Media Recs
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queerly_belovedWith many of us stuck in our houses or at least working very reduced hours for a good chunk of time, I thought now would be a great opportunity to round up some media recommendations featuring queer/LGBTQIAP+ characters! You can reply to this post with the titles of books, movies, TV shows, video games, podcasts, fanfics, webcomics, or whatever else you can think of that folx might enjoy. If you've read/watched/played/listened to/etc something that someone else recs, you can chime in with your own reviews. Suggesting authors or creators in general are also good.
Optional template:
Title:
Author/Creator/Distributor:
Media type:
Summary:
Identities represented:
Content Warnings:
Where you can find/get the thing:
amadi has a tutorial for how to make spoiler-blocking warning tags here, if you want to use it; I've got the relevant code available for copy-pasting below:
All the fields in the template are completely optional, so use as many or as few as you like, or even skip the template altogether and throw together something yourself. I'm looking forward to finding all sorts of new titles to explore!
Optional template:
Title:
Author/Creator/Distributor:
Media type:
Summary:
Identities represented:
Content Warnings:
Where you can find/get the thing:
amadi has a tutorial for how to make spoiler-blocking warning tags here, if you want to use it; I've got the relevant code available for copy-pasting below:All the fields in the template are completely optional, so use as many or as few as you like, or even skip the template altogether and throw together something yourself. I'm looking forward to finding all sorts of new titles to explore!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-17 11:37 pm (UTC)Author/Creator/Distributor: Effie Calvin
Media type: Book, Audiobook
Summary: F/F romantic comedy with some action sequences; when her arranged fiancé dies unexpectedly, Princess Esofi is instead given the option to marry his surviving sister, Princess Adale. Unfortunately, Adale has never wanted the responsibility of ruling. After a less-than-stellar first impression, Adale ends up in competition with her classist cousins for Esofi's hand, all with the looming threat of dragons on the horizon.
Identities represented: Sapphic, bi/pan, abuse survivor, fat
Content Warnings: Violence, death, animal harm, referenced abuse, mild fatphobia (The book itself is really fluffy, there's just some action sequences where Shit Happens)
Where you can find/get the thing: Pretty much anywhere books are sold? The audiobook is available through Audible. Also, right now the publisher is running a sale only through their website where you can get the ebook for $0.99 USD and the rest of the series for 40% off!
This series is super duper adorable and fluffy. There's also nonbinary rep, but most of it is tertiary characters up until the fourth book, which has an important secondary character who's nonbinary; the upcoming fifth book has a trans woman as half of the romantic pairing. The author has an incredibly beautiful system set up in universe for transitioning, and I recommend reading that if nothing else. Oh, and there's an ace character in the first and third books, but so far she's only recognized as ace via Word of God; there's an important aroace character in the fourth book as well, who is a complete badass.
Anyway! Now's a great time to check out this series, and if even a dollar is pushing it, I do plan to do a giveaway of at least the first book at some point in the near future.
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Date: 2020-03-17 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-17 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-17 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 12:06 am (UTC)Author/Creator/Distributor: Squinky
Media type: Video game, musical
Summary: "In this unique and offbeat stop motion musical detective adventure game, Dominique Pamplemousse, the titular protagonist, is a down-on-their-luck private investigator of ambiguous gender only one rent payment away from homelessness. When the CEO of a major record company shows up asking Dominique to locate a missing pop star, taking the job appears to be the straightforward thing to do. However, as things are never quite as they seem in these kinds of stories, Dominique winds up framed for a crime they didn't commit, bringing to surface their mysterious past and the events that led them to take up shady detective work in the first place.
Oh, and did I mention it's a musical? With singing and everything?"
Identities represented: Nonbinary, POC
Content Warnings: Death, capitalism
Where you can find/get the thing: Dominique Pamplemousse website
Full disclosure, I did support this game on Indiegogo when it was being funded.
Anyway, Squinky has made a whole bunch of really cool games, though DomPom 1 is probably their best known. They cover themes like social awkwardness (and socializing in general), imposter syndrome, sexism and misogyny, being trans, and all sorts of things. Definitely worth checking out if point-and-click video games are a thing you might be interested in.
