In a time when fewer people than ever, it seems, are reading books, the parched publishing industry has wrung some quenching juice from an unexpected source: Dramione fan fiction. “Dramione,” for those unfamiliar—as I was until a couple of months ago—is a portmanteau of, and “ship” name for, Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger, two characters from Harry Potter. This summer, two Dramione fics turned rewritten novels became New York Times bestsellers, and a third—arguably the most highly anticipated of the three—debuted this week. But what is it about this particular couple that romance readers are finding so interesting? Is the Dramione phenomenon just, as the Times insinuated in a recent piece about the fandom, a cheat code for aging, politically savvy millennials to keep on reading about Harry Potter—but make it spicy—well into their 30s? And do the books hold up as ostensibly original novels, stripped of all copyright source material and attributable byproducts of She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?
Full disclosure: I haven’t touched a word—or watched a film, or enjoyed a theme park ride, or played a video game, or attended a play—emerging from the Harry Potter universe since about 2003. This is not the result of a concerted effort to boycott billionaire author J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans activism so much as a simple accident of birth, being a little bit too old to have cathected onto the IP the way it seems as if a full 75 percent of millennials did. So when I dived into the three recently published Dramione books—Rose in Chains by Julie Soto, The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley, and this week’s Alchemised by SenLinYu—it was as a regular romance and occasional romantasy reader, free from the burden of racking my brain to recall what few (generally hostile) interactions Hermione and Draco had in the books or in the movies, in which they were played by Emma Watson and Tom Felton, respectively. (Perhaps the good looks of these actors are to blame for some of the lasting appeal of this pairing.)
Reading these books, as well as a few scattered shorter Dramione fics on the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own and Instagram, left me with a reverse-engineered understanding of the characters and what might attract fans to their forbidden romance. Hermione is brunette, studious, scrupulously ethical, into STEM, a scholarship kid from an unusual background, unsparing in her cutting remarks, the sort of Ali Hazelwood–type heroine who intimidates most men with her intellect. Draco, on the other hand, is platinum-haired, a bully, posh, intense, athletic, obsessive, and cruel. They share in common qualities of stubbornness and persistence that they come to mutually recognize, over time, as admirable.
In Irresistible Urge, Hermione and Draco become Aurienne Fairhrim and Osric Mordaunt, respectively, a medical researcher from a caste of healers and an assassin from a shunned caste of murderers for hire. They team up to find a cure for some magical disease he’s got, and a lot of banter ensues. This book is what romance readers call a “slow burn”—no sex, except for in the characters’ dreams and fantasies—and it’s especially sharp and wry. Here’s part of one of their fights: “Mordaunt said that what Aurienne really wanted was a more Elastic Spirit; she was an unbearable combination of high-handed and small-minded. Aurienne said thank you; she would consult him next time she needed advice from an Abscess with inferior hair. Mordaunt, vexed, said, how dare she, when her bun looked like a perfect onion?” It’s not quite right to call Irresistible Urge “cozy”—though Aurienne and Osric don’t have sex in this first half of a planned duology, it’s set in a libertine world, where each of them is a full adult with a deep sexual history that gets referred to often—but it’s got a Wodehousian vibe to it, featuring a number of interchanges that will be immensely satisfying to readers suffering persistent esprit de l’escalier over their performance during remembered interactions with their high school enemies.
Despite having a higher rating on Goodreads, Rose in Chains, featuring Briony (catch that rhyme) Rosewood and Toven Hearst, and the first in a planned trilogy, is a much less artful exercise in readerly wish fulfillment. This is a straightforward “That popular boy you liked in high school secretly loved you all along” romance plot—for which, to be sure, there is something to be said. Briony is on the losing side of a war between magical factions, and Toven, a winner, purchases her at auction. He keeps her in his house as a prisoner, but secretly, he is working with her. This leads to many situations in which Briony must represent herself in public as his sex slave (truly) so that Toven’s fellow evildoers will believe she is off-limits, while, behind the scenes, Toven doesn’t touch her—until she wants that. Which, by the end, she certainly does. “You underestimate how desirable you were to those men back in school,” Toven says to Briony, explaining the need for the two to continue their PDA—and the reader sighs along.
