Male authors -- especially *married men* -- you should absolutely throw your hat in the romance ring. There's a shortage of GOOD romance by male voices out there. Not explicit/cringe stuff, but the sweet, funny, charming, and occasionally adventurous things that made your wife fall in love with you. Love makes life worth living, so don't think you can't write romance just becuase you haven't yet (or your name isn't Nicholas Sparks).

To be honest, I like the idea. I am tierd of girl bosses characters, I want main heroine to be princess again.

Malfoid Deepest Desire

Replacing Draco Malfoy with the "Malfoid", Draecina sends ripples through the whole edifice that Rowling built. It's how stories grow. Build one corner, and that corner makes you ask the questions that help you build another. If you replace a cardstock bully with a prideful and complex debutante, who yearns for forbidden things, and must eventually choose between her family, her heritage, her entire world, and the boy she loves, then this fills out the next part of the story by making us ask "why?" Why does she fall in love with Harry Potter? That answer depends on what she wants. And what she wants depends on where she comes from. And both these questions ultimately wind up at her father. Because a little girl learns about men, and about love, from her father. Now, it would be easy to declare that Lucius Malfoy is to be a cold, vicious, domineering, hypocritical, selfish, and abusive man. And therefore loving Harry Potter becomes an act of defiance. Becomes that tired old trope of kissing the motorcycle hoodlum to piss off daddy. But that's not love. That's daddy issues. And daddy issues will not change a girl. They will not carry her though the fire. They will not make her a hero. We can do better than that. Try the opposite. Lucius Malfoy's creed and values, repugnant though they are to our original author, are deeply and sincerely held. He does not believe in elites merely because he wishes to be one of them. He believes that the gifted, the talented, the blessed, are needed by the world, and their privileges come with a price of responsibility. So he has raised both his children with love, holding back nothing that it was in his power to give. But he has raised them for a mission in life, and never made his expectations anything less than clear. Draecina is to spend her childhood and teenage years preparing herself to lead. And she is to marry wisely, to preserve and improve a bloodline that is precious to the world. Now we know both why she falls in love with Harry Potter, and why she is terrified to admit this, first to herself, then to others. Harry Potter, you see, has all the traits of an attractive boy, courage, competence, athleticism, popularity, the respect of children and adults alike. He is always the main character, and a heroic one at that. But he is also a rogue. A scamp. A mischief maker. He does not do as he is told. He acts of his own accord. And in so doing, he always seems to end up saving the day, to wild applause. How could she not admire him? How could she not yearn to be part of his little band of troublemakers, sneaking about at night and breaking the rules? And when she is just a bit older, with early puberty bringing on thoughts of boys, how can he not represent the one thing she has been told she must not have, as the price of all her privilege? Passion. She doesn't want to sit in a parlour, silent save for a loudly ticking clock, and make awkward conversation with a series of well-bred boys who have been ushered into her presence for the sake of their race-horse bloodlines. She wants to feel. She wants to run barefoot in the rain. She wants the school's handsome and popular rogue to kiss her and tangle his fingers in her hair. But she is terrified. Too terrified to admit her feelings even to herself. And when she cannot avoid that, too terrified to act on them, hiding away from the boy she desperately yearns to follow after, pushing him away with words of scorn so that no one will suspect, then seeking him out only to fight with him, because if they are fighting, then at least he is looking at her, and anything is better than his absence. Why is she terrified? Of what? Of who? Of her father. Not of his scorn. Not of punishment. Not of his hard hands, for he has never struck her and never would. He has never shown her anything but love. And this is the cruelest trap of all. She is terrified of disappointing him. Daddy's girl cannot bear the thought of losing his love. He can never know who she has chosen to love, because then his patient, quiet disappointment would force her to choose. And she cannot. Every day she is tortured by guilt. She is a Bad Girl. She has been given everything, had every advantage, and still she cannot put her heart into the small measure of responsibility that the world asks in return. But while she cannot bear to choose Harry Potter over her family, or her family over Harry Potter, her choice is already made, and it is inevitable, because she has chosen him over any suitor that their quiet, thoughtful calculations of bloodline and political advantage could ever bring to her door. This is why she taunts him for his "low-class" behavior, and seeks to part him from "the wrong kind of friends". Because she harbors the fantasy, impossible though it is, that he, Harry Potter, the boy who holds her heart, can somehow become, be accepted as, one of the elites, as defined in the rules of her world. It's impossible, of course. He's a half-blood. Sure, he has power and skill in his own right, even fame, but for a child of the Malfoys? Never. So she yearns for him, succumbing sometimes to temptation and pulling him near, only to drive him away again as she is wracked by guilt and shame. She cannot choose him, cannot commit to her love for him, until she begins to see that her father, following his beliefs, has made reckless choices with dire consequences. Until she begins to think the unthinkable... that her father, the lordly, infalible Lucius Malfoy, might be wrong. Oh, not wrong that some people are better than others. She believes she is one of the elite, deserving of privilege, and she will believe this to her dying day. No, her father is not wrong about the order of the world. He is merely wrong about how those elites are to be discovered and known. Harry Potter, in the final dark days before the war, has shown his nobility. He is one of the elite, whether her father can see it or not. That is the moment she can say, in the privacy of her own head, I love him. I love him, and the question is not, was never, whether he is worthy of me. But whether I was worthy of him. She does not know. But she must try. She must run to his side, to stand with him, fight beside him, to add her strength to his in the hour of greatest need. To declare to the world that she chooses him, to declare it even without knowing, in that moment, if he will choose her in return. A leap of faith. Because she has loved him, but up to this moment, she has loved him selfishly, making her feelings of love, of being in love, more important than him. So now she must declare what she hid, without protecting herself, heedless of risk. It is not sacrifice itself, but choice to sacrifice, willingness to sacrifice, that calls the power down. (That's how I'd write it, anyway.)

