Gaming With Dragons

The sun was high in the sky, casting golden light over the rolling hills of the Hogwarts grounds. Sirius stood by the entry of his temporary cave, arms folded across his chest, watching Harry soar through the air on the back of Buckbeak. The hippogriff's powerful wings beat rhythmically, each stroke gliding Harry faster across the lake, Harry’s laughter carrying faintly on the wind.

He laughed like his mother.

Sirius let out a low chuckle, shaking his head in disbelief. "Damn," he muttered under his breath. "Professor Grubbly-Plank never let us fly the hippogriffs. Wouldn’t even let us near them most of the time."

A smirk tugged at his lips as he imagined James' reaction. James, whose competitive streak had one of Sirius’ favorite characteristics. James, who never missed an opportunity to claim the best broom, the highest dive, the fastest lap around the Quidditch pitch. If James had been here to see this...

"Oh, he'd be throwing a fit right about now," Sirius tilted his head as he watched the animal arc back for land. "Harry getting to fly a hippogriff before he ever did? He wouldn’t let that go for weeks.”

The ache of loss that usually lingered just beneath the surface softened into something warmer. James was gone, yes, but here was Harry—alive, thriving, and so breathtakingly himself. He seemed to have his father’s confidence, his mother’s laugh, and something all his own that Sirius couldn’t quite put into words yet.

He transformed back into Padfoot, watching as Buckbeak tilted to one side, Harry adjusting easily, and laughing louder. Padfoot felt a rare kind of peace settle over him, a smile lingering on his face he laid down in the sunbeams pushing through the trees.

doing my full cast audiobook based reread of the HP books i think I've perhaps stumbled on something?

in this age of trolling and the internet, it can sometimes be a little strange to see all the things people say to each other that others are willing to physically fight about or even DUEL over, since these days online you can say "I like bread" and get called a scumsucking traitorous nimrod who really needs to crawl up her own ass and die twenty-seven times before bed. but there are a lot of instances where people are so incensed they leap to physical violence or dueling positions in these books, and i feel like I've cracked the code? And that code, by the way, is the Code Duello.

every time I can find that someone physically or magically attacks someone else (with one exception, will point that out) in anger, it's due to one of the following honor insults from the Code Duello:

Accusation of Dishonor (being called a liar, thief, coward)

Challenge to Reputation (being called a bastard, a fool, a villain, etc.)

Insult to a Woman

Spitting/striking

Questioning someone's status as a Gentleman

help me out if I've forgotten any...

Book 1, the first magic duel, Harry tells Malfoy he's not brave without Crabbe & Goyle around (calling him a coward, #1)

Book 1, Hagrid pulling out his wand against Vernon Dursley when Vernon calls Dumbledore a fool (#2)

Book 2, Arthur vs Lucius, Lucius says he thought Arthur's family could sink no lower due to them being with the Grangers (could be both (#3)

Book 2, Ron draws on Draco (and the whole Gryffindor quidditch team essentially does the same) when he calls Hermione a Mudblood (#3)

Book 3, Remus calls Snape a fool (#2)

Book 3, Marge insults Lily and Harry blows her up (#3)

Book 3, Hermione slaps Draco after he calls Hagrid pathetic (#2)

Book 4, Draco goes after Harry with magic after Harry insults Narcissa in the ferret scene (#3)

Book 5, the Weasley twins and Harry go after Draco after he insults both their mothers (#3)

Book 5, Sirius and Snape both pull our their wands to duel after Snape calls Sirius a coward (#1)

Book 6, Snape attacks Harry and does in fact yell DON'T CALL ME COWARD (#1)

Book 7, Harry attacks the Carrows after they spit on McGonagall (#3, #4)

Honestly i only realized all this after thinking about Horatio Hornblower (1998) because I was reading Order of the Phoenix right when Harry and George jump Malfoy and thinking, what kind of Code Duello ass lack of control does Harry have here, he has about as much self-control as this midshipman from the 1800s being asked if his mother makes her living on her back. I am forced to conclude that Pureblood families do in fact abide by some kind of Code Duello about insults to honor, and Harry is sort of...just also like that.

The ONE exception is the Sectumsepra scene, but that's only because Draco attacks when he sees Harry, so it's not in answer to any kind of verbal insult. But like...that's a LOT of examples....am I missing anything?? This is especially striking to me on this reread because Harry even talks about how trash talk from the Slytherins doesn't bother him at all anymore. It really obviously does if they are doing it to his HONOR, though!

