Thanks to all readers and reviewers, especially: brittnymalfoy15, idreamofdraco, SomethingsWicked, and pitzi.
+++
Welcome back, D/G essay readers! :) Thanks for coming. Please take a seat, and don’t forget to pick up your free chocolate caramel popcorn and an eggnog latte on the way in. Now let’s start at the point where we left off at the end of Chapter Two.
When last we saw Ginny, Voldy and the Death Eaters had kidnapped her because she was the only way to lure Harry into their trap. She’s now in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor. It’s impossible to know at exactly what point she was originally planned to arrive, but I would say that it was roughly when the Harry/Hermione/Ron roundup took place. That always seemed very arbitrary to me because I don’t see that it was motivated by any specific event. It just… happened. So that might have been it. Harry does get there, under circumstances kind of similar to the ones that actually happened—except that he went to MM as a deliberate choice. And like everyone else, Draco knows that Harry has to be on his way.
The way that Draco and Ginny would have contributed to the plot so far is one of those things that is obvious only once pointed out—after that, it’s impossible to ignore. The ways that it would have happened are so significant, so specific, that I think we can safely say the argument supporting the details of the theory is a very strong one. But now we’re going to go a little further into the realm of speculation than we’ve been doing so far, and it’s because the exact possibilities do branch off from here. I do think, though, that given the early arguments, this is the most logical path for the plot to have taken.
Let’s say that Draco was the first one to figure out that Harry was at the manor , and that nobody else had managed that yet. (If they had known, Harry would certainly have been nabbed right away; they set the trap for him in the first place, remember?) Harry pleads with Draco to let Ginny out, reminding him of what he witnessed at the time of Dumbledore’s death. Who knows… maybe he would use a “I know that you’re really capable of doing the right thing, Malfoy, so do it now” argument.
We can guess that Draco has a lot of freedom as far as being allowed to roam through the house, meaning that he could go down to the dungeons. There’s no reason why Draco can’t do what Harry asks, and Harry knows this.
So Draco has a choice. He can keep Ginny there, or he can let her go. He has every reason to choose the first option. Voldy and the DE’s have to be suspicious of his motivations, because they already know that he couldn’t kill Dumbledore. In fact, that could easily be the major reason why he wasn’t allowed to go back to school—it would be too easy for him to run away and escape from it all. By keeping Ginny and revealing Harry’s presence, he would please everyone; as Lucius says in film!DH, everything could go back to the way it used to be.
He would also FINALLY win out over Harry, which otherwise will never happen because his former nemesis has moved beyond his grasp. The most common motivation that we’ve seen for Draco’s actions throughout the entire series is doing simply that, winning where Harry loses. And Draco has never succeeded yet. We never really even see him making another attempt after OotP-- the incident at the very start of HBP isn’t part of a rivalry with Harry; it’s about lashing out at him because of what happened to Lucius Malfoy. But Draco has spent the entire HP series trying to beat Harry at something, and without the Ginny plotline in DH, that desire has no resolution. And we’ve had many clues in the text that he has a special jealousy over Ginny. Keeping her and turning Harry in would represent the greatest victory of all; this dual success could make up for every one of his failures.
Every motivation is there for Draco to keep Ginny instead of letting her go—jealousy, envy, desire, fear, the yearning to please his parents, and the seductive pull of power.
And against all of this, there’s only the fact that he hates Voldemort and the Death Eaters after understanding much more of what they really are. He’s sickened by what he sees and what he’s forced to participate in. He grasps the evil side of the darkness that once seemed so appealing to him.
This is Draco’s true defining choice. He could keep Ginny at the Manor, and he has every reason to do it. But he doesn’t. He lets her escape. Whatever his feelings about her (and I highly doubt that they would have been spelled out), he allows her to leave, even knowing that she goes straight to Harry. It is his moment of moral triumph, perhaps even more so than not killing Dumbledore.
Again, we can’t be sure that this scenario is exactly the way it went down. But it’s hard to even know where to begin with listing the fatal problems and weird loose ends that are solved and tied up by this one solution.
