down early, once with a broken ankle and then she gets shot in the face. Interestingly, when you read that entire section carefully, you realise she never gets a single shot off ‘in battle’. She Reductos the shelves, but then so does everyone else, after that she’s just deadweight, a passenger until she gets hexed unconscious. The second time we are shown that Ginny isn’t all that she’s cracked up to be in an actual battle is in HBP during the firefight at the end. Yes, we are told she is ‘locked in battle’ with a Death Eater, but I am not the first to point out that we are SHOWN that far from fighting effectively, she is simply desperately dodging and running away (page 558):

‘Ginny was locked in combat with the lumpy Death Eater, Amycus, who was throwing hex after hex at her while she dodged them: Amycus was giggling, enjoying the sport: “Crucio – Crucio – you can’t dance forever pretty -”
“Impedimentia!” yelled Harry.

Amycus is quite clearly toying with Ginny, ‘enjoying the sport’, he does not feel any sense of threat from her because there is none. Harry has to save Ginny here, indeed, one wonders if she survived as long as she did only because of the Felix Felicis Harry had given Ron. She says it herself on page 571: “Harry, if we hadn’t had your Felix potion, I think we’d all have been killed, but everything seemed to just miss us -”. In the ‘locked in battle’ scene, far from showing SuperGinny (able to take down Malfoy with a single hex) it gives us Ginny as the ‘token heroine’ of a 1950’s Sci Fi. She may have a weapon, we may even see her brandish it, but when it comes down to it she is knocked to the floor by the monster and lies there screaming while her boyfriend has to save her.

Some may say, ‘yes, but we saw ToughGinny take out Zacharias Smith on the train with the Bat Bogey, so much so that Slughorn was mightily impressed’. Well, once again we don’t SEE it at all (we never saw her Bat Bogey Draco either – we don’t know what happened there), and furthermore when I think about that Zacharias scene something occurs to me: in all likelihood Ginny took on an unarmed man in a surprise attack. I cannot imagine that Zacharias was holding Ginny at wand-point when he questioned her, in effect he was thus unarmed when she attacked. The hex itself may have been spectacular, but it was not evidence that Ginny is good in battle as taking out an unarmed and unsuspecting opponent is a far cry from taking out someone in battle, under pressure, when they are shooting back. We have seen her under pressure in battle twice, and we have seen her fail twice. Extrapolating backward, I can only see her successfully taking out an armed and up for it Draco Malfoy, only if Draco was holding back because he didn’t want to hurt her.

A foreshadowing of this is on page 349 of OtTP during the first DA training session: ‘Ginny was teamed with Michael Corner; she was doing very well, whereas Michael was either very bad or unwilling to jinx her.’ Yes, Ginny may be doing very well because she is very good (but her SHOWN performances in DoM and at the end of HBP argue against this), but it more strongly reads that Michael held back because he didn’t want to hurt her. Now that reeks of foreshadowing in the sense that it strongly implies that the boy concerned held back because he secretly cares for/is attracted to the girl concerned. But we know it cannot be about Michael, as at that point it is openly acknowledged that he and Ginny are already dating – so if it is foreshadowing of a secret attraction, who is it foreshadowing of? The very next boy we hear ‘fighting’ Ginny is Draco, in Umbridge’s office – there is no-one else in between. I think that the he ‘was either very bad or unwilling to jinx her’ reference is foreshadowing of the conduct of the Bat Bogey fight.

So, I’ll let my point stand: The Draco v Ginny Bat Bogey shoot-out is evidence of Draco’s interest, as Ginny won only because Draco couldn’t bring himself to go flat out at her.

EVIDENCE FROM HBP: I can see four pieces of evidence that Draco is interested in Ginny (the D/G experts may be able to see many more). The first and most obvious is on the train journey into Hogwarts, which has already been gone over at length by Anise in various essays/posts, but I’ll go over it again. HBP pages 143-144 Draco and company are discussing who got an invite to Slughorn’s compartment:

“Who else had he invited?” he (Draco) demanded.
“McLaggan from Gryffindor,” said Zabini.
“Oh yeah, his uncle’s big in the Ministry,” said Malfoy.
“ – someone else called Belby, from Ravenclaw -”
“Not him, he’s a prat!” said Pansy.
“ – and Longbottom, Potter and that Weasley girl,” finished Zabini.
Malfoy sat up very suddenly, knocking Pansy’s hand aside.
“He invited Longbottom?”
“Well I assume so, as Longbottom was there,” said Zabini indifferently.
“What’s Longbottom got to interest Slughorn?”
Zabini shrugged.
“Potter, precious Potter, obviously he wanted a look at the Chosen One,” sneered Malfoy, “but that Weasley girl! What’s so special about her?”
“A lot of boys like her,” said Pansy, watching Malfoy out of the corner of her eyes for his reaction. “Even you think she’s good-looking, don’t you, Blaise, and we all know how hard you are to please!”
“I wouldn’t touch a filthy little blood traitor like her whatever she looked like,” said Zabini coldly, and Pansy looked pleased. Malfoy sank back across her lap and allowed her to resume the stroking of his hair.