Crookshanks? The Potters' cat? IDK. I AM NO GOOD AT PROMPTING, YOU SEE.

The moonlight poured through the gaping hole in the ceiling, illuminating the fallen beams and scattered debris below. Broken timbers cast jagged shadows along the walls, where scorch marks marred the forest-themed wallpaper, baby animals still moving quietly through painted trees Lily had so carefully chosen for the nursery. A room that had once been bright with life and love now lay gutted, hollowed out by death.

Sirius stood at the center of it all while aurors and Ministry officials moved around him, calling to one another, shifting ruined furniture, tracing the residue of magic with their wands. Someone nudged at the still forms of Lily and James.

Sirius pulled Harry closer against his chest.

He was waiting for Dumbledore. He would not leave with some unknown medi-witch. He would not abandon them, would not leave Lily and James here alone, would not fail Harry now. He had to stay standing. He could not shatter into pieces and scatter across the floor like the broken roof at his feet.

Then, cutting through the noise, came a small, insistent meow.

Sirius’s head snapped up. There—an orange tail disappearing into the wardrobe.

Careful not to jostle the baby in his arms, he crossed the room and eased the wardrobe door open.

Inside, nestled in a laundry hamper, sat a fat ginger cat, entirely unharmed.

For a moment, Sirius just stared.

“Look, Harry,” he murmured, voice rough. “We’re not quite alone, are we? Good old Winston’s still with us.”

He crouched awkwardly, one arm still tight around Harry, and scratched behind the cat’s ear.

“You going to help me take care of him, then?” Sirius asked quietly. “Help me look after Harry?”

Ok having just reread Half-Blood Prince for the audiobook I'm struck with a few things we know about the ways Hogwarts has changed over the past 20-30 years, based on information we have from the books, and honestly, I'm fascinated by the implications.

Goblet of Fire - Apollyon Pringle Whipping Arthur Weasley

So we know that Pringle was the caretaker when Arthur and Molly were at Hogwarts, and the corporal punishment was so severe that it was leaving permanent scarring for things like "being out of bed at 4am to take a walk with your girlfriend." So, this seems like everything in the past was more strict, except..

2. Half-Blood Prince - Slughorn Reports Filch

This is really interesting to me! Slughorn has not been at school for at least a decade, and he's worried that Filch isn't worried about the right things.

3. Order of the Phoenix - Snape's Worst Memory

One thing worth mentioning that I don't see brought up often in discourse about SWM is that no one, at any point, goes or threatens to go for a teacher. I can't think of another altercation of that level in the main storyline where a teacher isn't sent for or arrives partway through. Usually, whenever hexes start flying, it's broken up and everyone sent to the hospital wing very quickly. Speaking of which...

4. Order of the Phoenix - Snape's Worst Memory - 2

Snape, James, and Sirius use spells against each other that in Harry's time would have him in detention for several months. While James and Sirius were in fact often in detention, none of this is treated as being for Intense Crimes like Harry and Draco throwing Crucio and Sectumsepra at each other.

5. Half-Blood Prince - "Petty Crimes"

James and Sirius indeed are often recorded as being in detention for "petty crimes" like hexing fellow students, and McGonagall, Flitwick, Hagrid, etc. treat this fondly in their reminiscences as precursors to the Weasley Twins. It could be memory making them fonder, but I further think that Hogwarts was just generally rougher in those days. And my final point to that effect...

6. Half-Blood Prince - Ginny and the Bat Bogey Hex

I really can't imagine a current teacher congratulating a student on hexing another student and rewarding them about it.

7. Goblet of Fire - Draco as Ferret

Yes, it's obviously Barty in disguise, and yes, he's pretending to be Mad, but it's not like both Barty and Moody didn't go to Hogwarts. Tbh I think it makes the most sense that Transfiguration As A Punishment is something that would have been done decades ago, that Moody would possibly remember.

Okay, conclusion: This all really reminds me of how a lot of Brits I knew in college would reminisce fondly about how when they were young, all the cops were unarmed and it was a good Saturday night to go out and get so rowdy with their friends that they got into fights with cops, whereas these days that's not really DONE. I'm not sure whether the school governors had MORE control, LESS control, were MORE involved, were LESS involved, but it feels like back then, Hogwarts was a much rougher place, and students were expected to be able to take care of themselves, and not rely on teachers to take care of them. Corporal punishment was common, hexes were casual, littering was unimportant.

