Pen Robinson wrote:
Anyone remember my post equating Draco to Mabel or Veronica? Probably not. Never mind.
*waves hand excitedly in air*
Oh, I do! I do! Pick me! Pick me!
Yes, I remember "Malfoy is Mabel!" In fact, I've had it sitting around for ages, trying to think of some response that wouldn't be a naught but a "me too."
For those watching at home: in message #39144, Pen wrote about a genre convention of the old-fashioned boarding school stories from which the HP books are, in part, derived.
Pen wrote (excerpted from message #39144):
Malfoy is Mabel. Or possibly Veronica.
No, really. Come on, doesn't anyone else remember those delicious Girls' Boarding School stories we... well, I, at any rate, used to read? Stories in which Our Heroine (Pippa, or Daisy, or something similarly wholesome), the poverty-stricken but noble-in-character scholarship pupil arrived at a Jolly Good School and was promptly picked on by The Nasty Little Rich Girl (Veronica or Mabel) because she had No Money and came from a Poor Family. Our Heroine underwent many trials, petty nastinesses of all kinds were inflicted by Mabel (or Veronica), but Virtue Triumphed In The End. Usually there was a Poignant Scene in which Our Heroine came to Mabel's (or Veronica's) rescue, and Mabel (or Veronica) made a tearful recantation and Avowal of Friendship.
Hee. Oh, yes. I remember these. I found them bizarrely fascinating as a child. They were just so utterly alien to my life. Like reading about classical Athens, you know. Or Middle Earth. Or perhaps (given that I always thought those Jolly Good Schools sounded downright dystopian—as, for that matter, I do Hogwarts—more like tales from the Gulag. But indeed, that was precisely how they always worked. The "Rescue and Redeem" scenario was always the order of the day in the boarding school story.
Genre precedent here, of course, suggests that Draco Malfoy may well have a life-debt to Harry Potter looming menacingly in his future. This possibility has also been strongly suggested by fact that the text has been encouraging the reader to draw parallels between Harry-Draco and James-Snape ever since the end of the very first book.
It's always tricky dealing with genre precedent with the HP books, though, because the series is such an utter genre soup. This is a large part of its appeal, of course. I also think that it's the reason that we see speculations covering such an incredible generic range proposed on this list. Pip's "Spy Game" theory adheres to the conventions of the Le Carre-style espionage genre. "Redeemable Draco With D/H Ship" looks to the conventions of Romance. Pippin's "Lestrange Is Loose!" looked (quite self-consciously and entertainingly) straight to Agatha Christie, as—far less self-consciously—does her Evil!Lupin, IMO. "Fourth Man," despite its espionage-derived name, is also rooted firmly in Christie. "Ron As Seventh Son" is YA fantasy. "Harry Is the Heir of Gryffindor" is epic fantasy. And so forth.
The HP books do not really belong wholly to any of these genres, but JKR has borrowed elements of all of them in brewing up her soup, and so it is unsurprising that they should all find themselves represented when people try to speculate about where the series might be going next.
Of course, the fact that the series is such genre soup also accounts for people's wide and dramatic variance in what sort of future speculations they consider to be "canonically plausible." If what you're picking up on while you read the books are all of the boarding school story conventions, then suggestions that by Book Five the students are all going to be engaged in some sort of grim warfare are likely to strike you as utterly ludicrous. If you're looking to the epic fantasy influences, on the other hand, then you're more likely to be expecting the story to "take to the field" in Book Five, as fantasy novels are often structured to do precisely that once past their midpoints. And of course, if you're looking to JKR's Agatha Christie influences, then no secret identity or missing person plotline can ever seem too convoluted or too improbable to be canonically likely, so long as all of the usual Christie textual clues seem to have been laid properly in their places.
But back to Malfoy As Mabel (or Veronica), I do find it reasonably likely that JKR might eventually smack Draco with a life-debt. It's been amply foreshadowed, and there is strong genre precedent. It does seem a bit less likely to me post-POA, though. After all, how many times can JKR really plan on pulling that whole life-debt schtick?
::Thinks of unregistered animagi. Shakes head.::
Well. Yeah. So who can say?
—Elkins
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