Pretty much everything set up in CoS is meaningless without it. The much-touted idea that all of the clues for the ending are there makes no sense otherwise. (Harry and Co. having to fight the basilisk again doesn’t begin to count as “holding all the keys”, if you ask me.) Every interaction that has been set up between Draco and Ginny is fulfilled; otherwise, they’re left hanging. The Lucius connection is completed; the fact that he never has anything to do with Ginny again after CoS is otherwise inexplicable.
There are so many aspects of Draco and Ginny’s characters in DH, in particular, that just do not make sense without this plot development. Draco finally had some depth of character and genuine importance in HBP, and then… that was it? Really? He had been presented as aware of Ginny’s interest in Harry since the first moment he ever saw them together. It’s not that this jealousy was necessarily romantic when they were eleven and twelve years old, but when he saw that 16-year-old Harry and 15-year-old Ginny were finally together, isn’t it the most logical thing in the world that Draco would make that leap? The D/G interactions in HBP would finally have meaning—his marked notice of her on the train, her antagonism towards him after the Sectumsempra incident, neither of which ever had any resolution because of their lack of any interaction in DH.
And a lot of JKR’s statements about Ginny’s character in general would finally make sense. Otherwise, they just don’t. She is the only case of an HP character where we’re never shown what she can do; instead, we are told. (If you’ve ever been in a writing group, you have heard the 101-level “show don’t tell” advice until you’re ready to strangle the next person who says it. Are we really supposed to believe that JKR doesn’t know this, especially when it is demonstrated with literally every other character?)
Ginny was set up to have powerful magic. Her latent power in the CoS, JKR’s statement that we were going to see “impressive magic” from Ginny after “hints” at what she could do, her status as the seventh child of a seventh son… nothing, nothing could have made less sense than setting up all of these expectations and then never fulfilling even one of them. And that’s what happened. But if we had seen Ginny use magic to get out of the dungeons at Malfoy Manor, we would have seen what was repeatedly and specifically promised.
For all of the interview quotes about how forceful and tough Ginny is, we almost never witness her making a real decision or taking action. And I think it’s significant that the only place we really see this is in OotP, the book where character development started to get away from JKR, the one that would have set the series on a much more complex and interesting path. Afterwards, that’s it. We’re only TOLD about how she kept up the DA and defied Snape and the Carrows in DH. It’s as if she desperately tried to escape and develop character on her own, and then she was ruthlessly squashed… (hugs feisty!Ginny.) By deciding to get out of the dungeons, asking Draco to let her go, and escaping, Ginny would actually show that resourcefulness and courage.
Another important point—and it’s really sad one-- is that H/G actually has some meaning in this context. Whether or not it would have been spelled out—and my guess is not—the fact would be that Ginny could have chosen Draco, and she didn’t. She supposedly cared about Harry. By showing her choosing Harry when she could have done differently, we would have seen proof.
Harry would know this, and would be aware that she chose him when he wasn’t her only option. It would have shifted the dynamic in their relationship to something that felt real. It would have been a moment of strength for Ginny—in the wrong direction, I think, considering how Harry had treated her for six and a half books by then. But it would have been a choice it was possible to at least understand and respect.
If all of this is true, and if the Draco/Ginny/Harry triangle was part of the original plot arc, it’s not that we would have necessarily liked its ending. The way we’d probably want it to play out is that Draco makes the choice to free Ginny and she chooses to stay with him, realizing that Harry is a loser who’s STILL treated her like crap. I doubt this is what JKR had in mind. ;) But we would end the narrative and the D/G connection knowing that a deeper relationship between the two of them was indeed a possibility, just not the road that was taken. And again, H/G would have actually made some sense as a canon ending in this case.
Even the epilogue would also be less obnoxious in this context because we’d know that Harry and Ginny did not end up together arbitrarily. It wouldn’t feel so empty, so tired, so full of clichés, so much like a sixth-graders’ first attempt at bad fanfic. Instead, while we might not agree with it, the epilogue would… well, at least not make you want to throw the book across the room after reading it. We’ll analyze exactly why the existing epilogue was such a fail when we delve more deeply into pairings, but that’s enough for now!
We really could go on and on here, but it boils down to one thing.
