"I have often said that Sherlock Holmes was the most remarkable man I ever knew. But even he was not untouched by time, by change, or by companionship. Nancy Drew came into his life like a spark meeting dry tinder: brilliant, unsettling, necessary..." - Dr. John H. Watson

Joe Rogan interviews Malfoid. JOE: "So you controlled Harry Potter's entire dating environment?" MALFOID: "I made it clear to him that I was his best option." The Joe Rogan Experience #9¾: Draconia Malfoy. Jamie, pull up the meme. Inspired by @schmede_AI #Malfoid #HarryPotter #JoeRogan

Malfoid - "I Really Wanna Stay at Your House" by Rosa Walton (Edgerunners). Inspired by creators like @AzratemES and @aidenguoai #Malfoid #HarryPotter #Anime #Hogwarts

Malfoid - The Princess is the Dragon We'll start with the name, because the name is where the story tells on itself. Draco means dragon. Everyone knows this and nobody acts on it. For seven books the boy who carried the name was read as a sneer with hair, a rich child's rudeness, a bully whose chief menace was that he could make a first-year feel poor. The dragon in him was taken as decoration. A family that names its children after stars will produce a Draco the way it produces a Sirius or a Bellatrix, and the reader files the name under pedigree and moves on. This is the polite reading. It is also, I think, a way of not looking. Change one thing. Make the dragon a girl, and make her the one the hero is going to love. The name stops being decoration at once. A boy named for a dragon is a boy with an unfortunate father. A girl named for a dragon, placed at the center of a love story, is a problem in the architecture of the story itself, because the fairy tale has a job for a dragon and a job for a princess, and they were never supposed to be the same job. The Monster and the Prize The old pattern is simple enough to draw on a napkin. There is a tower. There is a girl in it. There is a dragon between the hero and the girl. The dragon guards; the girl waits; the hero arrives with something sharp. Every element knows its place, and the story works because nobody in it is permitted to be two things at once. Draconia is two things at once. She is the obstacle and the reward, the fire and the tower, the thing to be slain and the thing to be won. The hero cannot rescue her from the monster, because the monster is the person he would be carrying out of the tower. The sword has nowhere to go. And this, I would argue, is not a flaw introduced by a joke about gender. It is the joke revealing something the original pattern was built to hide: that the monster was always rather close to the girl, that fear and desire have been kept in separate rooms by a story that profits from the wall between them. The enemies-to-lovers plot has always been the fairy tale with the wall taken down. Its real question is not whether the hero can defeat the dragon but whether he can stop wanting to, and whether the person on the other side of the fire can let him. Rowling's own school puts the warning over the door, in Latin, for anyone who cares to read it: never tickle a sleeping dragon. The motto reads like a school's joke about itself. In this version of the story it reads like a note about her. What the Dragon Is Sitting On Dragons hoard. We say it so easily that we miss how strange it is. A creature of enormous power spends its life lying on gold it cannot spend, in a cave it will not leave, waiting for someone to come and take the one thing it has arranged its whole existence around keeping. The dragon is not rich. The dragon is a prisoner whose cell happens to be full of treasure. The Malfoys are this exactly. Wealth, blood, secrets, the family name: all of it held, none of it enjoyed, all of it guarded by people who seem never to have asked what the guarding is for. And the Western imagination has been clear for a very long time about where that leads. In the Norse Völsunga saga, Fafnir begins as a man and becomes a dragon by brooding over stolen gold until the brooding is all that is left of him. He does not find the hoard and turn monstrous. The hoarding is the metamorphosis. C. S. Lewis repeats the lesson in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where a disagreeable boy named Eustace falls asleep on a dead dragon's treasure "with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart" and wakes up with claws. Nobody cursed him. He simply became what he was thinking. So when I say Draconia's arc is about what she is willing to let go of, I do not mean the money. I mean the thing underneath it: the conviction that a self is something you keep rather than something you spend. A dragon can only be saved by learning to want something it cannot guard. The House of Serpents She is sorted into Slytherin, whose emblem is the snake, and here the symbolism threatens to become redundant. Latin draco could mean a great serpent as easily as a winged beast, and medieval painters frequently could not tell the two apart. The Bible does not try. Revelation 12:9 names "the great dragon, that old serpent, called the Devil," folding both animals into one adversary. A dragon-named girl in the serpent house is close to the same thing said twice, which may explain why the canonical character always felt so airless. There was no second message in him. The name and the house said the same word. But the serpent is a more two-faced animal than the dragon, and that is where the air gets in. Yes, there is Eden. Yes, there is temptation and the lie and the crushed head. But the snake also sheds its skin, which is about the oldest image of renewal the West possesses, and it winds around the staff of Asclepius as the sign of healing. Jesus himself tells his disciples to be "wise as serpents." Slytherin's advertised virtues, cunning and ambition and resourcefulness, are not the virtues of villains. They are the virtues of people who expect to have to survive something. The richest serpent in the tradition is made of bronze. In the Book of Numbers the Israelites are dying of snakebite in the wilderness, and Moses is told to cast a serpent in bronze and lift it on a pole, so that anyone bitten who looks at it will live. The image of the thing that kills becomes the cure. Centuries later, in the Gospel of John, Jesus compares himself to that raised serpent, and the symbol passes from poison to healing to Christ without ever changing its shape. Here is where I have to be careful, because this is the point at which an essay like this one wants to cheat. The bronze serpent is a healing image. It is not a wicked snake that repented. Any story of transformation we read into it is ours, not the text's. And the text has a sequel that nobody puts on the greeting card: in 2 Kings 18, King Hezekiah smashes the bronze serpent to pieces, because the people have begun burning incense to it. The same object was deadly, then saving, then an idol, then rubble. If the serpent teaches anything, it