8. Chamber of Secrets - Albus sends Tom back to bed

This could be seen as preferential treatment to a Prefect, or knowing he has a good reason, but when we go up against Arthur being strung up and whipped for being out of bed, or even Harry getting detention for being caught out of bed in his first year, it seems very indulgent.

9. Half-Blood Prince - They'll All Be In Trouble

It reminds me, a little, of how cruel McGonagall can be in her punishments - and how lenient, when she feels like it.

She is happy to take enough points from first years that they face real social stigma for half the year, just for sneaking out of bed and maybe tricking another boy. She was also yanking Draco by the ear. Even without the scary Forbidden Forest detention - that is harsh.

Then the next year - she teary-eyed lets Ron and Harry walk without escort to 'go see Hermione'... despite there being strict rules put in place because the Chambers were open again. Very much like Albus letting Tom 'hurry off to bed' even though its 'best not to roam the corridors these days. Not since...'

Filch also loves 'the good old days' of hurting students. Fascination with torture - or actual distaste in recent policy change...? hm...

But something seems different since the early 1960s when Arthur was at school, at the very least. Kids aint getting whipped/hexed now. Even in the 1970s, when evidently teacher reaction to bullying was still very lax - Sirius and James were getting detentions, not hurt.

I wonder if Albus Dumbledore becoming headmaster between 1966 and 1970 (probably the later end of that) had anything to do with it.

tl;dr link page:

"It seemed impossible that I would be able to come to Hogwarts. Other parents weren't likely to want their children exposed to me. But then Dumbledore became Headmaster, and he was sympathetic." (Remus, PoA ch18)

Remus was bitten in 1965. Until Dumbledore became headmaster his parents deemed it impossible for him to go to Hogwarts.

it's that very specific kind of closeness that a Gifted Kid and Favorite Teacher have, the almost parasocial thing (especially when you live at the school) of knowing there's someone that you want to indulge, someone you want to show off for, someone you want to impress, and all of that goes both ways

there's SOMETHING about the fact that he's the only person who talks about Lily as her own person, not about how she was with James, not about how fuckable she was, not about how beautiful she was, not about her sacrifice. but about how she was funny, and sassy, and clever, and inventive. about how missed she is, how loved she was on her own terms, for who she was, not because she was supposed to be filling a hole in a man's heart or a place at a man's side.

he's the only character we ever really see wrestle with the concept of WANTING to Be Good, not just to make a person like him, but because it's hard to be brave, it's frightening to stand up for what's right. he wants to be better than he is. Harry doesn't get the memory, truly, by telling him to do it for Lily. he gets it by saying, "you'll get to undo any damage you may have done that day by being brave now." he WANTS to be brave, but he doesn't think he is. it isn't just that he's willing to do it For Her, it's that the thought of her inspires him to want to be better on his own terms.

he's one of the only teachers (i would say Remus is the other one) who hits the Good Teacher Trifecta - he loves his subject, he's good at teaching, and he seems to genuinely like his students as people. yes, he plays favorites, and yes, he has his weaknesses. he's fallible, he's weak, he's pleasure-seeking, he's greedy, he's gluttonous. and he wants, underneath and through it all, to be better. he's dramatic, he's charismatic, he's charming, he's acknowledged by everyone from Lucius Malfoy to Albus Dumbledore as a great wizard, and he's one of the only people who truly gets to overcome his own weakness, going from letting Young Tom Riddle sweet-talk him into forbidden information to DUELING him in the Great Hall.

Molly, who has known Hermione since 2nd year (or possibly first year if Ron wrote her letters), believes Rita and treats her, a 14/15 year old girl like shit. It's not even a 'you can't treat people like this' type protective speech, the behaviour she shows is closer to bullying and very passive aggressive. It's immature. Molly is suppose to be a grown woman. She thinks Hermione is hurting/corrupting Harry and her response is to send Hermione comically small chocolate Easter eggs? Not to write to Harry and find out the truth?

