#second queerness is also a culture that you engage in

[undaughtered]

hi! i was interested in a topic and i realized you were probably one of the better people to ask. what resources would you recommend for studying the impact of christianity on sex and sexuality?

the oxford handbook of theology, sexuality,and gender is invaluable, but i'm unsure if there has been a new edition since 2014.

historical texts: if you are an absolute beginner, the chapter sexuality in christian traditions by adrian thatcher, in the cambridge world history of sexualities: volume ii is a good, solid overview. additionally: contextualizing gender in early christian discourse by caroline stichele and todd penner. christianity and sexuality in the early modern world by merry wiesner-hanks, sexual desire and love: origins and history of the christian ethic of sexuality and marriage by erich fuchs.

critical + liberation theology: god, sexuality and the self by sarah coakley, touching our strength by carter heyward, indecent theology by marcella althaus-reid, why women need the goddess by carol christ, sexuality and the black church: a womanist perspetive by kelly b douglas, enfleshing freedom: body, race, and being by m. shawn copeland, postcolonial imagination and feminist theology by kwok pui-lan, queering christ: beyond act up by robert e. goss, the good news of the body edited by lisa isherwood, theology and sexuality by susanna cornwall, queer theologies: the basics by chris greenough, our lives: a womanist queer theology by pamela r lightsey.

critical issues in sexuality: the making of biblical womanhood by beth allision barr, #churchtoo: how purity culture upholds abuse and how to find healing by emily joy allison, the cry of tamar by pamela cooper-white (NB: don't know why google books doesn't have the most recent second edition), jesus and john wayne by kristin du mez, catholic sexual theology and adolescent girls by doris m kieser, black gay british christian queer by jarel-robinson brown.

additionally, am extremely excited about the release of lower than the angels by diarmaid macculloch in april: i would keep an eye out for its release and try to read it if you can, as i suspect it's going to be an excellent, critical historical overview.

there are, of course, gaps in my recs, but everything i recommend here i consider essentially introductory. you'll find some of this work is focused more on gender, but we cannot discuss sexuality without also discussing gender; additionally, the majority of non-white theologies (womanist, east asian, indigenous) are engaging with gender rather than sexuality at this point in their respective developments.

[stupidcupid06]

I want to talk for a second about what it means to be queer. This is, of course, a highly personal topic that varies from person to person, and I won’t mind if people disagree, but I think its important to talk about what I see as fundamental aspects of these words.

I am asexual. This means that I don’t want to, and probably never will, have sex (consensually). Plenty of people throughout history have been asexual, but I want to focus on the priests - christianity, in its conquest of the world, banned many of its priests and nuns from having any form of sex. As such, they probably attracted a good deal of asexuals, as it was a job that provided an institutional reason for them to not be interested in sex. Their parents, who might have otherwise insisted they have children, have no reason to complain, now.

Here’s the thing, internet. These priests were almost all not queer. Despite being connected with a label that is deeply queer, and despite living out their entire lives asexually, they were almost universally not queer, as I’m defining it.

Because queerness isn’t about what label you use. It’s about the actions you take.

So what does define queerness, then? Queer people are those who challenge the dominant narrative. Those who ask, “Why do we believe that my happy life requires sex, or mairrage, or for me to be the same gender as my birth?” “Why do we demand that everyone live the same way, with the same pronouns, using the same language?” Queerness isn’t about gay, straight, ace, allo, cis, trans, or nb. Queerness is about questioning society. And more specifically, it’s about living in such a way that it makes your questions about society readily apparent.

Now, this is a difficult idea to handle, internet, especially as you all live in a place where anyone’s identity is argument fodder. But I think it’s worth bearing in mind. I’ve met two cishet white men who I would absolutely consider queer, and a few bi people who I wouldn’t. Because those cishet white men were not just allies, they also live their lives outside of the dominant framework of society. They, just by existing, caused people to question society. and what’s accepted and not accepted.

And similarly, the bi people I mentioned all didn’t exist outside of society. They lived firmly within it, only willing to show their bisexuality to trusted people very privately, and never willing to question their society when outside of these small, trusted circles.

(Tangent: I’m not saying that being a social chameleon makes you not queer, because I am both of those things, but rather that you need to use your social maneuverability to spread queer ideas in your society and exist in a queer way even as you move among social groups.) (also none of these people I’m talking about (bi or cishet) have described themselves as queer to me, for the record)

“But wait, cupid!” you might be asking, “Doesn’t this lead to people with queer labels being excluded from queer communities?” I’m glad you asked, rhetorical straw man! I believe in a variety of different queer communities. There should be communities open to anyone which help all people become more queer. There should be specific support communities to help groups of specific labels. There should be cishet-excluding communities which help people who aren’t cishet become more queer. There should be communities of all types for all kinds of different queer people. The key is:

Maintaining compassion for individuals, and helping them become more queer and come to terms with their queerness and survive in an anti-queer society.