Chekhov famously once said that if the playwright puts a gun on the table at the beginning of Act 1, then she’s got to pick it up and shoot by the end of Act 3. Well, what JKR did was like going into a room filled by a number of tables, all with different labels on them. “Plot,” “Theme,” “Action,” “Characters: Snape, Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione”, and so on and on. She then laid down gun after gun after gun on each table, all the way from BB guns to Winchesters to Glocks to Uzis, plus a nuclear bomb or two. Then she went from table to table to table and fired every weapon on them.
That’s the real key—not just that the D/G plotlines weren’t followed up on, but that all the others were. We know that JKR DOES know better than this, because there were so many clues laid early in the series that WERE fulfilled by the end—the cloak, the scar, the prophecy, neither can survive while the other lives, the roles of characters like Snape and Dumbledore and Umbridge, ad nauseum.
To return to the metaphor, maybe we liked the way those weapons on those other tables were used; maybe we didn’t, but either way, Chekhov’s advice was followed and every other gun in the room was fired. But not one shot from one gun on the Draco-and-Ginny table ever went off. JKR laid them down, and then she never touched them again. She just looked at that table, turned away, and slammed the door shut.
A fifth-grader in a Remedial Creative Composition class would know better than to write a story in that way. Are we really supposed to believe that JKR didn’t understand how little sense it made?
I honestly believe that the potential D/G material was thrown out, and that the narrative suffered because of it. I think that if JKR had chosen differently, yes, we would have had some of the D/G interaction that WE would have liked to see so much. But it’s more than that. Everyone would also have a narrative that was better, richer, more satisfying, and more lasting.
So we now see D/G was what canon needed; in fact, it’s the only development of the narrative that would have made any sense at all at many key points. Draco and Ginny should have played a vital role in the plotline, and their relationship should have been key. I’d also argue that their story would have formed an emotional core that was missing in the end. In the next chapter, we’ll see how this translates to D/G as a pairing. In fact, we’ll understand why they’re the only pairing in canon that has the true potential to last in fiction-- and what that means for the future of the fandom. We’ll move past what we should have had in canon, and into what we can have now.
(See? This really is headed in a logical direction.;)
+++
+++
Welcome back, D/G essay readers! :) Thanks for coming. Please take a seat, and don’t forget to pick up your free chocolate caramel popcorn and an eggnog latte on the way in. Now let’s start at the point where we left off at the end of Chapter Two.
When last we saw Ginny, Voldy and the Death Eaters had kidnapped her because she was the only way to lure Harry into their trap. She’s now in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor. It’s impossible to know at exactly what point she was originally planned to arrive, but I would say that it was roughly when the Harry/Hermione/Ron roundup took place. That always seemed very arbitrary to me because I don’t see that it was motivated by any specific event. It just… happened. So that might have been it. Harry does get there, under circumstances kind of similar to the ones that actually happened—except that he went to MM as a deliberate choice. And like everyone else, Draco knows that Harry has to be on his way.
The way that Draco and Ginny would have contributed to the plot so far is one of those things that is obvious only once pointed out—after that, it’s impossible to ignore. The ways that it would have happened are so significant, so specific, that I think we can safely say the argument supporting the details of the theory is a very strong one. But now we’re going to go a little further into the realm of speculation than we’ve been doing so far, and it’s because the exact possibilities do branch off from here. I do think, though, that given the early arguments, this is the most logical path for the plot to have taken.
Let’s say that Draco was the first one to figure out that Harry was at the manor , and that nobody else had managed that yet. (If they had known, Harry would certainly have been nabbed right away; they set the trap for him in the first place, remember?) Harry pleads with Draco to let Ginny out, reminding him of what he witnessed at the time of Dumbledore’s death. Who knows… maybe he would use a “I know that you’re really capable of doing the right thing, Malfoy, so do it now” argument.
We can guess that Draco has a lot of freedom as far as being allowed to roam through the house, meaning that he could go down to the dungeons. There’s no reason why Draco can’t do what Harry asks, and Harry knows this.