And then you have Sirius, who has known about Hermione less than a year and only met her once and he doesn't even flinch at the sight of Rita's smear campaign - and we know that he was reading it because he was collecting every magazine and newspaper he could from Hogsmead as Padfoot. He doesn't react to it at all - no, instead he judges Hermione by 1. how she helped Harry rescue him the year before 2. how she stuck with Harry in gof when Ron didn't and 3. she ability to get a sense of people's personalities/character ("measure of him").

Maybe he understood that kids are kids: they fight today, make up tomorrow, and it’s their business. Maybe he and James had their own disagreements when they were young. Either way, it’s great. He didn’t change his positive attitude toward Ron, was always friendly to him (and Ron, in turn, defended Padfoot from Hermione’s criticism in Order of the Phoenix), and simply listened to Harry and sympathized with him.

#is literally walking in lock-step with marvolo and morfin's control over merope and it's actually very difficult to read when you start#making the connections between the two families.

#anyways i think that i would defend ginny weasley to the death because when you look at her from a purely watsonian perspective #a lot of her more 'bitchy' reactions actually make a lot of sense for a young girl growing up within a patriarchal hellhole that wants #to control women's sexualities because of how 'dangerous' women are when they are freely allowed to express their desire to be sexual

Maybe Hermione understood Cho Chang’s psychology, but Ron understood Padfoot.

It’s pretty ironic that in the situation with Sirius, Hermione sides with Mrs. Weasley, considering that Sirius always treated Hermione kindly (including when the newspapers were claiming she had broken Harry’s heart), unlike Molly, who acted pretty low toward her in that same situation.

Snape, as far as we can tell and adding historical context for the part of England he grew up in, lived in abject poverty. I'm talk a 4-room house without a bathroom. The old cartoons of men bathing in a big tin wash tub? That's a real thing that people as young as Severus Snape had to do! This is industrial revolution meat grinder industry, and Tobias Snape was either often unemployed due to a lack of available jobs once Margaret Thatcher and her ilk axed the coal industry or was injured at work (or both, both works.) The story implies that Tobias is a drunk, so the Snapes deserve what they get. The circle of Social Darwinism and all that rot: they are bad people, so they deserve misery, and aren't able to have a stiff upper lip and avoid complaining, so they make others uncomfortable by existing, which makes them bad people, so they deserve misery...

The Weasley’s are the ideal noble poor family. They make it work, buying all the kids' school supplies on the tiniest budget with minimal hand-wringing about it and absolutely no charity will be accepted. They win a big cash prize and blow it on a vacation because they don't really need the extra money to make ends meet. Arthur works hard, we don't see any of them smoke or drink that I can remember (contrast with Mundungus being chastised for smoking a suspiciously scented cigar and Snape's probably nicotine stained teeth) and they are just so happy and pleasant to be around. Sure their clothes are worn, but everyone has something warm in the winter because Molly knits! Sure, they are poor, but even with all the kids at boarding school Molly doesn't get a paying job. She does political activism volunteer work. Isn't that just so very conservative feminist of her? Arthur makes just enough, so long as they stick to the budget.

It's also worth noting that in-universe part of the reason the Weasleys may see themselves as being poor is that they are an old pureblood family and may to some extent be comparing themselves to families like the Blacks and the Malfoys - possibly because possibly not long ago they had similar levels of wealth which subsequently got lost.

I don't want to minimize the genuine pain and emotional impact going through that can have. No matter how much someone has, it can be extremely difficult and distressing if they lose what they consider to be their baseline standard of living. Having to make dramatic changes to your lifestyle and losing privileges you were used to is often extremely hard. And many times that is still true even if the changes someone has to make are giving up luxuries that most people could never have afforded or imagined to begin with. But even so, it is relevant context.

Anyway. I quite suspect the Weasleys don't even need a lot of money for the food either. Between the orchard, the vegetable garden, and the chickens (also in the wider series actual real pigs) that's a lot of food they don't need to buy anywhere. No wonder they could afford to blow all that money on those family vacations!

I think it's also a possibility we're all getting caught in differing definitions of 'poor'. I can't help but think of that one Simpsons post that periodically goes around, about how they were originally meant to be very poor and shabby but in the present day their lifestyle is way out of reach of most people, to the extent that they actually get thought of as rich these days. The same effect could be in play here - they're meant to be poor and perhaps in their own context they are, it's just that in present day circumstances that qualifies as rich.

