u/Business_Track_2436

Most people think Draco redemption arcs are popular because of Tom Felton's looks or the micies but in my opinion, those are takes formed by completely unimaginative, ignorant people. It's okay to dislike or not want to engage with it, but not understanding why is just weird.

The fanfic "The Disappearances of Draco Malfoy" perfectly encapsulates how a realistic, proper redemption of Draco could've been done.

Their characterization of Draco is pretty much identical to how we see him in canon, the divergence is just a result of this:

>The night that Harry and Dumbledore return from the cave, the Death Eaters are delayed from reaching the top of the Astronomy Tower for one more minute. Draco Malfoy lowers his wand.

>A Deathly Hallows rewrite in which Draco accepts Dumbledore's offer to fake his death and go into hiding with the Order of the Phoenix.

We get a look into Draco's pov right after this moment from the Half-Blood Prince:

>“I can help you, Draco,” said Dumbledore.

>“No, you can’t,” said Malfoy, his wand hand shaking very badly indeed. “Nobody can. He told me to do it or he’ll kill me. I’ve got no choice.”

>“He cannot kill you if you are already dead. Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Nobody would be surprised that you had died in your attempt to kill me—forgive me, but Lord Voldemort probably expects it. Nor would the Death Eaters be surprised that we had captured and killed your mother—it is what they would do themselves, after all. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban.....When the time comes we can protect him too. Come over to the right side, Draco.....you are not a killer.....”

>Malfoy stared at Dumbledore.

>“But I got this far, didn’t I?” he said slowly. “They thought I’d die in the attempt, but I’m here......and you’re in my power....I’m the one with the wand......you’re at my mercy......”

>“No, Draco,” said Dumbledore quietly. “It is my mercy, and not yours, that matters now.”

>Malfoy did not speak. His mouth was open, his wand hand still trembling......

Afterwards, this is what Draco thinks (in the fic):

>With every passing second, the wand in Draco’s hand seemed to grow heavier.

>Do it, hissed Bella’s voice in his mind. Kill him, Draco.....the filthy Muggle-lover......look at his ruined hand, look at how he stands, how he breathes. He is as good as dead already! Kill him now!

>Draco had been hearing Bellatrix’s voice all year. In the days after his assignment, her fanatical energy had felt like a gift. She knew as well as he did that the Dark Lord had given him this mission to punish his father—and yet, she’d said, think, think of what you might achieve, Draco! It is a chance that any faithful servant of the Dark Lord would die for, to serve him beyond all others!

>Draco had repeated the idea to himself so many times that it had become a liturgy. This wasn’t a death sentence at all. It was an invitation to the Dark Lord’s right hand, and if he could only kill Dumbledore, he would cross the finish line, ensure his family’s status forever, and win power and glory beyond imagining. Kill Dumbledore, and end the dark year at last.

>But now, as the night wind stung his eyes, as he stood shivering upon the cusp of victory, Draco allowed himself to imagine it fully. He saw himself sitting beside the Dark Lord as his most honored deputy. And he saw the truth, glowing steadily and ominously like a faint red light behind everything else. He thought he might have known it for months already.

>This was not a finish line. It was the starting gate. Kill once, and he would need to kill again and again to survive. And even then, even if he gave the Dark Lord decades of loyal, absolute service, he wouldn't be safe. He could be brutally punished at any time for a single error, as his father had been.

>He thought wildly of his parents, then of Crabbe and Goyle, Pansy and Blaise. They would suffer for his failures the way he’d suffered for his father’s. His life would be the dark year drawn out forever into the future, a lifetime spent beneath a knife that hung by a thread.

>Draco clutched harder to the wand, telling himself to act—to say the incantation—to make the choice—but the world seemed to be dissolving around him. Everything was coming apart into incomprehensible patches of texture and sensation. There was this: the pale green light that shimmered down from the Dark Mark overhead, undulating over stone and flesh and rampart, like standing in an underwater place. And this: the tacky stick and reek of cloth in the damp pit of his right arm, where his robes had bunched; he hadn’t showered in three days, sleepless with preparation. And this: the hiss and whip of the wind at the top of the world.

>This. The depth of the lines in the old man’s face. Draco was standing close enough to see where the silver hair joined to the ancient skin, like a thousand silk threads coming out of old, soft fabric.

>Bella’s voice faded, replaced by an echo of Dumbledore’s gentle words. It is my mercy, not yours, that matters now.

>The old man was right. There was no mercy anywhere else.

>His hand trembling more violently than ever, Draco lowered the wand.

It makes his rejection of Snape's help and bragging to his friends about being a Death Eater more palatable.

It also delves into what his thoughts might've been like, holed up in Grimmauld Place and seeing Regulus' room, which was filled with Death Eater fanboy stuff:

>Draco remembered the clippings about Death Eater activity he’d seen in Regulus’s room while he’d been sleeping there. He remembered the photographs of the slight Slytherin boy, a Seeker like him, excited by the idea of joining the Dark Lord, a cause of Wizarding pride. And if the clippings suggested the group was too violent, that was only because the writers didn’t understand the importance of the cause.