IMO Draco ‘sat up very suddenly, knocking Pansy’s hand aside’ in response to the mention of Ginny’s name, particularly as it was co-joined with Harry’s (remember, we know that Draco knows that Ginny fancies Harry, the CoS Valentine taunt makes that canon). Draco uses disbelief about Neville as cover for his uncontrollable physical reaction to the mention of Ginny.

(Anise’s note: If you listen to the audiobook version of HBP, you will absolutely hear this. The pause between Neville and Ginny’s name seems to last about a minute. It makes it very clear that Draco is reacting to Ginny’s name, not Neville’s.)

If JKR truly meant Draco to be startled at Neville’s inclusion, the text should have run:

“Who else had he invited?” he (Draco) demanded.
“McLaggan from Gryffindor,” said Zabini.
“Oh yeah, his uncle’s big in the Ministry,” said Malfoy.
“ – someone else called Belby, from Ravenclaw -”
“Not him, he’s a prat!” said Pansy.
“ – and Longbottom - ”
Malfoy sat up very suddenly, knocking Pansy’s hand aside.
“He invited Longbottom?”
“Well I assume so, as Longbottom was there, along with Potter and that Weasley girl,” said Zabini indifferently.

As it is, in canon Draco reacts after Ginny’s name is mentioned – not after Neville’s name is mentioned. It is not especially remarkable that in canon Draco goes on to mention Ginny, ‘but that Weasley girl! What’s so special about her?’, as he has commented on every other invitee so far, but what is remarkable is what Pansy does in response: ‘ “A lot of boys like her,” said Pansy, watching Malfoy out of the corner of her eyes for his reaction.’ That ‘watching Malfoy out of the corner of her eyes’ shows her explicitly fishing for a reaction from Draco – she is assessing his reaction to Ginny, and for her to do that she may have already have suspicions on his attraction to Ginny. As Anise has already pointed out, Zabini then unwittingly deflects the situation, calming Pansy down, ‘Pansy looked pleased’, with Draco then sinking back across her lap. As Anise has pointed out, one sinks ‘with relief’. Draco is relieved that he got through it without an irate Pansy or with his emotional cover being blown.

Note also that in the above Draco does not insult Ginny with any ‘blood traitor’ slurs, despite having been perfectly willing to make outrageous comments about Hermione on page 110: “If you’re wondering what that smell is, Mother, a Mudblood just walked in.”

The above section is the most concrete evidence in HBP, but there is more, although IMO it is less direct. On page 500, just after Ginny and Harry have hooked up, we are told: ‘The fact that Harry Potter was going out with Ginny Weasley seemed to interest a great number of people, most of them girls’. Most of them girls – so some of them must have been boys. We are free to speculate that Draco was among their number. The second piece of evidence I will quote here comes on page 576 (after the tower-top firefight) when Ginny and Ron are describing to Harry how Draco got the DE’s into Hogwarts and past Ron, Ginny and Neville who were guarding the corridor outside the Room of Requirement:

“He came out of the Room about an hour after we started keeping watch,” said Ginny. “He was on his own, clutching that awful shriveled arm -”
“His Hand of Glory,” said Ron. “Gives light only to the holder, remember?”
“Anyway,” Ginny went on, “he must have been checking whether the coast was clear to let the Death Eaters out, because the moment he saw us he threw something into the air and it all went pitch black -” ….
“We tried everything – Lumos, Incendio,” said Ginny. “Nothing would penetrate the darkness; all we could do was grope our way out of the corridor again, and meanwhile we could hear people rushing past us. Obviously Malfoy was could see because of that Hand thing and was guiding them, but we didn’t dare use any curses or anything in case we hit each other, and by the time we’d reached a corridor that was light, they’d gone.”