I keep thinking about this chase in The Force Awakens. At least twice, Finn attempts to take Rey's hand as a matter of protection, and both times she vociferously refuses. One could argue that they'd just met, and it was her planet, so she knew better where to run to, but it seems pretty clear the statement goes beyond that. Rey doesn't need Finn. In fact, the scene ends in a humorous moment where he falls and she offers her hand to pick him up. On its own, I'd say it's a funny intro to their relationship, yet over the course of the sequel trilogy, it reveals itself as the precursor of Rey's weak character work. Thematically, it's poisonous. Recently, I was in an online conversation where I asked why young people are dissuaded from marriage. By and large, it seems the resistance is coming from the women. The young men are conscious of all the same realities - how difficult the economic landscape is, and how marriage is a long, sometimes trying road for better or for worse - but there is still a desire to love and serve. Yes, there are some men who are not mature, who are outright jackasses or latently and lustfully cruel, but this is not the norm. For the most part, they're just boys who want to cross the threshold into real responsibility and growth. And the girls seem to keep telling them, "We don't need you." Worse, there's this sort of looking down upon them for wanting such a thing. It shows up in pop psychology phrases like, "You should learn to be complete without us." This is, quite frankly, diametrically opposed to the created order. For it was God who said all the way back at the beginning, even before the impact of the Fall, "It is not good for the man to be alone." And it also overlooks the reality that the only thing that keeps women from being abused by evil men is the ready presence of good men willing to fight them. Economic stability comes and goes, but a man with a family to care for is the backbone of a civilization. They were given strength for a reason. Two other related phrases I saw turn up were, "A baby will ruin your life," and "Women want partners, but men want servants." There's no denying children are a disruption... a glorious disruption. I can't think of much else that so swiftly cuts through the veil of uncritical, yet strangely justified selfishness we wrap ourselves in. Not that children are a mere tool to this end, or that they should be thought of as a guaranteed hack for growing up, but reality is what it is, and most people discover untold depths of sacrifice, strength, and ingenuity in loving their kids. I lost my job right in the middle of my children's teen years. It was devastating, but I didn't have time to wallow, because I had people to feed. And I'm forever grateful for that chapter of life because it made me love my responsibility to them all the more. As for partnership versus servant hood, I think it's time we recognize marriage is, at its heart, service from both sides all the way down. It's in our nature to think our burden is so much worse than our partner's, but I don't know any decent man who doesn't know he's headed for an early grave and most of his youthful dreams are not coming true on account of the fact that he has a far better set of dreams to labor for. My point is that within marriage and family, we're always serving each other, and to think otherwise is completely unrealistic. The partnership is formed in the serving. I guess the reason this all gets under my skin is that I love the life I've been given, and it has not been easy. I love my wife and I know I am a far better man because of her and our children. And I remember the first time I reached for a girl that way. We were in a sea of people all crushing against each other trying to go a hundred different directions. In that moment, I knew I needed to take her hand. She knew she needed to let me. Which is why 32 years on, I still want to be her hero.

