And why he doesn't have to be.
There are Harry Potter characters that we love to hate, or who are a delight to have around despite – no, because of – their obvious unscrupulousness. Who wouldn't read on with eager anticipation to see Gilderoy Lockhart, Rita Skeeter, or – most of all – Dolores Umbridge get their comeuppance? There are characters like Bellatrix Lestrange, who we can't help but love to watch delight in being evil; there are characters like Severus Snape, one of the most fascinating examples of pure moral greyness; and there are characters like Umbridge that we just want to punch in the face. And sometimes, that's the appeal: stories need antagonists, to show us the darker sides of humanity, and sometimes the absolute worst thing you can do to a character is redeem them.
Which brings us to Draco Malfoy.
Draco is fun to have around because of what he is: Harry's rival and the school bully, who isn't nearly as tough as he'd like to think he is. He talks a tough game, but whenever something really important comes up, he'll run off and hide behind someone bigger than him. He doesn't, I need to point out, give off that strong, protective energy which is a large part of what usually makes a Bad Boy so appealing. And it works. He wouldn't be interesting if he were a nicer character, because then he wouldn't exactly be fulfilling his role in the story, would he?
Of course, as the story goes on, Draco does become a more complex character. He develops, as most of the Harry Potter characters do, out of his archetype and becomes more well-rounded. This boy, who thought he had it all figured out, who always had everything he wanted or needed but still never knew how to be satisfied, suddenly finds himself in over his head and has to face the scary possibility, not just that he might fail and be killed, but that the adults all around him whom he'd always loved and trusted to guide him onto the right path might not have known what they were doing after all.
Some fans call Draco the boy with no choice, claiming he was groomed to be a Death Eater from a young age and was never able to make another decision. Of course he was probably influenced by the adults who raised him (because who isn't?), but it was Draco's own decision to become a bully, and all evidence suggests he really wanted to become a Death Eater before he quite understood what that meant. It's a very dangerous practise to say anyone ever had “no choice” about anything. There's always a choice: Sirius Black chose not to be in Slytherin like his family or support the causes they believed in, Regulus Black chose to leave the Death Eaters when he found out how heartless Voldemort was, Snape chose to switch sides and spy for Dumbledore, Dudley Dursley chose to extend an olive branch to Harry. Peter Pettigrew chose to betray Lily and James to Voldemort and save himself instead of them. Harry himself realizes the vital difference between defeating Voldemort because he was prophesized to and doing it because it's what he believes in. To say Draco had no choice not only gives him a free pass for all his rude, immature behaviour, but also strips him of all agency and accountability – and is it ever really that interesting to read about a character who never has any say in how his own life turns out?
Draco Malfoy does not need to have pain and hardship read into his story so that we can feel sorry for him. He does not need to be enabled, treated like a helpless victim who was powerless to make better life choices. When we first meet him early on in The Philosopher's Stone, Draco doesn't give off the sense of being lonely or empty, even underneath the surface. Something must be bothering him, of course, the way he feels the need to be so mean to other people. But it doesn't feel like sadness. There is a sense, perhaps, that no matter how much he has or is given it will never be good enough. I can't say why he started feeling that, but it is a pretty common human trait, tending to notice only what's missing no matter how much is already there. Maybe he picked it up from his parents, who were dissatisfied living in a world where Muggle-borns have rights. Who knows? Draco has a family who loves him, he is able to buy whatever catches his fancy, he's already pretty sure of who he is, where he belongs, and what sort of world he'll be growing up in. And - he's also hyper-focused on Harry not wanting to be his friend. He's obsessed with Harry being more famous than him, perhaps interpreting this as Harry's being better-liked than he is. And he deals with it the only way he knows how – by putting down other people, which he possibly learned from the way his parents talk about anyone they consider to be beneath them. Talking badly about other people probably pushes away most potential friends, thus starting a vicious cycle Draco could easily choose to end by deciding to be nicer. He never shows any sign that he feels badly for the people he hurt or wishes he hadn't done it, and honestly if he had felt bad about it but kept doing it anyway, that would have just made him incredibly weak-willed, Peter Pettigrew on a less serious scale, and made him even worse.
There is a scene in Chamber of Secrets where Harry overhears Draco and Lucius inside a shop, and we get our first taste of what Draco's father is like. He's strict, we can tell that right away. He's not the most demonstrative parent in the world (at least not in public), but there is nothing there at all to imply he neglects Draco. Actually, from the remark he makes about how many times Draco has complained to him about Harry, I get the sense he's been very patient in putting up with this and is only now starting to tell his son he's had enough! The sense I get of Lucius is the sort of parent who tries to “guide” his child, and believes being very firm about what he expects from him will ensure Draco ends up on the best possible path. He tells Draco exactly why he should not appear “less than fond of Harry Potter”, and scolds him for the poor marks he got on his exams, not allowing him to make an excuse and say it was the teachers' fault for playing favourites. (Draco would probably love being dubbed “the boy who had no choice”, a ready-made excuse like that!) Of course, scolding a child for getting bad grades is not exactly the best way to motivate them to do better in future, but many, many parents who are not Death Eaters do this without any ill intentions. Seems to me if Lucius really didn't care about Draco and was neglecting him, he wouldn't even care what grade Draco got on his exams.
