Thanks to all readers and reviewers, especially: brittnymalfoy15, Marinka, SomethingsWicked (who is quoted in this chapter!), and purrbecomesthenight.
Before we start THIS chapter...
Another piece of evidence for the D/G plot thread occurred to me after posting Chapter 3, and here's how it goes...
We certainly know that Draco was Snape's favorite student at Hogwarts. Later, we saw that he was willing to do anything rather than let Draco die or fall into darkness, including killing Dumbledore. Snape and Draco were parallel characters in some ways, although this was never explored to the degree that it should have been.The past Snape/Lily relationship was crucial to the plot of DH (and was actually the part that worked best, I would argue.) So let's say that Snape represents Draco, James Potter-Harry, and Ginny-Lily. (Yes, I know, the idea that Harry married Ginny because she was like his mother is extremely creepy, isn’t it? But there are a lot of parallels between Lily and Ginny.)
Snape/Lily foreshadowed D/G. This isn't to say that they would have been exactly the same type of couple, or that their paths would have been the same. But we saw in CoS and from several clues later on that Draco had much more interest in Ginny than he ever admitted. I think there are subtle hints that he would have liked to be the kind of friend to her that Snape was to Lily, although it clearly never happened in Draco and Ginny's case.
So I really see the parallel to Snape’s choices in Draco’s lost decision to let Ginny escape from the MM dungeons. Just as Snape never forgot Lily and would always resent James more than ever, Draco would never forget Ginny and would always resent Harry on an even deeper level than before. (An interesting idea for a fic is that Draco also resents Ginny’s kids—I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen that, but it would be realistic.)
Just ONE more link in the chain of evidence...
Okay! On to the next chapter. :)
+++
In the last couple of chapters, we’ve seen that a major plot thread in HBP and DH was missing, and we’ve looked at what it could and should have been. We can deduce that it was inextricably tied up with Draco, Ginny, and whatever it was that lay between them. (Here’s your Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat and a magnifying glass! Don’t you feel smarter already? ;)
The D/G potential was intrinsic to the plot, which I think has a lot to do with the feeling some of us had that something indefinable didn’t quite work out. I think that many readers sensed this even if they had no interest at all in D/G. (And again, the D/G relationship in the lost plotline would almost certainly not have been overtly romantic. So this really applies to everyone interested in HP for any reason.)
This is the core. We all had to start with this, although I do think that’s only a part of the whole story about the importance of D/G. We see why some kind of D/G interaction/relationship makes so much sense in terms of the plot, but that’s not the end.
So let’s move on to the next logical question. Why does D/G have a lasting power? If it were only because of their importance in the plot of HP itself, that wouldn’t be enough to explain it—or to show why we should continue to care about D/G.
I really think that D/G has an iconic quality that no pairing in HP even comes close to achieving. This has to do with characteristics of the pairing itself as well as what it means to the plot, and also some key qualities that Draco and Ginny have in and of themselves.
D/G may not be the only pairing that we ship, and it certainly might not be the only one that we write—because for a lot of people, fandom interests extend beyond HP. (Have y’all looked at ALL the categories in ffnet lately? There’s Microsoft Paint fanfic!!!) But D/G is why we’re here. This is the pairing that hooked our imagination to begin with. And that’s why it specifically relates to us—as fans, as readers, as writers. So that’s where we’re going in this chapter! :)
And you know what that means… we’re going to go over all the HP pairings! ;) (I can’t believe I’m doing this… talk about back in the day, right?) Of course, pairings are far from the only issue—as SomethingsWicked put it, we feel let down by the end of DH, not only as shippers, but as HP fans in general. But I do think that the comparison-of-pairings exercise is significant related to the important points about what D/G is, could have been, and could become.
So if we look at all the different pairings in HP, we can see that these represent tropes. What exactly is a trope? (looking up the Merriam-Webster dictionary online…)
b : a common or overused theme or device : cliché
Merriam-Webster is pretty snarky about this, but I don’t think that a trope is necessarily a bad thing. There is nothing new under the sun. There are only seven basic plots (or five, or three, or one, depending on who you believe. ;) It’s all in how the cliché is used—but I do think that in and of itself, a trope is not really enough to make a pairing last, which is why D/G is more than a trope.
