The Draco Trilogy

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The Draco Trilogy was an epic Harry Potter Fanfic series written by the Big Name Fan Cassandra Claire, now a published author of the Mortal Instruments series under the name of Cassandra Clare. It used many of the same tropes found in Mortal Instruments, and deviated wildly from Harry Potter Canon because it was begun before the fifth book was released. The series consisted of three novel-length fanfics: Draco Dormiens, Draco Sinister and Draco Veritas. It began with a standard Freaky Friday Flip plot and developed into a complicated tale involving all sorts of magical inheritance, the four founders of Hogwarts and more.

Notable for beginning the Draco in Leather Pants phenomenon, the story took Harry's rival Draco Malfoy and turned him into a sarcastic, leather-clad Anti-Hero best described as a combination of Corwin, Spike and Artemis Fowl. Became wildly popular in fandom to the point where some fans began to prefer the Draco Trilogy to the actual canon.

There was also a good deal of controversy in fandom when the author was blacklisted from Fanfiction.net for plagiarizing lengthy passages from a Pamela Dean series without attribution (and, apparently, lying about having permission to use the passages in her fanfiction, although she did sort of get permission after she was caught). This is often confused with the series using a large amount of quotes and scenes from TV series (including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Blackadder) and several published works, which were credited at the end of each chapter. Avocado, the person who first discovered and reported the Pamela Dean plagiarism, wrote here a recount of the plagiarism debacle.

The author removed her fanfiction from the internet when she became a published professional, but rumor has it the Draco Trilogy can still be found online if you know where to look... for example, right here!

Tropes used in The Draco Trilogy include:

