You Will Never Guess the Manosphere’s Newest Crush

Users How a Harry Potter Incel Meme Reached the U.S. Department of Education The right has finally found a gender swap they can get behind. Screengrab from X/@Department of Education Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. This week, the Department of Education posted an image on Twitter captioned, “There’s Magic in Learning—Make Education Great Again.” The image was of—sorry, checking my notes—what appears to be an A.I.-generated illustration of the viral right-wing Harry Potter genderswapped fan-fiction character Draco Malfoid. Let me back up and explain. About a month ago, an artist going by @redteneri posted a drawing on X/Twitter of Harry Potter character Draco Malfoy as a girl with long blond hair, hoop earrings, and green irises. At the time, the artist named her Dracaena Malfoy. There were some more human-made renditions of Dracaena. And then, as the character spread across the platform, a brick wall of A.I.-generated videos and images of the character began to drop onto the internet, and Dracaena Malfoy became Draco Malfoid—foid being the misogynistic term used by the incel community to refer to women. Malfoid fans flooded Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling’s comment section on Twitter. They hit TikTok with longform A.I.-generated episodes of Draco Malfoid and Harry Potter’s enemies-to-lovers arc at Hogwarts. They created a dark academia romance simulation called Pureblood & Prejudice. And that’s when the federal government posted this slop post about it. And the fans exploded. “MALFOID OCCUPIED GOVERNMENT,” one fan wrote. Harry Potter fan fiction can be traced back to the dawn of social media, but what’s new about Draco Malfoid is that this may be the first time that alt-right spaces are wholly embracing this particular internet niche. Though J. K. Rowling herself may be famously transphobic, much of the fan fiction community has historically been composed of young women and other marginalized users, and that’s reflected in the kinds of stories told among fandoms. More than 70 percent of Wattpad’s reader demographic was women as of 2021, and more than 80 percent are Gen Z and millennial; there are currently 322 stories tagged under “Political Harry Potter” on the mother ship of internet fanfiction, Archive of Our Own, and pretty much every single major internet fandom is built on a fictional queer romantic pairing, whether it’s gamers’ Dream and Georgenotfound (dreamnotfound), Dean Winchester and Castiel (Destiel) of the SuperWhoLock crossover fandom, or Harry Potter’s own Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter (Drarry). That’s the surface-level annoyance of it all: The right-wing military bros are now reading true-to-form Harry Potter fan fiction and swearing that it’s unironically good, and all it took was gender-swapping Draco Malfoy to a waifish blond girl. But real fan-fiction followers already knew it was good, before the heteronormative revisionist history! More pressingly, the undertones and birth of Malfoid mark a distinct change to the direction of this fan fiction. They didn’t write Draco Malfoy as a trans girl (as if J. K. Rowling would’ve let that happen)—they reinvented him as an android woman, peddled out predominantly on a wave of A.I. slop. Draco Malfoid, not Draco Malfoy. In case your screen time is a reasonable amount of hours, here’s the brief etymology: The term foid originated on misogynistic platforms like 4chan, largely considered the lobby of the manosphere; it’s a portmanteau of female and android or humanoid organism, also sometimes truncated as femoid. Its original implication is that women are subhuman, and other variations of the term play on this same ideology. Foidslop, for instance, describes content that’s made by women, for women, with the subtextual message being that this kind of content is worthless because women are worthless. A get-ready-with-me video with a girl sharing her techniques for putting on blush? Foidslop. The Barbie movie? Foidslop. A story about two boys falling in love, like Heated Rivalry or fan fiction? Foidslop. Foid, like the rest of incel language, has become something of a reclaimed meme to the wider masses. So it’s not exactly damning of something violent bubbling right below the surface. After all, terms like “-maxxing” and “chud” and “-pilled” all originate from the same place, and they’ve all taken a place in the wider lexicon. But it does show just how widely the incel-adjacent touchstones have spread through our lexicon, and the way that the federal government has aided and abetted the spread. It’s not just that the Department of Education is posting about Draco Malfoid, but it means that they’re keenly aware of how this kind of language on the internet spreads, and they want to be in on the joke. It’s not been confirmed by the Education Department whether their image is A.I.-generated, but when I ran it through the SightEngine A.I. image detector, it came back as 99 percent likely to be A.I. Most of the episodes about Draco Malfoid and Harry Potter are A.I.-generated. Much of the art, at this point, is A.I.-generated. Maybe that’s what hurts the most. For decades on the internet, fan-fiction writers and editors worked day in and day out, churning out hundreds of thousands of words by hand, architecting stories in real time, often fighting with their fans to make it happen. This was a time when the internet was building toward something we all thought was going to be better, more creative, more hopeful. Draco Malfoid storylines are probably just skimming dialogue and plot points off the backs of decades of work by young women around the globe, who spent years posting disclaimers like “Sorry for the errors, my English isn’t too good.” Nobody wants to work these days, I guess. They just want the Malfoidslop. Artificial Intelligence Department of Education Harry Potter Internet Social Media Memes