And one by one, those trope-y pairings are…
D/Hr-- which is about forcibly hooking up the female main character with the bad boy. And I have to say that I always feel like it’s pretty forced. I’ve read some good D/Hr fics, but the premise has always been too unbelievable to me. I’ve never been a strict canon writer, but I think that our transformative fics have to be believable in terms of original canon. Even in a complete crackfic, I just cannot see those two together. If Draco has to be paired up with someone else, most other pairings are more believable than D/Hr. Sorry. I like to write the idea that Draco would have liked to be Hermione’s friend at Hogwarts and mellows enough so that a friendship might even happen, but that’s as far as I think it can be justified. That having been said, the D/Hr community has done a LOT of things in the past couple of years that we can learn from and need to learn from. But we’ll talk more about that in the next couple of chapters.
D/H-- two male antagonists ending up together as a gay couple. It’s an old trope and it can be done really well, but for a variety of reasons, I don’t think it ever really works logically for these two characters. A lot of D/H fics are really great as pieces of writing, though—it’s just that they might as well have nothing to do with HP.
H/Hr—two best friends realizing that their feelings are not platonic. This is much more believable, and some great fics have come out of this one. But by the end of DH, I didn’t want to see Harry inflicted on poor Hermione. :P
R/Hr-- I think it’s actually not that far from H/Hr. It’s based on the inevitability of two people who’ve had both a friendship and latent sexual attraction finally hooking up. It may actually be the most realistic ship, although I think it’s not the easiest thing to make it exciting in fics all by itself. But it’s a good side pairing. I like to hook up Hermione and George, though. :)
Draco/Blaise is ditto with GAY best friends, as is Ginny/Hermione. Those are two that I think would have made sense if I could see Draco as gay or Ginny as a lesbian, which I really can’t. (I usually write that he had one drunken fling with Blaise at Hogwarts, though.)
Harry/Ron is another version of this idea, and quite honestly, this is the most realistic Harry ship by far. Harry never shared so much of himself in the entire narrative with anyone other than Ron, not even Hermione. No other two characters were so close. (Can’t we rewrite the epilogue and pair them up right now? ;)
Ginny/Pansy (an unusual one, but I’ve seen it) is always linked to D/H, and is about two girls realizing their supposed boyfriends are gay and hooking up with each other.
Draco/Pansy-- this actually is a ship that I could have seen if Ginny died a tragic death. Pansy showed that she could be a devoted friend, and she was certainly the only person interested in saving the entire school in DH instead of shielding Harry at everyone else’s expense. Draco and Pansy had similar backgrounds and interests. They could have gotten along fairly well. I don’t really see that Pansy ever would have reached any of the depths in Draco, though, and this would mean that she never could have been to him what Ginny would have been.
Draco/Astoria is about… well, randomly sticking two people together, as far as I could tell. Why didn’t we ever see any mention of Astoria, even when we’ve seen a lot of Daphne? And being only 2 years younger, Astoria certainly would have been at Hogwarts.
And of course, we HAD to come to H/G.
That relationship is the furthest thing possible from the way it was presented-- undying, true love and longstanding devotion rewarded at last. That’s a trope which I think isn’t all that appealing to begin with. It sets up a hierarchy between the two people involved; it’s the kind of relationship where one partner loves and one is loved. There is always an imbalance of power.
But H/G doesn’t even succeed at that. Instead, this is a pairing of an insecure girl fixating on an oblivious boy; she worships him, he basically ignores her except for sexual attraction—and that’s the only real reason they end up together. That’s the key to why I think that the epilogue is so bad, apart from the terrible writing, apart from the annoying idea of doing nothing to wrap up the narrative almost twenty years later except for listing all the pairings. H/G is really disturbing, and we’ll talk more about that a little later.
D/G, more than any other pairing, has many different levels. It works as a Romeo/Juliet type of pairing, which is the most obvious comparison-- achingly passionate, condemned by both of their families, and treading the knife’s edge between true love and tragic ending. Taking an example from history, they could even be Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn-- an obsessive love between a rich, powerful man and a poor but brave and spirited woman that turns dark and destructive in the end.
These are very powerful tropes by themselves, but it’s what could have happened between D and G is what makes them an iconic pairing and not only a trope. And this, too, is taking place on more than one level.
