Draco in Leather Pants/Literature/Harry Potter

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The Trope Namer

  • Draco Malfoy is the Trope Namer. Even though he's a smug Spoiled Brat Dirty Coward who only feels confident behind his burly cronies, fans like to paint him as a sexy and sensitive guy. He does get a little better by Half-Blood Prince and even becomes somewhat of a Jerkass Woobie, but he's still far from nice, and never canonically lives up to the Estrogen Brigade Bait treatment by his fans.
    • This sums it up pretty well: "In Fanon, Draco is known for his cool dialogue and a tendency to wear leather trousers. In Canon, Draco is known for barely managing a decent put-down on Ron and a tendency to cry like a little girl in the bathroom."
    • Some fanfics get a little ridiculous, pairing Draco with the most unlikely people. Several have paired him with Hermione!
    • Several? Draco/Hermione romance stories on Fanfiction.net outnumber Ron/Hermione, Harry/Hermione or Harry/Ginny stories by a substantial margin, which may demonstrate just how popular this trope is.
      • Hermione is certainly not the least likely pairing Draco has found himself in in fanon. Try Harry, or Hagrid.
    • This was thoroughly mocked in the Potter Puppet Pals episode "Draco Puppet", where Harry responds to the numerous fan requests to introduce a Puppet Pal Draco. Having established that he's doing this, Harry spends the rest of the video in Sarcasm Mode as he introduces us to our new puppet friend:

Draco Puppet: I'm Draco! I'm really rich, and I'm really proud of the fact that I'm pureblooded white! I mean wizard! Tee hee!
Harry: What a wonderful person!

    • A good possible explanation for Draco's fandom is Tom Felton's portrayal of the character, especially in Half-Blood Prince, as well as possible Adaptational Attractiveness.
    • At the end of Deathly Hallows, Draco at the very end appears to have reformed and become the responsible parent of a Hogwarts student.
  • J. K. Rowling has spoken out against people who dare to suggest Draco/Voldemort aren't as horrible as she insists they are. Significant parts of Book 6 are meant as Take Thats against those people. For example, Tom lived in an orphanage all right (just like Little Orphan Annie), but the most horrible thing in said orphanage was... Himself. He used his magic to bully other kids and was feared both by them and by the staff. It is clear that he was never a good guy...
  • My Immortal, in addition to fitting this Trope to a T, at one point does, in fact, feature Draco in leather pants.
    • Naturally, My Immortal takes this to an absurd degree. So many fanfics portray Draco as a sensitive guy, basically the opposite of his canon personality, that it's a cliché in itself, but My Immortal goes so far as to make him so ridiculously needy that it seems he would fall straight into Wangst without encouraging words from Ebony Enoby. The most (in)famous fanfic example is probably The Draco Trilogy. See that work's page for more.
  • Interestingly played with in the fic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality -- Draco is a genuinely likable boy who just happened to be raised by Emperor Palpatine. Harry interacts with him rather differently in his first meeting, and instead of the immediate politically charged rivalry we get a less-immediate, still-politically-charged kind-of-alliance,-maybe. And then later on, when he's an occasional viewpoint character with a fairly sympathetic perspective, you keep running into the fact that he "considers rape to be what the cool older kids did" and believes Dumbledore to be entirely evil.

