Queerly Beloved

Welcome back to Thursday Recs, and for once I'm posting this in a (relatively) timely manner!

My rec for this week is the novella "Glorious Day", by Skye Kilaen.

The bodyguard is a traitor. The princess is her one true love. And the revolution is almost here.

Elsenna Hazen left spaceport security and ended up a royal bodyguard. She should have known better than to fall in love with a princess.

It’s been two years since one ill-advised kiss in the garden pulled them apart. With uprisings in the streets, the nervous princess transfers Elsenna back into her service. Her Highness has no idea Elsenna is leaking data to the revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the princess’s oppressive father.

Now Elsenna wakes up each day wondering what will happen first: her own execution, or that of the woman she could never stop loving. When rebel attacks escalate and the king plans retaliation, Elsenna discovers that the fights for her love and her life are one and the same.

A low heat science fiction F/F romance novella with a guaranteed HEA.

A fantastic read; the end of the fourth chapter still shakes me. There's some violence in the book because, well, revolution, but there is a Happily Ever After ending, as stated above. The princess is also chronically ill and blind, as well as having split attraction: she's sexually attracted to multiple genders, but only romantically interested in women.

For more thorough warnings and to read the first scene, check out this link.


Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Inspired by Community Thursdays, I thought it would be fun to do some sort of weekly recommendation roundup! Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend.

I'll start:

Cinder Ella by S. T. Lynn

I got the rec from Tumblr so long ago that I cannot find the post (and may not even have reblogged it), but I just finished rereading Cinder Ella by S. T. Lynn, and it is a super sweet and bubbly book. It’s about a Black, trans woman Cinderella, who falls in love with the (also Black) Princess, and overall it’s just super cute. She also develops a couple of friendships with other girls over the course of the book, and has a really sweet and well trained pet dog named Lady. The way the author fit the fairy godmother character into the book is especially fun, IMO.

Warnings for fatphobia, misgendering, transphobia, and transmisogyny by Ella’s step-family.

Now with sequels: Mer Made (available now, next on my to-read list) and Beauty's Beast (available July 5th).

How about you? Can you recommend something this week? And yes, self-recs are welcome 😉

With 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:

<b>Title:</b> <b>Author/Creator/Distributor:</b> <b>Media type:</b> <b>Summary:</b> <b>Identities represented:</b> <b>Content Warnings:</b> <b>Where you can find/get the thing:</b>

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:

<span title="This is a warning that is also a spoiler. Highlight to read." style="color:#666;background-color:#666;">Warning text goes here.</span>

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!

Phew, okay! I've got our community tags up. Or, well, as many as I can think of, at any rate. I'm sure there's a bunch I missed, and fandom tags in particular I'll have to add as we go.

Anyone who wants to is welcome to look over the tag list and request that I add something to it, especially if it's something I missed. This was just everything I could come up with off the top of my head, and while it covers a lot of stuff, I know I'm not perfect and didn't think of everything or everyone. Please also let me know if you spot any spelling mistakes or typos; I'm still not entirely used to the keyboard on my new laptop, which will account for some slipups, but definitely not all of them.

Let's see here, what else. Oh! CW is short for Content Warning, and warns for types of content that people might not want to deal with or, in the case of NSFW (literally: Not Safe For Work), is the type of thing they might get in trouble for having a record of on a work computer. Media is for reviews and shoutouts about various forms of media that have representation of us, good and bad. Everything else should be fairly self-explanatory, I think.

Since Dreamwidth has a tag limit of 1000 for free accounts (1500 for paid, 2000 for premium paid), there may come a time when I have to combine some lesser-used tags in order to preserve some more-used tags. We've still got close to 900 tags to go before reaching the free account limit, though, so I'm pretty sure we'll be okay for a while.

Thanks to everyone who's joined so far, and if you have any feedback, I would be very interested in it!

Edit: It looks like I have tags hidden somehow at the moment? Lemme go take a look around, see how I need to fix that.

Edit 2: Apparently all unused tags were marked as "private" in the tag management thing. There's probably a better way to fix that, but it's late and I'm tired, so my current workaround is: Literally tag this post with every single tag available. (For the record, I tried doing that and then untagging everything, but the tags went right back to being private, so that shortcut is a no-go.)