I am so honoured, so full-hearted, so excited, to announce that I am now represented by Thao Le of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Yes, that Thao, the one who represents Ali Hazelwood and Thea Guanzon. (I am all nerves, I am a single nerve, I am screaming, crying, throwing up)
Thao found me through The Mortifying Ordeal, mutual fangirling ensued – and now, this is officially happening. The project we are working on will please the Dramione stans, the slow burn masochists, and the STEM girlies all at once.
So looking forward to sharing this next chapter with you!
It’s 2002 and Spider-Man just came out and Hermione has been slowly getting Draco used to TV and movies by renting VHS tapes every once in a while. One night she chooses Spider-man and is obsessed (Draco doesn’t get the allure of superheroes) and makes them be this for Halloween that year
Plus two bonus sketches cause when else am I going to have an excuse to draw him as everyone’s favorite friendly (sassy) neighborhood (mansion living) spider-man!
ive watched this video 5 times in the last two days and it always makes me laugh til i get a headache & i wanted it on my blog but didnt find it anywhere so guess i gotta do it myself
I think about this video roughly once a week. It makes me laugh SO HARD.
@owllinallover has truly sent me to an early grave with this stunning artwork of my two sweet baby angels from YDIFM. She is the absolute queen of speaking volumes through a single look and I will never stop looking at this. AH! I love it - thank youuuuu <3
@zeebee3 is my fandom bestie forever and always and her writing is just out of this WORLD gorgeous and hot and wonderful and it makes me so happyyyyy.
If you’re not reading this story, run! You won’t regret it!
I’ve always been interested by how and why people change. Morally grey characters tempt me because they demonstrate a sort of openness and appreciation for ambiguity – and Draco in particular is portrayed at a time in his life when one’s moral and social frameworks are being formed, so core questions of identity and one’s place in the world are being built on a day-to-day basis. The conflict between his family/tradition/normative sense of “right” and his better interests/better angels/rational process of learning about the world is a ripe opportunity to explore how people develop their ideas of how to behave and orient themselves philosophically — it isn’t like you hit age 17 and get a giant “GOOD” or “EVIL” button. One of the core theses of Lionheart is that everyone, absolutely everyone, has reasons for the things they do, and they are making the choices they do because, in their view, they have no better ones. Now, many of those people are wrong. Draco was, in the original books. But I wanted to argue that that’s a question of contingency, not of nature. He could have made the right choices. (Some of them, anyway.) It would have been hard, but he could have made them. And that’s why what he did was wrong.
Also, he’s a catty snob, so. Like calls to like, etc.
I power read Lionheart months ago and it's been living in my brain ever since. In random moments, I see/think about your characters in the world around me. Like: a couple in the park holding hands? I start musing on your Draco's PDA thoughts. I remember the handholding moment as the Third Task started. I see a threadbare book in the thrift store? I wonder how fired up Hermione would be if someone asked her if wizards had an obligation to fix Muggle goods. If Reparo can fix a roof (and costs a witch nothing), should impoverished Muggles have to fight with their insurance company after a storm? On and on. I love it.
Thanks for opening up your asks for questions! Seriously, that's a badass move. There have been a few stressful moments in my life where--bing!--I check Tumblr and read one of your answers and I'm immersed in your HP world again, carefree and curious. <3
I have about a billion things I could ask/am curious about, but I'll restrain myself to two. This time. ;-)
Draco's mentioned once or twice that Harry & Ron don't understand him and Hermione. I was interested in that moment right before Draco follows Hermione to the Owlery. Harry stopped Ron from saying anything, and Draco recognizes that he's probably just as ignorant about Harry and Ron's friendship. So: 1) Is it too spoilery to ask what Harry (dear, sweet boy that he is) has noticed about Hermione & Draco? Does he think of them as one nerdbrain, or is he like Draco? Hermione? Weren't they married like, ages ago? I'm so fascinated by what others see when they look at Draco and Hermione because good GOD, what a power couple. And 2) Could you speak to Harry and Ron's relationship? Is Harry like, "Ron, you've gotta kill that Hermione pipedream," or is that topic irrelevant in the face of Quidditch gossip and less relationship-driven moments? Their (Harry and Ron) connection just seems so...necessary. It's beautiful.
