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As April comes to an end, many of us remember two things: exams that we forgot to study for (oops!) and the Battle of Hogwarts that stole many young wizards’ lives on May 2^nd, 1998. But weep not, dear Harry Potter fans! Our loveable heroes will forever live in our hearts, in our fictions and fanarts, in whatever form we like to remember them best, for all eternity.

But sometimes how we—writers, artists, and cosplayers—portray a character doesn’t fit the mold mass media has carved out for him or her. Fan artists have long illustrated their favorite characters according their own artistic vision, but now some illustrators are creating art that portrays the magnificent trio as an array of races and colors to mirror diversity of their fans.

This niche in fandom is called “racebending"—when a character is seen as an ethnicity other than as described in the canonical works—and it's produced some of the best fan works in all of tumblrdom. Read on to see more!

Photo via Harvard Gazette

I always loved the allure to writing letters. It’s a conversation that stretches over continents. There’s something incredibly romantic about that (at least to me). When I was younger, I had a penpal in New York. We wrote letters to each other often. I told her things I wouldn’t dream about telling anyone else because it felt like, even though what I put on paper lasts longer than any conversation, it felt safe.

Letters feel very safe.

So how about let’s exploit that a little?

To honor Letter Writing Week, I rounded up some of the best epistolary (letter-writing) novels I know. While I personally count diary entries as letter-writing, since we write it to our future selves (or imaginary friends, or our cat), I won’t include those on this list. Just purely letter-writing, fictional and non. And emails. And texting. And smoke-signals.