My take is that ‘the moment he saw us he threw something into the air and it all went pitch black’, because he wanted to protect Ron, Neville and Ginny by throwing them under cover of invisibility. Only Draco can see in that environment, as only he is actually holding the Hand, the DE’s can no more see the children than the children can see them – whereas Draco can see everyone. I doubt that he threw the corridor into darkness to protect the DE’s, as a group of crack, shock-troop DE’s, plus a slavering, kid-chewing werewolf whose presence Draco hadn’t reckoned on and didn’t approve of, would stomp all over Ginny, Ron and Neville (and remember, Draco doesn’t know that two out of the three drank the Lucky Potion – he thinks they’ll get killed). Why does Draco move to protect them ‘the moment he saw us’? Well, one reason is because he isn’t the case-hardened, machine-tooled git he would like to see himself as (which in canon we learn that he isn’t from his subsequent action on the tower), but also … does he particularly do it because one of the children is Ginny? It’s interesting to note that JKR puts that passage into Ginny’s mouth, thus relating Draco’s action particularly to her as she is the ‘teller’, when JKR could have easily had Ron say the words and thus diluted the impact.

The last argument I am going to forward is, for me, the most interesting. On page 177, during the first Potions lesson, Slughorn goes into the effects of Amortentia:

“Amortentia doesn’t really create love of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room – oh yes,” he said, nodding gravely at Malfoy and Nott, both of whom were smirking sceptically. “When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love …”

That is a very peculiar and weighty passage – for me one of the most important passages in the book. It not only gives us a sharp clue as to the whole ‘Love Potions’ imbroglio, but also it addresses the issue of obsessive love, and then ties it to Draco. The passage is in three sections, the first is the series of clues on the Love Potion issue: “Amortentia doesn’t really create love of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room”. But the second: ‘– oh yes,” he said, nodding gravely at Malfoy and Nott, both of whom were smirking sceptically’, and third: “When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love …” are actually about something else. The third part stands out as somehow tacked on because it is actually NOT related to Slughorn’s first speech. In the first part he is clearly saying that Amortentia cannot create love, but then in the third he talks about obsessive love as an entirely separate issue – as something that is quite real and has powerful effects. What ties the two sections together is the mid-section, where IMO JKR deliberately brings Draco into the mix. From the narrative perspective there is absolutely no need whatsoever to introduce Draco or Theo into this section, Slughorn’s speech would read just as well without, but JKR does it. Why? IMO because she is forcing us to consider ‘obsessive love’ in conjunction with Draco. On current evidence I don’t think she is forcing us to view it in conjunction with Theo, as on Theo we have no current evidence, but we do with Draco.

When I read the above passage I thought that the, “When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love …” section was a big clue to a lot of what is going on/is revealed in HBP. Obsessive love was the driving force behind Snape’s life-choice to betray Voldemort; obsessive ‘love’ is what impels Ginny to take advantage of the love-drugged Harry; obsessive ‘love’ is what impelled Merope to drug Tom Riddle Senior and thus in the process give birth to Voldemort; obsessive ‘love’ is what Draco feels for Ginny and which may yet be the trigger for future redemptive actions on his part. As an aside: I have put ‘love’ in inverted comas in three out of four of those cases, as although I feel that there may have been a relationship of sorts between Snape and Lily to the extent that he knew her enough to be really in love with her, I think that Merope, Ginny and Draco are not truly in love with the object of their various obsessions as in each case they do not KNOW the person involved so they cannot truly love them, they can only be infatuated with them. In each of those three cases they simply hold ‘the beloved’ as an icon, a totem representing the perfect life that they believe would be open to them if only they could ‘get’ that person. Merope did NOT know TRS, she only worshipped from afar as he was the local glamour-figure, the handsome Squire’s son; Ginny did NOT know Harry when she ‘loved’ him for all those years, she only saw him as ‘rockstar’ Harry and when she is dating him it comes across as very tepid, as though she got less than she bargained for, the real Harry not being everything she had built him up to be. As for Draco – it may irk the D/G fans here, but IMO Draco does NOT know Ginny any more than Ginny really knew Harry. He can’t possibly know her, we only have a few recorded instances of them actually ‘speaking’ to each other: Flourish and Blotts, the Valentine Card incident and … and actually I can’t think of any others (though if there are any, please bring them up). Even on those two occasions they don’t interact, in the first Ginny snaps at Draco and he doesn’t respond directly to her but baits Harry with her as the topic, and in the second Draco snaps at Ginny who then ‘covered her face with her hands and ran into class’. Draco and Ginny mirror each other to an extent, as Draco is ‘in love’ with Ginny as an icon, whilst Ginny is simultaneously ‘in love’ with Harry as an icon. Ginny obviously knows who Draco is (and at least she doesn’t think he’s an idiot – as on Page 275 of HBP she thinks ‘it’s great’ that Harper is playing Seeker instead of Draco, as in comparison to Draco ‘he’s an idiot’), but we cannot go about inventing or supposing canon instances where Draco and Ginny could have truly gotten to know each other, as there are no such canon instances. (Although there is always Book 7.)