I hope you're doing well! Thanks again for sharing such an immersive, gripping story with us.
Aw, this is so touching, thank you! I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can without spoilers or breaching any rules on author-answer-ethics. Standard disclaimers: anything not in the text doesn’t count, if I want you to believe something I have to give you a reason to believe it in the body of the fiction itself, and you’re free to disagree with anything I say here. For the purposes of these types of questions, I’m basically just a fan who knows what the author had for breakfast this morning.
Harry knows that Hermione and Draco are… something. I think this comes through most in the arc of Book 4 where Ron separates from the group, and it becomes a tricycle of Draco, Hermione, and Harry. Harry is miserable, and it’s not just because Ron leaves (although that’s a large part of it); he’s now in the position that Hermione occupies for most of the original series, where he understands very clearly that his other two friends, while both loving him very much, are First in each other’s minds. He has a number of remarks that start to show his irritation with this, though he tries his best to be understanding — it is a similar dynamic to him and Ron, after all. (Fun story: I didn’t realize until late in my drafting how much Hermione and Draco’s dynamic echoes Harry and Ron in canon, from meeting on the train, the paying-for-candy moment, the Sorting, the class partnership, etc.)
All this to say that Harry looks at Hermione and Draco and sees a wall, in the same way that Draco looks at Harry and Ron and sees a wall. He doesn’t understand it, but he knows that’s deep water, and he knows he’s usually better off not touching it. (Some of this comes through in Ron’s conversation with Draco by the pumpkin patch; there’s a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to “whatever the hell you and Hermione have got going on,” along with a quick gloss on their weird pseudo-spiritual mind-meld connection, which was meant to give a glimpse into how the rest of Gryffindor sees them: eerily well-suited people with separately terrifying abilities who, when together, sail merrily off into their own universe of intelligence/plots-and-schemery and become a black hole of You Don’t Want To Fucking Know. I sometimes amuse myself by thinking of Dean and Seamus giving the first years PSAs on Do Not Approach the Wild Swots In Action.) And he, like most of Gryffindor Tower, would have to be blind not to see how much they favor each other. They’re always together. There’s really nothing that they can do to hide it.
Which is probably why he pulls Ron back in the Owlery moment. He understands that what Hermione is dealing with is something that Draco, perhaps only Draco, can fix. She needs to hear a very specific kind of reassurance, and she needs to hear it from him. In the same way, when Hermione tried to calm Harry down before the plan to rescue Sirius in the third book, she failed miserably; they love each other intensely (they’re siblings! the muggle-born twins!) but they’re extremely different, and of all the Quartet dynamics, they’re the ones who seem most at peace with that. Harry and Hermione’s friendship works because they get what the other needs and they get that sometimes it’s not them. (Harry more than Hermione, because she’s still working on the concept of “sometimes people do not want my help” in general, but still.) There’s a reason basically no one ever speculates about them being involved outside of a joke, because no one who knows them would think they could work romantically. They love each other, but they weird each other out, and they’re content with that.
In contrast, Ron and Harry’s friendship is more of the soul-bonded, life-partners, “he is more myself than I am” kind of friendship. Catherine and Heathcliff dig-up-the-corpse-to-lie-down-with-it type of shit. When Ron gets a death scare in the finale of Book 3, Harry goes fucking ballistic. Likewise with Harry’s portkey fakeout in the end of Book 4 — Ron loses his shit. They are deeply, irrevocably attached to each other in an almost codependent way, which is the product of Harry’s “first friend ever, like literally fucking ever, not nobody else, not one” situation meeting Ron’s “first person who ever loved me as Ron and not so-and-so’s brother” situation. So just as you put it, really: necessary and beautiful (and messy).