Dominique Pamplemousse 1 is currently for sale for $1 USD (though you can pay more), with DomPam 2: Combinatorial Explosion! available for the same price!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 02:33 am (UTC)Author/Creator/Distributor: Written by Kata Konyama. It's getting an official English release by Seven Seas Entertainment sometime this year, under the title Love Me For Who I Am.
Media type: Manga.
Summary: Ordinary high-school student Tetsu is a pretty nice guy, so when he sees his effeminate classmate Mogumo wish for friends that will understand them, he thinks that a job offer to work as a maid at his older sister's otokonoko, or "girlyboy" cafe would be right up their alley. (NSFW warning if you chose to Google Image Search that) However, he misunderstands. Mogumo isn't actually a "girlyboy", or even much of a girl or boy after all.
And so begins a sweet slice-of-life story about gender, queer romance, and community.
Identities represented: God, where do I start? Gay/m-spec dudes, trans women, lesbians, m-spec women, NB people...
Content Warnings: One of the main characters is a lesbian who suffers from severe internalized homophobia. Mogumo, the NB protagonist, suffers from transphobic bullying and is the target of sexual attraction from a lesbian, who misgenders them in some narration. Some dysphoria talk.
Where you can find/get the thing: Sadly, the official English localization won't be out until June at the earliest, so any interested parties will have to find it through more illicit channels.
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Title:Yuureito
Author/Creator/Distributor:Written by Nogisaka Taro.
Media type:Manga.
Summary:I'm just going to copy-paste from TV Tropes, because I'm lazy.
In 1952 a woman is killed by her adopted daughter by being tied onto a clock tower's hands until her back breaks.
Two years later, the clock tower is now known as the 'ghost tower' and is supposedly haunted. Amano Taichi, a shut-in, is attacked by someone or something in the same clock tower, and almost dies but he is rescued by a mysterious man named Tetsuo.
Tetsuo is searching for a treasure that is connected with the ghost tower and asks Taichi to be his partner. Taichi's enticed by the idea of becoming extremely wealthy and is further convinced when his house mysteriously burns down. As it turns out, there's a Serial Killer out there that attacks people in the 'ghost tower'.
Identities represented:: Tetsuo is a trans dude, and he and Taichi wind up together. Also, Taichi has some hints of genderqueerness, and there are two other queer men represented, but one of them's a child molester, so..
Content Warnings:: It's a mystery story, so there's quite a bit of death. Young children die on screen. Some deaths are gruesome. In some cover art, Tetsuo is sexualized to an extent that some trans readers may find to be dysphoria-inducing. Period-accurate trans- and homophobia, and loads of it. The Big Bad's plot revolves around trying to rape his transgender son and force him to have his kids. The murder of children by their parents is a theme.
Where you can find/get the thing: Sadly, this manga is unlikely to ever get an official English translation, but there are so many goddamn anime scanlation aggregators floating around that it'd be pretty easy to find a copy.
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I also really want to recommend Lamento- beyond the void, a BL visual novel about a catboy named Konoe who lives in a world struck by illness and curses and goes on an adventure to save it, with a choice of three male love interests along the way (Rai, a snow leopard mercenary, Asato, a black cat with a troubled past who is best boy, and Bardo, a tiger innkeeper)
I'm not explicitly recommending it because A: No official English translation, and B: Getting a hold of even a used copy can run you up to 100$ on Amazon. But seriously, it's Nitro+cHIRAL's best VN to date. There is a Let's Play by a gentleman who goes by AwesomePerfection1, though he is very, very shouty. If you do want to give it a shot, however, the main things I need to warn for is that there's a lot of rape, both in the backstory of certain villains and in pretty much every bad end, the Konoe/Bardo ship has something of an age gap, and there are backstory references to women in cat-person society being used as breeding stock.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 11:53 am (UTC)Author/Creator/Distributor: Seanan Mcguire
Media type: Book, start of a series
Summary: Series concept: When the children from portal fantasies come back, many miss their true home more than they want to stay with the families they left behind. Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children is there for them in all the ways the parents who want them to be their old selves aren't.
this book: When Nancy comes back from her still Underworld of black and white, her parents want their "Little Rainbow" back more than they want to understand her. In despair they send her to the School, where she discovers she is not the only one who wants to get home more than she ever wanted back to "the real world". She is still finding her place among them when murders start happening at the school.