Is Malfoid the beginning of the Romance Revolution?

#Malfoid #harrypotter

The real question is whether you’d be able to host 13 dwarves with no notice.

I would be very pleased to see this happen in bookstores rather than endless shelves of “Embossed Smut”. There is an untapped audience for stories that can appeal to a much larger demographic, and plenty of undiscovered talent that could happen. This article was very well done.

I think I’m starting to understand why the whole Malfoid phenomenon hit like a freight train. And I think it has a lot to do with those of us who grew up watching the Harry Potter movies, waiting year after year for the next one. Yes, the books are much more extensive. They develop characters, relationships, and situations that the movies could barely touch on. That’s not even up for debate. But for many of us, our experience with Harry Potter came mainly through the movies. And there, if I’m being sincere, Harry’s romances never really felt completely natural. Cho appeared, and suddenly she was his love interest. Ginny was always there, but when the time came to turn her into Harry’s great romance, for those of us who had only watched the movies, it almost felt as though several pages were missing between one scene and the next. Even Luna would have made a little more sense. And then someone did something as simple as changing Malfoy’s gender. And everything changed. Because Draconia was no longer just the rival. Suddenly, there was another story hidden inside the one we had known all along. Seven books and eight movies about Harry and Voldemort could also become the story of two children growing up together. Like an hourglass, every encounter, every fight, every insult, and every year at Hogwarts allowed another tiny grain of sand to fall. He was a boy who had only just discovered the magical world. She was a girl who had been raised to despise everything he represented. She was taught that she was supposed to hate him. And she couldn’t. I think that’s a big part of why so many people became so invested in this, especially men. Because it doesn’t just transform Harry Potter. It feeds a fantasy that is much simpler and far more human: To experience a beautiful romance in the middle of an extraordinary life. And maybe that’s why stories like these captivate us so deeply. I actually like The Lord of the Rings more than Harry Potter. But there’s something fantasy can offer us that our everyday lives rarely can. Because life on this side of reality can be, in one word, boring. Monotonous. Of course, there are good things. There are beautiful places. I have my motorcycle, I go to the gym, I can cook something delicious, and there are plenty of things I enjoy about my life. But millions of other people can ride a motorcycle, work out, or cook a great meal too. There’s no castle waiting for us when we turn eleven. We don’t discover that another world has been hiding behind our own. And chances are, we won’t meet someone who started out as our childhood rival, grew up alongside us, and after years of fighting and clashing, somehow became the love of our life. Then a story like this comes along and touches something that had been sleeping inside us for years. Not necessarily because we want to be Harry Potter. Maybe it’s simply because, for a little while, we get to glimpse the kind of story we would have loved to live ourselves. Or maybe because we get to return to a story we loved as children and ask ourselves: What if it had ended differently?

