W J Long III | Sci-Fi & Thriller Author

Replacing Draco Malfoy with the "Malfoid", Draecina sends ripples through the whole edifice that Rowling built. It's how stories grow. Build one corner, and that corner makes you ask the questions that help you build another. If you replace a cardstock bully with a prideful and complex debutante, who yearns for forbidden things, and must eventually choose between her family, her heritage, her entire world, and the boy she loves, then this fills out the next part of the story by making us ask "why?" Why does she fall in love with Harry Potter? That answer depends on what she wants. And what she wants depends on where she comes from. And both these questions ultimately wind up at her father. Because a little girl learns about men, and about love, from her father. Now, it would be easy to declare that Lucius Malfoy is to be a cold, vicious, domineering, hypocritical, selfish, and abusive man. And therefore loving Harry Potter becomes an act of defiance. Becomes that tired old trope of kissing the motorcycle hoodlum to piss off daddy. But that's not love. That's daddy issues. And daddy issues will not change a girl. They will not carry her though the fire. They will not make her a hero. We can do better than that. Try the opposite. Lucius Malfoy's creed and values, repugnant though they are to our original author, are deeply and sincerely held. He does not believe in elites merely because he wishes to be one of them. He believes that the gifted, the talented, the blessed, are needed by the world, and their privileges come with a price of responsibility. So he has raised both his children with love, holding back nothing that it was in his power to give. But he has raised them for a mission in life, and never made his expectations anything less than clear. Draecina is to spend her childhood and teenage years preparing herself to lead. And she is to marry wisely, to preserve and improve a bloodline that is precious to the world. Now we know both why she falls in love with Harry Potter, and why she is terrified to admit this, first to herself, then to others. Harry Potter, you see, has all the traits of an attractive boy, courage, competence, athleticism, popularity, the respect of children and adults alike. He is always the main character, and a heroic one at that. But he is also a rogue. A scamp. A mischief maker. He does not do as he is told. He acts of his own accord. And in so doing, he always seems to end up saving the day, to wild applause. How could she not admire him? How could she not yearn to be part of his little band of troublemakers, sneaking about at night and breaking the rules? And when she is just a bit older, with early puberty bringing on thoughts of boys, how can he not represent the one thing she has been told she must not have, as the price of all her privilege? Passion. She doesn't want to sit in a parlour, silent save for a loudly ticking clock, and make awkward conversation with a series of well-bred boys who have been ushered into her presence for the sake of their race-horse bloodlines. She wants to feel. She wants to run barefoot in the rain. She wants the school's handsome and popular rogue to kiss her and tangle his fingers in her hair. But she is terrified. Too terrified to admit her feelings even to herself. And when she cannot avoid that, too terrified to act on them, hiding away from the boy she desperately yearns to follow after, pushing him away with words of scorn so that no one will suspect, then seeking him out only to fight with him, because if they are fighting, then at least he is looking at her, and anything is better than his absence. Why is she terrified? Of what? Of who? Of her father. Not of his scorn. Not of punishment. Not of his hard hands, for he has never struck her and never would. He has never shown her anything but love. And this is the cruelest trap of all. She is terrified of disappointing him. Daddy's girl cannot bear the thought of losing his love. He can never know who she has chosen to love, because then his patient, quiet disappointment would force her to choose. And she cannot. Every day she is tortured by guilt. She is a Bad Girl. She has been given everything, had every advantage, and still she cannot put her heart into the small measure of responsibility that the world asks in return. But while she cannot bear to choose Harry Potter over her family, or her family over Harry Potter, her choice is already made, and it is inevitable, because she has chosen him over any suitor that their quiet, thoughtful calculations of bloodline and political advantage could ever bring to her door. This is why she taunts him for his "low-class" behavior, and seeks to part him from "the wrong kind of friends". Because she harbors the fantasy, impossible though it is, that he, Harry Potter, the boy who holds her heart, can somehow become, be accepted as, one of the elites, as defined in the rules of her world. It's impossible, of course. He's a half-blood. Sure, he has power and skill in his own right, even fame, but for a child of the Malfoys? Never. So she yearns for him, succumbing sometimes to temptation and pulling him near, only to drive him away again as she is wracked by guilt and shame. She cannot choose him, cannot commit to her love for him, until she begins to see that her father, following his beliefs, has made reckless choices with dire consequences. Until she begins to think the unthinkable... that her father, the lordly, infalible Lucius Malfoy, might be wrong. Oh, not wrong that some people are better than others. She believes she is one of the elite, deserving of privilege, and she will believe this to her dying day. No, her father is not wrong about the order of the world. He is merely wrong about how those elites are to be discovered and known. Harry Potter, in the final dark days before the war, has shown his nobility. He is one of the elite, whether her father can see it or not. That is the moment she can say, in the privacy of her own head, I love him. I love him, and the question is not, was never, whether he is worthy of me. But whether I was worthy of him. She does not know. But she must try. She must run to his side, to stand with him, fight beside him, to add her strength to his in the hour of greatest need. To declare to the world that she chooses him, to declare it even without knowing, in that moment, if he will choose her in return. A leap of faith. Because she has loved him, but up to this moment, she has loved him selfishly, making her feelings of love, of being in love, more important than him. So now she must declare what she hid, without protecting herself, heedless of risk. It is not sacrifice itself, but choice to sacrifice, willingness to sacrifice, that calls the power down. (That's how I'd write it, anyway.)