Maintaining anger against societal structures, which tell us who we can be and otherizes us and keeps us queer.

Done that? Great! You’re queer!

[daughterofzeus-the-novel]

I know some of classicsblr dislikes the way Madeline Miller modernized the Illiad for Song of Achilles but I loved Circe and I'm really liking this one so far

[chocolatepot]

I realized that the best example to make my point is the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby.

The Ladies were a pair of female friends who ran away together in 1778, dressed in men's clothes; they were caught and separated, but made another escape attempt that was more successful, and their families reluctantly allowed them to go their own way. Minor celebrities, their neighbors just knew them as a pair of eccentric ladies who kept house together while people in the know came from far away to visit them.

They habitually wore masculine-styled riding habits. They were buried in the same grave (along with the servant who helped them elope, Mary Caryll). Butler left a diary that said nothing about them having sex. Some in the period suggested they were lesbians and they reportedly were shocked. This was an era where men and women had same-sex "romantic friendships" that were more effusive than what we'd consider platonic today. Anne Lister, Definite Lesbian*, visited them.

All of these data points can be interpreted in two ways, one implying they're queer and one taking it for granted that they weren't.

Riding habits: They're the closest women could get to men's or gender-neutral clothing in the Georgian era / They're practical and hard-wearing

Same grave: They were in love and wanted to be buried like spouses / They were best friends and didn't want to be separated

Diary: Butler didn't want to provide proof of what would have been considered wrongdoing to anyone who found her notes / Butler just didn't have any romance or sex to record

Shocked: They worried about exposure and had to pretend to be horrified at the thought / They genuinely were not behaving as anything except platonic friends and were genuinely shocked

Effusive: Many romantic friendships were in fact what we'd call queer today, acceptable to the world as non-sexual homoromantic relationships / Romantic friendships were between straight friends, like it says on the tin

Anne Lister: Lister recognized a kinship with these women and wanted to be part of their network or validate her sexuality through their acceptance or something / Lister was imposing her own take on their relationship or just admired them as independent women

Neither option is more objectively true. The first interpretations are simply using a different lens than the second, one that presumes that the Ladies being queer is a possibility.

Our culture generally teaches us that straight is the default, that everyone is far and away more likely to be straight than anything else, so it's not only safe, but the most sensible thing to do to choose an interpretive lens that doesn't bother engaging with the possibility of queerness. With this assumption in place, any reading of historical evidence (visual or textual) that doesn't exhaust all possible straight readings before moving on to a queer one is suspect as not having scholarly rigor. (It's also, of course, seen as much worse to consider someone queer if they would call themselves straight than to do the reverse, in general.)

People on the street do this and historians who don't have any background with queer theory do it too. That doesn't make it the only correct way to talk about the potential queerness of historical figures, and in fact more historians are developing the ability to balance potential queer readings with others!

Complete rigidity about this these days is, in fact, generally a sign that someone has very little interaction with real, contemporary historical scholarship. The study of history is not an attempt to determine all the facts of the past, but an attempt to interpret them in many different ways in order to illuminate what might otherwise be ignored.

If you want to read more about the Ladies of Llangollen, how they've been perceived, and how good historians deal with the ambiguity of queer readings of history, I would recommend “Extraordinary Female Affection”: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Endurance of Queer Community by Fiona Brideoake, which appears to be open access.

*Anne Lister, I should mention, has only been considered a Definite Lesbian herself since the translation of the sexually explicit parts of her diaries from code, because We Must Always Presume Straightness even if a historical woman behaves highly unconventionally for a straight woman of her time. Actually, they were decoded in the early 20thc by a Lister descendant and literally hidden again because, if only 100% serious proof allows a queer interpretation of someone's actions, lacking that proof means that nobody will be able to seriously speculate without getting called a loser writing fanfiction.

[stewiesclark]

Second Nature: Chapter One

Full Series

September 18, 2013.

“It’s Wednesday. I have class tomorrow, Grace and you know that I rarely go out then.” Harriet pleaded to the much shorter strawberry blonde in front of her.

“Okay, let me reiterate. Nic is going to be there and you know this part and I could use a friend, there’s nothing weird about it at all. You don’t have to drink, I just need a friend there,” Grace pleaded for the millionth time. She had been trying to convince Harriet to go out with her all week to this party and each plea was unsuccessful. Her philosophy was something along the lines of preferring to not get into straight people's business — it’s not her culture.

Harriet deadpanned her, realizing she was going to lose but figured she could use some leverage in this scenario. “What could I possibly get out of this?” She asked playfully but also very seriously. Whenever one of them wanted something that the other REALLY did not want to do they playfully leveraged each other. Some people would call it using your friends, but Grace and Harriet would call it sisterhood.