• Abusive Parents - Lucius Malfoy, possibly the Trope Maker for Lucius being abusive, which is now considered a cliché in Harry Potter fanfiction
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Author Appeal - The female characters are always excited whenever they get to wear old-fashioned Pimped Out Dresses which are thoroughly described -- sometimes enough to temporarily overshadow in their minds the life-threatening circumstances they are in. The girls also tend to think a lot about how the boys in their lives smell differently. Apparently this is important in weighing their relative attractiveness -- and no, none of them seem to actually smell bad.
• Be a Whore to Get Your Man - When Harry and Hermione's relationship hits a rut in Draco Veritas, Ginny suggests Hermione try this to get Harry's attention. Subverted in that Hermione tries it, but Harry hardly notices as he's naturally so busy angsting.
• Bittersweet Ending: Voldemort's defeated, Narcissa and Sirius are married, Harry and Draco are off to travel the world - but the two Official Couple s are (temporarily, at least) broken up.
• Beautiful All Along - Hermione.
• Calling the Old Man Out
• Captain Oblivious - Harry. Dear God, Harry. He fails to notice Ron is having an affair, Hermione and he are having relationship problems, and that Draco (who he shares telepathy with) is dying. However, Draco and Snape are pretty much the only ones who seem to be paying enough attention to realise all these things.
• Catch a Falling Star - The Weasleys rescue Harry in this manner at the end of Draco Dormiens
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Hermione, not just towards her boyfriend but towards all her guy friends. Lampshaded by various characters as they accuse her of not letting any girl (even Ginny, her friend) get close to 'her boys'.
• Comically Missing the Point - In the third book, Lavender is asking Ginny which boys she prefers over others. She doesn't understand why asking her if she prefers Harry or Ron is "just sick" at first, but then remembers that Ginny used to have a crush on Harry.
  • It should be noted that the same gag was used in an episode of Friends.
• Dances and Balls - Seem to happen a lot, including the the usual and inexplicable restaging of the Yule Ball, although this series may be the Trope Maker there (well, aside fom Goblet of Fire, obviously).
  • The weirdest instance of this: a formal ball is thrown for Harry's seventeenth birthday party in Draco Sinister. Because Harry would have enjoyed that way more than the low-key seventeenth birthday party he later had with the Weasleys in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And whose idea was this? Sirius's! Because it's so in character for Sirius Black to throw a Jane Austen ball to usher his godson into wizarding adulthood.
    • Well, it seems like it was more like Narcissa's idea.
• Deadpan Snarker - Initially Draco, but most of the main cast has this to some extent.
• Doorstopper - In terms of word count, the full trilogy is longer than the first six Harry Potter books. That's nearly twice the length of the original Russian version of War and Peace. Atlas Shrugged is less than two-thirds the length of The Draco Trilogy.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Blaise and Draco.
• Driven to Suicide: Lucius Malfoy, with some help from Ron.
• Expy - Draco bears a marked resemblance to Jace Wayland in Mortal Instruments, right down to the looks, the snark and the evil father. Some of Draco's scenes and one-liners were re-used for Jace as well.
  • To draw more parallels, Clary=Ginny, Simon=Seamus, Luke=Sirius, Jocelyn=Narcissa, Valetine=Lucius, Sebastian=Tom, Hodge=Wormtail, Isabelle=Blaise....
  • Also see her Infernal Devices trilogy. Will, Jem and Tessa are almost complete Expys of Draco, Harry and Hermione, right down to the love triangle and the co-dependent friendship between the two boys.
• Fandom-Specific Plot - As noted above, the Yule Ball plot, although with the brilliant subversion that absolutely nothing happens except for pointless drama involving Draco and Ginny not getting together for the twelfth time. Oh, the angst! Cassie really has the wrong idea about the Yule Ball. First of all, it's part of the Triwizard Tournament and not an annual event. In Goblet of Fire, the Yule Ball is important enough to be attended by Ministry officials and have the most popular wizarding band provide the music. In the Cassie Verse, the Yule Ball is basically a high school prom and it's trumped by something called the Seventh Year Pub Crawl, causing seventh years to actually regard the Yule Ball as beneath them. In Goblet, the ball takes place on Christmas Day with Harry specially being amazed how many people were staying over break so they could attend. Cassie conveniently has it take place weeks before Christmas break.
• Freaky Friday Flip
• Functional Magic: Obviously present in (most) Harry Potter fanfics, but notable here due to Cassie being... rather bad at following the internal logic of the Potter Verse. For example, Salazar Slytherin is depicted as having gotten his Black Magic powers from the demons of hell, while the books explain that Dark Magic is fueled by hatred, not infernal forces. This can be excused since the explanation for dark magic was written after the Trilogy had already ended. Making Draco The Heir of Slytherin, which directly contradicts nearly all of book two, has no such excuse.
  • Simply put, Cassie was pretty good about following her own rules (God knows the thing ran long enough for her to develop them), but not Rowling's. And as it went along, she tended to pick up guns from her own armoury rather than from the actual Potter books. Basically, she tore Rowling's mythology down to its foundation and then cheerfully built her own mythology over it.
• "Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress, but we have to work with her."
• Heel Face Turn - Draco's character arc in the first story. Yes, present-day Draco fanfic writers, Cassie actually bothers to explain why Draco is on the good side. Your Mileage May Vary as to how well it's pulled off, but at least she doesn't just take it for granted that we'll buy Draco hanging out with the Golden Trio.
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: When Ron sleeps with Hermione, who's actually Pansy in disguise, under dark magic, then it's an unforgivable sin. When Hermione makes out with Draco and cuddles in bed with him for several nights, it's barely glossed over.
• Heroes Want Redheads - Draco spends a great deal of the story involved with Ginny Weasley and Ron with red-haired Slytherin girl Blaise Zabini, who in canon was later revealed to be male--and black.
• Heterosexual Life Partners: Harry and Draco. Also Gareth and Ben. And Ginny and Blaise, by the end.
  • Uh, Gareth and Ben aren't at all heterosexual. They're a couple.
• Hey, Catch! - Lampshaded. Draco's horrified that he automatically caught the thing thrown at him.
• Hooked Up Afterwards: Ron and Blaise, in the epilogue.
• Ho Yay - Loads and loads of Harry/Draco Subtext. About halfway through Draco Veritas, we get this little gem (paraphrased):

Harry: I love you. Draco: Whaaaaat? (they get attacked by random mooks, are understandably distracted, and it is never mentioned again.)

