100 days of enemy recs: 99. Harry/Draco

[melannen]

I would be lying if I said the randomizer actually waited until the day 99 to give me this fandom, but it truly did wait until the last ten days! (and then I took the last ten days and put them in my own order, because the list was getting a bit thin.)

Harry Potter of course has no shortage of enemy ships (I used to ship Peter/Petunia, just because everybody had to pick a ship) but I couldn't not cover the good ship Guns 'n' Handcuffs. The Bang (and the Big) in "Big Bang". Going strong for 21+ years. (In fact, one of the first ever H/D authors just published a new H/D fic this week. Which I have not read yet.)

Harry Potter basically started as a crossover of a boys' school story and a fairy tale. And in the school story, you need a rival, like I mentioned in the Earthsea book. I feel like there must have been a lot of people (still are!) in Harry Potter fandom where that was the first book the school stories genre they had encountered - it was very unfashionable and had been for decades by the time the first Harry Potter book came out, for all that everyone from Jane Yolen to DWJ had already done wizardy versions of it - and so they were learning the conventions from HP, instead of nodding along to them. (I guess not everybody had pulled their grandma's old Grace Harlow books off the shelf in the back bedroom on boring summer afternoons.) But if you were familiar with the genre, you knew exactly what role Draco would play as soon as he showed up at the robe shop. And you started shipping it immediately.

I had a discussion elseweb recently about how you can see how some of what goes off in the later Harry Potter books is that JKR couldn't figure out how to transition from the school story/fairy tale pastiche into something else, when she got to the point in her story where she needed to, and you see that in Draco's storyline in particular. He needs and wants to be more than the stock genre antagonist but JKR never quite lets him, and that builds a character tension that is super useful for shipping, too.

Anyway, I have no idea how to come up with a set of three recs that in any way capture this pairing or my experience of it, so instead you get the first three fanfics I ever read for it that are still online (some of the first fanfics I ever read on an online fic archive.) Are they any good? I have no idea. Do I dare re-read them to find out? Nope. But here they are anyway!!

• Love Under Will by bookshop
  Chapters: 16/?
  Pairing: Harry/Draco
  
  Summary: I don't even remember at this point and the website doesn't have one. Harry and Draco fall in love? Under will? I suspect?



• Irresistable Poison by Rhysenn
  Chapters: 15/15
  Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
  Spoilers: All books
  Rating: PG-13
  
  Summary: I am 99% sure this fanfic is the first time I ever encountered the phrase "I want to be inside you". I believe it was uttered in the Astronomy Tower.



• Scholomance by astolat
  Fandom:Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences, Explicit, Mature
  Warnings: Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
  Complete Series
  Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley
  Words: 37,392 Works: 6
  
  Summary: I have not seen anyone address the question of how much this series has in common with that other Scholomance series that just came out, so: I need to catch up on them both, but I just wish to remind everybody that this exists! Draco Malfoy walks into the Scholomance and walks out alive again!

Comments

[brownbetty]

that is. Definitely a selection of fic you selected!

[melannen]

Have you re-read them? Do they hold up even a tiny bit?

[brownbetty]

I think I only read Scholomance to the period where it stalled so maybe I should go back!

[edenfalling]

Holy wow, that rec set is a blast from the past.

[melannen]

I'm shocked all of those are still available tbh, so much of the popular fic from that era has come down.

[ambyr]

Scholomance

Wait WHAT. Why has no one else brought this up? Why?

(Someone should read it and tell me if it has anything to do with Other Works Of The Same Name, because I'm sure not going to.)

[petra]

The way I learned that she had published a Scholomance Real Book was by someone making a reference to it, and my brain helpfully supplied "But that series was finished a zillion internet years ago," thinking of the fanfiction. I haven't read the Real Books either.

[melannen]

My first thought was "oh cool maybe she finished it finally with serial numbers off" having apparently forgotten it was finished in 2007!

