My personal shippers' Manifesto
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| Title: | My personal shippers' Manifesto |
| Creator: | |
| Date(s): | September 13, 2004 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Harry Potter |
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| External Links: | My personal shippers' Manifesto |
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My personal shippers' Manifesto is a 2004 Harry Potter, Harry/Draco essay by Aja. It is a response to Dorrie's Shipper's Manifesto.
It is part of a 2002-04 series of essays. See About Writing.
Excerpts
To me, what H/D all comes down to is love, the sheer force and strength, faith and hope that is present in love, doing battle with everything else in the world--every circumstance of situation, every toil of war, every personal and societal prejudice and prejudice of background and fate-- that could possibly stand up against it. The more the odds are stacked, from that first non-handshake to "I'll have you" and beyond, the more the thing that H/D is at its core is vital. Because when you ship something like this you aren't shipping something that is easy, or superficial (the first mistaken assumption non-shippers make about our ship). You are shipping something that becomes more essential even as it's becoming more difficult. All of the things that make it so difficult for us to imagine H/D after OotP are the things that make it necessary that we should ship Harry/Draco even more after OotP, because to ship H/D requires getting to the core of prejudice and personal bias, and turning it into something approaching grace and understanding and compassion.
To really ship H/D, whether or not you ship an H/D that is redeemed or an H/D that is totally dysfunctional or an H/D that drags them both down to hell, you have to focus first on Harry. As Draco currently is in canon it requires no great leap of imagination to see him being totally in love with Harry--nobody denies that his obsession is fueled by a deeply personal, passionate hatred, and nothing is as arguably deeply conflicted and mutable as passionate hatred. To get Harry to see Draco, however, as something worth his time and interest and caring, requires getting to the core of prejudice in Harry. And as much as we adore him, there's a hell of a lot of conflict and prejudice there to work through. Harry needs to develop compassion for those he doesn't understand, and he needs to develop the understanding that everyone is worth caring about--even and especially someone who is making so much effort to get to him, time and again. It's impossible not to care a lot about someone who has hurt you. It's impossible not to *care* for someone you hate, because when you choose to hate someone, you're investing in a very strong emotion, and even when you've switched off your emotions, as Harry largely does to Draco in OotP, you can't always back down from your level of investment. Harry and Draco already have a huge investment in each other: Draco because of the fact he has dogged Harry's heels for 5 years, and sees Harry as responsible for his father's imprisonment; Harry, because of the fact that he still sees Malfoy as his peer rival and leader of a group of students who represent everything to which he is diametrically opposed.
Draco has never been as important to Harry as Harry has always been to Draco, but Draco also has never written Harry off the way Harry writes Draco off. For all the emphasis that is given in H/D fics of the way that writers have to "redeem" Draco, or give his character depth to make him seem more kind, compassionate, human, whatever, all of the real impetus on change has to be in Harry. It's Harry who couldn't give a damn about Draco, especially by the end of book 5. It's Harry who has no qualms hexing Draco unconscious and shoving him in a luggage bin to ooze. It's Harry who refuses to take Draco seriously--it's also Harry who repeatedly wields the power he has to humiliate Draco, time and again. It's very obvious that one thing we are to take away from the pensieve scene in OotP is that that scene could easily have been Draco's pov regarding the trio. Were we to see the books through Draco's eyes, Harry would come away looking like anything but a hero, just as his dad did in Snape's memory.
The H/D shipper is someone who allows Harry to give that one moment of full attention to Draco. That is the essence of any H/D fic, whether the moment is expanded to turn into love, whether the moment comes as a result of, or precipitates, lots of soul-searching and changing perceptions, or whether that moment comes as a frenzy of passionate quidditch uniform-ripping sex. Shipping H/D does not have to be about whether you see Draco as a reformed angel of light or a leatherclad bad boy with a dark mark on his arm. Shipping H/D is about stripping prejudice and preconceptions away until you are left with a Harry who is willing to see Draco as Draco wants him to see him. It requires bringing Harry to the point that Harry can acknowledge Draco's right to be acknowledged, which is something Harry has never done since the day he decided that Draco reminded him of Dudley in first year.
They are all stories that leave us with the sense that after that moment nothing will ever be, or ever was, the same again. And that is why H/D is important to us--because we recognize that in that moment there is a shift, that something vital happens to them both. It is this desire to see that change, to witness it and see what comes of it and where it takes them both, that draws us to them. I think that it's also this desire that makes fics like Draco Veritas and Silvia's "And I Get By"(2) so beloved of H/D shippers, because they are fics that deal with that moment of truth, and that subsequent change--and even without overt slash, they are getting to the heart of what matters to most H/D shippers. For most of us it isn't about the hotness or the love-hate or the sexual tension or all the hints of subtexty attraction, though all those things are, certainly, very much part of the appeal--but rather just the inherent drama and beauty and intrigue of seeing the two of them reach a place where they can see each other just as they are.
And I think, deep down, whenever I see the two of them changed by that moment, whenever I see the two of them learning to understand one another, falling in love despite everything around them and within them that would get in the way or proclude that from happening, the moment changes me too, and reminds me of what is important--about how to forgive and understand and be compassionate, and how to find love in the most unlikeliest of places.