Identities represented: Nancy is Asexual (but not Aromantic); Kade is a Trans boy; another girl is a mad scientist who exclusively wears suits and goes by Jack. I go into detail there because it may only ping as GNC for me because I need it to be.
Content Warnings: serial killing; graphically described death (well by YA standards); at one point they dispose of a body; eye trauma; All the kids are there because their parents couldn't deal, so it hits some parental abuse notes pretty hard even if I'm not sure if the white picket fence kids would see it if you pointed it out to them. School bullying with a bit of transphobiabut IIRC the bigot loses her support when that part becomes more obvious
Where you can find/get the thing: Seanan McGuire is pretty big in fantasy and this thing won its share of awards so pretty much any bookstore that sells fantasy. The only thing is it gets shelved with regular fantasy or YA fantasy pretty randomly.
I could write odes to Nancy and this book. I can see where someone else might not see it as perfect but it was exactly what a lot of us needed in way that is hard to put into words. In addition to a diverse cast, it also represents something I haven't seen much of: parents who aren't Abusive(tm)but whose relationships with their kids are more harmful than the run of the mill "no teen gets along with their parents" or "Bob treated his queer kid awfully until he came around so we're going to pretend healing the wound undoes having wounded his kid in the first place". I didn't mean to write a rec nearly as long as the novel here so I'm editing down and will post a longer rec on my own journal soon.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-20 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 04:17 pm (UTC)Title: Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
Author/Creator/Distributor: Studio- Seven Arcs, Creator- Masaki Tsuzuki
Media type: Anime (with manga and drama cd adaptions)
Summary: Nanoha Takamichi is a 9 year old in modern day Japan who gets swept up in a extradimensional conflict over magical artifacts that have been found on Earth. She is requested to help recover these magical artifacts by an injured mage, and he gives her an artifact that allows her to do so. This spirals rapidly into a whole bunch of other stuff. The series is a Seinen magical girl/sci fi mashup that alternates between dark and sugary sweet. There are five animes, four films, and several manga and drama cd adaptions. Ive only watched the first season because im Terrible at finishing series.
The fanservice/nsfw joke amount is VERY low, as per most magical girl series, though I havent finished all of it so I cant say for sure that there is none at all.
If you like- magical girl series, over-the-top shonen-style fights, cute girls doing cute things(moe-type fluff), sci fi space nonsense and magitech, or serious/dark-toned plotlines, this is something for you.
If you DONT like any of that, or if you have a serious trigger for child abuse maybe skip this one.
It is good in both sub and dub, if you need one or the other and fantastic for binging if you have the stamina.
Identities represented: Nanoha and Fate are both lesbians, confirmed by word of god. Even without word of god they are pretty implicitly queer characters. They also raise a child together.
Content Warnings: Child abuse(Physical and emotional abuse of a young child by a parent, it is explicit, severe, taken seriously, and extremely hard to watch. The most severe of which is in episode 7.), aftermath of abuse, death, lots of flashing lights, some of the scenes might inspire motion sickness
In the later series I know there is- mentions of abuse and the aftermath of abuse, medical horror, and the kidnapping of a child
Where you can find/get the thing: The first season is on amazon prime, I believe, though there are many places to get it illegally.
Title: Cardcaptor Sakura
Author/Creator/Distributor: CLAMP
Media type: Anime and/or manga
Summary: Sakura finds a book in her attic, and accidentally releases a bunch of magical cards. The guardian of these cards, Kereberos, then drafts Sakura to get them back.
This is a bog-standard magical girl anime that is obviously for younger audiences.
The english dub cut and butchered it SO BAD and straightwashed it. Watch the sub or read the manga. Im not sure if they ever re-released the dub.
Identities represented: 'Everyone is Bi' is in full effect, this is a clamp work. In the non-butchered version, most characters have crushes on characters of the same gender that are treated the same way as a 'straight' crush.
