Queerly Beloved

Hello again, and this week I have an actual rec for you!

The Adventure Zone: Balance Campaign - podcast and graphic novels. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. The advantages of the podcast are that it's effectively complete; you can listen to or read transcripts of all of it, whereas the graphic novels are still being made. The advantage of the graphic novels is that they're somewhat more polished and make some corrections earlier than the podcast did.

"Okay, Socchan," you say, "but what's the representation here?"

Well, the show may have been made by four straight white dudes, but during the story, you eventually learn that one of them is playing a character who's a gay man. There's also a super surprise trans woman character who you get to formally meet in the seventh story arc. And then there's a sapphic romance in the third arc, and this is where it gets a little bit complicated and where podcast vs. graphic novels can make a big difference:

Click the triangle to view spoilers

When the dungeon master started the campaign, he was completely unaware of the "bury your gays" trope. And the main character who's gay was not "out" in the podcast until the story arc that followed. Feedback from fans and a greater understanding of queer representation lead to what is quite possibly the only example of un-bury your gays I have ever heard of. In the podcast, this happens in the last three episodes, a good four or five arcs later; in the graphic novels, it happens at the end of the volume where the characters are introduced. So to be clear: It happens in both versions of the story! It just happens a lot sooner in the graphic novels than in the podcast.

The podcast also takes a little longer to hit its stride than the graphic novels (again, more polish), but if you can make it through the first few episodes, things do start getting pretty good, and then really good.



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!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

Oh right, I should probably boost this over here as well:

My sister-in-law would like me to remind everyone that free-to-read speculative fiction magazines Strange Horizons and Samovar pay Pro Rates for artists, writers, and, in Samovar's case, translation! They are also always looking for stories by and about marginalized people: Non-straight, non-cis, intersex, POC, disabled, minority religion, etc. Samovar also offers stories in multiple languages, so feel free to submit something that's not in English! For example, in their recent Mexicanx issue, they had a story in Nahuatl!

The staff at Strange Horizons and Samovar are especially proud to focus on content about a particular identity whenever bigots get up in arms about their inclusion (or, as was the case with the Sad/Rabid Puppies and the Hugos a few years back, have completely misunderstood what the magazine and its staff stand for).

From an accessibility standpoint, they also have a podcast and toggle-able content warnings at the top of each writing entry; as of very recently, the content warnings are also available in multiple languages!

From a writing standpoint, Strange Horizons and Samovar use the broad definition of speculative fiction that includes not only all types of fantasy and sci-fi, but horror, and pretty much all non-reality elements, as well as accepting poetry and nonfiction.

Also, again, my SIL works as an editor for them, and I can vouch that she's good people and is telling the truth about how enthusiastic the staff are about representation in stories.

Anyway, if you like to write stuff (or draw or translate stuff!), or like speculative fiction, be sure to check them out!

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.)