And his thoughts on his previous horrible actions:

>He did have memories of Dobby from before Hogwarts. The elf had scurried around the house wringing his hands and polishing surfaces and punishing himself, and as a child Draco had found it all hilarious: the look of the elf with his batlike ears, and the tea towel he’d had to wear, and the way he’d had to do anything Draco asked, no matter how ridiculous or excessive. Draco remembered enlisting the elf to play make-believe games with him when Crabbe and Goyle weren’t there. He would be the hero, and the elf would be the evil monster encroaching on his territory, and when Draco inevitably conquered the monster, he would order Dobby to do things representing his defeat, like sitting in a closet in the dark for four hours. Draco would go and check on him halfway through just to sit in the strange, weightless feeling of his own control.

>Now, he realized, the memories gave him an uncomfortable twinge. But he shoved that discomfort back. He’d been seven, maybe eight years old at the time. How should he have known that the elf was miserable? How should he have known that the elf could even feel misery? If Dobby had ever let on anything other than enthusiasm and cooperation, his father would have ordered him to iron his hands.

>Really, said a disgusted voice in his mind, are you going to spend time feeling guilty about how you treated an elf when you were a child? After all, if he felt guilty about Dobby, of all things, what was next? Accidentally landing that Katie Bell girl in St. Mungo’s, or poisoning Weasley? Draco had never allowed himself to dwell on those things, because what would feeling guilty have done, exactly? He knew they would get better, or die, whether or not he felt guilty.

>Besides, he’d had his own death to worry about. There were reasons I acted the way I did, he thought with a kind of righteous indignation. Was he supposed to feel guilty for prioritizing his own life? Was that what people like Granger wanted, for everyone to prostrate themselves at each other’s feet, never thinking of themselves?

>Was that how she’d put on that diadem?

>He closed his eyes more tightly, so that strange shadows of polygons erupted on the backs of his eyelids. Clear your mind, said Bellatrix’s voice, training him in Occlumency. Clear everything away. Close yourself to the world, to guilt, to doubt, to shame. He succeeded, except for one thing, which lingered no matter what he tried. Granger’s face as she lowered the diadem onto her head, crowning herself, terrified and defiant.

Draco's struggle to break from the conditioning of his upbringing is also really well portrayed:

>On Thursday morning, Draco awoke feeling nauseated. He’d lain awake for hours last night, nerves flaring, running through reams of memories of his parents. Not just all the things they’d said about Muggles and Muggle-borns, either, but the way they’d looked at him when he was younger, the constant glow of pride in their faces.

>He’d remembered his mother letting out one broken sob when she’d clasped him in her arms at Grimmauld Place, the night they’d faked their deaths. He’d never heard anything like that from her. He expected no one besides his father ever had. By the time the embrace had broken, she was already collected again, her thin pale face rigid with suppressed emotion.

>He’d remembered his father coming out of the Floo from Azkaban. His mother had seemed to melt into his father’s arms, and then, when Lucius looked at Draco, thin and grey-faced from the effect of the Dementors, he’d extended a shaking hand and drawn Draco into the embrace. For the first time in a year, huddled against his parents, Draco had felt safe.

>He’d felt like a child again. He never would have admitted that that was something he’d missed.

>His parents had given him everything he’d ever wanted. They’d raised him with a degree of love, attention, and affection that he knew was unparalleled even within his group of friends, who were generally prized and pampered at home. They’d never asked him for a single thing—except, maybe, that he become the man they’d raised him to be.

>Draco had never in his life taken a step that felt so opposed to their wishes. Defecting from the Dark Lord, even hunting the Horcruxes, was one thing—he’d done all that to keep the family safe, to take steps toward restoring their lives.

>Going to Muggle London was different. He tried to tell himself he was acting out of necessity, but it just wasn’t true. He couldn’t lie to himself so easily anymore. That curious part of him kept hissing questions in the back of his mind, kept demanding to know more, to see this world where Hermione had grown up, that his family and friends hated so much.

>Maybe, he thought, he would arrive there and easily see why they acted with disgust. That was a possibility. Maybe he would finally see the evidence for what his family had always said about Muggles being dirty, oafish, like sheep, a disgrace for wizards to associate with.

>But if not? If there’s no reason? whispered the voice in his mind.

>For once he didn’t know whose voice it was. Maybe his own. And he had no answer for its questions.

His reaction to seeing the Muggle World is also quite endearing and hilarious:

>Draco felt agitated. Just then, another person wearing those odd black earmuffs walked by, holding the same shining grey oval.

>“What are those earmuffs for?” he blurted, unable to stop himself. “It’s not that cold.”

>“They’re headphones,” Potter said. “You can listen to music through them. It comes out of the CD player. The grey thing.”

>“CD player?” Draco repeated. He was aware of how stupid he sounded, even infantile, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. After weeks of suppressed preoccupation over what the Muggle world really was, how it behaved, how it operated, he was here, in the thick of it. He had this urgent, rushing feeling, like the realization that he was in a dream, with a puzzle that he needed to solve before he awoke.