Malfoy also gets tons of care packages sent to him from home (which is a sign of affection no matter how much we try to put down gift-giving as a valid form of love language), and never once considers staying at Hogwarts over Christmas except when the Chamber of Secrets was open. I also find it very hard to believe that Draco would always be so quick to defend his father if he were really emotionally abusing him. Remember in Order of the Phoenix, when Lucius was arrested for being a Death Eater and Draco tries to attack Harry for it? “You're dead, Potter,” he says, and tries to ambush him on the Hogwarts Express on the way back home for the summer. Not exactly the reaction of someone whose abusive father is finally no longer able to reach him. The way Draco talks about his parents, I believe they are the people he relies on to give him everything, to make him feel better whenever he starts to feel like the world isn't treating him well enough. I believe he looks up to, admires, and trusts them completely, and that's why he's so proud to carry on his father's legacy. He responds to Lucius's big ideas for his future with complete agreement and pride.
Sure, we readers with our outside perspective can tell Draco's father isn't the nicest guy in the world. Sure, advocating for only pure-bloods to have rights, trying to frame Ginny Weasley to discredit her father, threatening the board of governors' families if they don't do what he says... all of that is pretty nasty stuff, but the way Lucius treats the world at large, and anyone he considers to be “beneath” him, is not necessarily the way he treats his own son. Oh, there are people, I'm sure, who treat everyone horribly including their own immediate families. There are people, I suppose, who treat the outside world well, in order to keep up their reputations, but are horrible to their families behind closed doors. And then there must also be people who genuinely care about and want what's best for their families, but don't spare a thought for the people of the outside world, and I believe this is the category Lucius Malfoy falls into. All the hints that the Malfoys are actually a close-knit family, who care about each other but don't care about anyone else, are staring us right in the face.
And besides, wasn't there some other parent in the books, who was strict and even raised her voice with her children, who got very upset with two of them when they didn't want to follow the life path she had planned out for them, but who never gets accused of being an abusive or unloving parent? Oh yes – Mrs Weasley.
Hear me out – Molly Weasley uses a lot of the same parenting tactics – and slip-ups – that Lucius Malfoy does. Mrs Weasley also has high standards for how she expects her children to behave, but she responds to her children's wrongdoings not even by expressing disappointment and telling them she expects better, but by yelling at them for minutes on end, sometimes in front of guests, so much that everyone becomes uncomfortable and starts making excuses to leave the room. She goes so far as to send Ron a letter which shouts at him and humiliates him in front of the entire school – which strangely enough, not one single character in the book nor any fan I've ever heard has called this out as a hugely inappropriate form of punishment. (I have heard fans discussing which of Harry's parents would have been more likely to send Howlers, but I have yet to hear anyone suggest Howlers need to be retired as a form of Wizarding parental discipline immediately.) Mrs Weasley can act extremely hostile towards any outsider she doesn't deem “good enough”. She makes a totally out-of-line crack about Sirius's being in Azkaban when she doesn't agree with how he (the guy Harry's parents specifically wanted to raise their son if they couldn't) wanted to parent Harry, after completely dismissing his godparent rights by asking who else Harry had as a parent other than her. She makes Fleur very obviously stick out and look excluded at the Weasley family Christmas, where Harry, who is not technically related at all, has a Weasley Christmas jumper but Bill's literal fiancée does not. And she definitely has plans for her sons' futures, but seems to be almost on the verge of disowning them when they don't live up. She scolds Fred and George – in front of guests no less – for not getting enough O.W.L.s, forcibly confiscates their joke shop merchandise they spent months of hard work developing, and basically acts like they don't exist if they don't live up to her expectations (when Ron is made a prefect and Mrs Weasley says “That's everyone in the family!”) And yet somehow, no one finds this as serious as the idea that Lucius Malfoy would probably be disappointed if Draco didn't become a Death Eater. I bet you anything, if there had been a scene where Lucius saw a Boggart and it took the form of a dead Draco, all kinds of people would be protesting that it didn't seem “in character”.
I think the whole reason Mrs Weasley gets a pass when Mr Malfoy doesn't is because she is on the “right side”. Well, that and we mostly see her from Harry's perspective, and we all know Molly treats Harry better than she treats her own kids... But the sense I get is that it's very easy to see Mr Malfoy as the unequivocal Bad Guy, without a single redeeming trait, because he believes in pure-blood supremacy. Kind of hits a little too close to home in the current day and age, doesn't it? I think our perspective on Lucius Malfoy is coloured by all the real-life parallels to that whole pure-blood thing, which is why it can be hard to appreciate how he was meant to be more complex, morally grey, and human, they way most Harry Potter characters turn out to be. He had very questionable beliefs, did some pretty terrible things, but at the same time was still a loving husband and father.
And once we accept that Lucius Malfoy, whatever his other serious faults, did care about his family, we also need to accept that whatever was bothering Draco, and motivated him to become a bully, it wasn't a sense of emotional neglect from his father. Honestly, we don't need to read any past tragedies into Draco's backstory to make him an interesting character. His character arc – and that of his parents, because they too started out thinking Voldemort was right before they realized he considered their precious son expendable – was exactly the one he needed. The Malfoys already have the perfect redemption: “...he (Harry) spotted the three Malfoys, huddled together as though unsure whether or not they were supposed to be there, but nobody was paying them any attention.” (– Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, from the last chapter before the epilogue). The Malfoys have come to see the error of their ways, or at least the error of helping Voldemort, and are sitting together with the good guys. They're uncertain, but no one is telling them to leave and just accept that they're there. I always presumed that now they will integrate back into society and live normal lives, without the burden of being Death Eaters looming over them, and maybe, hopefully, with a bit more of an open-minded attitude than they had before.
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