There's a reason why JK is Rowling around in a giant stack of money right now. And it isn't because she sat down at a keyboard thinking "gosh, I hope people think I am a Very Serious Adult Grown-Up, thinking Very Serious Adult Grown-Up Thoughts all day." She had other priorities. No one needs anyone else's permission to write words on a piece of paper, of course, but I think that if you're worried about people thinking you're weird, or uncool, or childish, then "fiction author" might not be most comfortable choice of professions. You have to risk being all of those things if you want to make people feel something, you see. In order to reach past other people's emotional defenses, the walls they put up against the everyday world, the only place you're going to find material to do that is to reach past your own. Humans are among the most childish of all species. We continue to have brain growth into adulthood, and we learn and play and be curious throughout our lives. That's what good writing taps into... that childish place in other people. And it comes from the childish place within ourselves. If you sit down at a blank page, and you're too embarrassed to tap into that, well, you're not going to tap into that, are you? You're going to stay in the shallow end, where it's safe, and you don't ever have to worry about not being taken seriously. Doesn't mean you can't write a fun story, but you ain't getting seven movies and a theme park. As for me, if someone captures lightning in a bottle, then I'm not too proud to look over and see what kind of wires she used.

I think the Malfoid trend is insanely fascinating because it's a commentary about men today. Malfoid was brought up from birth to hate everything about Harry, but despite everything in her corner of society pushing her to despise him and see Harry as a foe, she can't help but love him because he represents something her side of the wizarding world could never show her; honest love and a relationship not based on how useful someone is - which was one of the core themes of the books anyway. For men, Malfoid represents pure love - something modern men yearn for - because she had to overcome her own prejudices to let herself love him, and that's a love a man can trust. She fought for him while he fought the world that tried to enslave her emotionally and even physically. It's an incredible love story based on collective fan fiction by MEN that went viral because men are just thirsty for honest, trustworthy love. It's actually kind of heartbreaking when you think about it.

People talk about a sex drought but what we really have is a romantic wasteland where the foids have all been taught to hate the boys and the boys are trapped in a cycle of cold-blooded minmaxxing that makes them feel like reptilian sociopathic roboclowns when they actually succeed in obtaining sexual access to the foid herd. Like hyperpalatable junk food that tastes incredible but leaves you fundamentally unsatisfied due to the absence of anything recognisable as nutrition, the "sexual marketplace" is denuded of the actual romance that men yearn for. Malfoid resonates so strongly because she represents the possibility of romance within the wasteland. She hates Potter, she can't stop thinking about him, she hounds him relentlessly. Potter is clueless, he thinks she really does hate him, not realizing she's subjecting him to the mother of all shit tests as she works through a turbulent, contradictory ball of emotional snakes born of impossibly high aristocratic standards, indoctrination to hate Potter and everything he represents, and a hidden fascination that she can't admit to herself yet cannot shake. Malfoid, the Bad Girl, is every girl, because the girls have been miseducated to be bad at being girls - competitive and antagonistic, driving away that which they most desire by attacking, mocking, humiliating, and undermining it, rendering themselves and everyone around them pointlessly miserable due to their misplaced loyalty to the dead hand of a death cult whose every promise is a lie born of hatred for them and for the people they truly love. Twisted and painful as this tsundere romance is, it is the only kind of romance that is possible, even in principle, within the wasteland. This gives Malfoid a powerful erotic charge that has nothing to do with "sex"; the story is entirely PG-13, but hit the pornographically jaded chuds between the eyes like a 2x4. Writers looking to rebuild literary culture should ponder this. Romance is the most conspicuously missing element of life in the 21st century.

It’s only in the starting stages, but I’m working on something original but that taps into the same vein as what you’re talking about. There has to be a market for men who like romance too, not just for its own sake, but as part of a larger adventure for something bigger—the “yearning,” I believe people keep calling it. That’s my hope, anyway.

And in the end she chooses love, she chooses to let him in and seek to avenge him when she thinks him dead and stands by his side when evil looms over them. This is what all men yearn for; love. Simple, True and of the sort that Saint-Paul wrote about to the Corinthians.