Remember what we saw in the last chapter of this essay. The story of their interaction is the one that would have completed the plotline and emotional core of DH, and so of the entire series. In comparison, all of the other HP pairings are just kind of… there. Even the ones that are canon and not annoying; even the ones that made sense and could have realistically happened—they aren’t central to the plot. But one of the main reasons D/G represents an iconic pairing is because they are central to what the plot should have been.
When you think about the really iconic pairings, they are all inextricably part of the narrative. Without Scarlett/Rhett, there would have been no GWTW. Without Rochester, there’s no Jane Eyre narrative. Without Irene, the entire plotline of A Scandal in Bohemia wouldn’t have existed. Not only was she the driving force of the narrative, but SH’s decision to not go after her at the end is the culmination of the plot itself. (Furthermore, if you look at it in a modern way—BBC, Elementary—Irene is the one who emotionally scarred Sherlock for life.) Without Cathy/Heathcliff, the entire driving force of the narrative is gone from Wuthering Heights.
And of course, without Romeo or Juliet, there’s… well… no Shakespearean drama named Romeo and Juliet. Without Henry/Anne, we don’t get the Reformation, Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, the birth of the middle class in England, the British empire… it changes history a lot.
But there’s one more to think about from the POV of what makes D/G such a special, unique pairing. And that’s the fact that both Draco and Ginny had special qualities as individuals, wounds that they could have healed by sharing, broken places that could have fit into each other. Where Harry failed Ginny in a pretty spectacular way, Draco—and only Draco—could have come through for her.
That’s all in the next chapter!
+++
Remember—the Fic Exchange is starting on December 1st!! Head on over to the LJ page and check it out. The link is here: The LJ Exchange Page
12/21, ETA:
So here's the thing: the rest of this essay was on the Long-Lost Drive of Doom. As of today, the computer expert can't salvage the files. :( It's been sent to a mysterious "lab" somewhere in CA. Who knows, maybe it's the eastern deserts, close to Roswell, and aliens might be involved...
But anyway. I WILL NOT GIVE UP HOPE. AND... whether the original is ever retrieved or not, I WILL keep writing this thing. There are older notes, and chapters can be reconstructed. This essay will be finished. OH YES, IT WILL.
Before we start THIS chapter...
Another piece of evidence for the D/G plot thread occurred to me after posting Chapter 3, and here's how it goes...
We certainly know that Draco was Snape's favorite student at Hogwarts. Later, we saw that he was willing to do anything rather than let Draco die or fall into darkness, including killing Dumbledore. Snape and Draco were parallel characters in some ways, although this was never explored to the degree that it should have been.The past Snape/Lily relationship was crucial to the plot of DH (and was actually the part that worked best, I would argue.) So let's say that Snape represents Draco, James Potter-Harry, and Ginny-Lily. (Yes, I know, the idea that Harry married Ginny because she was like his mother is extremely creepy, isn’t it? But there are a lot of parallels between Lily and Ginny.)
Snape/Lily foreshadowed D/G. This isn't to say that they would have been exactly the same type of couple, or that their paths would have been the same. But we saw in CoS and from several clues later on that Draco had much more interest in Ginny than he ever admitted. I think there are subtle hints that he would have liked to be the kind of friend to her that Snape was to Lily, although it clearly never happened in Draco and Ginny's case.
So I really see the parallel to Snape’s choices in Draco’s lost decision to let Ginny escape from the MM dungeons. Just as Snape never forgot Lily and would always resent James more than ever, Draco would never forget Ginny and would always resent Harry on an even deeper level than before. (An interesting idea for a fic is that Draco also resents Ginny’s kids—I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen that, but it would be realistic.)
Just ONE more link in the chain of evidence...
Okay! On to the next chapter. :)
+++
In the last couple of chapters, we’ve seen that a major plot thread in HBP and DH was missing, and we’ve looked at what it could and should have been. We can deduce that it was inextricably tied up with Draco, Ginny, and whatever it was that lay between them. (Here’s your Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat and a magnifying glass! Don’t you feel smarter already? ;)
The D/G potential was intrinsic to the plot, which I think has a lot to do with the feeling some of us had that something indefinable didn’t quite work out. I think that many readers sensed this even if they had no interest at all in D/G. (And again, the D/G relationship in the lost plotline would almost certainly not have been overtly romantic. So this really applies to everyone interested in HP for any reason.)
