~~addendum. you say you *heart* draco. WHY?

[reenka]

so, while this is related to my last post re: fanon conventions of how/why harry gets that lovin' feelin' for draco, it's slightly more meta (more meta, you say? the horror! the... over-intellectual horror..! um.)

so.
we are wondering why harry would like draco.
why do YOU [you being, a h/d writer/reader in specific] like draco??

why don't you `ship draco with someone who's more likely to like him for the same reasons (um, and who would that be?? don't ask me....)
why do you `ship him with someone who is going to be most likely immune to his "charms" (whatever those charms are. what are his charms??)

do you just think he's cute?
do you like evil blonds (even though that's more lucius' dept., draco's more the not-so-evil pathetic-bastard-who-probably-comes-too-early kind of blond) and all else be damned?

do you like snark so much you don't care he has no heart?
do you think he's secretly yearning for affection?
do you like pain?
do you want to see harry in pain, and gain vicarious pleasure?
do you just have a perverse liking for baddies (and good-guys liking baddies? ooo, naughty).
do you wish you -were- draco, and not the sad, lonely too-nice person that you are? (nevermind that draco's sad and lonely too, in most fics).

i'm not excluding myself here. guilty as charged. yea, i like draco 'cause he's snarky and naughty and pathetic and aww yeah, he needs some loff (kinky loff, if ya know what i mean). and yea, i wish i was more draco-like so that i felt more self-satisfied even though i wouldn't gain any points in the patheticness dept. and so it goes. we fall for the ones we shouldn't, and we want those stupid "mistakes" to actually -not- be mistakes on paper. right? yes, of course :D

but why did we fall for the one we shouldn't have?
i don't think we had these grand cliched reasons. no one ordered the other to kill us (*laughs* one hopes).
does one just go, "ooo, cute," and then it escalates? is it that certain tingle? ha. the physiology is pretty easy.

but still, we think-- as stupid as -we- were, falling for the wrong type (and if you never have, what are you doing `shipping harry/draco??! shoo, shoo! hee), harry wouldn't be that stupid, would he. harry would make draco work for it right? yeah. he'd show draco. he's not easy like that. yeah? yeah.

we're not easy like that. yeah? yeah.
harry's got backbone. harry's got integrity. harry's got pride. malfoy is gonna get what's coming to him. yeah? yeah.
    if you `ship harry/draco but not buffy/spike (and vice versa), you're a strange, strange person. that is all.

Comments

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

I'm a strange person. I ship H/D and not Spike/Buffy. The reason for this is that I have still never seen Buffy. Oh well. ;)

Draco is severely under-developed in canon (because we see through Harry's POV all the time) and is therefore interesting for writers to get into his head and attribute motivations and desires to him that he may or may not in fact have. There's just so much to work with.

Why with Harry? Chemistry. The same reason I like Mr Darcy/Elizabeth or Benedick/Beatrice or any other couples that start by sniping at each other. It's fun and sexy. :)

[metro99.livejournal.com]

Why? I can tell you why I like Draco. I like him because he's so faulty. I said he was immature and kind of an idiot when I replied to your last post. That's what I like about him. He goes through all this trouble to get Harry into trouble and ends up getting the short end of the stick, no matter what. It's funny. It amuses me. And I have a thing for antagonists. ...well, except for totally-evil!Voldemort. He's not amusing, even when he constantly loses to a little boy.

As for shipping him with Harry, I have no clue. When I read the books - after a brief intro to slash in a different fandom - it was the pairing that jumped out at me, beside R/Hr. They've got a certain chemistry. That whole love/hate thing, I guess. And to me, it makes more sense than any of those other slash pairings. Harry/Snape just doesn't make sense to me. I can't see sexy!Snape. He looks greasy and hook-nosed to me. Harry/Ron doesn't appeal to me. Ron is just too...Ron. Don't get me started on Harry/Neville or any of that. It just doesn't work for me. Oh, wait. These are all Harry pairings. Okay. Draco/Ron reminds me of Cartmen/Kenny from South Park. It just wouldn't happen. Draco/Snape...same thing with Harry. Draco/Lucius doesn't make sense. The Malfoys don't strike me as a family who does that sort of thing. To me, it's as likely as them playing charades or pictionary together.

In summary, no other pairing makes any remote sense to me, as much as Harry/Draco boggles me.

[addictedkitten.livejournal.com]

I don't think I really 'ship Harry/Draco because I like either one. I'm more about the dynamic, you know? Not exactly who they are (Harry and Draco, schoolboys at odds), but rather who they ARE, in the larger sense (the Boy Who Lived and the future Death Eater, and all the baggage that entails).

But I mean, duh. Honestly, this is why I think H/D strikes me as so great: when I was in the eleventh grade, there was this boy named Charlie Foster, and I absolutely could not stand him. He was obnoxious, and irritating, and generally an ass, and really, really intelligent. And I hated him, and we snarked at each other a lot, and one day he walked into the classroom and I thought "Fuck, he's hot." And suddenly everything took on a whole new dimension.

Ideally, when I write H/D that's what I'm trying to capture: that moment when you realize you've fallen for the wrongest person you could possibly fall for, and Harry and Draco are like me and Charlie to the most extreme possible degree. And then you add all the other things that make H/D so unlikely and I'll be damned if I can resist a challenge like that. Based on the Charlie experience alone, I find H/D probable, because love/lust is, on occasion, outrageously stupid and ironic, and just imagine if there was some way that it could WORK. That would be so incredibly intense.

Though, okay, I admit, I have a bit of Draco in me. I'm snarky, bitchy, obnoxious, and don't have a problem letting people know when they're boring me. So I'm like Draco, only not, you know, evil so much as just kind of mean when it suits my purposes. And generally, he intrigues me, just because there are so many valid and believable places you could go with his character. Nobody's the same person at seventeen as they were at eleven, and just because Lucius is a Death Eater doesn't mean Draco will be, and so on and so forth. You know? Yeah.

Did I actually even answer your question? I'm sorry, here, let me ramble in your journal.

::runs away::