Before jumping in, check out the introduction to the trilogy if you haven’t already.
Let’s start this journey off right with renowned food hacker Todd Wilbur’s butterbeer copycat recipe.
For a limited time, some grocery stores in the US carried butterbeer knockoffs. Just as quickly as they appeared, they vanished. Or it went evanesco. (What’s the proper conjugation for that?)
I could have ordered butterbeer, but part of the fun of doing this blog is attempting to make recipes, and there are plenty of people offering their takes of the elusive liquid treat. Many of these recipes simply called for adding flavorings to cream soda and topping it off with whipped cream. It’s a quick and easy way to get your butterbeer fix, but I liked Top Secret Recipe’s description of the drink being like “caramel butter cookies.”
This stuff is super sweet and creamy, but not unbearably so. It’s also loaded with sugar, so I don’t recommend having more than one glass. I used the glass container left over from a Oui yogurt to sample two servings, and because I was curious, I tried the foam with a sample of Cheerwine. My heart was racing for a couple of hours afterwards. The three wee-sized (or Oui-sized?) servings may have equaled half a glass, which may be too much for my blood sugar.
For those of you who don’t have the pleasure of having Cheerwine in your region, it’s kind of like a sweeter version of Dr Pepper—Imposter Pepper, if you will. The butterbeer foam added just a hint of that buttery caramel flavor, which surprisingly didn’t ruin the drink. I think the Cheerwine overpowered it.
One note when making this recipe: Get an immersion blender. It’s mentioned in the directions for a reason. I mixed mine in an electric mixer and it barely blended the Dream Whip. In fact, it barely turned the ingredients into a proper foam, leaving the concoction as a thin, watery froth. Don’t try to whisk it by hand, either; that’s asking for a cramp. Most hand blenders will set you back $20-$40 USD, but it’s worth the investment, especially if you like homemade smoothies.
After foaming up the mixture, you’ll find that it appears watery. Just spoon it onto your drink. It might drip down like old goo in a broken lava lamp at first, but it will build itself back up and come to rest on top of the liquid.
With all that out of the way and our frosty butterbeer copycat in our hands, let’s dive into the first installment of Draco Dormiens.
Chapter One: The Polyjuice Potion
We open our PDF file with a disclaimer absolving Clare herself of any wrongdoing.
The Blaise thing is… interesting to say the least. But that’s not until much later in the trilogy.
The story proper begins in Snape’s potions class.
Already I want to take a red pen to both those paragraphs. Just stab the computer monitor with a pen, because annotating in a PDF program couldn’t accurately convey my mild frustration. Commas are not sprinkles. There is nothing wrong with short sentences. Even the occasional sentence fragment can be used to great effect.
My research dug up that Clare was 27 and had a career in tabloid journalism when she began writing the trilogy. (Naturally, I never thought to save those sources all those years ago.) If this was indicative of her professional writing style, I hope the editors at the rag exercised their skills.
By the way, the narrator is awfully sure of what Hermione is “probably” thinking given all those details they provided.
Cool As Ice Mice. Someone needs to do a Harry Potter/Vanilla Ice rewrite, with Draco in the Vanilla Ice role.
Drawling out of the corner of one’s mouth kind of has the appearance of an Elvis Presley impression. Considering the raging lust a lot of female Potterheads have for him, it’s kind of fitting to compare the two. But I still stand by my Cool As Ice Mice comment.
Do Ice Mice squirm as you’re eating them. If so, eww.
Getting back to the story, Ron also gives the correct answer, much to Snape’s disappointment.
Line breaks are also your friends, especially if you’re going to describe the actions of other characters. It’s not a good sign when readers’ eyes glaze over and seek out the white space between paragraphs for a sense of balance.
PANSY: I want to wear your skin, Draco…
Hey, wait, you’re paired up with Neville. How are you going to morph into Draco? Sneak over and yank a hair out of his head and pretend that it fell into your glass? What were you planning to do as Draco?
My mind didn’t need to go there.
I just looked at the previous brick of a paragraph. They’re using paper cups. Paper cups, a Muggle invention, at Hogwarts, an ancient institution established in a culture that tries to isolate itself from the Muggle world.
That’s not the only slip-up. Just you wait.
Harry and Draco naturally protest to being paired up, but Snape isn’t sparing them any discomfort. He’s enjoying it a bit too much, in fact. If he’s like this with kids in secondary education, I’d hate to see him attempt daycare. Doesn’t the Hogwarts staff think to vet any of their instructors before hiring them or is the ability to waggle a wand in the air the only prerequisite?