>Besides, Potter had told him to ask questions, hadn’t he? And wouldn’t it seem twice as stupid to pretend like nothing around him existed? At headquarters he’d been able to act like he wasn’t thinking about it. Here, with everything pressing in on him, there was nothing else to consider. This was all.

>“A CD is something that holds music,” Potter said. “It’s been recorded onto it. Like …” Potter was clearly struggling for words.

>Then Hermione spoke.

>“Imagine an Echo Charm,” she said, “but cast on a disc. If you put the disc into a player, it’ll play the song as many times as you’d like.”

>It was such a minuscule thing. Such a tiny, human thing. But suddenly Draco’s throat grew so tight he thought he might choke.

>He saw his parents sitting at the end of their glimmering dining table and speaking about Muggles with fear and disgust. He saw the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters standing in a circle around the Muggle from the village, whose body was twitching and jerking. He saw himself and his friends in the Slytherin common room, eleven years old, laughing about the filth of the Muggle world and everything that came from it. It was how they’d related to each other, the reason they’d felt special, different, and important.

>Draco realized he was sweating. All the energy he and his friends and family had poured into hating Muggles, when Muggles didn’t even know wizards existed. The one-sided loathing suddenly seemed almost farcical, the behaviour of obsessives. That boy at the register just trying to get through the day, Leo Clifton and his monster masks, the girl in the street trying to get her mum to pay attention to her—these were the people they all hated?

>These were the people he’d been told were brutish and inferior, worthless and subhuman, and yet sinister, too—the people who would bring about the destruction of pure-blood life?

>Draco felt out of his own body. He felt as if he were seeing himself from across the grubby little chip shop, a wizard in a plastic booth, small and out of place, plucked from the roots of his family and the ancient ideals of his house, set adrift in a maelstrom of differences he’d thought were irreconcilable.

Henley has always denied/minimized his sexual relationship with Corll, so there's not a lot known about this particular aspect of their dynamic, but I wanted to discuss it.

Initially, after his arrest, Henley denied ever being in a sexual relationship with Corll at all:

>After I knew him for awhile, I began to figure that he was queer, homosexual. Then after awhile, I just came out and asked him if he was queer and he said yes, that he liked to have sex with boys by going down on them, and then asked me if he could do it to me and offered me ten dollars to let him do it. I told him no. Then he asked me several more times after that, but I never would let him.

However, around the same time, David Brooks contradicted Henley's claims:

>Eventually they [Henley and Corll] became close friends and Wayne became involved with Dean sexually to some extent, but I don’t know how much.

Henley would finally later admit that he did in fact have oral sex with Corll, but insisted it only occurred once:

>“The only time I had sexual contact with Dean was due to David,” Henley said. “He set it up. I made it apparent that it was not something I was happy or comfortable with. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it just never came up again. It was a terrible experience. Nothing like sex with a girl, which I really had not done that often. This big man loomed over me. I felt trapped. I tried to relax and get it over with, but there was no pleasure involved.”

However, I have a hard time believing that this only happened once, based on a few things.

Henley's family was in a very precarious situation after Henley's parents divorced. Elmer Wayne Henley Sr. refused to pay child support, and would frequently come by Mary Henley's place to harass his ex-wife. So Mary had 4 sons to support and put through school all on her own. As a result, a lot of pressure fell on Henley to financially support his family. He dropped out of high school and began working two jobs, where he made around 5—10 dollars an hour. I think that given his financial situation, Henley would've agreed to Corll's propositions, whether he really wanted to or not.

Additionally, a casual friend of Henley's that testified at his trial, Gary Gibson, claimed that sometime after meeting Corll, Henley began visiting a popular gay venue male hustlers frequented—The Palace Club:

>Later, Gary came to wish he’d never met Corll or Wayne Henley. Wayne seemed to have a secret life; Gary suspected he was turning tricks at a bar called the Palace in Montrose, and stealing and doing illegal favors for Corll to earn the small scraps of cash he brought home to his mama. At that time, Wayne seemed constantly in motion between his own house, Corll’s place, and the home of a college student who worked at the Palace as a bartender.

So I'm willing to bet that Henley just doesn't want to tell the truth because it's traumatic to talk about (he also occasionally minimized the abuse he suffered from his father).

But this is a statement Henley that really interests me:

>Corll had once handcuffed Henley on the torture board and burned him with a cigarette to show him he was not to act on his own, leave without permission, or think for himself.

So Henley claims that Corll put him on the torture board, handcuffed him, just like his murder victims, Mike Durst, Billy Ridinger, and Brooks, but DIDN'T rape him? Come on.

I do believe that Corll put Henley on the board though. He'd done it to one accomplice, why not the other? Corll raped and tortured Brooks ruthlessly over the course of 2 days to establish dominance over him, and Brooks was generally quite compliant! But we're supposed to believe that he never felt the need to do the same with Henley, who had left Houston several times to get away from Corll, had begun drinking very heavily after getting involved in the murders (to the point of making incriminating comments to his friends), and was getting into trouble with the law?

What are everyone else's thoughts on this?