Malfoid Sucks

So why do Zoomers think it “works”?

This new Malfoid meme is one of the most degenerate things I’ve ever seen.

And it’s not that I don’t understand it or get the appeal, because I absolutely do.

But it’s objectively just about the worst sign for societal health that you could ask for.

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For as long as I can remember men have complained about women eroticizing male friendship and trying to turn it into a fag thing.

I distinctly remember being in middle school and wanting to jerk off to fanfics about Snape raping Hermione and having to scroll through a billion slash fics written by fat teenage girls about Harry and Ron or Sirius and Lupin or James and Sirius or Fred and George or Dumbledore and Filch blowing out each other’s shitty hairy assholes.

It was horrible.

That said as a wizened man of 33 years I can ackshully understand the appeal now—namely that for a lot of teenage girls without any sexual experience of their own it’s a lot less psychically onerous to write a boy character in erotic situations who is going to be way less concerned about shit like rape, pregnancy, reputational contamination etc., and therefore lets the whole thing feel kind of frivolously masturbatory whereas the moment you have a girl character get fucked all the stakes immediately rise a lot higher such that for many young girls the whole thing becomes way too “real.”

Moreover male friendship is an erotic container that lets young women explore the various interpersonal dimensions of masculinity without any of the scariness of overt sexed asymmetry, which they’ll sometimes approach as an intermediary stage by way of rival eroticization—i.e. having Snape sodomize James or Harry blow out Draco.

Looking back Harry/Draco slash fics were fucking EVERYWHERE in the late aughts, and I remember loads of quirksome chungus Millennial chicks experiencing their suppression on Potter fansites as one of the great civil rights issues of our time.

Every now and then the girls writing these fics would grow some ovaries and write a proper story where Draco fucks Hermione—virtually always making Draco a lot more competent than he appears in the books, often to the point of creating a functional Draco-Snape composite so as to make him a properly compelling Bad Boy—but slashshit remained their primary genre of interest, with most of the associated fanart showing Draco in a kind of exaggerated version of his bookself wherein he adopts an almost bratty submissive twink role contra Harry.

At the time I never would have fathomed that almost two decades later Harry Potter would be discovered by a new generation intent on making those fanfics respectable by giving the young aristocrat a proper pusspuss and changing basically nothing else.

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So why is Malfoid degenerate?

To start with because male-male rivalry is a developmental necessity for young boys essential for the cultivation of epistemic hygiene and a strong character.

A good parent will reproach you when you fuck up, as will a good friend, but for them doing so is ultimately a lot more expensive than merely affirming you, whereas for a genuine rival calling you out on your bullshit is cheap and pleasurable.

The rival’s opinion is also emotionally cheap to dismiss as jealousy or sabotage—and that, of course, is exactly what allows you to quietly course-correct in response to his critiques and how they land publicly while externally maintaining a stiff upper lip.

More importantly, the emotional fuel downstream of wanting to outshine or refute a personally consequential rival is often precisely what enables a young man to rise to the occasion and do genuinely impressive things. If everyone treated Simba like Timon and Pumbaa he’d probably just want to sit around eating bugs all day; he becomes a Hero because basic decency and honor oblige him to knock Scar’s ass off Pride Rock and into that hyena horde.

When hatred doesn’t simply ossify into sterile resentment it’s a lot of times one of the most productive emotions a man can feel.

And the thing it’s all too easy to forget about Harry vs. Malfoy today is that the two of them genuinely despised each other.

It was a hilariously Millennial rivalry—personally obsessive and deeply narrativized, with each boy staking a tremendous part of his identity on being Better than the other in an ideological way and constantly trying to humiliate him and refute his self-theory.

Note that neither Gen X guys nor Zoomer boys really compete in this way; they’ll absolutely fight over girls or concrete status positions, or clash in bounded athletic, professional, or intellectual containers, but for most guys born outside the 1980-1995 bracket it feels fundamentally bizarre to have THAT much emotional energy invested in obliterating another male’s self-esteem qua itself.

But for Millennial guys it’s a natural impulse, because deep down every single one of us thinks he’s the Main Character, and our basic masculine currency isn’t money or looks or competence or anything else so much as Main Character Energy—which is to say a presumptive right to attention, moral authority, and interpretive deference.