I am basically convinced that not having a woman to fight for diminishes most men. We need something outside ourselves to inspire us to go bigger. Only rare sorts can go without.

LOTR might genuinely be one of the greatest things humans have ever put on a screen and I’m not even exaggerating. You can watch it as a kid and think it’s about hobbits and swords and this terrifying ring. Then you watch it as an adult and realize it’s basically about everything that actually matters. Power corrupts people and evil usually starts really small..Good people can be tempted and courage isn’t about being fearless. Friendship can literally carry you when you can’t carry yourself anymore. The smallest person in the room can change the course of history. You do the right thing not because you know you’re going to win, but because it’s the right thing to do. Honestly… I think it should be mandatory viewing for kids at some point. Not just “watch the movie” but actually dissect it. Why does Boromir fail? Why can Sam resist what other people can’t? Why does Frodo show Gollum mercy? Why is Aragorn a good leader when he spends half the story reluctant to have power? What happens when someone becomes consumed by resentment, fear, or the desire to control other people? Then make kids apply those questions to their own lives. Friendship, temptation, loyalty, courage, responsibility, choosing who you want to be when nobody is forcing you to choose correctly. There are probably more useful lessons about becoming a decent human being buried in those movies than in half the stuff we make kids memorize in school…and those are learnings and lessons that would stick and could carry you through all of life. My favorite part is that the heroes aren’t these invincible characters either. They’re tired, scared, tempted, and completely outmatched. Half the time they have no idea what they’re doing but they just keep going…. Then somehow Peter Jackson took ALL of THAT and made three epic movies at the same time, filled them with real sets, real landscapes, thousands of extras, incredible music,… and made something that still looks better than movies being made with $200M budgets 25 years later. I really don’t think we’ll ever get another thing like it.

It seems people have very funny and misguided ideas about the inspiration of JK Rowling for Harry Potter. You need to consider she is British, born in 1965, which means really, really British. She grow up in a very culturally homogeneous UK and immersed in even older staunchly British stuff. There are many influences on her work, of course, but anyone with a bit of literary culture can see the influence of Shakespeare and Charles Dickens for the themes and the character archetypes, the drama and the social atmosphere, and their relationships. The world itself is inspired in a lost "old UK" inspired by victorian era narratives with classism, etc. Again, Dickens and Bronte. Then she mixed it with a lot of Narnia and Tolkien, that at their core are also a yearning for the 19th century rural and aristocratic, bucolic UK where Tolkien and CS Lewis grew up. Those are also inspired by British folklore, Greco-Roman mythology, etc. Harry Potter itself, he is at his core, a mix of the main characters of David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Orphan, from an aristocratic/famous family but grow poor, but then got rich, tragic but heroic, tortured by society but humble and honest... Dickensian. JKR uses magic to create the wizardly world, where all that vintage victorian society survives, partially isolated from the muggle post-industrial late 20th century UK. Malfoid... Malfoid makes sense - among other things, like Ginny is a insipid underdeveloped character - because Draco Malfoy turns into a perfect copy of Estella Havisham, from Great Expectations (Dickens), fitting perfectly with Harry Potter, which is -more than- partially inspired by Pip. I am not saying that the person who had the idea of Malfoid had her in the head when he thought about it. Estella Havisham is an archetype you can find in multiple literary and other fictionally works: Entitled, beautiful Mean Girl who manipulates and tortures basically everyone around her, focusing on a boy who secretly loves but she would never admit it, not even to herself. It adds an impossible Shakespearian love between the young leaders of two rival houses... hmmm. It resonates at a basic subconscious level in the heads of all the people who think about it a little, even if they cannot point to the sources, which takes a bit of training in literary analysis and a high degree of autism, I suppose. Oh well...

So, I saw this yesterday and a concept hit me like a freight train falling from the heavens. I call it a "Wizard Wedding". Now, what *is* a Wizard Wedding? When a wizard and a witch whose souls are intertwined cast a spell through the same wand, the spell produced is far greater