Yeah that annoys me as well. In canon Voldemort makes a point of trying to kill as few people as possible, even letting knows aids of Dumdledore walk around. He would not kill anyone he didnt need to.

 

Even with Voldemort leading an attack on those two locations, the attack would be a monumental disaster.

Unless it is a hit and run job like on Ollivander.

 

My biggest problem with such attacks is that they have no strategic purpose.

 

To be fair canon didn't have much strategy either.

 

If you made a realistic enough Hermione/Draco (which is kind of impossible, 'nuff said), you'd have to have her best friends at least worried for her. I'm thinking a sixth year fic: Hermione's heart broken because of Ron/Lavender and ends up running to Myrtle's bathroom to have a cry. Hermione runs into Draco who is crying to Myrtle about his lot in life, and they are forced to either be rude to each other in their weak moment or ask the other what's wrong.

Neither one immediately admits anything, but a bridge has been crossed; Hermione realizes that Draco is having a problem, and vice versa, but neither knows what that problem is. Time progresses, and when they meet in the hallways, Harry thinks Draco is being quiet because of his mission from Voldemort when in reality, it's because he's avoiding Hermione's glance. When they finally do cross paths alone, Hermione reveals that Harry thinks he's up to something. Draco insinuates that Hermione doesn't need to get hurt just for caring about him, to which she tells him flat out that she doesn't want to see him hurt. They end up raging at each other, with Hermione being the verbal victor, and Draco eventually reveals that he does have a mission from Voldemort and that if he doesn't finish it his parents are as good as dead, and so is he. Hermione wants to help, to the point of asking him flat out what the mission is, but he calls her a Mudblood and tells her to leave him alone.

Katie is attacked and then Hermione thinks she knows what really happened, though she doesn't tell Harry and Ron. Hermione realizes that Draco is being forced to kill Dumbledore, but she knows that Draco will never be able to do it. She waits for a chance to get him alone, and when she does, she explains that if he goes to the Headmaster with her, she will help him. Draco rebukes her, telling her that his parents will be killed, and that if the Dark Lord finds out he's even meeting with her, he'd be tortured into insanity or worse. Hermione admits that he's right, but she still thinks she should go to Dumbledore and reveal it all. Draco threatens an Obliviation, but Hermione steps back into a dueling stance and challenges him, to which he throws a few spells of strength but eventually refrains from hurting her, stopping altogether.

He's crying. She starts crying. 600,000 fan girls are crying.

He decides that maybe going to Dumbledore wouldn't be such a bad idea, to which Hermione is politely told to leave the office so they can discuss things. She stands her ground, telling the Headmaster that she is staying. Malfoy quietly asks her to leave, and she does, astounded that he'd do that to her after what they had just been through, and her declaration that she was on his side.

Snape, Dumbledore and Draco craft a plan to stage Dumbledore's death. Draco can't believe it, but he knows how lucky he'll be if he goes forward with it. His family will be safe, and so will he, while he'll be in the Dark Lord's good graces for being heartless. Harry cannot know, Dumbledore says, because he will not want the Headmaster to die and will expose himself to the Death Eaters and die himself. The plan is to allow the Death Eaters into Hogwarts and straight to Dumbledore, who will be killed by Draco. Snape seems ill at ease with this, and doesn't know if Draco will actually be able to kill when the time is right. He does not express these concerns to Dumbledore, but he does privately to Draco.

Anyway, I'm spent. There was a story in there somewhere.

 

Yeah, man, because people IRL never grow up, learn better, or change their opinions on things. In cases like this it doesn't happen often, but stories about things that happened all the time wouldn't be interesting to read.

 

Considering that most Draco/Hermione authors set their romance during Hogwarts, I hardly see Draco 'growing up, learning better, or changing his opinion' in that time.

 

A teenager being a completely different person than they were a few years before is not at all unrealistic. There's plenty of time to establish a Draco/Hermione relationship within the Hogwarts years (and it doesn't even need to start diverging year 1 or anything), but it does require an author who actually realizes that the canon characters aren't even slightly compatible (which eliminates 99% of the people who would have any interest in writing the story), and actually has the slightest idea how to develop characters over time and slowly establish a relationship (which eliminates 90% of FF romance authors).