HOW WILL IT ALL END? GUESSING WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO DRACO, GINNY AND HARRY, BASED ON WHAT HAPPENED TO SNAPE, LILY, JAMES AND INCLUDING THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE LOVE POTION.

The simplest way to project forward is to take what happened before and simply replace the names with the current players, which gives us the following pattern:

• Harry saves Draco’s life; Draco sees no particular reason to be grateful.
• Unrelatedly, Draco unwittingly betrays Ginny and endangers her life
• Draco strives with might and main to reverse the effects/save/protect Ginny.
• His efforts are in vain as Harry fails in a task in protecting Ginny.
• Ginny dies.
• From Draco’s angle, Ginny died because of Harry.
• Draco hates Harry for this.
• Harry dies (Draco, as Snape attempted with Sirius in PoA, is instrumental in this death by either action or inaction, he sees it as avenging Ginny).
• Harry and Ginny are dead, Draco is left living a life of bitter tragedy.

Well, I don’t think all of the above will happen – I think some of it will, but not all of it. Here is what I think will happen:

HARRY SAVES DRACO’S LIFE; DRACO SEES NO PARTICULAR REASON TO BE GRATEFUL.

I see this happening. The foreshadowing of:

“Well, they did rather detest each other. Not unlike yourself and Mr. Malfoy. And then your father did something Snape could never forgive.”
“What?”
“He saved his life.”

is just too strong to ignore. Plus, at the end of HBP we are all fully aware that Draco is in grave danger – at least two DE’s (other than Snape) SAW that he ‘disobeyed Voldemort’ in that he couldn’t/wouldn’t kill Dumbledore despite being under the maximum possible pressure (threatened death of self and death of parents). I think that at the very least Voldemort will regard Draco as expendable, or even see killing him as a useful example to ‘les autres’. In GoF we also have foreshadowing of an extremely unpleasant possibility, when we are told of the trial of Barty Crouch Jnr. Barty Crouch is a blond, teenaged boy who has gotten mixed up with the Death Eaters, though I believe he was NOT an actual Death Eater at the time of the trial. In GoF page 458, we are told:

“Was his son a Death Eater?” asked Harry.
“No idea,” said Sirius. … “The boy was definitely caught in the company of Death Eaters – but he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the house-elf.”

IMO here JKR gives us the horrifying truth: Barty Crouch Jnr was not a DE when he was flung into the hell of Azkaban. He was associated with them certainly, he was probably fascinated by their glamour as they were a powerful group, but he was far less guilty and had committed far less heinous crimes then many who got off. Barty was sent to Azkaban after a ‘show trial’ prosecuted by his zealous father, who was determined to be seen to fling his own son to the Dementors in an effort to save his own career from the tarnish of having a Death Eater/failure for a son.

“Did Crouch try and get his son off?” Hermione whispered.
“Crouch let his son off? … Anything that threatened to tarnish his reputation had to go. … Crouch’s fatherly affection stretched just far enough to give his son a trial and, by all accounts, it wasn’t much more than an excuse for Crouch to show how much he hated the boy … then he sent him straight to Azkaban.”
“He gave his own son to the Dementors?” asked Harry quietly.
“That’s right,” said Sirius.

In the GoF Dumbledore pensieve scene we then see the trial memory and see Crouch’s treatment of his son; JKR tell us (via Dumbledore) that putting a memory in a pensieve is a good way to more clearly see ‘links and patterns’. Well, we know that the trial memory ‘link’ was that Mad Eye was actually Barty Crouch Jnr – but what was the ‘pattern’? I think the ‘pattern’ (of a terrified blond boy pleading for his father’s love in the face of being ‘thrown to the wolves’ by that same unloving and uncaring father, who is prepared to sacrifice his son to save himself) will be specifically repeated between Voldemort, Lucius and Draco. We know from HBP that Lucius is in trouble as Voldemort holds him accountable for both having endangered/caused to be destroyed the Horcrux diary, and for the fiasco at the DoM. As Dumbledore says on page 475 “Ah, poor Lucius …what with Voldemort’s fury about the fact that he threw away the Horcrux for his own gain, and the fiasco at the Ministry last year, I would not be surprised that he is secretly glad to be safe in Azkaban at the moment.” Lucius is a man whom I have never seen show the slightest love for his son; when we see them ‘alone’ in Borgin and Burges in CoS, he treats him like a trained dog: ‘touch nothing Draco’, ‘come Draco’. Lucius is a man who covets power. Lucius is a man in deep trouble with Voldemort. I think Lucius is bound to get out of Azkaban in Book 7, and if Voldemort gives Lucius a forced choice between his son or his self, I have no doubt that Lucius will choose to sacrifice Draco with every sign of willingness – in an effort to simultaneously shore up his position within the DEs and to save his own skin; after all, he can always have another son.

