Manacled by Senlinyu. The Handmaid’s Tale-esque Dramione war story that’s taking AO3 by storm.

Title: Manacled

Author: Senlinyu

Source: AO3

Length: 370k words

Chapters: 77

Genre: Dystopia/Tragedy/Romance

Rating: Explicit

Published: 2018-2019

Trigger Warnings for discussions of violence, torture and rape. This is an incredibly bleak, heavy story. Not recommended if you are in a bad place, and definitely not recommended for minors. I think the rating “Explicit” is often used as synonymous with “sexy”, but in this case the fic features not only explicit sex, but explicit violence, sexual violence, and psychological violence.

Getting into this review, I realised there were two major themes about fanfiction and shipping in general that I wanted to address, and I’m probably going to annoy absolutely everyone in the process. Dramione is apparently a hot-button topic.

So let’s talk about ships baby.

For my part, I love shipping, and I will state categorically that there is no such thing as a bad ship in fanfiction. Fanfiction by its nature should not always be held to the same standard as a publicly produced media. Fanfiction is a medium in which people get a free license to overlay their own personal fantasies onto characters, whatever those fantasies may be. Literally any ship at all can be reconstrued into something palatable or even socially acceptable (such as using time travel to close uncomfortable age gaps, or rewrite history to erase the bad blood between two characters, etc), but even if it is still uncomfortable, or problematic, that doesn’t invalidate it as an interesting story or concept, and it doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to enjoy it as a piece of fiction. I’m not here to say that fanfiction is above criticism – it obviously is not otherwise what am I doing here – but the point is that if someone wants to write a story about a muggleborn girl and the son of a death eater having a romance against all odds or even good sense, more power to them.

There is also a factor to consider (which I see complained about a lot) that the attractiveness of Tom Felton is the biggest or only reason for people to ship Draco, and whilst I do not disagree that attractiveness plays into the shippability of a character, it also doesn’t matter. People ship for a huge variety of reasons, deep and shallow. If we all agreed with the canon all the time we wouldn’t be bothered with fanfiction, so whilst having convincing, logical arguments for why characters are compatible in-universe is one way of deciding who you want to ship together, it is totally valid to not be limited to that. Personally, I love when an author can write so compellingly that I can believe a ship that never would have occurred to me in canon. In my review of The Problem With Potions, I came away thinking that Luna/Goyle was actually really sweet.

I have always seen, in the abstract, the appeal of the Dramione ship. It has an archetypal Beauty and the Beast quality to it, and I’ve seen no small amount of fanart depicting this aesthetic. And despite the many complaints which come up around the problematic messaging of this dynamic – including in the original Disney adaptation – it is still an incredibly compelling story and can be handled well.

It is a valid criticism at least, to say that even though it is aesthetically appealing, creating this specific dynamic with Draco and Hermione usually requires such significant character rewriting that it can be immersion-breaking if you’re not invested in the ship from the outset.  

I have one further disclaimer before I dive into my review of Manacled, and that is that I have not read swathes of fanfiction featuring Dramione. The Draco Trilogy was one of my first exposures to it, which wasn’t terrible, but much of what I’ve seen since I’ve not enjoyed, and I’ll go into why below.

Manacled has been taking over the fanfiction scene lately. It has become so popular that it seems to have become the defining fanfiction for the ship – if your friend wants to sell you on Dramione, this is the story they’re going to push you to read. It has its own Facebook fan group, dedicated fanart which frequently gets posted to the author’s Tumblr, a pretty decent MV trailer, a 4.7/5 rating on Goodreads with nearly 800 reviews, well over a million hits on AO3, and it has been translated into 10 languages.

It’s kind of a big deal.

Plot

The framework for Manacled is heavily borrowed from The Handmaid’s Tale, although the plot bears very little resemblance to the show or book. The Death Eaters won the war, Harry and Ron died in the final battle, and Hermione was imprisoned in a sensory deprivation cell for about 18 months. The story commences when Hermione is dragged from her cell by Umbridge, who has been acting as Voldemort’s prison warden and is a clear parallel to the character of Aunt Lydia. Hermione is found to have locked-away memories which legilimency cannot reach, and as she is now the most important remaining member of the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort’s desire to unearth what she is hiding is the only thing which keeps her alive.