[jainas]

The real books are a blast IMO! And they are not the "serial numbers off" kind either... but they do have extremely good Enemy ship vibes.

[melannen]

Right?? Why was I the first one to point to this?

Comment downthread says they're not real similar, dunno if I'm disappointed or not.

[ambyr]

But why would you reuse the title…? Oh well. People make choices.

[melannen]

It is a RL Eastern European myth under that name, I'm not surprised she did another take on it. But yeah the exact same series title word-for-word was sure a choice.

Scholomance

[ironymaiden]

Having now read both (thank you), I would say the most they have in common is the room with no walls and the contrariness of the magic book.
I enjoyed the books and do recommend them - know that the narrator is not exactly unreliable (but she's unreliable)

Re: Scholomance

[melannen]

Oh good to know!

I actually really loved the Scholomance in the fic series but it did seem like it would be hard to sustain for several whole ya novels.

[author_by_night]

Good point about there also being a boys' boarding school motif in the books. I agree that that didn't help.

Draco... I never cared about him the way much of fandom did/does, but I will say I think his redemption arc was attempted, but halfhearted. Same with Lucius and Narcissa's. There's actually a lot of "there" there - I think they do the things they do for family preservation. They're incredibly loyal to one another. But we just get hints, and in the final battle, they don't exactly help, so they remain villains. Though Draco does try to avoid identifying the trio when they're taken to Malfoy Manor, again, by the final battle he's still right on that line.

ETA: I realize this is more of a rec list than analysis, just offering my two cents because I have a lot of them.

[melannen]

It was actually one of the things I loved about the series going in, because I'd loved the old books of the genre (and some of its American variations, which weren't always boarding schools but kept much of the formula) as a child. But the stock "bully" character in those gets his/her comeuppance, not a redemption arc. JKR kept setting up for a redemption arc and walking halfway down it, then falling back on the formula.

(I will note that at least in the US variants some of the school series transitioned right into war series when WWI/WWII hit, and the bully did often redeem his/herself in the war, but JKR never committed to that genre transition either even though that's where the plot went - maybe it wasn't was much a part of the British version, or maybe she just didn't figure it out, or maybe by that point she was trying to "transcend" genre where she should have leaned in.)

[dragoness_e]

I suspect the sheer carnage of WWI may have killed the "boys' boarding school" genre. It would be hard to read or tell stories about the misadventures of kids in school when half to 3/4ths of your own school boy chums lay dead in Flanders fields.

[vicki_rae]

Scholomance from the fanfics is an old Polish fairy tale mentioned in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Satan claims every every 10th student as his due.

It's the Devil's school with never more than a dozen students at the same time who voluntarily transport themselves in and must teach themselves, are always alone, and have to learn on their own how to get out. Draco uses it as an escape hatch in the fanfics and the school is a very small part of the fanfic series.

In the books you can see how the bones of the fairy tale distantly inspired the school but the characters, magic, worldbuilding, and plot, are all quite different.

[melannen]

Oh I know about the Scholomamce! I'd heard of it even before the fic actually. It's the bit where she's written two series about it and nobody's mentioning it that made me wonder. (It was actually a much bigger aspect of the series when I first read it, because for years it was cliffhangered right at the point Draco got out.)

[marginaliana]

Hi I would like some Peter/Petunia recs plz and thx :D

[melannen]

Oh God I don't know if there are any, I certainly didn't finish anything.

Peter fans were limited enough that we had one thread on FAP for all our ships and gen fic, and I don't think anyone else shipped it. (also this was post-GoF period when we'd only seen a bit of both of them.)

Maybe I will finally finish the wip fic from then with Peter and Pet in it this year! Stranger things have happened.

[pauraque]

Peter/Petunia!! I was among the tiny handful of Peter fans on the LJ side of things (I never went on FAP) and I don't think I ever heard that pairing even suggested. Though, it's HP, so one should really never be surprised at any pairing being suggested.