STUDENTS: HA HA HA! Fat, ugly people are deserving of our contempt and cruelty!
Draco resigns himself to learning far more than he wanted about his blood enemy. Following fanfic rules, Draco the antagonist shows more composure than the true hero. I’ve forgotten the finer details of characterization in this trilogy, but I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those “Harry is a whiny shit and Draco is a suave, mature portrait of masculinity” fanfics.
Was Harry this much of a bitch in the books?
I can’t find “speccy” as slang through the first few pages of Google search results. It is, however, the name for a freeware utility that does… stuff. I’m going to assume that “speccy” is a faux Britishism unless informed otherwise.
Cripes, Potter, just smash your cup into Draco’s face. Minus 100 points to your house, but at least you’ll really show ’em how you feel.
Is giving students a potion that messes them up like this a sound decision?
With the transformation complete, the boys look over their new forms. Harry “wasn’t any shorter than Draco, so his robes fit all right.” (In his own imagination, Harry was an impressive 188 centimeters. That’s about six-foot-two or approximately thirty donuts.) Draco himself seems to be enjoying the experiment.
“I was just thinking that I really am astonishingly handsome,” he says. “I could kiss myself. I mean, seriously, in this particular situation, I could kiss myself.”
Draco, no, please don’t feed that part of the fandom.
Harry stomps off to see Ron and Hermione transformed into each other. Hermione, as Ron, cries, “[H]ow awful for you!” Yes, how gorgeously, handsomely awful for you, Harry.
Just a question: What’s stopping the kids from distracting Snape, switching places, and then acting like they had transformed into each other?
Ron thinks Harry as Draco is creepy, to which Harry good-naturedly replies, “Well, you look pretty stupid yourselves.”
DRACO: *staring into space, suddenly startled* Sorry, I was just daydreaming about pies. Lovely pies. Pecan, boysenberry, rhubarb…
Five minutes into the project, Harry is already fed up with being Draco.
Please tell me I’m about to witness the wizard version of yo mama snaps.
For whatever reason, Draco mentions an offer he’d made to Harry back when they first met. He could have given Harry access to “real power” if he ditched his friends. You know, the people he just insulted. But ever the hero, Harry replies with, “You can take me off the evil mailing list, Malfoy, I am not interested.”
Ouch, Draco just got burned… well, more like he got irritated as though he extinguished a candle with his fingers, but ouch.
Draco realizes that they’re not changing back to their former selves. All the other students have reverted and Snape has returned to lecturing about the potion. You’d think a professor would make absolutely sure that everything was back to normal. Well, a competent, thorough professor.
Muggle-hating Draco and his Muggle Rolex watch. I won’t lie, it certainly feels like I’ve been at this for longer than forty-five minutes.
Harry immediately jumps to the conclusion that Draco has done something to the potion. Draco tries to calmly explain that he’d never want to be Harry permanently, but our speccy git hero isn’t having it.
The amateur pugilists were as keen as mustard, and as one delivered a tornado of blows, the other hoped to ketchup and overpower his opponent.
Now here’s a question: Do the injuries stay with the person after they morph back, or does some weird magic transfer the injuries to the one who dealt the blows?
Draco lands the finishing punch, sending Harry flying backwards and headfirst into a stone wall, surprisingly not killing him. Draco-as-Harry watches Snape try his blandest to restrain Ron and Hermione, who are scrambling like cats in harnesses. Hermione breaks free and gloms onto Draco’s sleeve, sobbingly asking if he’s okay. (Get used to the threat of and actual waterworks, they’re a staple in the trilogy.)
As the Gryffindors argue that Draco punched first—sure to be the Potterverse equivalent to “who shot first”—the real Draco realizes that everyone believes he’s Harry. Snape demands an explanation from Draco.
Now it’s Draco’s chance to end the shenanigans. He can tell Snape that something terrible has happened with the potion, and they can find a solution. Maybe some house points will be deducted, but it’s a small price to pay for relief.
*sigh* We could have avoided over a thousand more pages of angst, misunderstandings, backstabbing, and super angst if he’d just told the truth.
Snape carries Harry-as-Draco’s body while Draco follows him to the infirmary. Draco feels uneasy, probably concerned that he’ll be stuck with Harry’s shredded wet rag of a hairstyle for the rest of his days.
Madame Pomfrey is ready for them, and while she tends to the unconscious lad, Snape takes this opportunity to lay into the imposter Harry.