 

My pet peeve on DLP is reading Syed's posts in the review section where his review involves suggesting countless cliches to the author when the story is perfectly fine.

 

Do not take the name of Syed in vain, Rache

It's plausible that Malfoy might get over his racist attitudes. It's less plausible that he'll stop being a cowardly twat.

 

Eh, On the whole I find Syed to be more amusing then annoying.

 

My biggest problem with Draco/Hermione doesn't have anything to do with Draco. He lacks conviction, so there's no reason to think that, when put to a severe enough test, he won't drop his bigotry in favor of a more tolerable and socially acceptable attitude just out of self-interest. Like he does in canon post-Hogwarts, with varying degrees of implication.

My main problem with the pairing is that Hermione has absolutely nothing but contempt for Draco in canon. He is a schoolyard antagonist with aspirations towards being a wizard Nazi. She never finds him attractive, seeks his attention, or defends him. Even when she is dismissing him as a threat, it's not because of his character but because of his incompetence. Is witnessing one crying jag in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom (an extremely popular element of these sorts of fics) enough to make her see 'Draco the inwardly noble but tortured young man who is probably part-Veela or something because guys can't just be blond unless they are Captain America even though we retain an entirely different spelling of blond for dude' instead of 'that cowardly, arrogant, racist ferret who's probably crying because daddy won't let him brand the Dark Mark on his new pony'.

 

Really after second year there would be very little chance of a Draco/Hermione relationship. I mean here he was at the precocious age of 12 gleeful at the idea that a bunch of "mudbloods" would be killed by Slytherin's monster. Yeah, I just don't see Hermione getting over that.

 

I know people I'm on good terms with who at 12 were pretty fucking horrible about all Jewish people, because hey, prejudiced parents, so 5 years of constant growth? Idk, canon Draco and Hermione are a nope. But the same children growing up in an AU? plausible, but hard to do.

 

Ten years later . . . sure, I might see it. Four years later and Malfoy is still canon-Malfoy? Not a chance.

People grow up, and depending on what happened after the war, there's a whole range of things that might happen to Malfoy that could change him.

 

The slytherin 'Ice Queen' or whatever suddenly falling madly in love with Harry for no apparent reason.

 

There was also Buckbeak. That is the first thing I think about when I see it happen in the latter years. Though I think that the most annoying part about the pairing is not exactly the impossibility of it but that Ron and Harry act all accepting of it, saying it was obvius that they liked each other. That is what boggles me most about it.

Oh, and Malfoy did a little victory dance when Harry fell down from his broom and was probably severely injured. And started a hate campaign against his friend in fourth year.

 

Main problem with Draco/Hermione is that to make it work at least one character needs to be replaced by OC.

It would be better to use somebody like Theodore Nott as base for OC for Hermione/pureblood pairing (what may be interesting, some day I may even try to check whatever somebody produced readable story).

It is quite hilarious that the best what may be said of Draco is that he was incompetent at doing anything (for example murdering Dumbledore) and had not enough cunning to earn anything during period of absolute pureblood supremacy.

 

I believe that is how misogyny works, non? You start out with a general distaste for women because they don't do or contribute anything, just get married and spend their days rearranging couch cushions and nagging people with jobs. Then the hormones hit and you find yourself drawn to them, which is just irritating. You don't enjoy their company, the things they talk about are silly and insipid, listening to them prattle on and on puts your teeth on edge, but time and again you feel compelled to seek them out. You spiral into self-loathing for desiring things you don't want to desire and graduate to actually hating women for making you feel that way. The contempt and yearning are not pretty so women spurn you, which only reaffirms what you already knew - they are stupid and wouldn't recognize excellence even if it were trying to grope them. Along the way you get into eve-psych and seduction. Eventually you do get a girlfriend and are perfectly horrible to her. And if you succeed in getting her to a dark insecure place you could even end up married.

What I'm saying is, for a sufficiently damaged person loathing is no obstacle for a relationship. Could Malfoy find out he has a thing for mudbloods and go a similarly crazy route? I think so.

So yeah for me a Draco/Hermione could work if she were vulnerable, then lied to and then boom - a crazy abusive relationship in full swing.