• • There's even an in-universe kiss. Granted it wasn't really Draco, just a Polyjuice hooker but Harry didn't seem to be complaining.....
  • Also, Ben Gryffindor and Gareth Slytherin.
• Identical Grandson - The plot of Draco Sinister focuses on certain characters that are descendants and/or possibly reincarnations of the Hogwarts founders.
  • Harry and Draco also look almost exactly like previous heirs Ben Gryffindor and Gareth Slytherin, to the point where Ron mistakes the latter for the former in his vision.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty - Salazar Slytherin's rather Squick-inducing efforts to drug Hermione with love potion.
• Jerkass - Godric Gryffindor, despite being (supposedly) a good person. When you're smugly happy that a sixteen-year-old is dead, you're kind of a bastard.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold - Snape and Draco.
• Kissing Cousins - The romance between Sirius and Narcissa, who were later shown to be cousins in the books but were not related in the Draco Trilogy. To be fair, though, virtually all the main characters end up being related.
  • Technically there was a hint; at one point, Arthur Weasley mentions that the lengths blood purists go to to keep Muggles out of the bloodline means that all remaining pureblood families are related to one another, and the Weasleys, for example, are distant cousins to the Malfoys.
  • Also, in Order of the Phoenix, it hints on pure-blood families marrying their cousins, which is part of the reason the Gaunt family was the way it ws. And, it's better than Sirius/Bella at any rate.
  • An in-universe example: Ben and Gareth, who are heavily implied to be together despite being (second) cousins.
• Kryptonite Factor - Something called "adamantine" is basically kryptonite for wizards. Mainly it's there to stop Harry and Draco from resolving every plot in two seconds after they become uber-powerful mega-wizards who don't need wimpy wands. Of course, even when adamantine isn't there, it's Lampshaded how thoroughly bad Harry and Draco are at being Magids, since they know very few spells and mostly have their wands anyway. In fact, Harry can barely do anything at all unless he's very, very angry.
• Lost in Imitation - A kind of fanfic version with the character of Draco Malfoy. Not portraying Draco as a two-dimensional bully was actually a rather novel idea at the time and even after Cassie made him turn good, she didn't stray too far (most of the time) from what a hypothetical redeemed version of the character might be like. Of course, only the positive aspects of her version of Draco were picked up on and years later fanfic!Draco had decayed from snarky anti-hero to misunderstood Woobie who wouldn't hurt a fly.
• Love Makes You Crazy
• Love Makes You Evil - Pansy.
• Love Triangle - several. Namely: Harry/Hermione/Draco, Ron/Hermione/Harry, Draco/Ginny/Seamus, Ginny/Draco/Blaise.....
• Malevolent Architecture - It's practically impossible to enter Cassie's version of Malfoy Manor without getting killed at least three times.
• Missing Episode - Cassie tried to invoke this trope with regards to the whole fic, but the Internet has proved a Worthy Opponent.
• Not Listening to Me, Are You? - Sirius tells Harry he's changed his mind and decided to marry Remus instead of Narcissa. Harry, predictably, is too busy with his own problems to notice.
• Only a Flesh Wound - Cassie is a big offender for giving characters wounds which could cause them to bleed to death in real life and having them completely shake it off.
  • Averted when Draco is badly hurt by an arrow to the shoulder, and nearly dies. Also, when Ron's hand is badly burned, he's out of it for a considerable time.
• Plagiarism - Many dialogues and even full scenes were copied word-by-word from several published works, without credit.
• Power Perversion Potential - Features a Polyjuice brothel!
• Sealed Evil in a Can - Salazar Slytherin.
• She's All Grown Up - Ginny.
• Shout-Out - Draco Dormiens places Malfoy Manor near Chipping Sodbury, the birthplace of J. K. Rowling. The Canon later placed it in Wiltshire.
  • There's actually one to the Evil Overlord List. In Draco Sinister, Draco notices Salazar Slytherin's personal library includes a book called The Handbook for Evil Overlords, which "didn't look as if it had been read much."
• Take That - an unintentional one, given that it was written before the series finished, but happened when Hermione described how she believed she and Ron would end up together, and Harry and Ginny would too, and they'd spend every Christmas together. Draco's response? "How revolting."
  • Actually, Draco delivers quite a few of these to the original series. For example, when Harry asks if being in love always feels like having a huge, scary monster in your chest, Draco responds "No, I think you have indigestion. I'd see a medi-wizard if I were you."
• Write Who You Know - The character Rhysenn Malfoy is named after the author's friend, who wrote under the pen name of Rhysenn.
• Yandere - Pansy Parkinson and, to an extent, Ginny Weasley.