That’s what somatically registers to a Millennial male as “high status,” and it overlaps pretty heavily in lots of situations with simply being rich / famous / hot, but when it doesn’t overlap Millennial guys will often register a situation completely differently from a man significantly older or younger than himself, as for Millennials a man can have more of every conventional status good imaginable and still lose an interaction should his rival manage to establish before the audience of consequence that he’s a fraud, a coward, a prick, or an undeserving beneficiary of institutional privilege.

Note that in Harry’s first meeting with Draco in Madam Malkin’s and later when they reconvene on the Hogwarts Express Harry isn’t particularly upset about Draco being richer or more immediately socially dominant than him but is absolutely fucking livid about Draco feeling automatically entitled to talk shit about Hagrid and the Weasleys while simply proclaiming to Harry who the “right sort” of Wizards are.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons Harry globs onto Ron so immediately is that Ron is familiar with the wizarding world, interpretively competent and good at calling out bullshit, and especially for a Millennial dude deeply unpretentious. He’s also insecure and kind of an ass at times who’s wrong about loads of shit, but especially in the first few books Ron keeps Harry’s priors about the wizarding world updated superbly well, which Harry needs on account of himself being a bit of an overly reactive diva.

Millennial men respect above all else a dude who calls it like he sees it without being interpretively imperious, because deep down every one of us is hugely interpretively imperious and managing that tension is kind of the chief objective in Millennial male social relations, as being told what or how to think about things by some nigga we don’t respect at all is basically always the fastest way to make us chimp out.

We also tend to moralize our status contests a lot more readily than other cohorts—the dude we’re jockeying with can’t simply be annoying or in the way, but has to be the antagonist of our bildungsroman: arrogant, lucky, privileged, predatory, etc.

And to that end Harry and Draco are almost perfect to polarize each other.

Each one of them absolutely has unearned privilege, with Draco being the richest boy at school with the most powerful father and Harry being the Boy Who Lived, which means that even without Millennial theatricality the two of them are naturally going to turn into rivalrous status poles—particularly when you throw in an ideologically valent house struggle that pushes Draco towards being ambitious and genealogically aggressive and provides Harry with an institutionally legitimized moral grammar for breaking rules he perceives as corrupt while proactively becoming a sort of human Schelling Point for anti-Slytherin action.

For his own masculine identity to cohere Harry needs to prove that Draco’s inherited prestige is counterfeit, whereas Draco needs to prove that Harry’s narrative centrality is unearned celebrity. It’s not just a matter of Quidditch rivalry or wanting to fuck the same girl or be the most brilliant student at Hogwarts—it’s about wanting to rub the other boy’s face in shit to such an extent that his entire self-concept is wiped out and your interpretation of him becomes canonical in the public record. Each victory is just one more exhibit in his prosecution, and each defeat something to be explained away.

The antipathy is epistemic and literary in a way non-Millennial rivalries seldom are, because you can’t simply kick his ass or fuck his girl and move on—you need to make the little faggot admit to himself that he’s the lesser man and renounce his interpretive authority or else the conflict still feels ongoing.

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Zoomer boys are different.

For one thing they tend to have far less intricately narrativized life-stories—ultimately because the Zoomer Oral Culture and feedbrain makes their lives recalibrate far too quickly for that given their need for plausible deniability and dramaturgic nimbleness, but more proximally because their friends will call them a Coping Faggot if they adopt literally any autonarrative other than the one most immediately legible to the man on the street, which in their case is a bitchy teenager angling to put them in their place.

And they’ll absolutely compete with each other professionally, athletically, erotically, and so on—but they tend to be a lot less sentimental and moralistic about it, and the moment someone starts making excuses for why he lost everyone starts roasting him.

On one hand this makes them a lot more self-aware than Millennials; it also makes them a lot less likely to seriously compete in any arena where they don’t feel like they have a decent shot at totalistic domination, as the status return on partial victory is significantly lower than it used to be for Millennial men—hence the vastly more asymmetric nature of Zoomer masculine life.

Without copes the only tenable routes to dignity are a) Clavicular-style success within instantly legible and algorithmically-mediated global status markets where no one can contest your superiority; or b) arbitrageurial domination of ultra-siloed microcultures with little to no portability into the mainstream status economy like you had with the much thicker Millennial subcultures of the 2010s.