Now that I've dabbled in this trend a bit, and played around with what's possible, I'm going to put on my *other* Serious Professional Author Hat, and explain why you like her so much. Draecena, or Draconia, or Drakenia, Malfoy — the "Mal-foid" — is NOT a gender-swapped version of Draco Malfoy. That's why her eyes are green and not grey. She's a completely different character. She fits into the socket that Draco fills in the story, but for an author, characters are defined by their wants. Because their wants determine their choices, and their actions, and these determine the ultimate outcome of the story. Draecina is a different person from Draco, because she wants different things. Draco, as written, is a simple creature, created for a simple utilitarian role in the story. He wants power and attention. He wants to advance his family's political agenda. He wants to defeat Potter. Rowling may have put a little spin on the ball in the later books, but he never strays too far from this. Draecina is completely different. She not only wants more things, she wants conflicting things, and she is torn between them. She is split between duty, love, and pride. She wants to advance her family's cause and political agenda, to help them, to earn their love and make them proud. And for this, like Draco, she must defeat Harry Potter and everything he represents. But she is also a teenage girl. And she wants to kiss the most popular boy in the school. The hero, the sports star, the celebrity. No, she takes that back, she doesn't just want to kiss him. She wants him to kiss her. And more fundamentally, she wants him to yearn for her, as she yearns for him. Look at me, Harry Potter, her soul cries. See me. Do you think I'm beautiful? Please think I'm beautiful. Please want me. But she cannot say a word of this. Because she also has pride. She cannot, she will not face the humiliation of anyone else knowing how she worships her mortal enemy. No one must ever see the stolen scarf she presses to her face, in the darkness of her bedroom. But if she is to say nothing, how will he ever know? How will he ever look at her? This is the rack she is stretched upon, torturing herself inside her head late at night, tossing and turning when she should sleep. Conflicting wants make the best, deepest, most living characters, and drive the best stories. Through the alternate set of books (that exist now only as a shared idea in scattered heads) these drive her actions towards Potter himself... not simply opposition and aggression, but a dance of approach and avoidance, of fights and arguments and timid, plausibly deniable bids for something more. Until, as in the originals, the two are driven to crisis point, a violent confrontation, each desperate not to hurt the other, but also driven to violence by the fear that this other holds no goal but lethal hate. And Harry, seeking only to defend himself, strikes her down with a magic that does not merely disable but *cuts* with lethal force, tearing into her body, almost killing her, and leaving her with a terrible scar across the smooth, soft, perfect white skin that his eyes used to devour the merest glimpse of. This is the worst point, the pit, the long dark night of the soul that every author must eventually walk a character into. Draecina curses herself for a fool. None of it meant anything. He never cared for her. He hates her with every fiber of his being, and why would he feel otherwise? But try as she might, she cannot actually blame him. He overheard her plotting his death. They fought. Is it any wonder that he struck at her with whatever weapon he had to hand? She cannot stop loving him, even though she knows now that it is utterly hopeless. In her hospital bed, left unable by her injuries even to toss and turn, she stares at the ceiling and weeps in despair. Harry feels... sick. He fought for the right cause, he knows that. But this doesn't feel like goodness, and it doesn't feel like winning. It feels wrong, like he has destroyed something beautiful. He has left her with terrible scars, and terrible memories, that she will carry for the rest of her life. More than anything he wants to go to her, to kneel beside her hospital bed and beg her forgiveness. But that is foolish. She hates him. He is the last person she would ever want to see, and she would never, ever forgive him. It's hopeless. This is the greatest task of the author, to create this terrible moment, and then, somehow, perform some magic to walk these characters to the ending the story demands, where the day, the hero, and the world are all saved by the very thing that started the story to begin with... the love of a woman who would give her life to save his. Except this time, that love is not an inheritance, for Harry is no longer a child. He is a man now, facing a dark and terrible enemy, and that love is not simply given, nor can it even be earned. It must be inspired. And the two lovers must defeat their enemy together... not through a cheap magic trick, nor through a vague and sappy appeal to ill-explained abstraction like "the power of love", but for the very real and concrete reason that heroes have friends and allies, families and lovers, while tyrants have only reluctant and fearful slaves. And from that first inflection point, the pit of despair, it is difficult to see the second, the moment of triumph. In all the best stories, the ones that really matter, there is a moment so dark that sometimes we don't want to go on, because how could the ending ever be happy? But we must go on, because that is the third moment the story demands, the moment we must reach. And it is not Harry, but Draecina, who must give it to us, that happy ending. Look at me, Harry Potter, she must say. Look at my scars. I will not hide them from you, not anymore, though they make you flinch with guilt and turn away. Look at me. I forgive you, my love, not merely because I love you, but I because I understand in my very soul the impossible trap you were caught in, the conflicting forces that tore you apart inside. But you must look at me, all of me, and see me as I am, flawed and scarred and imperfect, for I must know if I am still beautiful in your eyes, if you can accept my love and forgiveness as I have accepted yours. We must bury the anger and bitterness that passed between, and pass on only good to the next generation. Because I have just learned that the next generation is coming very soon now, and I hope we are ready. It takes a wise character to say this, so she must grow throughout the story from a scared and lonely little girl to a woman who can face the future, even though she is afraid. This is why you love this character. Because she makes a beloved story into something that is even more about the things that matter, the universal experience of what it feels like to be a human. And it's why I'm not ashamed, nor embarrassed, to "fix" a billion-dollar success story. Because humans are a pack animal. We hunt together, and build on each other's work. Everything we have achieved as a species, from great stories to great civilizations to rockets to the stars, was built on foundations laid down by others, and will be the foundation for others to build on. Frodo carries the ring across Middle-Earth, through Mordor, and halfway up the mountain. And then it's your turn to carry him the rest of the way.

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