Other Characters

  • Averted, even inverted, with Draco's dad, Lucius, whose fans tend to appreciate him for the aristocratic, pimp cane accessorized bastard that he is without giving him the "Awww, he's really just a sexy Woobie!" treatment. In fact, Lucius provides an easy way for fanfic writers to portray Draco sympathetically. After all, if Lucius is an Abusive Parents, then Draco has a nice Freudian Excuse. And your story has a built-in villain, too! Ironically, in the canon, the fact that Lucius cares about his wife and son seems to be his only redeeming quality. Also, Lucius had no capacity to influence Draco's becoming a Death Eater one way or another, seeing as he was in Azkaban for the entire sixth book, which was when that happened. Lucius is hardly Dad of the Year, but neither is he the abusive Complete Monster who exists to torture Draco the Woobie either.
    • From the day Draco was born to the day Lucius went to Azkaban he was raising Draco to be a fervent believer in the Death Eater ideology, which is the largest part of why Draco sought that status so eagerly in the first place. So saying he had no influence on it happening is a bit much.
  • Bellatrix Lestrange. But that may be related to Helena Bonham Carter's huge tracts of land.
    • And the "feminist fangirls" who refer to Bellatrix as a "role model" because she almost kills a young girl and then mocks her very pissed off Mama Bear upon both that and the death of one of her sons. And then they bash said mother for killing their Bella and calling her "moo bitch". Never mind that Bellatrix is a Yandere who only has eyes for a man who doesn't give a damn for her, or that she's said that if she had kids she'd sacrifice them to Voldemort, or that she was among the Death Eaters that tortured Neville Longbottom's parents into insanity -- she's a "super great feminist" for bashing motherhood. Which doesn't have any Unfortunate Implications.
      • To be fair, not all Bellatrix "feminist" fangirls are quite as far-gone as the examples here; the main complaint seems to be that she's the only major female character who doesn't end up having a family, and the way this is used to contrast her with her sisters and with Molly Weasley. It's still inaccurate; McGonagall isn't a mother or wife either and, as her Pottermore material explains she did turn down a chance at marital bliss with her childhood sweetheart because it would have come at the expense of her career in magic, and when she was briefly married later, she elected to keep her maiden name. And the "love and family are more important than ambition" message is hammered just as hard with the male characters; it's one of the major things dividing Harry and Voldemort, for instance. Besides, implying that a "good" feminist female character should be a Celibate Hero comes with its own set of Unfortunate Implications, and it's not like all the mother characters were housewives like Molly was. Hermione and Ginny end up as the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and a famed Quidditch player/writer, respectively, along with getting married and having kids.
      • For that matter, even the background of the Potterverse is full of women in powerful positions; Fudge's predecessor as Minister of Magic was a woman (Millicent Bagnold), and Barty Crouch's successor as Director of Magical Law Enforcement likewise (Amelia Bones). The latter even has a minor role in book 5.
  • Inadvertently done in the film adaptations with Narcissa Malfoy, mainly due to the Quidditch Cup (which established her as well-bred yet unpleasant and elitist) being cut. Her first appearance, in Half-Blood Prince, is now entirely sympathetic--that of a terrified mother attempting to keep her only son from getting killed.
  • Blaise Zabini fans can maybe be forgiven for this tendency. He was a Slytherin boy in Harry's year who, up until Half-Blood Prince, had only ever been mentioned in passing, making him prime fodder for fanfic writers interested in creating a sympathetic Slytherin character without spitting in the face of canon. Then he was given some character development in the series and revealed to be a buddy of Draco Malfoy's and every bit as bigoted and dickish as that association suggests, which some people have rather understandably chosen to ignore so as to continue imagining him in whatever mold they originally preferred, and others have tried to justify.
  • Salazar Slytherin had a dream... a dream that one day, an adequately racist and motivated student would find the secret underground chamber he built to house a deadly basilisk and use it to mass-murder his Muggle-born classmates. And some fans would have you believe that's just dandy. (This one has actually been done well in some cases -- Slytherin lived at least a thousand years before the series takes place and conceivably could have been the victim of an in-universe Historical Villain Upgrade.)
    • It helps that the series implies that he wasn't always a "twisted old loony". In fact, according to the Sorting Hat, he and Godric Gryffindor had once been the best of friends.
    • Also, he was living in a time period when wizards were persecuted and would-be-murdered by Muggles. So even though the plot to kill a bunch of muggleborn kids is pretty hard to justify, the fear, distrust and hatred of Muggles in general isn't. And you can see how if those sentiments already existed in his psyche once he went crazy they could get twisted into the mass-murderousness.
      • The thing is that the books make it clear that Muggle "persecution" was never anything actual wizards couldn't deal with -- the only people who were hurt in witch hunts were other Muggles. And in the present day of the books, it's unequivocally the wizards who hold all the cards and can get away with abusing Muggles if so inclined and, within wizarding culture, the purebloods who are privileged and the Muggleborns who are discriminated against. Fanon likes to reverse this state of affairs, whether because it goes against the expected Cool Loser/All of the Other Reindeer characterization of the misunderstood hero's secret underground community, because they think that if wizards are a literal minority then they must a political minority too, or just because of this trope. Whatever the motive, it takes a lot of finagling to pull off reframing the whole history of magic in a way that doesn't blatantly contradict the books, and not a lot of people bother with that.