is that these symbols do not hold still. They are not a code to be cracked. They are a weather system. Even the colors do some work. Slytherin's green and silver are cold, poisonous, moonlit. Gryffindor's red and gold are blood, fire, noon. A dragon, which breathes fire, has been placed in the cold house. There is a small contradiction lodged in her like a splinter, and stories of this kind are made of splinters. The Lion, Who Is Not Reliable Either Gryffindor's lion carries a weight of Christian association that is hard to shake, and in a British children's book it is impossible. C. S. Lewis made sure of that. He insisted Aslan was not allegory but "supposal," an imagining of what Christ would be if he arrived in a world of talking beasts, and the image was old before Lewis touched it. Revelation calls Christ "the Lion of the tribe of Judah." The medieval bestiaries told of lion cubs born dead and breathed to life by their father on the third day, which the church painters took as a gift. Rowling has said the Christian themes are there, and Harry's walk into the forest to die and his coming back are not subtle about it. And yet. The First Letter of Peter warns that the devil goes about "as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." Psalm 91 promises the faithful that they shall "tread upon the lion and adder" and trample "the young lion and the dragon" underfoot, which puts the two animals on the same side, both of them under the heel. The lion is no more guaranteed than the snake. Neither animal will tell you, on its own, what it stands for. This is inconvenient for symbolism and excellent for fiction, because it means the boy in red and the girl in green are both wearing emblems that could turn on them. Not a Code but a Composition It would be tidy to say that Christianity has one story about lions and serpents, and that this romance rewrites it. It would also be false. Genesis gives us the enmity between the serpent and the woman's seed, and the promise that the serpent's head will be crushed. It gives us no lion. Revelation has both the Lion of Judah and the great dragon in the same book, and they never meet; the dragon is thrown down by the archangel Michael, who does not appear on anyone's house crest. To set a serpent girl against a lion boy and call it the oldest story is to assemble a pattern out of pieces that were never in the same room. What the composition does hand you is a choice. The old pattern says one of them must crush the other, and the Harry Potter books more or less obey it: the serpent-faced Dark Lord is destroyed, the serpent-house heir ends the series small and frightened and alive by someone else's mercy. The rewrite keeps the enmity and declines the crushing. That is the whole wager. It is a wager about whether a story can carry hostility all the way to its end and spend it on something other than a death. Two Ways to Save a Dragon Here the tradition is generous enough to offer two endings, and honest enough that they do not agree. The first is Lewis's. The dragon-boy Eustace, miserable in his scales, is led by Aslan to a pool and told to undress. He scratches at himself and peels away a whole skin, and underneath it is another skin. He peels that one. Another. Three times he strips himself and three times he is still a dragon. Then the lion says, "You will have to let me undress you," and sets his claws in. "The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart," Eustace says afterward. It hurt worse than anything he had known. And then he is thrown into the water and comes out a boy. What the scene says about redemption is more exact than most sermons. Eustace must want it. He must try, and fail, and keep trying, because the lion does not touch him until he consents. But he cannot finish it himself. Grace and will are not competitors here; each is necessary and neither is sufficient. The shedding of skin, which belongs to the serpent, has been borrowed for the dragon, and the oldest emblem of renewal is used to end a monster. Because that is what happens. Note it. The dragon does not survive the scene. Eustace is saved by ceasing to be what he was. The second ending is Isaiah's, and it keeps everyone. In the eleventh chapter the wolf lies down with the lamb, the leopard with the kid, and a nursing child puts its hand over the hole of the cobra and is not bitten. Nothing in that vision is transformed. The wolf is still a wolf. The cobra still has its fangs. What has changed is only that the harm has stopped. The differences remain and the violence does not. These are not the same promise, and a story about Draconia will have to decide, even if it decides quietly, which one it believes. Lewis says what she is must be torn off her, and that it will hurt, and that she will be glad. Isaiah says she can keep the pride and the sharp mouth and the chin held up against the world, and simply stop using them to wound. I will admit which I find harder to imagine. Killing the monster is a story everyone knows how to tell. Turning the monster back into a child is a story Lewis has already told beautifully. But a creature that stays a creature, and is loved as one, and does no harm because it has chosen not to: that asks the imagination for something the sword never asked of it. What the Name Was Saying So the name was never decoration. It was a warning the story declined to read, and the gender swap, which looks on its surface like a meme about a boy with a bad haircut, turns out to be the thing that forces the reading. A girl named for the dragon, sorted into the house of the serpent, is both the monster and the prize, and possibly the prisoner of a hoard she cannot spend. The boy in the lion's colors, whose emblem means both the Christ and the devil depending on which page you open, meets her as an enemy, which is to say as the one person in the school whose attention she cannot stop wanting. Behind them stands a tradition in which the serpent's image can kill and heal and be worshipped and be smashed, in which the lion can save you or eat you, and in which redemption sometimes means the beast is stripped away and sometimes means the beast lies down and is left alone. None of it was planned by anyone. All of it is there. What the symbols give a writer is not a meaning but a set of pressures, and what makes the joke worth taking seriously is that the pressures all point at the same question, which is the question the fairy tale was built to avoid. What do you do with a dragon you are not allowed to kill? #Malfoid #HarryPotter

Malfoid will not be deceived by those muggles! #malfoid #HarryPotter

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Malfoid Edit) aka Sorcerer's Stone #Malfoid #HarryPotter #hogwarts #HarryPotterFanart

It's Friday October 16th and Professor Sybill Trelawney predicted this. #Malfoid #HarryPotter #hogwarts #Yearning

Professor Sybill Trelawney predicted this. #Malfoid #HarryPotter #hogwarts