Hermione does not know what she has hidden away either as the memories are also sealed from her. The healer who examines her advises Voldemort that now that Hermione is no longer being tortured, the memories should eventually return on their own. However, a magical pregnancy may retrieve them faster and so Hermione is enrolled into the regime’s new surrogate program. The surrogates are the equivalent to the Handmaids, even down to the red dress they are required to wear, though with the addition of extremely sophisticated manacles which prevent the wearer not only from using any magic at all, but also from touching objects which could be considered weapons or harming themselves or their masters.  

Apparently pureblood birthrates have been dropping to critical levels, so Voldemort mandated marriages for all his followers immediately after the war. For couples who are found to be barren, surrogates are assigned. Hermione’s case is special as there is another goal to impregnating her. Once she is impregnated, the delicacy of the pregnancy would prevent Voldemort from being able to use legilimency on her without endangering the baby and the memories. However, as the father of the child would share a similar magical signature with it, he may still be able to use legilimency even through the pregnancy. Therefore, Hermione must be assigned a master who is deeply trusted by Voldemort and a skilled legilimens himself. Snape is asked first, but declares himself unsuitable for the assignment, so Hermione is sent to be a surrogate for the mysterious assassin and executioner for Voldemort – the High Reeve. The High Reeve is Voldemort’s second in command; his most feared soldier; basically the Frontman in Squid Game, down to the mysterious black mask. He is, of course, Draco Malfoy.

The story is an AU following Order of the Phoenix, and depicts a much more drawn-out, bloody war. Hermione was trained in Europe as a healer for the Order, and this became her primary role throughout the war. The plot centres around Hermione’s life as a surrogate for Draco, living in the manor and trying to recall what happened during the war. The chapters occasionally shift into wartime memories and what life was like for Hermione even before the Order lost, and both timelines are very bleak. Life is miserable for Hermione, and perhaps just as sadly, it seemed like the war broke down Hermione’s friendships with Ron and Harry long before they died. Hermione has been an island for years.

Once the armour around her memories finally crumbles, the story suddenly goes back to the war timeline and stays there for a good 38 chapters – more than half the story – only to return to the present timeline for the conclusion of what she does with her restored memory.

Characterisation

I want to now talk a bit about how Hermione is treated thematically, because I have very complicated feelings about it. I even came up with a term for it – I have called it:

The Stripping of Hermione

No, not a physical stripping, obviously. This phenomenon is about a power dynamic in which Hermione is made physically and/or mentally incompetent for the express purpose of building a romance. It is an author choice, sometimes explained away with good or bad plot choices (such as having her wand taken away), at other times it is depicted as occurring naturally (such as being so caught up in the romantic tension that she forgets her own name). It goes hand in hand with the male love interest taking a very controlling, domineering role over her. I notice this dynamic in Dramione fics far more often than I see it in other ships featuring Draco or Hermione.  

Now the thing is, Dramione is not the only ship in which I’ve spotted this dynamic. Across other fandoms it seems to primarily occur with hypercompetent female characters in heterosexual relationships. With conjecture, I would say that it comes from this notion that somehow still prevails in some modern storytelling that a woman’s male partner must be stronger and more competent than she is for there to be romantic, and especially sexual tension. I know somewhere in my own childhood brain I once had the impression that this was how romances worked, without knowing exactly why I thought so.

With fanfiction, if the author believes that their characters’ power roles must be reversed, they have two options: One is to “power up” the male character – This was done in the Draco Trilogy, wherein Draco becomes some sort of God-Tier wizard – and the other is to strip down the female character, most often by rendering her helpless.

It is this latter trope particularly which I find quite distasteful and a trope which is unique to fanfiction, because it requires an author to take away the agency of a normally very strong character. I am also not fond of the underlying implication that female helplessness is so vital to finding romantic happiness that a woman must make herself smaller if she is too competent. I do not see this trope occur when the genders are reversed, nor in fanfictions for same sex pairings.

I think I see this occur so often in Dramione because of the idealised Bad Boy version of Draco who appeals to many authors of this ship. It is no secret that the authors and consumers of Dramione stories are primarily straight women – Draco as a sexy romantic partner is the fantasy, and bookish Hermione in many cases may be the author self-insert, or at least the vessel of a kind of wish fulfillment. I have no wish to criticise women for having a fantasy involving a sexy bad boy, but I would like to at least see a greater degree of agency in the female protagonists of such stories. There are essays to be written about fantasy, control and romance novels, but the short version is: I don’t kink shame, but I think it’s important that writers have an awareness of what they write, and readers should take care to separate the fantasy of a problematic kink from any application in real life.

