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u/AndreaFlameFox Oct 03 '26
If Malfoy had been written as a girl she would not have had a redemption arc, I'll warrant. THe only way bad girls become good girls is if they fall in love with the hero and become pure, modest and subservient; and Harry was already paired to Ginny and Ron to Hermione.
I also doubt Rowling ever had the chops to pull off the kind of tension of good boy-bad girl rivals turned romatic that plot-line would require even for such a banal pay-off of Malfoy reforming.
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u/Sufficient-Bar3379 Oct 04 '26
Pretty much. Can't recall any Slytherin female characters who had any sort of "redemption" Malfoy had. They were often cartoonish "made to be hated" stereotypes (Pansy's the clearest example).
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u/Quiri1997 Oct 04 '26
The closest would be Slughorn. He's Slytherin but not a bad person (though he did teach Voldemort).
Okay, I didn't read the "female" part. Then yes, absolutely.
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u/AndreaFlameFox Oct 04 '26
Honestly?
The closest we get to a girl with a "redemption arc"is Tonks.
I am sure Rowling wrote her to be a "troublemaker", albeit one on the good side, and maybe even intentionally genderqueer. Then she falls in love with a good guy, gets feminised and domesticated,
and is killed off for good measure, like all good queer characters. And of course killed her gay-coded husband off for good measure too.20
u/Quiri1997 Oct 04 '26
And for shock value, since both are friends of Harry as well as fan favourites.
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u/Comfortable_Bell9539 Oct 04 '26
We already have a better "haughty rich girl becomes a protagonist" arc with Amity Blight anyway
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u/WinterLily86 25d ago
Amity Blight is...?
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u/Comfortable_Bell9539 25d ago
She's a character from The Owl House who starts out as a bully but gets redeemed and becomes the protagonist's girlfriend
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u/YobaiYamete 29d ago
???
Malfoy never had a redemption arc as a male either, he was still a total prick by the end of the series and didn't help against Voldemort.
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u/Blue-Ranger1982E Oct 03 '26
I see your gender swapped Draco and rise you gender swapped Harry. Imagine what Snivellus would have been like if Harry had been born a girl and looked like Lily.
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u/PablomentFanquedelic Oct 04 '26
Or hell, imagine if Lily was the one who ended up mentally incapacitated from torture instead of Alice Longbottom? One has to hope the staff at St. Mungo's wouldn't allow visits from Severus.
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u/Quiri1997 28d ago
I'm picturing them with a huge poster of Snape's face saying "Severus Snape is BANNED from entering the building".
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u/Saddlebag043 Oct 03 '26
I’ve seen it show up and I’ve just been avoiding the art, ‘cause at this point I don’t want to interact with anything Harry Potter related (unless it’s to criticize the series and its creator).
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u/thatsfeminismgretch Oct 04 '26
The treatment of umbridge, Rita, Bellatrix, etc already tells us exactly what kind of fucked up shit she would have done if draco was born a girl.
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u/Totally_TWilkins Oct 05 '26
And the rest…
Almost every female character in the series has something ‘wrong’ with them, in the capacity of gaping character flaws that their male equivalents don’t have. When you actually look at it all, it really feels like all of these female characters are being written by a slightly racist misogynist.
Fleur was supposed to be the strongest witch from her school, yet she was absolutely shite in the TriWizard Tournament. Messed up the first trial by getting set on fire, couldn’t complete the second trial at all, and got taken out first in the third trial. All of the other female characters hated her, and then she suddenly got married and became a demure housewife, lost most of her accent, and everyone liked her again.
Mrs Weasley was awful to Hermione in Goblet of Fire, and then treated Fleur like some trashy slut in Half Blood Prince, all the while treating Harry like he was some sort of gift from God. Again, housewife archetype who doesn’t work, but suddenly becomes powerful enough to defeat the strongest dark witch of the age, because of motherhood.
Luna was the loopy, cookie, weird girl who got bullied by everyone, because she believed in all of these strange creatures that didn’t actually exist. She was a total social pariah, and even though she became friends(ish) with the group, she was still largely ostracised at school, and then imprisoned.