In the Barty passage above it is important to note that the horror was not that Crouch sent Barty to Azkaban per se, but that ‘He gave his own son to the Dementors?’. I can easily see a scenario in which, at Voldemort’s behest, Lucius takes the lead in attempting to throw Draco to the Dementors as a sign of his fealty (the Dementors are with Voldemort now, and not at Azkaban). One thing about the Dementors which is increasingly relevant given the Horcruxes and the emphasis on ‘souls’ is that upon the Dementors Kiss (PoA page 183):

“What – they kill?”
“Oh no,” said Lupin. “Much worse than that. You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self any more, no memory, no … anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You just – exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever … lost.”

Well, empty shells are just asking to be occupied, aren’t they?

If I were a Dark Lord in an ugly, possibly pain-wracked body with burnt skin and a hideously inhuman appearance, if I were Dark Lord who had once been young and beautiful and prided in that beauty – then I’d want out of ‘ugly and pain-wracked’ and back into ‘young and beautiful’. If I were a Dark Lord with the power to possess others, then taking over a forcibly vacated Draco-shell (easy for Voldemort to possess because it was soul-less) would do just fine, thank you very much. Draco is after all, as JKR set up in canon in HBP, a good-looking boy. A good-looking boy who, as Voldemort now sees it, owes Voldemort a penance for his failure.

Will Draco be saved from this fate worse than death? You betcha! Barty was in essence saved by his mother, although she dies in the effort (Narcissa loves Draco, and unlike Lucius would be prepared to die for her son rather than letting her son ‘die’ for her) and we have the James/Snape foreshadowing of Harry saving Draco. So Draco’s got two people pulling for him.

There is a tiny piece of foreshadowing of Harry saving Draco, and Draco not being grateful for it, in the CoS Quidditch Gryffindor v Slytherin show down. Before it, Harry is instructed to win or ‘die trying’. During the match, he gets his arm broken by the rogue Bludger but then sees the snitch hovering above Draco’s head. At that point he dives straight at Draco. And then we get inside Harry’s head: ‘one idea firmly lodged in his numb brain - *get to Malfoy*.’ (JKR’s italics) Now that is weird, because what Harry should be thinking is – *get to snitch*, but he isn’t. I think it’s foreshadowing. Something else happens after that: ‘Malfoy thought Harry was attacking him’. And Ron later says ‘That was some catch you made, Malfoy’s face … he looked ready to kill.’ If this is foreshadowing then what we may have is Harry saving Draco and Draco thinking Harry was actually endangering him.


WILL DRACO ENDANGER GINNY, STRIVE TO SAVE HER, BUT WILL SHE DIE ANYWAY BECAUSE OF HARRY?

Yes, yes, yes and yes – and the way I feel about Ginny after HBP I’m not exactly all set to weep about it. This is the part of the essay relating to the fall-out of the Love Potion deception, as without Ginny setting herself up as Harry’s Girlfriend, her endangerment would not arise as she would not be a target for Voldemort.

WILL DRACO ENDANGER GINNY? Even if he doesn’t wittingly or unwittingly betray her, he’s tied up with the Death Eaters and so will feel a sense of responsibility if they aim to capture/kill her. I think that no matter what, Ginny will certainly be a DE target as she is officially ‘Harry Potter’s Girlfriend’ and thus will be seen as leverage over Harry. IMO this is foreshadowed in the HBP Harry/Ginny breakup when Harry says (page 602):

“Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to. He’s already used you as bait once, and that was just because you’re my best friend’s sister. Think how much danger you’ll be in if we keep this up. He’ll know, he’ll find out. He’ll try and get to me through you.”

Even when the Love Potion scandal breaks, she will still be a target as there will be confusion as to what was real and what was not. In any case, Harry’s character is such that he would feel compelled to save her as he would feel guilty that she was in the mess partly because of him – plus he’s a hero and ‘saving people’ is his thing. I think she has made herself an obvious target and that when DE attack comes, she will be weakened by the fact that Harry’s rejection of her (following the Love Potion reveal) will have left her, like Merope and Tonks, drained of her powers by the emotional shock of the rejection.

