Found your online essay about Samirah al-Abbas--it was very incisive and I am grateful for having found it, especially since you're another Muslim Canadian who's a bit into the deep end of nerdiness. It gets a bit lonely when my sister is the only other Muslim I know who orbits any of the same interests as me.

I've read the Magnus Chase books, and while I was just happy to see a female Muslim character like Samirah at the time, I've gradually grown a bit more concerned about her juxtaposition with all the...stuff. Your essay helped clarify a lot for me.

I have only just learned of your fiction writings, and I am very interested in reading them--I am quite sick of religion being denigrated, absent, or restricted to fictional ones in sci-fi and fantasy, especially stories that are supposed to be in the future.

To be honest, though, my main impetus for reaching out is that I would like to know if you consider the context of Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V problematic to include Muslim characters in. I'm trying to write a fanfiction for it, and while I was already rewriting the fantastical aspects so that they didn't infringe upon any tenet of Islam, your remark about context got me worrying again about whether the context of Yugioh would send the wrong message. I'd write fanfiction for something that wouldn't even involve these questions, but I specifically want to put Muslim characters where there's a lack of them.

I wouldn't bother you with this, but none of the scholars/imams whom I know are familiar enough with this to really be able to answer, and you know this kind of thing, even if not Yugioh in particular. I already ditched the idea of doing fanfiction for the earlier series in the Yugioh franchise because occultist/pagan stuff is pretty heavily enmeshed in the plot, and Arc-V is mostly sci-fi, but the materialistic aspect of the card game does still concern me a bit. There isn't any "god" problem to be had with Arc-V, the only issue is maybe some soul-related things, but we've explicitly not been told much about that, so I figure I have a bit of room there.

P.S. I am going to have two original Muslim characters as my main characters, who will be 14 years old for reasons involving the plot of the show. Do you think that's too young for an arranged marriage to be in the works for them? It wouldn't necessarily have been formally arranged yet, and they're already going to be somewhat close regardless. I just thought you would know better than me whether that might go over too much the wrong way--I was planning on it depicting it as being so that my characters can have a halal relationship.

P.P.S. I'm only just 21, and haven't published anything online let alone otherwise. I genuinely admire you even though I only just found out about you.

P.P.P.S. Please keep up this good work!