Content Warnings: There is talk of death and grief and some of the background ships have questionable age gaps (The most questionable of which is the manga-exclusive background elementary student and her teacher?? Watch the anime to avoid that one, she just has a crush on him instead.). There is also some cousin incest crushes(The mother of Sakura's friend Tomoyo was deeply in love with Sakura's mother who is also her cousin, and Tomoyo has a crush on Sakura, these stay 100% unrequited, but they are very much centered in the early plot).
Where you can find/get the thing: The anime is on crunchyroll, not sure about the manga.
Theres all the popular known queer media like Night in the Woods, Undertale, Homestuck, The Adventure Zone, Welcome To Nightvale, Dragon Age, Sailor Moon, etc of course, but I figure I should rec something that doesnt come up on cursory google searches.
Also I have a few where a Single non-central character is queer(often only in one version or way late into the series) or is only word of god queer I could rec? I also have some implicit queercoded recs, but that doesnt feel quite in the spirit?
I can dump them if anyone wants?
no subject
Date: 2020-03-20 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-21 06:20 pm (UTC)Series: Fate/Stay Night
Characters: Rin Tohsaka and Saber
Rep: they are both bisexual, but only Rin is confirmed bi and its explicitly canon to the original VN only and only apparent in one route iirc.
Warnings: Hoo boy canon is pretty. uh. The VN is an eroge, so its nsfw. Other warnings include child abuse of all kinds in various routes, death, incest, rape and attempted rape, and a bunch of gore. The other adaptions are a little less content warning inducing, but yeah. Just. Blanket content warning.
Other: In some spinoff materials of fate-verse Lancer is ambiguously bi, but its never really clear.
Saber is arguably also trans-coded(genderqueer specifically) due to her relationship to her gender and gender presentation. This is present in the much more-tame anime(I know its in the original anime, but I havent watched ubw to confirm there as well), unlike the bi rep.
Word of god states that the Rider from Fate/Zero, this series' prequel, is also bisexual. But Fate/Zero has a lot of the same content warnings as the original VN so theres that.
Series: Wings of Fire
Characters: Umber, Anemone, Silverspot, Burnet, Snowfox, Snowflake, Willow, and Sundew.
Rep: Only Sundew and Willow are main characters in the most recent book The Poison Jungle. Anemone and Umber have plot relevance, but everyone else is very. VERY Irrelevant, I had to look their names up on the wiki. Umber is gay and the rest are wlw.
Warnings: Across the series there is abuse (physical, neglect, and emotional), child soldiers, gore, abusive relationships and gaslighting, prominently portrayed trauma, and death
Other: Sorineth is pretty lacking in homophobia, but the rep feels kind of. Stilted. In a way thats difficult to describe. Like she just looked for WoF posts on tumblr and transplanted some of the crypto-radfem BNF's text post syntax into the story. I can hear the dogwhistles echo and im not sure if its intentional or if shes just seeing how The Fandom talks and emulating it.
This is also a really long series that might get expensive to read, as there are over 10 necessary books in the series.
As a warning: the fandom is brutal and filled with baby radfems for some reason. Avoid it like the plague to have a happy experience reading dragon books.
Series: Attack On Titan
Characters: Ymir, Christa, and Hange Zoe
Rep: Ymir is confirmed gay, Christa seemed to be in love with her also, and Hange is deliberately referred to with gender neutral pronouns in the manga and translators have been instructed to do the same when possible so they are possibly genderqueer?
Warnings: its Attack On Titan. Its violent, there was that thing with the later chapters and antisemitism that I havent been following, child soldiers, death, murder, cults, Mikasa as a child was threatened to be taken and sold in human trafficking. Probably more ive forgotten. it has pretty much no fanservice though, so there is that.
Other: Ymir dies So. You know. Theres that
Series: Yuki Yuna is a Hero
Characters: Mimori Togo
Rep: She is word of god in love with the protag, and theres a lot of homoerotic coding with them.
Warnings: Its a slightly blander PMMM so child soldiers, existential/psychological horror, downer ending, permanent disability, trauma, that kind of thing
Other: If you want more edgy queercoded magical girls and have watched Utena, PMMM, CCS, Lyrical Nanoha, and Sailor Moon already, this is good. Togo also is disabled and uses a wheelchair and her powers DONT magically heal her.
