Narcissa Malfoy's Hair

Disclaimer: Irritable rant follows. If it isn't clear, this is not targeted to any of my regular companions on DA. There's a specific branch of Narcissa-hair-hate that's bugging me, not every person who didn't love it.

Several times this week, as every week, I've copped some sort of attitude over Narcissa Malfoy's hair.

For the uninitiated, Narcissa is blonde in the books, like her husband and son (and unlike the rest of her family of origin, who are dark). In the movies, she's first half-black, half-blonde, and then half-black, half-white. This was controversial, more so than most aesthetic variances, and I think a big part of it is that there was such a long gap between her first book appearance in Book 4 and her first movie appearance in Movie 6. So on top of people just plain wanting her blonde, and on top of a good whack of people disliking the specific black/white aesthetic, a lot had sort of "cast" her in their minds. Narcissa appears in art and vids as everyone from Nicole Kidman to Naomi Watts, to this day (which, of itself, I don't mind).

I'm not going to defend the movie's creative choice here. I can really fall either way, and I like movie-Narcissa as an overall presence enough to really not be too het up about it and to be willing to represent her movie likeness in my creatives. I can see some practical reasons for it from the movie-makers' perspective - a big one being the need for casual viewers to recognise key Death Eaters from a distance and without needing to remember faces - but I also get why people didn't much like it. That, I take no issue with. That's just personal preference, and one shared by probably three-quarters of my friends, and I myself like a blonde Narcissa in other people's art as much as the next person. My Malfoy favourites folder is full of them.

Where I start to get annoyed, and where frankly I start to dig my heels in and never want to do a blonde Narcissa ever again, is the implication that representing her movie likeness is somehow not a valid artistic choice. Someone asked me this week why Narcissa had dark hair in an artwork. I was polite at the time because I didn't want to call the person out publicly, and I still don't so I'm not saying where it was, but c'mon. That's a dick move. You know very well why. I'm using a figure who's the spitting image of Helen McCrory for crying out loud, in a whole fleet of movie likenesses. Hell, I've even started using my Voldemort likeness routinely, and I have actual philosophical issues with that one.

I'll admit to a certain amount of pique, and stubbornness, because I get this much more often than I should (and not just here - recently one of my artworks was reblogged on Tumblr as a platform for how much they hate Narcissa's movie hair, and I'm like, really? Do you have to shit on my artwork for that? There's no shortage of movie shots you could have used, you know). But there is also a double-standard here. Lucius is never described as having long hair in the books. It was Jason Isaac's idea. I've never heard anyone question why an artwork-Lucius has long hair. (If I were being really cynical, I'd suggest it was because we all want to f*** Lucius, so he gets a free pass from all that pesky book adherence). Bella's hair doesn't have its own zip code in the books. Hermione, if I recall, is not quite the willowy knockout that is Emma Watson, and I might be wrong, but I don't recall Lee being a person of colour, either. You can't tell me every person loves every one of those choices, but they don't attract the continual furor of Narcissa's.

My point? I don't really have one long enough to justify the length of this rant. I'm not saying you should love Narcissa's movie hair. I'm not saying every Narcissa artwork has to look like Helen McCrory, in or out of character. I don't even mind if people I talk to regularly ask me, as a favour, to do just one as a blonde just for them just because we're mates. (I might even do one spontaneously just because you read the whole of this rant even though most of you hate Narcissa's movie-hair with all the fire of a thousand suns). That's all totally cool. But my patience with sucking up people acting like I should just completely stop depicting her in a way that is a close match for one branch of canon has totally run out.