You’re absolutely allowed to destroy and humiliate a rival—but what you can’t do is get personally invested in the rivalry with him, or else you look like a weird faggot. The only acceptable posture is affected nonchalance masking Machiavellian brutality.

The upside of this ecology is that you’re a lot more likely to get Ron-style negative feedback from friends who think you’re being a faggot or cringe instead of waiting for Draco to humiliate you; the downside is that Zoomer boys have a tendency to act like Ron in Goblet of Fire and call their buddy a theater kid the instant he acts a bit more exceptional than the record permits, which oftentimes robs Zoomer men of quite a bit of emotional energy / gumption compared to what you see in Millennial friend groups where everyone is presumptively expected to validate everyone else’s autonarrative to the point where it almost feels like a beanbag startup.

It’s genuinely a tradeoff; Draco correcting you is more painful in the moment but easier to metabolize against a heroic self-concept while maintaining protagonistic gumption, while Ron correcting you can be a lot more fraternal and jocular but also foster a deeply maladaptive crabs-in-the-bucket mentality.

But what matters for our purposes is that the Harry-Draco rivalry doesn’t work anymore.

To Zoomer boys it makes precisely no sense that Harry would continue obsessing over Malfoy book after book—particularly in Half-Blood Prince, when the world has at last vindicated his schizo epistemic isolation in Book 5 and he’s once more high status per normalfag sensibilities, and despite that he becomes almost totalistically obsessive with Malfoy and convinced he’s Up To Something.

Bruh: why not take the W and move on?

But such a move makes perfect sense to the Millennial Male, who sees in Draco a longtime adversary who straightforwardly deserves to be force-fed diarrhea and seems now to be acting erratically, whereas Harry finally enjoys a sufficiently secure status position to call Draco out overtly on his bullshit and cement his victory for posterity.

Finish him off!

Which note per the Millennial grammar ackshully doesn’t have to mean humiliating Draco straightforwardly—indeed, compared to Zoomer boys Millennial men are a lot more likely temperamentally to enjoy epistemically subordinating a former rival in an ostensibly friendly container where he bashfully admits you were right all along and is provided a sort of dignity participation trophy for bending the knee, maybe becoming a sort of Batman to your Superman independently corroborating your prestige. Hell, I think a lot of Millennial dudes would have found it a lot more satisfying for Harry to recruit Draco against Voldemort and then use him productively in the final battle.

Or you could go with something a bit more Gen X-coded and have Harry murk Draco accidentally with Sectumsempra at the end of Book 6, establishing definitively that he’s the Superior Man while massively traumatizing himself in the process and letting the reader ackshully take Harry seriously as a man instead of as this sexless christlike rorschach-protag while giving the final book a far greater sense of moral seriousness.

Instead JKR turns Draco into a woman.

He ceases to be any kind of credible adversary to Harry, with Voldemort assuming narrative preeminence and Snape usurping the role of more personal antagonist the moment he first saves Draco’s life and then shoves his ass out of the way to kedavra Dumbledore off that tower.

Then in the last book Draco can’t even credibly boss around fucking Crabbe, and it’s his mommy’s love for him that ultimately ends up being what lets Harry take down Voldie in the end… dude doesn’t even get to meaningfully participate in the ending theatrics on either side. It’s a total waste of the character that feels utterly inconsonant with his genuinely formidable role as Harry’s foil in the first five books.

And that was straightforwardly just bad writing on JKR’s part.

He goes out with a whimper in the most ignominious way possible that lets Harry surpass him without it feeling like an ackshual victory by masculine terms. It feels a bit like accidentally cumming while you’re clicking between porn videos, or someone scratching right next to an itch—profoundly unsatisfying!

You need to either let Harry eradicate Draco himself or actively recruit him against Voldemort. Anything else ruins the character—at least for male readers; girl readers can still enjoy him in a sense by imagining Harry blowing out his little blonde anus.

Alternatively:

You can give him a pusspuss and make his increasing incompetence endearing.

…which just so happens to be erotically dynamite for Zoomer boys, because it turns out Malfoy acts almost exactly like a bitchy, bratty, and status-obsessed little Zoomette.

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In 2026, the average young man is not going to feel like his male rivals are especially narratively salient, and if anything will be deeply embarrassed by any perception that he registers them as such.