All of this is prelude to say that my past attempts to engage me with Dramione have predisposed me against certain tropes heavily associated with the ship, and while I have still been open to enjoying the ship itself, I was hoping for something which would not engage these tropes.

I have complicated feelings about Manacled, because it does every single thing I don’t like about Dramione stories, and it is still an absolutely outstanding work of literature.

Manacled Strips Hermione to a level I have never seen before – she is sold into slavery, wandless, made incapable of even wandless magic, extensively tortured, regularly raped, impregnated against her will, and her mind is also periodically raped with legilimency. She does not even have the agency to take her own life. A more abjectly miserable existence I could not have thought of.

Draco also very much fits the Bad Boy / Ice Prince trope. He is a cold, highly controlled and domineering man. As High Reeve he is virtually untouchable, a ruthless killer, a skilled duelist, and of course extremely attractive.

Despite what seems like an incredibly cringe-worthy set up, the execution of these concepts is done with nuance, care and intelligence, proving that this kind of story CAN be done well. Hermione’s torture is not romanticised. Her rapes contain absolutely no element of forbidden pleasure. Her PTSD is not only dealt with but plays a significant role in her story and character development.

Although she and Draco do seem like different versions of themselves, both timelines of the story take place several years out of Hogwarts and into the war and their adulthood, so their life experiences having changed them in significant ways makes it more believable. Hermione’s logic and intelligence is still an integral part of how she operates and ultimately regains her agency. We learn the backstory from the war timeline which helps explain Draco’s hyper-competence, and how Hermione actually had a hand in creating it.

I would even venture to say that Manacled is more dystopian war story than it is romance. Very little of the story is romantic at all, and what is there takes a major back seat to the plot, which is extremely well executed and mostly revolves around the outcomes of the war. Voldemort and his regime are legitimately terrifying, especially to the surrogate women. The odds seem entirely hopeless for Hermione, and Draco seems pretty flatly irredeemable before Hermione regains her memories. It might be the only time I have ever said that the rapes he subjects her to make sense in context, and I do not take that lightly. If you have seen the Handmaid’s Tale you may have an idea of what I mean, but it would be a significant spoiler if I spelled it out explicitly.

Some small criticisms

Overall the fic is a work of art – it reads so well, it gets you emotionally invested and its plot is intriguing. But aside from the complicated feelings I detailed in far too many words above, I have a couple of nitpicks.

• I do feel like the manacles were too overpowered. They did far beyond what any magical object in the canon could have done, and were practically foolproof. In a way I think they simplified things to make Hermione as helpless as possible, but it was frustrating at times.  
• The surrogates were made up of muggleborn and half-blood girls, which seems hugely out of place in a regime where being pureblooded was the whole reason they had a war in the first place. It is sort of explained later, but I don’t feel that the explanation was strong enough for the huge shift in ideologies.
• It is implied early on that someone was helping Hermione in the sensory-deprivation cell. Everyone had forgotten about her for ages, so when she got out no one know who had been feeding her. This is never explained.
• Just this one goddamn line.

“His face had lost every trace of boyishness. It was cruelly beautiful. His sharp aristocratic features set in a hard unyielding expression. His grey eyes were like knives. His hair still that pale, white blond, combed carelessly aside.

He looked, every inch of him, like an indolent English Lord. Except for the almost inhuman coldness. If an assassin’s blade were made into a man, it would take the form of Draco Malfoy.

She stared at him. Taking him in.

Beautiful and damned. A fallen angel.

Or perhaps, the Angel of Death.”

Hermione is thinking this beautiful chunk of teenage prose in chapter 9, two days after he has last raped her, and long before she has regained any of the memories which would make her think of Draco as anything other than a monster. This one paragraph (which thankfully is not indicative of the rest of the writing) sticks out like a sore thumb against everything else Hermione is experiencing. It’s also not the first, perhaps not even the fifth time I’ve seen Draco compared to a fallen angel in fanfiction and I just can’t. 

TL:DR

Manacled did something I never thought a fic could do – it took every trope I hated about a ship and spun them together in a practically seamless, emotionally compelling story. Has Manacled sold me on Dramione? No. I’m still waiting for the Dramione fic of my dreams. Would I recommend Manacled to all of you? Yes, I absolutely would. If you think that the triggers in this story will not negatively affect you (and you’re over 18 years of age), then I highly recommend this fic as a tragic, compelling war and post-war story to give you a proper sad book hangover.  

I give this one an 8.5/10.