    • A good example of making him sympathetic without contradicting canon can be found here. Adult wizards had all kinds of magic they could cast to survive being hunted and burned, but families were prone to losing younger members. Girls could be burned as witches at nine and boys at ten, well before they were able to defend themselves. Children of Wizarding families had some protection in their parents and older siblings, but Muggleborns were SOL and often turned over by their own families. A thousand years have twisted his reputation into that of a bigot and a psychopath instead of the intelligent and cautious man he was (and is, as a ghost).
      • The problem with that reasoning is that in the real world small children are also helpless against many threats that their parents could readily defend themselves against or escape, and yet we haven't reacted by all turning into vicious isolationist racists.
  • Severus Snape gets put in leather pants a lot by fangirls. There are the ones who want to know him carnally, and then there's the fans who have blamed Lily for Snape calling her "Mudblood", or even tried to justify it and deny its connections to real-world racism. Ah, and they also bash Lily for "not being a good friend" (aka, refusing to become Snape's Extreme Doormat Love Martyr) to the guy who called her racial epithets.
    • An example. (Warning: HUGE triggers.)
    • Snapefen have even gone as far as to make snide comments about JKR's abusive first marriage, such as comparing her to a brood mare.
    • Anything we could say about the Snape-dom can be summed up here.
    • They also seem to ignore the fact he later joined the wizarding world equivalent of the KKK/Nazis, and after 'reforming' torments and bullies non-Slytherin students, taking special care to torment Harry because James bullied him as a teenager. And at least James picked on people his own age and not children less than half his age.
      • Worse yet, at the time Snape becomes a Death Eater Voldemort is already attacking Wizarding Britain as a terrorist. The equivalent of joining a neo-Nazi hate group would be bad enough, but what Snape did is analogous to joining the actual Nazis during World War II. By literal definition of the word, Snape was guilty of high treason and only Dumbledore getting him a pardon explains why he's still alive.
    • Snape's fanfic reputation is somewhat generated by his Woobie status. Basically, his entire life has sucked, and the only good thing in his life, Lily, was murdered and he was largely responsible for it. His Heel Face Turn is based solely on this one point. Those inclined to put him in leather pants ignore that Snape did not care one bit about Lily's son being murdered as long as Voldemort did not kill her too, and that even after she was murdered, he continued to not only not care about Harry (Beyond what was ordered of him) but actively hate and abuse him. That he cared more that Harry was James' son, rather than that he was Lily's son does not speak well for, as Voldemort puts it, "Snape's supposed great love."
    • Of additional note is that in the films, the negative aspects of Snape's friendship with Lily are omitted.
  • Scabior the Snatcher in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has become this because of his portrayal by Nick Moran in the film. The number of women wishing they could trade places with Hermione and have their hair sniffed by him is growing.
  • Also, Petunia Dursley. Yes, the Jerkass Resentful Guardian and Stepford Smiler that abused Harry ever since he went to live with her family, is sometimes shown as a poor victim "bullied" and "insulted" by her "stupid and snobbish" sister Lily, thus she "can't help" but hate Harry and blame him for "Lily's sins".
  • In the case of the Dursleys, both Rowling and the fandom agrees that Vernon is the least sympathetic of the three. Rowling never gives him a Freudian Excuse and fanfics often portray him as a Complete Monster. However, while the fans seem to consider Petunia the most sympathetic Dursley, Rowling seems to consider that to be Dudley, feeling that his actions were the result of bad parenting. Prior to the end of the series, fans guessed that Petunia would eventually apologize to Harry, but, to the surprise of many, it was Dudley who apologized while Petunia only got an implied Ignored Epiphany.
    • Dumbledore himself considered Dudley pitiful and called out his parents for raising him the way they did - as a selfish, entitled bully that thought he could get away with anything until he was a teenager.
  • Barty Crouch, Jr. due to being played by David Tennant in the movie and having a Tragic Villain Backstory in the book. Sometimes he gets paired with characters nearly twenty years younger than him like Hermione or Luna.
  • Marrietta Edgecombe gets a bit of this as well, as a glance at her entry on the Unfortunate Implications page will show. Admittedly we don't know that much about her but some fans like to imagine her as a tragic heroine who is torn between loyalty to her family and the DA, and that her punishment is completely unfair. Except she is shown to not want to be in the DA from the start, only there because Cho practically dragged her to the first meeting. Also people like to cite her having a parent in the Ministry as justifiable pressure, clearly forgetting she chose to seek Umbridge out personally and rat the DA out. That's also knowing that Umbridge had been known to pretty much torture students who stepped out of line. Bear in mind that also means she went to Umbridge knowing Cho, one of her best friends, would be punished as well. Considering what resulted from her betrayal her punishment - the purple pustules spelling "Sneak" - is pretty tame. People also like to play up that she is scarred for life when she never even seems to consider going to Hermione and apologizing for what she did in the hopes she'd remove the pustules.
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