but kylo and draco are not on par at all. 1) kylo is obviously a leading figure in the first order who very conciously chose this path while draco is just an asshole kid who was raised by asshole parents to be an asshole, 2) kylo is a grown-ass adult and draco is a child for most of hp, 3) draco has a sort of redemption arc while kylo so far has only been evil, 4) did i mention draco had asshole parents who are racists and raised him to be one too while kylo was raised by good people? -alljustletters
I know, I know. Kylo is objectively way worse. (As is Anakin, come to think of it, whom I do sort-of like as a person riiiight up until the child-murdering. After which, he is largely irredeemable I think. Even George Lucas has said that Vader’s actions in Return of the Jedi don’t really redeem him, so I don’t imagine any future Kylo redemption will really be a redemption either, unless there’s some twist we all don’t know.)
But…back in Harry Potter world…Draco still bears some responsibility for the choices he did make. He’s a bully, and a snob, and as a child/teenager he enjoyed hurting other children/teenagers and shouting racial slurs at people. I’m glad he never got worse from there, never started killing people, but…
Like, the closest real-world equivalent of Draco’s character arc I can think of is: someone’s raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, takes part in their horrifying homophobic protests, but slowly realises how much pain they’re causing people and defects. Which happened! Except…when that happened, the first thing the defectors (whom I honestly have nothing but sympathy for) did was apologise, and start working to correct their mistakes and examine within themselves all the prejudice they’d picked up and correct that too. Draco never did that work, as far as we know, but he’s always treated as if he did.
So, ur, I just think the amount of people shipping him with Harry or Hermione as if that wouldn’t be a massively problematic (for lack of a better word) thing just weirds me out, because people are usually so quick to condemn ships like that. (Like Reylo.) I know there are other reasons to condemn Reylo – Kylo being a murderer, people shoving Rey towards Kylo when Finn is right there – but, I don’t know, going through Tumblr and seeing which ships are deemed Awful and which ships are deemed Good is often a source of puzzlement to me.