PLEASE tell me your thinky thoughts about draco as peter pan and lucius malfoy/jason isaacs as hook. please. i am begging you.

ifeelbetterer:

weeeeeelll if you insist! 

First of all, Draco’s experience throughout the books is infantilizing-as-protection. Harry’s tragedy is always about being made to be an adult before his time, but all of Draco’s trauma and tragedy comes from being too much of a child. At every turn, Harry is asked to be the adult to the adults in his life, but Draco is always positioned as the child, even when it’s bad for him. 

So Draco’s connection to Peter Pan to me is all about that eternal childhood thing. We romanticize children in narratives like Peter Pan, but there’s also the fundamental fact that Peter will always be cruel and heartless because he’s a child. This is the same with Draco—the parts of him that are cruel and heartless come from that same extended childhood. And Lucius-as-Hook is both Draco’s villain but also a piece of his victimhood. His father is the adult who should have known better, just as Hook is the adult who shouldn’t be obsessed with a child nemesis. Hook’s villainy comes directly from the fact that he’s an adult in a child’s world and that his lack of empathy is therefore inexcusable. Lucius plays a similar part to Draco in that Draco’s posturing and tantrums make sense for the 11-year-old but are evil in the adult. 

[And the Malfoys are such an interesting parallel to the Dursleys because it would be very, very easy to narratively construct them as unloving and cold. In fact, a lot of fic falls into this pattern simply because it’s actually so shockingly (and secretly) innovative that there is never any doubt that Draco is loved by his family and Harry just is not. So the question of love is not tied to right or wrong and it’s certainly divorced from being a good person.]

There are also a lot of ways in which Hook functions as a mirror-adult of Peter and vice versa. Both of them are leaders of communities, both have the same fighting skillset (though Peter has the additional power of flight), and both become fixated on Wendy. It’s similar to how Lucius and Draco are parallels of each other. Both Lucius and Draco lead their communities, both rely on the same skillset to maintain authority and/or cultural capital, and both have the same weaknesses. But the key bit is that Draco “fails” to be his father’s true parallel, though his “failure” is somewhat intentional and is a definitive sign that he’s a better or more salvageable man than his father. So the adult version of Draco, once freed from the oppressive childhood of the war years and his Hogwarts life, is a man who can raise a Scorpius and who can form that cold-but-functioning bond of fellow civilians with Harry that we saw in the epilogue. Essentially, Draco’s childhood is a sort of mirrorverse version of Peter Pan-as-villain.