If you’ve been anywhere on TikTok for the past few weeks, you may have noticed a little trend popping onto everyone’s ForYou pages- Harry Potter- but more specifically, Draco Malfoy. This resurgence of popularity has only made me more passionate about one plot-line that never was: Draco Malfoy’s redemption arc.
For this analysis, I will be ignoring The Cursed Child. Personally I like to pretend it doesn’t exist.
The producers of the movie had a moment where even they wanted Draco to have his redemption, if only it hadn’t been cut from the movie. At the end of the YouTube clip found here, you can see the 2-second deleted scene that could have changed Draco’s entire character. It would have taken him from the single dimension characters we all know Ms. Rowling is so good at writing (no tea all shade), and given him the character arc we so desperately needed.
But I also recognize that there’s a lot of debate on whether Draco even deserved a redemption. Some say he chose to become a Death Eater, even was excited and proud to be one, bragging to his friends in The Half-blood Prince about being chosen for such an important task. Not to mention the way Draco tormented the Golden Trio and called Hermoine the wizard slur for like 6 years in a row.
But listen, if a grown a** man like Snape can bully 3 innocent children for 7 years and get a redemption arc, so should Draco.
Draco was tasked with the impossible as punishment for his father. As he states in the heart-wrenching scene on top of the astronomy tower in The Half-Blood Prince, “don’t you understand, I have to do this, I have to kill you, or he’s going to kill me.” Even Harry vouches for him at the ending, telling Ron and Hermione that his wand was lowering and that he (Draco) wouldn’t have gone through with it (killing Dumbledore.)
Another fan theory promotes the Draco-redemption case. In The Chamber of Secrets, when Dobby states he’s heard “good things about Harry Potter”, fans theorize that Dobby heard those from Draco himself, being that he’s the only one who knew Harry at that time in the Malfoy household. Of course, there are holes in this theory. Draco was still young at the time Dobby stated this and hated Harry.
Although we see the most brushed-over 2-second clip of Draco with his wife, Astoria, at the end of the movie, and the book quickly mentions the fact that Draco is present meaning that he’s not in Azkaban or expelled from society. That is not the ending we wanted or deserve for him.