WILL DRACO STRIVE TO SAVE HER? Yes, because that is what the triangle foreshadowing tells us will happen. As to any possible details of how … I think Draco might fake Ginny’s death in an effort to allow her to escape. In PS the very first potion mentioned by name, in the very first Potions lesson, with a description given of it’s effects, is (page 103):

Snape: “For your information Potter, asphodel and wormwood make a sleeping potion so powerful it is known as the Draught of Living Death.”

From its name, I imagine it makes you look as though you are dead.

With the element of ‘first’ about it, it’s practically spotlit on the page and I have been waiting for the Draught of Living Death to show up ever since. I was particularly alert to it because of the Romeo and Juliet connection; ‘living death’ is how Juliet attempts to escape her fate (she fakes her death and is entombed alive to be revived later), but of course it all goes wrong and she dies anyway. I don’t especially buy Romeo and Juliet as Draco and Ginny (though we do have the feuding families/fathers connection) as I don’t see that Ginny cares for Draco – but yet partly there is a parallel. Anyway, I’ve been waiting for the Draught of Living Death to make a bow, and what happens in HBP? – we meet it again. In the Potions class (page 179) the class are set the challenge to brew some up, with the winner getting the Felix Felicis. Not only does this set it up in the reader’s mind again, but also it sets up that Draco would have an idea how to make it. Incidentally, in HPB we are directed back three times to the first Potions class in PS: once by the Draught of Living Death mention, once by the use of the bezoar as the poisons antidote (the bezoar is also mentioned in the PS class) , and then finally by Hermione on page 419 when they are discussing how Harry’s use of the bezoar saved Ron’s life:

“Don’t start Hermione,” said Harry. “If it hadn’t been for the Prince, Ron wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
“He would if you’d just listened to Snape in our first year,” said Hermione dismissively.

The only extensive mention of Potions class in the first year/book is that first class: the Draught of Living Death class. In HBP we are thus directed back to that lesson three times by JKR, with each reference shoring up the others so that we are directed at bezoars, the Draught of Living Death and … to one of the very first things Snape says in the lesson (PS page 102):

“… the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses …”

Bewitching the mind and ensnaring the senses? It’s never made explicit, but the above sounds like a reference to Love Potion to me.

WILL GINNY DIE ANYWAY BECAUSE OF HARRY? I think Ginny’s death is foreshadowed too many times for us to just blithely assume it won’t happen, I suspect it will.

In HBP (see my Love Potion essay) I believe Ginny is foreshadowed by Merope, and what happens to Merope in the end? – she dies.

In JKR’s interview Ginny is tagged as ‘the new Lily’. What happened to Lily? – she died.

Under the Draught of Living Death connection to Romeo and Juliet, we are lead back to Juliet, and what happened to Juliet? – she died.

Under a nice theory by poster Jayne1956 of FAP, Jayne likens Ginny to Euridice of the Orpheus myth. Jayne sees the connection from the DoM battle, wherein Ginny breaks her ankle. Euridice was a girl who loved the Hero, got ‘bitten on the ankle’ by a deadly snake, dies and goes to Hades from which the hero, Orpheus, comes to rescue her. On the way back from the land of the dead Orpheus makes a mistake, does something he was told not to do, and the cost is that Euridice dies – this time ‘for real’, she cannot be got back. I love this theory as it ties in so neatly with the Draught of Living Death thing, for in the Potterverse we know that you can’t come back from the dead, so for the ‘Euridice’ myth to bear out and for Ginny to ‘come back from the dead’ she can’t be really dead to begin with – hence the Draught of Living Death. I also love that myth connection because in it Orpheus/Harry ‘kills’ Euridice/Ginny as James ‘killed’ Lily. I think that Harry screws up ‘the rescue’ of Ginny, and she dies. In any case, if Ginny is Euridice, what happens to Euridice in the end? – yep, she dies.

The only thing Ginny’s got going for her IMO is that she wasn’t a Boggart-corpse in ‘The Woes of Mrs. Weasley’ (OoTP). But I don’t see why that necessarily means she will live though, as by the end of that chapter Molly is repeatedly fretting over what will happen to Ron and Ginny if she and Arthur die – having already seen a very definite ‘dead Ron’ sprawled on the carpet. The fact that she sees ‘dead Ron’ but still seems convinced he’s going to live gives us no reason to suppose that just because she didn’t see ‘dead Ginny’ is any reason to think that Ginny won’t die. Furthermore, she saw ‘dead Bill’ and IMO Bill has now had his brush with death and come out alive – if a little werewolfy. The fact that Bill lived indicates to me that ‘The Woes of Mrs. Weasley’ should not be taken literally as an inclusive/exclusive list of who gets to live or who gets to die.


