Blaise Zabini is a character in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. A minor character, his gender was not revealed until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which resulted in several fans initially believing him to be female and errors in the series' Dutch translation. Despite this, he is more popular in fan-fiction of the series, partially due to his status as one of the few characters in Harry Potter of African descent. He was 17 in the Half-blood Prince book.
Appearances
Blaise is one of the "few black students at Hogwarts." He was initially mentioned as the last student to have been sorted by the Sorting Hat, which placed him in Slytherin. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, he is described as "a tall black boy with high cheekbones and long, slanting eyes". His mother is described as a "famously beautiful" witch who had "married seven times", with all of them ending in mysterious fatalities that left her significantly wealthier.
He is portrayed as snobbish and with "exceptional good looks". Due to the gender-neutral nature of his name and the lack of a description of him in the earlier novels, Dutch translations of the first novels in the series referred to him as female. This was corrected in the translation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when his gender was revealed.
Reception
As he was only mentioned once in the first book with no other descriptors, he was the "subject of rampant speculation, shipping, and fan art." According to Maria I Velazquez, following the reveal of his race, some fans of the series reacted with "frustration, grief, and anger at Rowling for "shatter[ing]" their image of Blaise by making him black." She quoted a blogger who argued that this exemplified the "ways in which racism and stereotypes frame the ways in which one reads a text", and that "whiteness becomes a kind of default, so characters are often assumed to be white unless the text explicitly states otherwise." Velazquez, notes that his race is "still an ongoing tension" within the fandom. She writes that "anti-black sentiments" towards the casting of Zabini in the films "became an opportunity for antiracist fans to engage in an extended, ongoing critique of real-world racism(s) in both fandom and the series itself."
The character is significantly more prominently featured in fan fiction than in the original series. As of 2018, there were 6,000 pieces of fan-fiction on FanFiction.Net and another 6,000 on Archive of Our Own featuring him as the main character, with many more featuring him as a major character.