Also probably what's poor among older pureblood families is different from what's poor among other people. For example Tonks probably defines poverty differently than Ron does or than her mother Andromeda does. After all, in many ways the Weasleys are quite similar to the Blacks & the Malfoys - similar views about nonhuman magical beings, implied cutting off of squib relatives, viewing muggles as inferiors (though the Weasley's believe in treating Muggles well, they seem them more as charming animals than equals). It would stand to reason they would have similar views on what constitutes poverty. Also, the Weasleys have a HUGE family compared to most families we see in the wizarding world so that also adds financial strain that most others in their circle don't experience

I don't think that people must be X amount of poor or X amount of suffering to count as poor. I wouldn't have a huge issue with the way the Weasleys are portrayed in the narrative if not for the contrasting framing of other poor families whose circumstances are much worse and who are treated very differently by the narrative.

This dissonance in treatment makes it feel like the story is saying if you are "too" poor then you're gross and terrible but also you should be happy with your lot and you can never climb out of those circumstances or be deserving of a happy ending the way your wealthier (morally superior) peers are. Like yeah Snape can redeem himself from being a Death Eater somewhat, but obviously he's not going to get the girl - that's for James the wealthy pureblood even though he never seems to have truly regretted his cruelty - nor is he ever going to leave Spinner's End or get to make it through the story alive - that's for people like Harry or the Weasleys.

Moral turpitude is linked to a greater level of poverty and those characters are never able to overcome it. Even later it clings to them and trying to climb out and not just accepting their fate as social subordinates is bad. Snape of course doesn’t get the girl and dies for his “betters”. Tom is defeated and his quest for higher status and dominance over the wealthy pureblood social elite leads him down a path of evil.

Also, I would say the other difference between the Weasleys and the Gaunts is not just how Dumbledore treats them, but also that the Guants are wayyyy poorer.

It's striking to me that Merope, Tom Riddle, and Snape all know what it is to be hungry. Ron, however, the poster child poor character, does not. There's literally a major plot point about how badly equipped Ron is to deal with having to go without. Harry also know what it is to be hungry but he was secretly rich the whole time so when he moves up in the world he’s actually returning to the status quo. We don't see much mobility that comes without judgement - except through marriage (Ginny to Harry and presumably Lily to James & Petunia to Vernon). Fred and George make it big with their joke shop and that's it. But they already started off in a much better situation than the true squalor that Merope or Tom or Snape grew up in.

Fantastic discussion of the the way wealth/poverty is treated in the Harry Potter books.

This is far beyond JKR's level of thought, but I sometimes wonder if magic doesn't react/respond to people's actions and priorities, such that the Weasleys, who care for their land, house, and family, put real work into growing vegetables and suchlike, have their needs comfortably provided for by their efforts, magical and mundane, while the Gaunts, who you really can't imagine gardening, are a more desperate-poor sort of situation, existing in utter squalor.

I do think there's an aspect of what you're allowed to do for yourselves that makes or breaks your poverty experience, and a large aspect of true poverty is the desperation that occurs when you're prevented in some way or other from accessing the benefits of your own efforts. England has a long history of poverty being made worse by denying the lower classes various sorts of access to the land and its produce. The Weasleys have enough land for a large, productive garden and some outbuildings, with no code enforcement people telling them they're not allowed to have chickens or whatever.

I think the Weasleys are very intelligent about leveraging what they have, and riding a fine line between the income and the expenditures, and I also think they've pushed their children to internalize that and not be asking for luxuries like their peers in other pureblood families have, and just like Dumbledore's excuse of not wanting Harry to be "treated like a prince" because of his celebrity in the wizarding world as part of the reason why he kept Harry away from them all, they kind of overdid it.

And Bill and Charlie flee to high-risk or high-paying jobs the instant they can, and Percy outright cuts ties with his family as an embarrassment in his pursuit of climbing the career ladder, and Fred and George gamble their life savings at age sixteen in the hopes of a windfall to start up a business and are selling their creations to their classmates before then to make that money, and Ron just sort of internalizes his family's poverty as a source of low self-worth and general shame, and Ginny, again, seeks out a high-paying, high-prestige job, and, though it may not be deliberately mercenary, a relationship with a person known to be wealthy, through years of his arguable indifference.

