Over the past few weeks*, an interesting phenomenon has been gaining steam in a section of Harry Potter fans who spend a lot of time online. This makes them a small subset of the population, but wow, are they enthusiastic about this cool new thing.

What is this cool new thing, you ask? People are asking themselves what the Harry Potter books would look like if Draco Malfoy, Harry’s schoolboy rival, was a girl. Not trans. A girl. That’s important. And they started making fanart. Then came the memes. Then the fanfics.

Thus was born the ‘Malfoid’ phenomenon, where the wizarding ‘prince’ Draco is portrayed as, essentially, a wizarding princess. A rival to Harry in school who has a secret crush on him, and they slowly come together and fall in love, and through the strength of that love, defeat the bad guy.

Aww. So cute. And I’m not being sarcastic; there is some genuinely good fanart and fanfiction popping up as the trend becomes more widespread. It’s nice to see people openly celebrating a young man and a young woman slowly falling in love and overcoming adversity together. And it’s amusing to read a rewritten scene where only the pronouns have been changed, and see how it changes- or doesn’t change- the original story.

As you may have guessed, I have words of encouragement about this whole thing, and words of caution.

First, the encouragement. There’s been an explosion of creativity surrounding Malfoid, and I love it. It’s great to see people practicing their art and writing- there’s even music about the rewritten universe- and the fandom, for the most part, has been positive and encouraging (there’s always a small percentage of jerks; ignore them). So far, the loudest grumbling has been against people who try to turn something wholesome and cute into something degenerate. It took almost two weeks before I started seeing anything that even came near Rule Thirty-Four; that’s rare for the internet. Keep pushing back against that; this is a cute trend, and I, at least, would like to see it stay that way. Also, the characters are children for most of the original story.

There are some excellent tropes that are being used in these fanfics, some of which have been desperately needed by readers, and creators haven’t been able to give them. The sweet, growing-up-together romance, the self-examination that Malfoid would have to go through to become a worthy partner for the hero, the hero and heroine coming together to fight the bad guy as one unit- these are all classic romance tropes, and for good reason. They tend to lead to healthy relationships in real life, and they make for entertaining fiction. And Western fiction has been sorely lacking in them for the past few decades- it’s all about the bickering love interests who seem to hate each other. We need less of that, and more of Malfoid.

Now for the caution. When you engage in fanfic, you’re playing in someone else’s world. JK Rowling has been very kind in allowing us to do so. Keep in mind that this was and is her world. Changing the story… well, it changes the story, and while changing Malfoy to Malfoid might make a better story arc, it also makes it less attractive to publishers of its time. Consider the nineties and early 2000s. Do you think a sweet, clean, teenage romance between a boy and a girl would reach the same heights of popularity that the original story did? I don’t. We’re only having this discussion because she wrote the original work and made it hugely popular. Ragging on her because she wrote a coming of age story instead of a romance kinda misses the point.

The trend has also started to become political. I understand the impulse of portraying a character who is so high-status that she doesn’t need to worry about a brain-to-mouth filter, and can get away with saying whatever she wants. Just remember that this started out as a sweet and wholesome trend. It’d be nice if it stayed that way. Also, the internet is forever; don’t put your name on a work that you’re likely to regret owning later. Use your judgment.

Now on to one of my personal pet peeves: people portraying Malfoid as an adult that she wouldn’t become without a whole lot of extra character development. Wanting the reward without putting in the work. Because the rewrite works for the book canon; you can get a great story with remarkably little change to the original words Rowling wrote. But I’m now seeing memes of Malfoid as an apron-wearing, cookie baking, loving wife and mother in the American middle class style, and those throw me so far out of the story, it might as well be on the other side of the galaxy. I get around it by reminding myself that it’s fanfic, but I’m worried this mindset is going to spill over into original creative works.

I’m probably more sensitive to this than most people, because I read and write historical fiction, and it grinds my gears when authors put a modern character with blatantly modern sensibilities into a historical setting.

This is not simply a temporal issue; it’s a matter of culture, and it’s relevant to the Malfoid phenomenon because a British wizarding princess would not become an apron-wearing, cookie baking, loving wife and mother in the American middle class style, without another seven books worth of character development to justify it. She wouldn’t understand those things; she wouldn’t value them; she wouldn’t have the skills to do things like bake cookies- and would feel degraded by anyone suggesting she should learn. She’s a princess; baking cookies is something the servants do, and in-universe, they’re not even human servants. If you want her to do those things, you’ve got to show why she would want to do them in the first place- and Harry, having grown up with the abusive and utterly middle class Dursleys, is not going to be the one teaching her to engage with middle class values and activities.

(Actually, that’s starting to become a fun spinoff of the spinoff- examining how Harry would change when he got together with the princess. His family was one of the old and wealthy ones, if I recall correctly, but he wasn’t raised in the style that you’d expect from an aristocratic family. So it might be more realistic for Malfoid to keep being her princessy self, and for Harry to take a level in social class, even though that’s not the point of the sweet, wholesome Malfoid trend.)

Authors and artists: you get a certain amount of leeway when it’s fanfic; everyone knows you’re playing with the original work, and accuracy isn’t usually the point. But if you go on to write and create your own original works, pay attention to cultural clashes like this. The British wizarding aristocracy is pretty obviously based on the British (real) aristocracy; learn how that social class behaves before you go putting them in situations they’d never encounter in real life, and expecting them to behave the way you want them to behave. This specific cultural mismatch is usually not a priority for Americans, because our social classes look different, and it’s easier to move between them- you gain enough money, you rise in social class; you lose all your money, you fall in social class. British social classes are somewhat financially based, but they pay a lot more attention to family trees than us colonials do.

The same goes for any characterization and development- think about what the character would value and how they’d behave based on their experiences, and if you want them to have different values or behaviors, you have to explain how they got there, or it’s going to look like you want the reward without doing the work.

The Malfoid trend is still new and developing. It’s cute; it’s wholesome; I hope it stays that way. If you’re following it, use it as a springboard to develop your skills as a creator, and go out and create original works that explore the themes that made this trend so popular.

I eagerly await the seven book series that explains why she learned to bake cookies with her kids.

*Let it be known that I wrote the majority of this post a week ago, and in the way of internet trends, the Malfoid phenomenon has already altered somewhat. Mostly to the good. The quality of the fanfiction has been high, and it’s still mostly wholesome. But my point about cultural clashes is still relevant, so I decided to let the post stand as it is.