they're lesbians, hagrid

Crowley: Can I...drive you anywhere?

Aziraphale: our love is forbidden. perhaps one day, my love, we shall hold hands in the park or kiss in the ritz...do not look at me with that forlorn stare. Would that I could hold you, to love you, but I am duty bound. NO! I cannot...for I know where it leads. Goodbye my dearest. You are far braver than I am...too brave by far. I wish I dared love you but I would condemn us both to an eternity of suffering. I shall see you one day, I know it. And it still won’t be occasion to tell you how I love you.

ANYWAY AS I WAS SAYING.

Caught and mostly handled; Sirius was Very Carefully Chill about it and so Harry did not learn about Parselmouths having a bad rep until much later.

The Dueling Club is different, too: I suspect that second year is the least complicated year of Draco and Harry’s friendship. It went something like this:

"Wait til you see what I’ve got planned for Dueling Club,” Draco said, passing Harry on his way to Herbology. 

Of course, Draco had the patience and reserve of a Niffler in a jewelry shop, so on his way from Herbology he told Harry, Ron and Hermione all about the extremely cool and dangerous spell he was planning to use.

Harry agreed that it sounded cool, but not particularly dangerous. “It’s not as though every snake in the world is mad to bite the next human being they see,” he said. “Most of them are nice. Even the grumpy ones are fine so long as you’re polite.”

“Talk to a lot of snakes, do you?” said Ron, laughing.

“Oh, not lately,” said Harry. “One of my friends at home has a hognose and a ball python, so I try to get in a visit and a chat with them when I can.”

He was walking a little ahead of the others, so it took a moment for Harry to realize they had all fallen silent. He stopped, and turned, and found that Ron, Hermione, and Draco all had matching looks of dismay. This was highly unusual, as most of the time the things that made Hermione look dismayed made Draco look pleased, and vice versa.

“Harry,” said Ron, “you’re a Parselmouth?”

“I suppose so,” said Harry. “Is that what it’s called? Padfoot told me it’s quite rare to be able to talk to snakes, but he didn’t say there was a name for it. You all look like I’ve cancelled Quidditch. Is it bad, being a Parselmouth?”

Hermione rallied first. “Well, of course it isn’t!” she said. “You’re right, it is extremely rare, and just because Parselmouths have, well, a bit of a reputation--”

“Meaning they’re all Dark wizards,” said Ron.

“Not all,” said Draco. “Just some. The famous ones, so that’s who you hear about, I suppose.”

“Exactly so,” said Hermione. “It’s not as though we’d hear about the Parselmouths who live quiet lives as -- as zookeepers, and things.”

“Right,” said Draco. He and Hermione nodded at each other, until Draco realized he was agreeing with Hermione about something and froze.

Ron and Harry watched this with some amusement, but Ron was still concerned, even later on. “It’s just a bit weird, is all,” he told Harry. “They say You-Know-Who was a Parselmouth. I dunno, just take a bit of getting used to, I guess.”

Commissioned this beautiful Linny piece by the very talented @viria and I absolutely love it!

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

1. Writer’s Market 2019 is a great place to start– it gives you a list of magazines and journals that you can send your work to depending on the genre as well as lists a shit ton of literary agents that specify what genres they represent, how you can get in contact with them and how they accept query letters. this is a book that updates every year and tbh i only bought it this year so i dont know how critical it is to have an updated version  

2. do your research. mostly on literary agents because if you listed on your site that you like to represent fluffy YA novels and some asshole sends you a 80k manuscript about like…gritty viking culture, you will be severely pissed off. always go in finding someone who you know will actually like your work because they’re the ones who will try to advocate for you in getting published.

3. learn how to write a query letter. there are slightly varying formulas to how you can write an effective query letter. you’re also going to want to get feedback on your query letter because its the first thing the literary agent will read and based on how well you do it, it could be the difference between them rejecting you outright and giving your manuscript a quick read

4. unfortunately, you’re gonna want to get a twitter. Twitter is where a lot of literary agents are nowadays, and they host things like twitter pitch parties, where you pitch your manuscript in a few sentences and hashtag it with #Pitmad #Pitdark, some version of pit. a lot of literary agents and publishers will ALSO post their manuscript wishlists, which is just the kind of books they’d like to represent/publish, and they hashtag this with #MSWL (it is NOT for writers to use, only for agents/publishers)

my long-suffering friends and followers:

Hermione has some moments that are pretty darn relatable in Prisoner of Azkaban… 😬 

A big shoutout to my patrons for voting for me to make a comic of a scene that wasn’t in the books! They suggested I try drawing a scene that was mentioned, but never shown, so I drew this scene of Hagrid helping Hermione through a particularly rough time in PoA! I hope you guys enjoy! 😊

Harry hesitated, but after all, Ron had been honest with him, so he told Ron the truth…