Leila wrote: Thanks for responding. I'm so interested in hearing different people's perspectives on these things.
I can see that . . . again, I'm saying all this in the context of how great that series really is. It's a great fantasy series, with some expert worldbuilding that goes down smooth, despite its complexity.
But it's also a great YA series, and I'm quite the "newbie" when it comes to YA. Writing for young adults is a different, specialized challenge, and the YA aspect is going to make things go a certain way. I've had some people say that Draco behaves exactly the way a child's rival should behave in YA --- and for all I know, they're right. Not only do I not write YA, I haven't read much of it either.
It's important to remember that you can't please everyone. If JK Rowling had attempted to do that, she almost certainly would have produced something very forgettable. If she made a certain choice in writing her story that displeased me --- but in the process, pleased more readers than she displeased --- then she made the right choice. I'm just one person, and I know some things definitely
should not bethe way I'd like them to be.
Maybe Rowling couldn't have met my expectations about Draco without sacrificing something else, to the detriment of the overall work. At any rate, I'm confident that she considered her decisions very carefully.
The stuff you said about Draco's environment is very interesting, I never saw it that way. I figured Draco's family definitely loved him, even though we might call them "bad people" and would likely call them "dysfunctional". I thought they took their family history seriously enough that they all loved their "family" as a concept, overshadowing any love they might have felt for other individual family members. And I assumed that Draco, who seemed to be acting like a medieval aristocrat who could subject most people to gruesome executions on a whim, might have been better served if his family had molded him more like an aristocrat from a later age, with a silk handkerchief over his razor blade.
In general, my strongest impression of Draco's strongest desire was to win the pride of an emotionally distant family. I never considered the possibility of his deepest desire being to gain approval of peers --- you say Draco is "just a boy wanting to be liked but not knowing how to achieve it". That's not only true, I would also think it also makes Draco more relevant to the YA reader. In light of that, maybe my assumptions miss the point. . . this is very subjective.