It just feels like the Weasley family's poverty was primarily of a created, contrived nature---that they're not really all that poor by the standards that matter, but by the standards that get applied to them and that they apply to themselves, there's a dynamic of defiance dancing with shame.

Molly does wonders on Arthur's salary, but she also thinks he can do better and advance higher at work; she very carefully doesn't bring finances into this, but directs a lot of subtle disdain and unsubtle complaints about his hobbies, interests, and choice of professional focus, giving the impression that she's more than a little embarrassed at the low status of his job.

It doesn't help that many of their peers, especially the other members of their social, rather than financial, class, are wealthy. Given Britain's type of class stratification, the impression is that of reduced circumstances, of Arthur "lowering himself" by going into trade or its wizarding social equivalent, and Molly, herself of pureblood stock, making an ill-advised love match to someone with dubious prospects, and stubbornly making it work, but not without some resentment at the man she married being the man she married.

Meanwhile all the Prewetts and Malfoys and Longbottoms and Blacks and whatnot are all looking down on them with varying amounts of disdain and pity, and their seven children grow up knowing not to ask for broomsticks or new clothes.

Godric Gryffindor was a goblin who forged the sword himself, and history pretends he was a human wizard.

Godric was a human wizard that married the goblin who made the sword.

Godric was adopted as family by the goblin who made the sword.

Draco - and kinda Lucius as well - is pretty squeamish about actual violence.

Draco plays a psychological game (... with varying degrees of success...) Books 1-5, he's never trying to *injure* or even *fight* Harry. He's more likely to take a punch himself, in order to get someone he doesn't like in trouble. Instead, he tries trick or frame Harry and his friends, makes up mocking songs, gets everyone to wear mocking buttons, does mocking impressions, is Snape's little hype-man, steals Neville's stuff, takes away house points for dumb reasons, idk. It would have been easy to write Draco as a little Joffrey Baratheon with violence simmering under the surface, but that's just not the character.

Then Book 6 starts, and we get this Draco newly forced to be violent, but even then... the way he deals with Harry on the train is to immobilize him, then break his nose by stepping on him, and immediately cover him with the invisibility cloak. That's a fascinating little interaction to me. Draco is keeping the violence very much at arm's length (leg's length) and then *covering it up* and refusing to look at it. All of his attempt to kill Dumbledore have so many intermediaries - get Rosmerta to give Slughorn the mead to give to Dumbledore, get Rosmerta to give Katie the necklace to give to Dumbledore. He's trying to keep his own violence as far away from himself as possible.

And then there's Lucius, who does kind of a similar thing. He doesn't care that violence *happens,* he just doesn't want to be there when it does. Bill makes that exact point - Lucius is fine with levitating/psychologically torturing muggles, but when the Dark Mark shows up - when things escalate to actual violence - he runs. In Books 1-4 he likes bribery and threats, but doesn't like... follow through? Even *Dobby's* punishments appear to be self-inflicted. Lucius' plan with the Diary is very Draco-esque (or I should probably say that Draco's plans are very Lucius-esque.) Give Ginny the diary that will awaken Slytherin's monster, as a way to get Arthur Weasey and/or Dumbledore in trouble. While he is far, far away.

In Book 5, Lucius is the one attempting to imperius people at the Ministry into doing things for him, and talking Harry into giving him the prophecy. He's contrasted with Bellatrix, much more comfortable with direct violence, who wants to run in guns blazing.

(I will say that Jason Isaac's Lucius Malfoy performance... threatens violence, in a way that Book!Lucius really doesn't. Movie!Lucius seems to enjoy grabbing/touching/hitting people with that snake walking stick. At least in Movie 2.)

(Tom Felton though... absolutely leans into Draco's discomfort with violence. I love the shocked little wince he does when Umbridge slaps Harry in front of him.)

We're social animals. Our main methods to resolve conflict are cooperation and avoidance. (And also fucking.)

Most violence happens in the heat of the moment. It is conflict resolution gone wrong.

There is a reason for why soldiers have to undergo training, and it's not just to teach them how to use their weapons. It's to overwrite the instinct that's telling them: "hey, can we solve this without putting our lives on the line?" They're basically put in a high-control environment, that desensitizes them and conditions them to obey orders.

Similarly, the Death Eaters are also a high-control group. It is unlikely that Death Eaters-in-training will undergo a standardized training-routine. However, it is likely that most of them (especially those recruited as teens and young adults) still undergo some (informal) training that does desensitize, condition and radicalize them.