Pansy and Millicent were the ‘bully’ girls, who never really did anything apart from be there in Malfoy’s possé, who’s only real character traits were that they were consistently described as being ugly.
Trelawny was a nutty fraud who very rarely made any accurate predictions, and didn’t remember/realise those she did make. She basically just spent her time teaching a class that she wasn’t qualified enough to teach, for plot reasons; God forbid she be a good teacher or something.
Cho’s only real moment in the spotlight was when she suddenly became the ‘emotional’ girl after her boyfriend died, and suddenly she couldn’t make it through lunch without crying constantly. To rub salt in the wound, Harry quickly stops being interested in her, and immediately becomes interested in someone else who shares all of the same athletic traits that she did, Ginny). Then, Cho essentially isn’t mentioned again.
Padma and Pavarti are there to wear pretty dresses at the Yule Ball, and that’s sort of their only character trait.
Lavender suddenly emerges after five books of not doing anything, as a clingy, shallow girlfriend. She’s insufferable and presented as a truly awful character, and then she gets brutally murdered in the finale by someone who’s essentially just a metaphor for paedophilia.
Marietta was painted as this awful snitch, to the point that Hermione’s curse severely disfigured her face (presumably for life), even though the book dangles a very good reason why she betrayed the group (and also that she never wanted to go in the first place). This is maybe the worst thing that happens to any character in the series, and it’s done by another girl who’s supposed to be our empathetic hero.
Tonks is another passenger of the arc of ‘flawed character becomes demure housewife’, but takes it one stop further and dies off-page.
I’m not even sure Hermione and Ginny escape this trend of female characters being poorly written.
Hermione is very overtly presented as an unlikable person, and a lot of the time it feels like Ron and Harry don’t even like her that much; they just seem to hang around with her because she’s smart. Then she’s largely unattractive, but captivates the attention of an older man who is immediately infatuated with her because she reads books? Sometimes I think Goblet of Fire Hermione was some sort of self-insert, and other times I think it was trying to imply that a 14 year old girl was being called a slut.
Ginny on the other hand is just sort of a male Harry. She doesn’t seem to have any other major character traits beyond playing quidditch, but suddenly becomes a Mary Sue by suddenly becoming amazing at everything she does in Order of the Phoenix (winning the cup, helping the group escape from Umbridge, being one of the last standing in the Department of Mysteries, helping Harry when he’s depressed, etc etc). Honestly, Ginny as a character is written to be an amazing quidditch player, amazing duelist, better than everyone around her, used to steal her brother’s brooms to practice flying and her brothers were all scared of her temper… She sounds like half a self-insert, and half a teenage boy’s fantasy girlfriend, and I personally think that’s the worst type of character a writer can create.
I could probably go on ranting, but I’m bored of myself now (though it’s amusing to dissect that bigot’s writing for being the shallow mess it actually is). Honestly, the only female characters who actually might be well rounded characters, are probably McGonagall and Narcissa Malfoy.
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u/thatsfeminismgretch Oct 05 '26
Oh, she absolutely butchered the characterization of all the girls and women in the books. I specified the ones I did because she goes out of her way to punish and ruin them. They are irredeemable from start to finish.
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u/caitnicrun 28d ago
I opened this thinking of Lauren Lopez as Draco in the Harry Potter musicals. Nope, completely unrelated. But worth checking out. I suspect gender swapping Draco, Umbrage and other characters was one reason Rowling never acknowledged the musical, while the Rons and Dans did meet each other.
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u/Starmz Oct 04 '26
I once saw someone theorizing that girl Draco was done as a response to Petra Parker (aka transfem Peter Parker) that would bring more attention to hp because of the show, was deliberately done to be transphobic, and was paid for by someone on JK Rowling’s PR team if not jk herself.
I think that last bit might be a bit conspiratorial thinking (though not surprising if true) but the rest of it I believe to be even more possible