WILL DRACO SUBSEQUENTLY KILL HARRY/LET HARRY DIE IN REVENGE FOR DEAD GINNY? In other words, will we see the remaining ‘old triangle’ pattern repeat itself in a dead James/Harry with an embittered Snape/Draco?

This is where I hope the pattern will change. I cannot see any definite foreshadowing of live or die for either Draco or Harry, but I think both will live, which means that the pattern of Snape/Draco not saving James/Harry in return for the wizard’s debt of James/Harry saving Snape/Draco, will be broken. I think this for three reasons.

Firstly, I think that sending out such negative messages as ‘you have to die to be good’ (Dead Harry), or ‘once bad, you cannot hope to change and live’ (Dead Draco) are not the messages that will end this book series.

Secondly, Draco is NOT a direct mirror of Snape, he is a Snape-Sirius hybrid. He never hated Harry to start off with, but actually wanted to be his friend. IMO that urge is still there.

Thirdly, we have the entire issue of House Unity. The message of this series will, I think, be that good can conquer evil if ‘good’ bands together under ‘House Unity’ and takes on evil as an indivisible united force. This House Unity will necessarily be exemplified by a Draco + Harry alliance (they are the literary representatives of their Houses). The fact that they have to ally, strongly precludes either Dead Harry or Dead Draco, and also stops any possibility of Draco ultimately betraying/failing to save Harry. The Dead Ginny will simply be the ultimate in theatrical devices to get us to believe ‘it will never happen’ as there will seem to be too much standing in Draco’s way.

The theme of House Unity has been a running constant in this series – there is so much evidence for it that it could comprise a small essay in itself. I believe that the books will end with a united ‘harmonious’ unstoppable force, combining to smash Voldemort’s powers and followers. For that to happen Draco and Harry (representing House Slytherin and House Gryffindor) have to ally, and to ally neither can die. Yes, I know that ‘JKR said’ that they would never get together:
Barnes and Noble & Yahoo! chat with J.K. Rowling, barnesandnoble.com, 20 October, 2000
hermione_rose_2000 asks: Hello Ms. Rowling, I am a big fan of the Harry Potter books. My name is Katherine Emily Rose and I am 11. Is it true that Harry and Draco will have to get together and fight evil?
jkrowling_bn: Don't believe everything you read on the net!
jkrowling_bn: I saw that rumour too... but it is just a rumour
But I’ve never put a great deal of stock in buying into her interview expressions, especially when they come out as panicked and startled sounding at the above one did.

(Anise’s Note: “Don’t believe everything you read on the net” is good general advice, but it’s not the same thing as simply saying no, and neither is “it’s just a rumour.” JKR has the chance to give us a flat-out no to this question, which is exactly what she did do with D/Hr…and she didn’t do it here.)

Plus we have the statement from her HBP Mugglenet Interview which is thick with hedging about:
JKR: “I've never, to my knowledge, lied when posed a question about the books. To my knowledge. You can imagine, I've now been asked hundreds of questions; it's perfectly possible at some point I misspoke or I gave a misleading answer unintentionally, or I may have answered truthfully at the time and then changed my mind in a subsequent book. That makes me cagey about answering some questions in too much detail because I have to have some leeway to get there and do it my way, but never on a major plot point.”
She says ‘never on a major plot point’ – but what exactly comprises a major plot point? What exactly comprises ‘get together and fight evil’?