If I had to guess, that group of Slytherins that was active during the first far (the one that is described by Sirius) did exactly that. For them, it was probably a string of escalating hate crimes. Insulting and bullying (muggle-born) classmates, hexing them in the halls, using the dark arts against them. Stuff like that. Once they graduated from Hogwarts, they were probably already radicalized enough to escalate things further, to commit acts of terrorism (against objects and places), to do violent attacks on muggles and other wizards and - at some point - to commit murder.

The Carrows are doing something similar in book 7, when they take over muggle studies and (defense against) the dark arts.

And this is where Draco diverges from Crabbe and Goyle.

From what we see in the books, Lucius seems quite content with the Voldemort's disappearance and the disbandment of the Death Eaters. He's probably quite glad that he can go back to bribe and bully the ministry for his own benefit. It's unlikely that he and Narcissa raised their only child to become a foot-soldier in a war against muggles that was already lost.

Draco will be the heir of their fortune. They don't teach him how to commit murder - they teach him how to commit tax fraud.

So when Draco is forced to become Voldemort's foot-soldier and to commit murder, he reacts like most people would: He tries - at least subconsciously - to avoid the conflict.

Going by the books? We know almost nothing about what Lucius Malfoy was up to doing during the first Voldemort war. He got a Dark Mark at some point. He (or maybe his father??) was given the Diary for safekeeping. Super debatable if he knew what the Diary did. (he definitely didn't know it was a horcrux.) Voldemort calls him "Lucius, my slippery friend" - whatever that means. Lucius was "cleared" after pretending to have been under the imperius curse, and has a pile of cursed artifacts that aren't exactly legal.

From there, you get into fanon and headcanons. What did Death Eaters in general get up to during the first war? Were there requirements of some kind? (people also have these discussions about Snape.) I've heard references to a JKR interview where she talks about Death Eater specialties? (I do not know if this interview exists, I haven't been able to find it.) Jason Isaacs has headcanons about Lucius.

This imo suggests that Lucius has, at minimum, no aversion to violence towards muggles. My own reading leans more towards the notion that he actively enjoys it, much like a hunter enjoys the chase of a deer through the woods. The death eaters take the implicit doctrines of pureblood society, wizarding supremacy and blood purity, to its logical conclusion: Muggles are less than human and thus, like animals, they can be hunted and hurt for sport. (And given that hunting is such a common pasttime for the aristocratic society the malfoys are mirrors of that metaphor is the one i come back to.)

This is also why I'm ambivalent towards the question if Lucius physically abused Draco. On the one hand, physical violence towards those persons that are deemed less than human in a particular ideology means that those subscribing to this ideology can still think they are acting humane even while they're committing atrocities. Draco is part of the in-group that is deemed human and worthy of dignity. So Lucius being violent towards muggles doesn't necessarily translate to him being violent towards his child.

I would say that for the world cup, the books do draw a line drawn between how far Lucius is comfortably willing to go, and how far, say, Barty is willing to go. Like, as far as Barty is concerned, Lucius & Co. are all tiny babies who aren't going far enough:

"They were merely making sport of Muggles. (...) I wanted to show those Death Eaters what loyalty to the Dark Lord meant, and to punish them for their lack of it."

Like *I* know Lucius is torturing them, I know psychological torture is obviously torture. But Barty's got physical torture on his mind, he blows his cover because he wants Harry to give him a play-by-play of how Voldemort tortured his death eaters "I expected him to punish them. I expected him to torture them. Tell me he hurt them, Harry..."

In my worldbuilding, and in my understanding of the Wizarding World --- wizards culturally split away in like 1700, but AESTHETICALLY split away closer to 1890. So: that leaves you with a world that is set up like 1700s England, but wearing a kind of 1800s-meets-medieval themed hat. The younger, more counter-cultural wizards seem to be pulling from later muggle fashion (the Weird Sisters sell T-shirts as merch) but in general. If you're being traditional. That's your cultural norm, and it doesn't match up that closely to a lot of mainstream 20th century fashion.

THAT SAID. Do I think the Malfoys are above doing some shopping at Paris Fashion Week? I absolutely do not. I got my Pinterest page right here, so lets look at some modern fashion the Malfoys would DEFINITELY wear: