Heyy, what's your favourite thing about Drarry?
Okay, so first of all, this question is HARD. And by hard I mean I spent like a week staring at this ask in my inbox and then realised there was no way I was coming up with a good enough answer without the help of @paoak. In fact, I would have been a fool to try. So, after an hour long session of brainstorming in the library like the obsessed fools we are, and in no particular order…here’s an incomplete list of our favourite things about Drarry:
- The fandom. The fact that it’s active, and thriving, and that it’s not just content creators that participate in it; that there’s so many fans out there making fic recs, giving stratosferic amounts of love to the creators, organising fests…
The fandom as a whole is also incredibly open-minded. Like…we have other fandoms that we can’t bother to be so active in online because of the amount of judgement and pettiness and antis in them, but Drarry? Ship and let ship, YKINMKBYKIO… With some exceptions, this is practically all we’ve seen in this community, and that’s honestly so refreshing.
We also love the way problems are faced in the fandom; how so many people explore themes such as sexuality, race, neurodivergence and politics (to name a few) in such a sensitive way, and how we as a community don’t stay quiet in the face poor fandom etiquette, such as not tagging sensitive content properly, reposting or anon hate. Like dude…we’ve got each others’ backs. How awesome is that?
- Their dynamic. In Paoak’s words and to put it simply, Drarry is, to the core, a snarky pining son of a bitch x an oblivious cinnamon roll willing to roast him every single time.
And like…yeah, there’s so many ships out there that are enemies to lovers, or that have shared trauma, or that have clashing/opposite personalities, or that meet as kids. But I don’t know that many that combine all of the above. And all of these are represented in so many different ways depending on when the fic is set! Drarry bickering innocently as kids, Drarry discovering their sexualities and feeling all the UST as teens, Drarry figuring out their lives as adults… Canon and everything that comes before and after it leaves us with such a wide range of ages to explore that you don’t see in many other ships.
And that’s not even mentionint how complementary they are. They were literally written to be everything the other is not and, in many aspects, to have the things the other wants the most. They’re made to clash against each other; they have every reason to hate each other, but, when it comes down to it, they come back to the other like metal to a magnet. Which gives so much room for us to imagine them coming together post-canon; growing and changing the other for the better, posing a challenge for the other, and driving each other mad. They just need each other, but the best part is—they do in canon. Their dynamic, the intensity between them—it’s all there in the books, if you just dare see it. But because Drarry itself is not canon, there are…quite literally no restrictions. There’s a different Drarry for every one of us depending on the way we interpret it. Canon is a strong foundation—one where we’re all free to build as many castles as we want.
And even though they’re so unstable, even though they’re always at the edge, there’s…balance, between them. Some people see their dynamic in canon as bullying, but from the perspective of yours dearly, who happens to be a victim of bullying…there’s a big difference between the unbalance that bullying entails and the constant back and forth that goes on between Drarry, and that leaves a different one of them coming on top every time. A back and forth that, by the way, only goes on until it really matters: when lives are at stake—that’s when they risk it all to save the other. Without hesitation.
And that’s where it gets the most interesting. Because at first glance, one could say that Draco is bad and that Harry is good. But if you dig a little bit deeper, they’re both scared, clueless, traumatised kids. They’re both flawed. Think of just the Sectumsempra incident, or how Draco can’t bring himself to kill Dumbledore despite everything that’s at stake. It’s nice to read about perfect characters from time to time, but if you want to explore everything there is to see in the gray area of life, fiction, and morality, Drarry is that ship that just takes your hand and walks you through every other path you may want to explore.
Which takes us to the last point:
- The heavy themes. Combine points one and two together—a fandom that is huge, alive, open-minded and sensitive and a ship that is everything but simple—and you’ll end up with a vast amount of fic that explores the most complex themes, often avoided in media and even within other fandoms, without stepping out of their explosive ship dynamic. And all of it often in the context of YA literature; adult, problematic, serious themes, combined with fun, adventure and magic.
And because god forbid that we did any studying instead of coming up with this hell of an answer, we even made our own (again, incomplete) list of themes that we’ve seen, loved, and learnt from in the Drarry fandom: infidelity, PTSD, grief, mental illnesses, self-discovery at all stages of life, sexuality, neurodivergence, disabilities, post-war politics, abuse, self-harm and suicide themes, denial of feelings, the brutality of war, the harshness of realising you’ve been kept from the real world and the discovery of it, unrequited love and a lack of communication even when there’s sex, consent and dubcon, and last but not least, sexual encounters that range from vanilla to BDSM, but that aren’t just smut for the sake of smut; that teach you about boundaries, and kinks, and safe/sane/consensual, and that act as a way for the characters to express emotions they’re trying to hide, and to connect. For their story to evolve; for them to change together.