Haters of the romance genre, and those who just don’t know what a broad variety of books are published within it, often joke that it’s all about sex, a way for women to lose their minds in text that helps them reimagine themselves as desirable. (One commenter on that New York Times piece described romantasy as “porn for women with roses and crowns on the covers.”) And sometimes it is that, it’s true. There are certainly sex scenes in SenLinYu’s Alchemised—and tons of other great romance plotting, with characters pining, yearning, and rescuing—but people hopping straight from Irresistible Urge and Rose in Chains to this book, like I did, may be shocked to find a straight-up war story, deeply bloody, sad, and miserable. The newly released novel is a revamped version of Manacled, a very, very long and very popular fanfic, originally based on both Harry Potter and The Handmaid’s Tale, that the author famously wrote on their phone while their baby was napping. This information about the book’s provenance is startling when you consider the elaborate violence in the plot. The many content notes at the back of Alchemised flag suicidal ideation, self-harm, human experimentation, medical torture, eugenics, and “allusions to necrophilia,” a phrase that I can’t imagine would prepare anyone for reading the graphic sexual threat that one villain makes to the heroine right after he stabs her in the chest.
Is it despite or because of this dark tone that I fell into Alchemised headfirst? At the beginning of the story we find out that Helena Marino (that would be Hermione) was a lonely scholarship student who was friends with the deceased Luc Holdfast (Harry, RIP), a princely figure from the family that rules the city of Principia, when they were all in alchemy school together. Kaine Ferron is the Draco figure, their former schoolmate and an arrogant heir to a fortune. The war is between sorcerers who use necromancy to reanimate corpses as soldiers (and to continue their own lives beyond their original bodies) and the Holdfasts and their allies, who regard these practices as taboo. Kaine, it seems—until certain revelations that unfold in the second act of the story—is one of the worst villains, working on the side of the necromancers.
Although the war is fought with magic, and the healing Helena does is often (though not always) magical, the long middle section of the book, in which we follow Helena’s desperate work inside the hospital where she tends casualties from the ongoing war, could be the story of stretched-thin medical personnel in any regular old human conflict. Helena is a deeply lonely person, alienated from everyone around her, except a few colleagues in the hospital who understand the desperation of the situation like she does. In this context, the growing romance with Kaine feels as if it has to happen. We fiercely need each of these people to have an ally in the midst of a grinding war fought by a fractured resistance that is going, inevitably, to be won by the worst possible forces of darkness.
It is perhaps this feeling that best explains the Dramione obsession. I have become convinced that it is the ship that helps people resolve real-life political tensions inside of fantasy. We’ve been inundated over the past decade with reporting and firsthand evidence of the rifts that the resurgence of right-wing trad thought has created between men and women. Dramione, as an idea, fixes all of that. The dominant, possessive Draco—he of the aristocratic bloodline, hailing from a world of rigid hierarchy and cruelty—always has to admit that Hermione—of humble birth, self-made in her brilliance and her autonomy—was right. And not only was she right, but he is in love with her rightness. As YouTuber Princess Weekes said in a video about the ethics of Harry Potter fandom (people inside romance are divided as to whether it’s OK to enjoy Dramione fic while boycotting Rowling), the Dramione ship imagines a romance between “the scolder in chief and the person who needs scolding the most.”
Dramione fever may continue into next year and beyond: I was unsurprised to learn that Alchemised, even before its release date, had already sold to Hollywood for a large amount of money. Of the three books, it’s the one that I could most see on the big screen. If Irresistible Urge could be a great rom-com, and Rose in Chains a fine adaptation as a series for Amazon Prime, then Alchemised should be a rated-R fall-release fantasy movie, strictly for adults. Whenever it gets made, it’s likely to be a hit, and no wonder. You can imagine why now, more than ever, people might be drawn to the idea of men and women who once were polar opposites coming slowly but surely into alignment. In these stories, the outcome is always love. Who wouldn’t want to escape into that?