Series: Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Heroes of Olympus (the sequel series to the original)
Character: Nico di Angelo
Rep: hes gay and has a crush on Percy, his exact sexuality was confirmed by the author. Im not caught up past the book after this is revealed though, whoops!
Warnings: child & domestic abuse, internalized homophobia, violence
Other: Thats a lot of books you have to read to get to this fact.
Series: W.I.T.C.H.
Characters: Nerissa, Irma Lair
Rep: Irma was confirmed word of god to be a lesbian in the cartoon version, also in the cartoon version, Nerissa has a few ambiguous lines that imply she was in love with Cassidy and therefore bi, but iirc Gregg Weissman never confirmed it??
The comic has a LOT of homoerotic subtext but its covered with Just Friends(tm) disclaimers. Like this kind of A Lot of subtext and coding (https://66.media.tumblr.com/e346fde5bd60edefc5229d8d8d55d217/tumblr_ob2znr8RdZ1s85sw9o1_1280.jpg).
Warnings: In the cartoon, its not really discussed but Nerissa is kind of a rapist (she pretends to be someone else and sleeps with this one guy under false pretenses. Its unknown if it was all a manipulative ruse or not). Its as Disney fluffed as possible and they dont use that word but. Yeah.
In the comics its kind of. Fanservicey. Will's dad is also a manipulative stalker scumbag. Cheating is brought up and discussed. There is one incident of Disney-fluffed attempted assault that was handled very poorly.
Other: You can find the whole show on youtube, and either buy the reprints by Yen press or find a scan(its a crapshoot on if the scan is a scanlation or official translation).
It IS a good magical girl comic/show, and probably my FAVORITE media series ever, definitely my favorite magical girl media. But its very 2000s dated and has plotholes everywhere.
If you want dragon motifs and Gal Pals, this is it. If you want more than subtext, watch Sailor Moon or Lyrical Nanoha.
There are probably more Im forgetting, but heres a good stack.
Speaking of forgetting, I somehow forgot MDZS in the explicit/central queer rep!
Series: Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation/ Mo Dao Zu Shi
Characters: Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji
Rep: They are canon gay and married in the novel, all other adaptions got censored by China's media police, but its pretty heavy subtext anyway.
Warnings: OH BOY, abuse, normalized abuse, war, gore, violence, death, trauma, the novel is NSFW and in the NSFW extras They both have a noncon kink and a lot of the sex scenes feature that and arent always clear to the reader that its play, bdsm is a thing, unsafe and unrealistic sex abounds
Other: Its incredibly good! Its incredibly long! Its canon! But not for everyone.
I can edit this post and add the popular ones most everyone already knows if you want?
no subject
Date: 2020-03-21 12:05 am (UTC)Media type: free ebooks, mostly romance
Identities represented: check individual titles; the ones I clicked include gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, polyamorous, and BDSM. those that have erotic content say so.
Content Warnings: who knows. I haven't read anything but the summaries and excerpts on the interesting-looking purchase pages. (of those I clicked: one involves Civil War history and one of the important historical characters is an enslaved man; one involves SFF-style slavery; one describes a stereotypical Romani character with an anti-Romani slur.)
Where you can find/get the thing: publisher website, free books section
no subject
Date: 2020-03-22 03:42 pm (UTC)Author/Creator/Distributor: Jude McLaughlin
Media type: Web fiction, books
Summary: What if superheroes and other comic book phenomena, but in a world where people act like people?
Identities represented: bi/pan, lesbian, gay, trans, non-binary, POC, disabled people. The first viewpoint character we meet is a bi/pan WOC, some of the others would be spoilers.
Content Warnings: Comic-book-typical violence; real-world-typical racism, sexism, trans- and homophobia, the usual bullshit. Some of the characters buy into some of those things. On-screen character death. Past and present abusive relationships. Rape and (separately) familial abuse in book 2. Book 3 introduces a new way of oppressing people, which would be a spoiler.
Where you can find/get the thing: The original web version is at