I was going to accuse Snape of overblowing matters, like confusing a bug bite for flesh-eating disease, but then I reread the last sentence. Out until morning? That’s more than a nasty bump, that’s a concussion!
Clearly upset that a chance to frame Harry for murder is for naught, Snape huffs off to Dumbledore to… complain, I guess. Pomfrey assures Not-Harry that Dumbledore is above Snape’s tripe and “knows what Draco Malfoy’s like.” Now as for why he doesn’t do something about the two of them like the wise headmaster he is, I dunno. Plot, I guess.
Pomfrey goes about treating Draco-as-Harry’s wounds when Potter’s Posse comes barging in. Draco takes the opportunity to look at himself yet again because I’m sure this is the third or fourth time that this has been mentioned.
*KERUNCH*
DRACO: My lip! You frizzy-haired git, what the hell?
The trio leaves the infirmary for Gryffindor Tower. Along the way, Draco learns that everyone back in the class is elated that he-as-Harry nearly sent Draco into the next plane of existence.
RON: He never excuses himself after he belches. He always takes the last pancake at breakfast. He picks his teeth after he eats pudding. He flosses his eyelashes. He sneaks troll nail clippings into unicorn feed.
Draco doesn’t know the password for the Fat Lady portrait, so he fakes a headache. Ron supplies “boomslang,” and the trio are welcomed into the common room by the demons from my personal hell, Fred and George Weasley. Yeah, I know they’re popular in the fandom and they do have the occasional good one-liner, but sometimes too much joking around and snarking is too much.
Anyway, before enduring the obligatory Weasley laugh-a-thon, Draco takes a moment to envy how much nicer the Gryffindor common room is than Slytherin’s. From all the descriptions I’ve read, it sounds like a converted dungeon. If it’s such a rathole, why doesn’t anyone improve it with decorations or, I don’t know, some magical enhancements?
Draco makes a note to complain to his father about the Slytherin common room once he gets his body back. I’m sure Pops Malfoy will take time from counting his money and abusing his enslaved mythical creatures to tell his son that a little damp builds character.
That MSE thing looks weird. If you’ll allow me to digress a bit, let me share something I learned about using abbreviations:
In non-fiction, you write out the proper name, then include the initialism in parentheses, like this: The Magical Stock Exchange (MSE) is enjoying a bull market this year…
Because if you refer to it later on, you can use just the initialism: Prior to 2001, the MSE saw a significant downturn…
In fiction, you would write out the proper name and later have a character refer to it by the initialism if desired: “You made your money through the Magical Stock Exchange?” “Of course. The MSE made me a millionaire within five years.”
If it’s never going to come up again, there’s no point in including the abbreviation. The abbreviation is there for brevity. You wouldn’t want to write Magical Stock Exchange over and over again unless the characters referred to it as such.
Fun fact: When the letters are pronounced separately (FBI), it’s an initialism. If it’s pronounced as a whole word (NASA), it’s an acronym.
Enough of the English lesson. Let’s get back to this chore.
Too easy. Not going to say it.
Good cripes, man. Draco is a rotten piece of dick cheese, but to lament the fact that a younger child didn’t die? Not really something an alleged “good guy” should say. Unless he was kidding. Even then, kind of dickish.
Hermione slides up to the Harry imposter and wraps her hand around his arm in a gesture that isn’t at all romantic. She asks him if he’s okay.
DRACO: I’m not accustomed to being so close to this kind of idiocy. How do you stand it every day?
Hermione surprisingly wants Not-Harry to go easy on Draco. Yes, go easy on the kid who once called her a Mudblood and delighted in the idea of the Heir of Slytherin destroying all Muggle-born students during their second year. She even goes so far as to tell Not-Harry that he should try to feel sorry for Draco.
DRACO: He exercises proper etiquette. He always leaves enough pottage for the other students. He has excellent dental hygiene. He has soulful eyes. And he’s taken an active interest in the animal nutrition program.
But Hermione is adamant that Harry tries to have a change of heart. After all, Draco has such a horrible home life and he’s a coward, not like the brave and skilled Harry.
I can’t tell if that’s an insult or… no, it’s a mild insult.
Fishing for one last insult against himself, Draco offers a weak “But he’s—He’s blond!” I want to interpret Ron and Hermione’s staring at him as if they’ve never heard of the hair color before.