[melannen]

I think it was kind of my version of that stereotype where the queer teenager picks a random celebrity to be obsessed with because they think they have to. I didn't really understand shipping at that point? But I knew you were supposed to do it? And nobody else had picked that one! I vaguely remember you from back in the day! There weren't many Peter folks around.

I did like the idea that the two characters the Marauders were constantly putting down teamed up to support each other. And that Petunia hated the wizarding world because it had killed her sister *and* her first boyfriend!

[lannamichaels]

I just had a sudden flash of an AU where Peter took the baby and ran.

[melannen]

I would read that!

Although I would be much more inclined to trust a Peter based on only PoA and GoF with the baby than the one we saw more of later on.

[lannamichaels]

My mental Harry Potter canon never got beyond GOF. I don't think I read the 5th - 7th books more than once. I still don't understand the hallows and haven't bothered, and the whole horcrux thing annoys me.

The later Harry Potter books are entirely of the "did I read this in canon or in fic" to me, like... did Harry really have a random trial? Did everyone think he was crazy and tell him he could never become a cop?

[melannen]

You should continue with that, that is the best way to handle it.

Except Luna Lovegood, Luna Lovegood deserves to be canon.

[lannamichaels]

I am confused by Luna Lovegood, tbh. "Here are a bunch of magical creatures that are clearly imaginary and fake" vs... all the other magical creatures that they just take as read as existing?

I suppose it could be a metaphor.

(also, I went to a school that small. You know who everyone is. Yes, everyone.)

[melannen]

I mean, it's a translation of cryptozoology, the same way we believe in giant squid but not sea serpents? It wasn't done super well though, that's true. Luna is still great though.

The only way to make it make sense was that Harry really truly honestly was just that oblivious to anyone outside his immediate circle, and possibly also faceblind, which did make a hilarious if unintended characterization note.

[lannamichaels]

I have seen a fic or two that posits that Harry is running around somewhat-blind in actuality because he's using a very very very out of date glasses prescription.

The moment I realized that the principal was calling all the kids in a family Mr. and Ms. X, rather than by name, was because he couldn't remember which one was which, and not to be very polite to children, was mindblowing.

[melannen]

...that actually makes a lot of things make a lot of sense.

TBH, my elementary school was only slightly bigger than Hogwarts, and while I knew everybody in my grade and and a fair number of people in the grade above or below I probably couldn't have named many other people unless they were siblings of people in my year or friends of friends. (Harry was probably also facing the problem that most of the non-Muggle-raised kids already knew everybody before Hogwarts, so there wasn't a lot of let's-meet-the-new-people happening.)

[azurelunatic]

When we were 5 and 7, my sister and I differed mostly in height. Otherwise, we had the same build, same color hair, same general features (same distinctive nose), identical haircuts, and crucially for everyone trying to firstname us, the same starting letter in our names. Mama had a hard time yelling at anybody without calling on someone else first (same first letter as Dad, too).

Our poor gym teacher got it wrong like 70% of the time, including when we were together.

[lannamichaels]

I am certain that Dumbledore thinks Ron's name is Charlie.

[azurelunatic]

This is extremely likely.

I like the fics where the author leans in to the school story thing and Dumbledore numbers the Weasley kids so until Ginny arrives, Ron is "Weasley Minor"

[lannamichaels]

omg I miss those tropes. There were so many good fics that leaned the fuck into the whole boarding school everything.

It's one of the reasons I had so much trouble bending my brain around the idea that HP belongs in the fantasy genre. Like, okay, but it's a boarding school book that has magic in it. It's already in such a strong genre!

[kore]

It's one of the reasons I had so much trouble bending my brain around the idea that HP belongs in the fantasy genre. Like, okay, but it's a boarding school book that has magic in it. It's already in such a strong genre!