This is the core. We all had to start with this, although I do think that’s only a part of the whole story about the importance of D/G. We see why some kind of D/G interaction/relationship makes so much sense in terms of the plot, but that’s not the end.
So let’s move on to the next logical question. Why does D/G have a lasting power? If it were only because of their importance in the plot of HP itself, that wouldn’t be enough to explain it—or to show why we should continue to care about D/G.
I really think that D/G has an iconic quality that no pairing in HP even comes close to achieving. This has to do with characteristics of the pairing itself as well as what it means to the plot, and also some key qualities that Draco and Ginny have in and of themselves.
D/G may not be the only pairing that we ship, and it certainly might not be the only one that we write—because for a lot of people, fandom interests extend beyond HP. (Have y’all looked at ALL the categories in ffnet lately? There’s Microsoft Paint fanfic!!!) But D/G is why we’re here. This is the pairing that hooked our imagination to begin with. And that’s why it specifically relates to us—as fans, as readers, as writers. So that’s where we’re going in this chapter! :)
And you know what that means… we’re going to go over all the HP pairings! ;) (I can’t believe I’m doing this… talk about back in the day, right?) Of course, pairings are far from the only issue—as SomethingsWicked put it, we feel let down by the end of DH, not only as shippers, but as HP fans in general. But I do think that the comparison-of-pairings exercise is significant related to the important points about what D/G is, could have been, and could become.
So if we look at all the different pairings in HP, we can see that these represent tropes. What exactly is a trope? (looking up the Merriam-Webster dictionary online…)
b : a common or overused theme or device : cliché
Merriam-Webster is pretty snarky about this, but I don’t think that a trope is necessarily a bad thing. There is nothing new under the sun. There are only seven basic plots (or five, or three, or one, depending on who you believe. ;) It’s all in how the cliché is used—but I do think that in and of itself, a trope is not really enough to make a pairing last, which is why D/G is more than a trope.
And one by one, those trope-y pairings are…
D/Hr-- which is about forcibly hooking up the female main character with the bad boy. And I have to say that I always feel like it’s pretty forced. I’ve read some good D/Hr fics, but the premise has always been too unbelievable to me. I’ve never been a strict canon writer, but I think that our transformative fics have to be believable in terms of original canon. Even in a complete crackfic, I just cannot see those two together. If Draco has to be paired up with someone else, most other pairings are more believable than D/Hr. Sorry. I like to write the idea that Draco would have liked to be Hermione’s friend at Hogwarts and mellows enough so that a friendship might even happen, but that’s as far as I think it can be justified. That having been said, the D/Hr community has done a LOT of things in the past couple of years that we can learn from and need to learn from. But we’ll talk more about that in the next couple of chapters.
D/H-- two male antagonists ending up together as a gay couple. It’s an old trope and it can be done really well, but for a variety of reasons, I don’t think it ever really works logically for these two characters. A lot of D/H fics are really great as pieces of writing, though—it’s just that they might as well have nothing to do with HP.
H/Hr—two best friends realizing that their feelings are not platonic. This is much more believable, and some great fics have come out of this one. But by the end of DH, I didn’t want to see Harry inflicted on poor Hermione. :P
R/Hr-- I think it’s actually not that far from H/Hr. It’s based on the inevitability of two people who’ve had both a friendship and latent sexual attraction finally hooking up. It may actually be the most realistic ship, although I think it’s not the easiest thing to make it exciting in fics all by itself. But it’s a good side pairing. I like to hook up Hermione and George, though. :)
Draco/Blaise is ditto with GAY best friends, as is Ginny/Hermione. Those are two that I think would have made sense if I could see Draco as gay or Ginny as a lesbian, which I really can’t. (I usually write that he had one drunken fling with Blaise at Hogwarts, though.)
Harry/Ron is another version of this idea, and quite honestly, this is the most realistic Harry ship by far. Harry never shared so much of himself in the entire narrative with anyone other than Ron, not even Hermione. No other two characters were so close. (Can’t we rewrite the epilogue and pair them up right now? ;)
Ginny/Pansy (an unusual one, but I’ve seen it) is always linked to D/H, and is about two girls realizing their supposed boyfriends are gay and hooking up with each other.