Draco storms up the stairs to the dormitories, infuriated that a Mudblood would ever feel sympathy for him. So distracted is he by his own anger, he slams the door behind him.
The “Aack!” alone would have clearly implied that Ron had been hit by the door. But it’s still kinda funny.
Transition to Hermione’s quarters where she stares forlornly into a mirror. I’ll admit, the titles that she’d been reading—Affirmations for Witches Who Do Too Much and Witches Who Love Wizards and the Wizards Who Don’t Notice—got a chuckle out of me. She’s pining for the speccy git who’d shot her down faster than a lightning spell. He himself was pining for Cho (the HP fandom’s most hated character) and also friend zoned Hermione by explaining how much their friendship meant to him.
HERMIONE: I suppose rather than having the self-respect to move on and build meaningful friendships with other young men that may grow into something more, I’ll just dwell on this one failed attempt. It isn’t like during the hopefully long course of my life I’ll ever have another chance.
Something seemed different this time around, but she prays that it wasn’t the head injury. The real Hermione probably would have figured out something was up by now and plotted how to reverse the spell while both boys were asleep. But we’re stuck with this version, so let’s make the best of it.
Cut to…
That’s the whole scene. Harry-as-Draco tossing in his sleep while two adults look on and mumble eye-opening insights. Gripping.
Because I really needed a vision of an underaged male checking out his rival’s genitalia. Thanks, Clare. I guess I should at least be thankful that she didn’t make Harry and Malfoy long-lost brothers who are secretly attracted to each other.
Later on, in the Care of Magical Creatures class, the students learn about grindleflerberts, which are toothy amphibians that Clare made up for the story. Any search you put in for this animal turns up other reviews and sporkings (text riffings of fanfics). I’ll give Clare credit here, this critter does sound neat.
When Hagrid leaves to get food for the grindle-fluff-butt-whatevers, Draco’s goons, Crabbe and Goyle torment Neville by holding his toad hostage.
Neville, I give you full permission to clobber the piss out of that mouthbreather.
I had to look at my keyboard to verify that K isn’t that close to T. But Googling “likkle” turns up some info about Jamaican patois, which is pretty cool.
Draco enjoys the display of animal cruelty until he realizes that Hermione is watching him. Bound by the duties of impersonating the Boy Who Lived, Draco walks up to Goyle and tells him to return Trevor to Neville. Yes, try to reason with the future serial killer. I hear they’re capable of rational thought and empathy.
I’m not very familiar with the Potterverse, so I had to look up Goyle in a fan wiki. It didn’t say anything about him possessing superhuman strength, only enough for him to make Beater on a Quidditch team. This is an embellishment Clare invented for the fanfic. It’s not a bad thing, but it would have confused me if I’d read more of the books or watched the other movies and looked for a scene where Goyle wrecks a city bus.
DRACO: Believe it, for now, I’m picking up thoughts about sweets. Pastries of every imaginable shape and size and flavor. And pies. Lovely pies. Blackberry, strawberry, and a confusing but intriguing combination of orange and rhubarb… Say, Goyle, you know what’s more heinous than animal abuse? Stealing dessert from the kitchen before the next meal hour.
No, please, I don’t care if it’s one of the main laws of the internet. I can’t abide slash of Croyle, Grabbe, or whatever horrible portmanteau that coupling would create.
Goyle takes off screaming into the daylight, leaving Trevor safe and sound. Draco valiantly returns the toad to a relieved Neville, and I only say “valiantly” because Hermione is giving Draco the “my hero” look. Draco is disturbed by the adoration and stomps off, purposely crunching Seamus Finnegan’s toes.
Mean-frigging-while, Pomfrey watches Not-Draco wake up from a fitful slumber. She calls Harry Draco, to which Harry replies by shrieking (yes, shrieking) that he’s not Draco.
Have wizards heard of applying cold compresses or taking ibuprofen? I mean, it can’t just be “lie down for a night and let’s hope for the best.” Do spells to cure head injuries exist? Injuriam reliviosa? Injuriam relivioSAH? How about listening to the kids? In a place where magic is the norm, and with a recent Polyjuice class having taken place, wouldn’t it be worth investigating a student’s claim that they’re not who they are?
Ugh. Anyway, after the bold decision to knock out Harry-as-Draco, Pomfrey makes the other bold decision to go over Dumbledore’s head and summon Mr. Malfoy to take his son home. Shenanigans continue!
Whew. That was a chore. I’m now on page 14 of 207… and that last page seems farther away now.
Prep Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Cleanup
