What do you love about Drarry?
This ask has been sitting in my inbox (and wriggling around in my brain) for some months. Others have answered it, very eloquently, and I didnât know that I had more to say. But I do. Thanks for asking.
I love Drarry because of how completely, and how instantly, the characters transcended their original narratives. How the community finished reading Deathly Hallows in July 2007, said âhmm,â closed the book, and promptly started tagging fanworks with EWE (Epilogue, What Epilogue?).
Because we all saw that epilogue for what it was: the kind of future that we might imagine for ourselves in grade school, doodling the name of our cutest classmate in our notebook and making up names for our kids. Or the kind of future some parents would write for us, where we marry their friendsâ children and never leave our hometown and never disappoint or surprise our elders.
But my hunch is that most of us, here in this space, have lived lives where we scrapped our own pre-written epilogues.
Whatever that has looked like for each of us â whether we came out, or got divorced, or left our religions, or had the baby too soon, or never had the babies, or have climbed mental health mountains, or picked a path less pristine â we chose different things to believe in.
Iâll be honest: I rarely return to the books that started it all. By now I know them enough. They live a bit in the same mental spaces as my own childhood. I love my childhood because I desperately love the smaller version of me who had so much to figure out! She was trying so hard and learning so much. But I donât spend undue time reliving the particular traumas that got me here.
And most of the guides I trusted back then, who tried to shape me into a particular ideal of what my future should be? I have left them behind. Itâs complicated. I could feel bad that their investment in me did not pan out the way they hoped, but I donât owe them who I am becoming.
Likewise, I love these kids that went to magic wizard school and went through unspeakable horror, often at the explicit maneuvering and brainwashing of their elders. I observe the ways in which they were manipulated and shaped to have certain futures.
And then I free them from their author. I let them grow up to be something different. The child I was recognizes the child they were, and then together we agree to go forward to messier, wider, more true stories.
I think this is why I can keep reading & writing Drarry even as their original author spirals into hateful existence. To me itâs like the âokay, well then, Iâm your mom nowâ response to a disowned trans kid or a pregnant sixteen-year-old.
We collectively see these (fucked up, and for good reason) characters and say, âokay! Well then, weâre your authors now. Get in. We've got places to go."