So Draco has a choice. He can keep Ginny there, or he can let her go. He has every reason to choose the first option. Voldy and the DE’s have to be suspicious of his motivations, because they already know that he couldn’t kill Dumbledore. In fact, that could easily be the major reason why he wasn’t allowed to go back to school—it would be too easy for him to run away and escape from it all. By keeping Ginny and revealing Harry’s presence, he would please everyone; as Lucius says in film!DH, everything could go back to the way it used to be.
He would also FINALLY win out over Harry, which otherwise will never happen because his former nemesis has moved beyond his grasp. The most common motivation that we’ve seen for Draco’s actions throughout the entire series is doing simply that, winning where Harry loses. And Draco has never succeeded yet. We never really even see him making another attempt after OotP-- the incident at the very start of HBP isn’t part of a rivalry with Harry; it’s about lashing out at him because of what happened to Lucius Malfoy. But Draco has spent the entire HP series trying to beat Harry at something, and without the Ginny plotline in DH, that desire has no resolution. And we’ve had many clues in the text that he has a special jealousy over Ginny. Keeping her and turning Harry in would represent the greatest victory of all; this dual success could make up for every one of his failures.
Every motivation is there for Draco to keep Ginny instead of letting her go—jealousy, envy, desire, fear, the yearning to please his parents, and the seductive pull of power.
And against all of this, there’s only the fact that he hates Voldemort and the Death Eaters after understanding much more of what they really are. He’s sickened by what he sees and what he’s forced to participate in. He grasps the evil side of the darkness that once seemed so appealing to him.
This is Draco’s true defining choice. He could keep Ginny at the Manor, and he has every reason to do it. But he doesn’t. He lets her escape. Whatever his feelings about her (and I highly doubt that they would have been spelled out), he allows her to leave, even knowing that she goes straight to Harry. It is his moment of moral triumph, perhaps even more so than not killing Dumbledore.
Again, we can’t be sure that this scenario is exactly the way it went down. But it’s hard to even know where to begin with listing the fatal problems and weird loose ends that are solved and tied up by this one solution.
Pretty much everything set up in CoS is meaningless without it. The much-touted idea that all of the clues for the ending are there makes no sense otherwise. (Harry and Co. having to fight the basilisk again doesn’t begin to count as “holding all the keys”, if you ask me.) Every interaction that has been set up between Draco and Ginny is fulfilled; otherwise, they’re left hanging. The Lucius connection is completed; the fact that he never has anything to do with Ginny again after CoS is otherwise inexplicable.
There are so many aspects of Draco and Ginny’s characters in DH, in particular, that just do not make sense without this plot development. Draco finally had some depth of character and genuine importance in HBP, and then… that was it? Really? He had been presented as aware of Ginny’s interest in Harry since the first moment he ever saw them together. It’s not that this jealousy was necessarily romantic when they were eleven and twelve years old, but when he saw that 16-year-old Harry and 15-year-old Ginny were finally together, isn’t it the most logical thing in the world that Draco would make that leap? The D/G interactions in HBP would finally have meaning—his marked notice of her on the train, her antagonism towards him after the Sectumsempra incident, neither of which ever had any resolution because of their lack of any interaction in DH.
And a lot of JKR’s statements about Ginny’s character in general would finally make sense. Otherwise, they just don’t. She is the only case of an HP character where we’re never shown what she can do; instead, we are told. (If you’ve ever been in a writing group, you have heard the 101-level “show don’t tell” advice until you’re ready to strangle the next person who says it. Are we really supposed to believe that JKR doesn’t know this, especially when it is demonstrated with literally every other character?)
Ginny was set up to have powerful magic. Her latent power in the CoS, JKR’s statement that we were going to see “impressive magic” from Ginny after “hints” at what she could do, her status as the seventh child of a seventh son… nothing, nothing could have made less sense than setting up all of these expectations and then never fulfilling even one of them. And that’s what happened. But if we had seen Ginny use magic to get out of the dungeons at Malfoy Manor, we would have seen what was repeatedly and specifically promised.
For all of the interview quotes about how forceful and tough Ginny is, we almost never witness her making a real decision or taking action. And I think it’s significant that the only place we really see this is in OotP, the book where character development started to get away from JKR, the one that would have set the series on a much more complex and interesting path. Afterwards, that’s it. We’re only TOLD about how she kept up the DA and defied Snape and the Carrows in DH. It’s as if she desperately tried to escape and develop character on her own, and then she was ruthlessly squashed… (hugs feisty!Ginny.) By deciding to get out of the dungeons, asking Draco to let her go, and escaping, Ginny would actually show that resourcefulness and courage.
Another important point—and it’s really sad one-- is that H/G actually has some meaning in this context. Whether or not it would have been spelled out—and my guess is not—the fact would be that Ginny could have chosen Draco, and she didn’t. She supposedly cared about Harry. By showing her choosing Harry when she could have done differently, we would have seen proof.
Harry would know this, and would be aware that she chose him when he wasn’t her only option. It would have shifted the dynamic in their relationship to something that felt real. It would have been a moment of strength for Ginny—in the wrong direction, I think, considering how Harry had treated her for six and a half books by then. But it would have been a choice it was possible to at least understand and respect.
If all of this is true, and if the Draco/Ginny/Harry triangle was part of the original plot arc, it’s not that we would have necessarily liked its ending. The way we’d probably want it to play out is that Draco makes the choice to free Ginny and she chooses to stay with him, realizing that Harry is a loser who’s STILL treated her like crap. I doubt this is what JKR had in mind. ;) But we would end the narrative and the D/G connection knowing that a deeper relationship between the two of them was indeed a possibility, just not the road that was taken. And again, H/G would have actually made some sense as a canon ending in this case.
Even the epilogue would also be less obnoxious in this context because we’d know that Harry and Ginny did not end up together arbitrarily. It wouldn’t feel so empty, so tired, so full of clichés, so much like a sixth-graders’ first attempt at bad fanfic. Instead, while we might not agree with it, the epilogue would… well, at least not make you want to throw the book across the room after reading it. We’ll analyze exactly why the existing epilogue was such a fail when we delve more deeply into pairings, but that’s enough for now!
We really could go on and on here, but it boils down to one thing.
Chekhov famously once said that if the playwright puts a gun on the table at the beginning of Act 1, then she’s got to pick it up and shoot by the end of Act 3. Well, what JKR did was like going into a room filled by a number of tables, all with different labels on them. “Plot,” “Theme,” “Action,” “Characters: Snape, Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione”, and so on and on. She then laid down gun after gun after gun on each table, all the way from BB guns to Winchesters to Glocks to Uzis, plus a nuclear bomb or two. Then she went from table to table to table and fired every weapon on them.
That’s the real key—not just that the D/G plotlines weren’t followed up on, but that all the others were. We know that JKR DOES know better than this, because there were so many clues laid early in the series that WERE fulfilled by the end—the cloak, the scar, the prophecy, neither can survive while the other lives, the roles of characters like Snape and Dumbledore and Umbridge, ad nauseum.
To return to the metaphor, maybe we liked the way those weapons on those other tables were used; maybe we didn’t, but either way, Chekhov’s advice was followed and every other gun in the room was fired. But not one shot from one gun on the Draco-and-Ginny table ever went off. JKR laid them down, and then she never touched them again. She just looked at that table, turned away, and slammed the door shut.
A fifth-grader in a Remedial Creative Composition class would know better than to write a story in that way. Are we really supposed to believe that JKR didn’t understand how little sense it made?
I honestly believe that the potential D/G material was thrown out, and that the narrative suffered because of it. I think that if JKR had chosen differently, yes, we would have had some of the D/G interaction that WE would have liked to see so much. But it’s more than that. Everyone would also have a narrative that was better, richer, more satisfying, and more lasting.
So we now see D/G was what canon needed; in fact, it’s the only development of the narrative that would have made any sense at all at many key points. Draco and Ginny should have played a vital role in the plotline, and their relationship should have been key. I’d also argue that their story would have formed an emotional core that was missing in the end. In the next chapter, we’ll see how this translates to D/G as a pairing. In fact, we’ll understand why they’re the only pairing in canon that has the true potential to last in fiction-- and what that means for the future of the fandom. We’ll move past what we should have had in canon, and into what we can have now.
(See? This really is headed in a logical direction.;)
+++
Leave a Review