Have you spent the last seven years wondering what on earth happened to Draco Malfoy to make him lose all his hair?
You’re in luck—our queen J.K. Rowling is about to tell us. As part of her ongoing series of new stories on Pottermore, Rowling is writing a new string of Christmas treats.
In a new post on Pottermore and Facebook, Rowling announced that the 12 days of Christmas will start Dec. 12, and will include rhyming riddles that fans can solve in order to “unwrap” each new gift. Included, we hope, will be a juicy backstory about Draco, the snobby rich kid who did his best to make Harry Potter’s early years at Hogwarts miserable.
When last we saw Malfoy, he was standing on Platform 9 and ¾, a balding, taciturn, middle-aged man, who was putting his own kids on the train to Hogwarts along with Harry’s.
That scene, of course, came to us as part of Rowling’s infamous epilogue to the final Harry Potter book, in which she jumped ahead 19 years (sound familiar, anime fans?) to show us her vision of the characters’ future. The epilogue so incensed readers of the books that it immediately spawned its own sprawling subgenre of fanfiction known as “EWE”—Epilogue? What Epilogue?—written by fans who wanted endless possibilities for their favorite characters following the events of the final book.
But endless fanfics are no substitute for the real thing, which is why we have no doubt thousands of fans will be lining up next Friday to find out new info about Slytherin’s favorite blond-haired bad boy. After all, to the average Muggle, Draco Malfoy may only be your average rich bully, but to passionate Harry Potter fans he’s much more. The practice of turning Draco into a mysterious, redeemable emo kid was so popular in the heyday of Harry Potter fandom that he was a trope-namer at TV Tropes. It’s not a stretch to say that Draco in Leather Pants was the original Edward Cullen.
So what has Draco been doing for a living all this time? How did he find his place in the post-Voldemort wizarding world? How did he meet and fall in love with his eventual wife, Astoria Greengrass? What on earth possessed him to name his son “Scorpio Hyperion”? (Clearly Rowling should have thought ahead to the fact that if you ship Harry Potter’s equally inexplicably named son “Albus Severus” together with “Scorpio,” the ship portmanteau is, to the embarrassment of everyone ever, As/S.)
Though we don’t expect Rowling to answer these and other truly important questions (surely Malfoy had at least one bitter make-out session with Harry and/or Hermione, right? At least one???) we have great hopes that she’ll give us some new insight into what was going through Draco’s head during that turbulent sixth year at Hogwarts.
We look forward to having plenty of new fanfic fodder to help us celebrate the holidays.
H/T Telegraph | Photo by gordontarpley/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)