Yeah, that was my impression reading the first book and for me it never tipped over into "fantasy set in a boarding school environment" from "boarding school pastiche with magic in it." I think she tried to switch over in the later books, but it didn't really take.

[kore]

I have not seen anyone address the question of how much this series has in common with that other Scholomance series that just came out

Okay that was a WILD moment of streams-crossing in my brain there, even if the other people say they're not really that similar. Whoah!

I was just weirded out by people not knowing boarding school book conventions because I didn't read DWJ while growing up, but there were certainly a bunch of YA novels set in boarding schools (Catcher in the Rye, anyone? A Separate Peace? Little Princess even?) altho those also overlap with prep schools, which are pretty different. Do Molesworth and Decline & Fall count? But really I got my impressions of British schools by reading memoirs by Robert Graves, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell, &c &c.

I guess the magic (lol) recipe was combining young wizards with the boarding school genre? Which was a lot closer to DWJ than Le Guin, altho Le Guin had the "what are wizards like before they're old" idea. Kind of like Lewis bringing popular culture stuff (Santa) into Narnia?

[melannen]

I think it wasn't just the Boarding School + fantasy thing, but it was specifically the Boarding School + Fairy Tales? Like, Harry the orphan who is forced to live under the stairs and do chores until his fairy godfather shows up, that's right out of fairy tales, so are the three tests to get into the secret room with the magic mirror. So is the horrible monster that lives in the walls and can only be defeated by the magic sword brought by the phoenix the hero had earlier befriended! Etc.

I mean obviously the fantasy genre was largely based on fairy tales too, but she was always pulling her tropes really directly from the source rather than filtering it through Tolkien et al, and I think that was a lot of the power of it - especially since most of our classic fairy tale retellings date from the same mid-18th century period as the height of the boarding school genre. (And she kept trying to lean back on fairy tales right up to Beedle the Bard, it just... stopped working as the story got larger.)

I actually haven't read many of the ones you're citing! But in the US at least there was a whole splurge of trashy children's book series in the late 19th/early 20th century that used the formula and tropes, and then they led right into the newer kids' series of my childhood like Baby-Sitters and Sleepover Friends. And I have always been super weak for them! Not just the setting trappings like Quidditch and the Houses, but things like having the rival/bully you're obsessed with, and having two best friends, and how the friends always spend at least half the book having a fight that gets made up by the end, and Dumbledore the twinkling headmaster, and befriending the groundskeeper, and almost being late to get there every year, and the required sneaking out to go get lost in the woods at least once a year, and so on.

I think the RL memoirs tended to rely a bit less on stock characters and incidents, and books like Psmith used a lot of the trappings but didn't rely on the formulas in the same way, but those are definitely an influence on HP too!

[kore]

I think it wasn't just the Boarding School + fantasy thing, but it was specifically the Boarding School + Fairy Tales? Like, Harry the orphan who is forced to live under the stairs and do chores until his fairy godfather shows up, that's right out of fairy tales, so are the three tests to get into the secret room with the magic mirror. So is the horrible monster that lives in the walls and can only be defeated by the magic sword brought by the phoenix the hero had earlier befriended! Etc.

Oh yes, that's a GREAT point! I love it. Harry is obviously Cinderella/the neglected youngest sister/hero in disguise, and that's true to some extent even after he gets to Hogwarts, isn't it? And it's not like she really pulled directly from Alice in Wonderland but there's the same kind of feeling with the mysteries and challenges.

....I am now trying to remember which trashy boarding school series I read, because I know I read at least one, but it wasn't Malory Towers or Angela Brazil or the other famous ones. Arrrgh. -- There was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
by Joan Aiken, but that's more Gothic and maybe AU, isn't it?

[beccaelizabeth]

This the fic I was reading yesterday
https://archiveofourown.org/works/9794657

I dont think I've read/watched the canon, or not much of it, I pretty much only like the fics where its like
many years later they are Actual Adults and can start sorting things out and figuring out what they actually want etc