Draco/Pansy-- this actually is a ship that I could have seen if Ginny died a tragic death. Pansy showed that she could be a devoted friend, and she was certainly the only person interested in saving the entire school in DH instead of shielding Harry at everyone else’s expense. Draco and Pansy had similar backgrounds and interests. They could have gotten along fairly well. I don’t really see that Pansy ever would have reached any of the depths in Draco, though, and this would mean that she never could have been to him what Ginny would have been.
Draco/Astoria is about… well, randomly sticking two people together, as far as I could tell. Why didn’t we ever see any mention of Astoria, even when we’ve seen a lot of Daphne? And being only 2 years younger, Astoria certainly would have been at Hogwarts.
And of course, we HAD to come to H/G.
That relationship is the furthest thing possible from the way it was presented-- undying, true love and longstanding devotion rewarded at last. That’s a trope which I think isn’t all that appealing to begin with. It sets up a hierarchy between the two people involved; it’s the kind of relationship where one partner loves and one is loved. There is always an imbalance of power.
But H/G doesn’t even succeed at that. Instead, this is a pairing of an insecure girl fixating on an oblivious boy; she worships him, he basically ignores her except for sexual attraction—and that’s the only real reason they end up together. That’s the key to why I think that the epilogue is so bad, apart from the terrible writing, apart from the annoying idea of doing nothing to wrap up the narrative almost twenty years later except for listing all the pairings. H/G is really disturbing, and we’ll talk more about that a little later.
D/G, more than any other pairing, has many different levels. It works as a Romeo/Juliet type of pairing, which is the most obvious comparison-- achingly passionate, condemned by both of their families, and treading the knife’s edge between true love and tragic ending. Taking an example from history, they could even be Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn-- an obsessive love between a rich, powerful man and a poor but brave and spirited woman that turns dark and destructive in the end.
These are very powerful tropes by themselves, but it’s what could have happened between D and G is what makes them an iconic pairing and not only a trope. And this, too, is taking place on more than one level.
Remember what we saw in the last chapter of this essay. The story of their interaction is the one that would have completed the plotline and emotional core of DH, and so of the entire series. In comparison, all of the other HP pairings are just kind of… there. Even the ones that are canon and not annoying; even the ones that made sense and could have realistically happened—they aren’t central to the plot. But one of the main reasons D/G represents an iconic pairing is because they are central to what the plot should have been.
When you think about the really iconic pairings, they are all inextricably part of the narrative. Without Scarlett/Rhett, there would have been no GWTW. Without Rochester, there’s no Jane Eyre narrative. Without Irene, the entire plotline of A Scandal in Bohemia wouldn’t have existed. Not only was she the driving force of the narrative, but SH’s decision to not go after her at the end is the culmination of the plot itself. (Furthermore, if you look at it in a modern way—BBC, Elementary—Irene is the one who emotionally scarred Sherlock for life.) Without Cathy/Heathcliff, the entire driving force of the narrative is gone from Wuthering Heights.
And of course, without Romeo or Juliet, there’s… well… no Shakespearean drama named Romeo and Juliet. Without Henry/Anne, we don’t get the Reformation, Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, the birth of the middle class in England, the British empire… it changes history a lot.
But there’s one more to think about from the POV of what makes D/G such a special, unique pairing. And that’s the fact that both Draco and Ginny had special qualities as individuals, wounds that they could have healed by sharing, broken places that could have fit into each other. Where Harry failed Ginny in a pretty spectacular way, Draco—and only Draco—could have come through for her.
That’s all in the next chapter!
+++
Remember—the Fic Exchange is starting on December 1st!! Head on over to the LJ page and check it out. The link is here: The LJ Exchange Page
12/21, ETA:
So here's the thing: the rest of this essay was on the Long-Lost Drive of Doom. As of today, the computer expert can't salvage the files. :( It's been sent to a mysterious "lab" somewhere in CA. Who knows, maybe it's the eastern deserts, close to Roswell, and aliens might be involved...
But anyway. I WILL NOT GIVE UP HOPE. AND... whether the original is ever retrieved or not, I WILL keep writing this thing. There are older notes, and chapters can be reconstructed. This essay will be finished. OH YES, IT WILL.
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