House Unity is coming, and that means some form of Draco/Harry alliance is coming. Given the subtlety and integrity of JKR’s writing, I cannot see her introducing a ‘nice’, ‘shiny’, ‘good’ Slytherin at this stage – the fabled ‘one good Slytherin’ that certain elements of the fanbase cling to as a built-in excuse for avoiding dealing with any actual Slytherins - and making that person the pivot for unity. Draco is what we have, and Draco it will be. Besides, introducing the ‘shiny, happy, nice’ sole member of Slytherin who is ‘not a git’ just so there can technically be House Unity with this one Slytherin somehow representing the whole House (i.e. House Unity including Slytherin but …er… without any actual Slytherins), totally destroys the point of what JKR is trying to do (Mugglenet Interview):
KKR: “But they're (Slytherin House) not all bad. They literally are not all bad. [Pause.] Well, the deeper answer, the non-flippant answer, would be that you have to embrace all of a person, you have to take them with their flaws, and everyone's got them. It’s the same way with the student body. If only they could achieve perfect unity, you would have an absolute unstoppable force, and I suppose it's that craving for unity and wholeness that means that they keep that quarter of the school that maybe does not encapsulate the most generous and noble qualities, in the hope, in the very Dumbledore-esque hope that they will achieve union, and they will achieve harmony. Harmony is the word.”
She is saying that the House must be accepted – not just one atypical, Mary Sue/Gary Stu ‘good’ Slytherin who is somehow going to pop up out of nowhere at the last second.
I said that House Unity could comprise an essay in itself, but let’s canter through just a few points:
The colours red (Gryffindor) and green (Slytherin) are frequently matched and intermingled throughout the books. The metals silver (Slytherin) and gold (Gryffindor) are frequently matched and intermingled throughout the books. E.g. the Gryffindor Sword is actually NOT gold and rubies as you might suppose but silver and rubies. The two above points are evidenced practically in every chapter of every book. In GoF (page 208) we are given specific reference: the description “the Hogwarts coat of arms: lion, eagle, badger and snake united around a large letter ‘H’.” United – and around the letter H, H being not only for Hogwarts, but also for H for Harry? If that H is symbolically for Harry, then Harry and Draco are connected yet again, as that makes them the only two pupils directly referenced on the Hogwarts seal. The school motto is Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titllandus (‘never tickle a sleeping dragon’, as Draco=Dragon). I know JKR has said ‘it means never tickle a sleeping dragon’ but you’d have to be REALLY naοve to believe that was all there was to it and that it carries no reference to Draco as a character. Does anyone really think that a woman that careful in her writing would make a ‘mistake’ of putting a ‘minor’ character in the school motto? I think it does reference Draco. Indeed, in the CoS duel, what hex does Harry stick on Draco? – the TICKLING charm.
So, I think Ginny will die and that Harry and Draco will live. I think the pattern will run:

• Harry saves Draco’s life; Draco sees no particular reason to be grateful.
• Unrelatedly, Draco (unwittingly?) betrays Ginny and endangers her life
• Draco strives with might and main to reverse the effects/save/protect Ginny.
• His efforts are in vain as Harry fails in a task in protecting Ginny.
• Ginny dies.
• From Draco’s angle, Ginny died because of Harry.
• Draco hates Harry for this.
• However, Draco overcomes his wrath despite the provocation of Dead Ginny and repays the wizard’s debt and saves/aids Harry – he realises that Voldemort ultimately killed Ginny.

Draco is not a nice person and he never will be – Draco would regard ‘nice’ as a four-letter insult. Besides, nice does not equal good (look at Peter Pettigrew) any more than unpleasant equals evil (look at Snape, and more clearly Phineas Nigellus). As Sirius said (OoTP page 271): “Yes, but the world isn’t split up into good people and Dearth Eaters.”

Neither Harry nor Draco will die but instead they will ultimately have to band together.

In the first Sorting Hat song, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff all get verses exclusively describing their character traits. Gryffindor ‘You might belong in Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart, their daring, nerve and chivalry set Gryffindor apart’. Hufflepuff, ‘You might belong in Hufflepuff, where they are just and loyal, those patient Hufflepuffs are true and unafraid of toil’. Ravenclaw, ‘Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, if you’ve a ready mind, where those of wit and learning will always find their kind’. But in contrast to all the others, Slytherin alone are described in terms not solely related to what they are, but also related to what they might be to you:

‘Or perhaps in Slytherin you’ll make your real friends, those cunning folk will use any means to achieve their ends.’

In Slytherin, Harry may not find his real friends, but I think he will ultimately find that they are not his enemy. Fundamentally, Draco is not the irredeemably damaged Snape who hated James on sight, and that will affect his response to Dead Ginny. I hope Draco will become what Snape always wanted to be – someone able to publicly prove their worth.

Relating things back to the initial issue: that JKR wrote the Love Potion incident because it is actually important to the plot – then hopefully I have given you pause for thought to consider that she did just that.


Anise’s Note:
This would have been up earlier, except that I was in Minnesota for a week with NO web access whatever. So I’m getting it up now! :) And I’ll just add Creamtea’s note to me: she thoroughly expects the Trio (barring possible character deaths) to re-combine before the end of Book 7. So do I; everything about the way their friendship has been developed foreshadows this, IMHO.
And watch for the thrilling conclusion to Creamtea’s Essay Series, coming soon to a website near you! (That would be… well… this one, actually. ;) That’s the long-awaited Mugglenet Interview Essay…
To Be Continued.
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