Meanwhile, it’s become a hell of a lot less embarrassing to be overtly rivalrous and antagonistic toward girls than it was twenty years ago, while the flirtation scripts surrounding peer-age courtship have become almost rivalrous by default.

Young girls now make more on average than their male peers. They’re better-educated and more institutionally connected. Meanwhile Gen X girldads are notorious for being weaponized by their opportunistic and mercenary daughters, whereas Zoomer boys often feel profoundly misunderstood by if not overtly adversarial toward their dad, while tending to experience institutional life as themselves and their male friends versus a deeply corrupt establishment and its theatrically capricious bugman toadies.

This makes Harry Potter, for all his Millennial diva tendencies, far more of a natural fit for them as a sympathetic protagonist than you’d expect given the books’ anemic popularity with Zoomer boys prior to September 2026. They’d almost certainly find his intensely intimate but never erotically consummated friendship with Hermione a bit strange, but his deep personal loyalty to low-status male friends would absolutely win their respect, as would his unwillingness to tolerate bullshit from people, though a lot of them would also think he’s being a kind of cringey Millennial theater kid in Book 5 and not playing the game strategically enough

It’s really specifically the Draco dynamic that would take them out of it, as in their world the right move is plainly to call Draco a LARPing faggot in Book 1 and move on.

Whereas if Malfoy is a girl?

Suddenly everything clicks into place.

The money. The institutional bullying. The status obsession. My father…

The idea of grappling with a girl who thinks she’s better than you because the world tells her she is but ends up humiliated because her father loses his authority while her reliance on institutional power collapses spectacularly in a way that exposes her own lack of autonomous talent is almost perfectly calibrated to erotically captivate Zoomer boys, as that’s been their path out of intersexual Hell for as long as they can remember.

The Millennial male fantasy is to prove to Hermione that you’re morally serious and narratively central enough for her to submit to and choose over your epistemic rivals in a fundamentally companionate container where the erotic sizzle comes at least in part from her own magnificence; the Zoomer male fantasy is to make that snotty little foid finally admit that she’s lowkey kind of retarded and worthless compared to you and has been coasting on privileges that she never ackshully worked for.

At which point you actually can love her as a woman again.

Because Zoomer boys aren’t as heartless and misogynistic as they seem sometimes.

They just know instinctively that girls are kind of dumb and capricious, and are tired of all the bullshit—which genuinely has gotten a lot worse than it ever was in our day, because as retarded and solipsistic as Millennial womyn are at least they’ve always been poorer and weaker than us and so felt a need to earn our respect. Zoomettes meanwhile never had any meaningful external policing of their behavior whatsoever, and to boys their age who aren’t apex-status unironically do just act like Draco Malfoy.

So I get the appeal of Malfoid.

I really do.

She makes for an awful cute little brat to tame.

But it’s also just a really bad fucking sign that young men are relocating their entire locus of narratively satisfying rivalry from other men to literal women.

Number one because it both serves as a leading indicator of and further exacerbates the willingness of young men to opt out of traditional male status contest to instead pursue what amounts to Hirschman-exit from a fake and gay Cornelius Fudgeworld.

Number two because it relocates the epistemic office of adversarial audit from one’s ackshual adversaries to one’s friends and cordial acquaintances, which as circlejerky as Millennial male friendships can get at times has gone way too fucking far in the other direction and created a world of Resentful Ron Epistemics where young guys bucketcrab each other out of being excited for things in a manner that honestly is appropriately calibrated for the relentlessly adversarial algorithmic status markets of 2026 but is also objectively terrible for masculine growth which at times does need to be a little LARPy and not wholly self-aware until that delusion can actualize itself.

And I’m not trying to like volitionally exhort Zoomer boys to be more theatrically competitive with one another in a Millennial theater kid way because that’s plainly not how anything works; at scale people are just roombas responding to incentive structures. What I want is for my fellow Millennials and especially any hardboiled Gen X girldads reading this to internalize why Malfoid is so strikingly popular with young guys nowadays and at least make some token effort to create a few avenues out of the mire for them, because I think it’s just viscerally apparent to everyone born prior to 1995 why this is a monstrously wretched development for civilization.

To wit—twenty years ago, girls looked at Harry Potter and couldn’t understand why two boys would spend seven years obsessing over one another without fucking.

Today boys look at Harry Potter and can’t understand it either.

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