“Nic has a hot, tall friend, Harrie, I’ve already thought through all of this,” She answered with an air of glee to her. Harriet couldn’t exactly deny the offer. While Grace is going to try to get this guy to see her again, she could be talking to someone new which is always fun for her — first, she needs a way to find other queer people on this campus and second, she loves to get to know people.

Harriet decided to drag this out for a moment or two longer for the anticipation to build. She faked thinking thoughtfully for a moment and then reluctantly answered, “Fine. I’ll go with you,” which ended with her giving Grace a genuine soft smile.

When they finally ended up at the party, it was a fraternity house that was as dirty as they come. Grace was taking her to meet up with Nic and Harriet had never met the man, but just based on the immense anxiety he gives her friend, she already was NOT a fan.

When they met up things were awkward, to say the least. It was Nic clearly just wanting to have sex with her and Grace becoming very very very into him. “You’re Harper, right?” He yelled at her over the loud music as Harriet was deep into drinking a cup of ‘battery acid’.

“It’s Harriet,” She yelled back but also deadpanned at him, and in response he just shrugged. “Grace told me that you’re gay so I thought you could meet my friend.” Harriet’s queerness was very well known, she didn’t really try to hide it and she hasn’t tried to hide it since she was in middle school, but it always made her laugh that at these kinds of things, they would always put her with the other gay person.

The girl Nic introduced Harriet to was tall, kind of lanky, and really pretty, almost engraving with her eye contact. She had really rather enchanting blue eyes and very engaging features to the point where you could not look away. However, the issue with that was that she was so goddamn tall that looking at her for a prolonged amount of time would probably break her neck. Harriet was not even short at all, she was about 5 '7, but the girl she was looking at was tall. 

At this point in time, it was very apparent that she had been staring for a good while at her and that became apparent when the taller girl spoke up, “Hi, what’s your name?” She said kind of awkwardly but her posture was tall still while leaning in over the loud noise of the party.

She giggled a little when it became clear that she had been staring earlier which just made the other cock her head, “Oh it’s Harriet.” She smiled softly before asking her what hers was back. She knew well that it was Breanna Stewart, but she did not want to come across as a fan.

“Breanna,” she replied and she could tell by the look on her face that it felt nice to be able to say that to someone rather than being told who she was by another person even if Harriet did know who she was. After all, this was UConn where people eat, sleep, and breathe basketball. The only place that might be more bullish about basketball is the state of Indiana which is where Harriet called home.

Breanna pounded for a moment on what to say before going ahead and asking her, “Do you want to go outside? It’s super loud in here and I would like to be able to talk to you.” She smiled at her and Harriet returned that with a nod which was the best to do given how ungodly the noise in the party was.

When they got outside, they both had a cup of a punch which contained god knows what and sat on a bench to talk, “Soooo how do you know Nic?” Breanna asked her to tease her because she knew how much of a dick he could be (to put it lightly).

“Oh he’s very on and off again with my best friend and the only way he would talk to her is if she came here tonight.” Harriet grimaced, “What a catch!” She joked before taking a sip of her punch and asking the same.

“He’s my ex’s best friend and he invited me because he told me and I quote ‘this hot girl that is sadly gay is going to be there so I think you should meet her’.” She explained in air quotes which got a laugh out of Harriet.

“He’s a character alright.”

“Enough about him though, what brings you to UConn?” Breanna asked inquisitively because she knew why she was there but other people’s reasons were always interesting.

She thought about it for a moment and how she wanted to answer this question, “Academic scholarship and I have family who live around here.”

“Oh wow so you’re like smart smart,” She teased.

“So what brings you to UConn?” Harriet posed the question back.

Breanna paused, not quite sure how to answer it exactly, “Basketball but that’s really not interesting at all.”

“I mean it is interesting, that’s a whole other life that most people have never lived.” She said kind of sounding philosophical of sorts.

The two kept talking about Harriet’s schoolwork which was in Economics and Engineering and Breanna’s experience with basketball and how she ended up here. They both went into detail, but not so much detail to the point where it was too much detail or too much for comfort.

Once they both realized hours had passed and Breanna had to be up in like three hours it became a problem, “Oh shit! It’s so late, can I have your number?” She asked which took Harriet off guard because she always gets shocked when people want to talk to her especially when someone like Breanna wanted to who was (in her head) out of her league.

She gave her her number and teased, “Wow this is a bold first move, just make sure you remember to talk to me with how busy you are.” She made a joke out of this since a piece of their conversation had been about how Breanna was so busy with the combination of basketball and schoolwork that she barely had time to eat.

“Well maybe Nic did one thing right by having us talk and don’t worry I’ll remember to talk to you,” She said kind of flirtatiously leaning close to her which made Harriet go insane inside and as she was thinking about it Breanna moved near her which made Harriet go, “you have to sleep,” She said placing her hand on her cheek and rubbing it. 

“I do, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Then before Harriet knew it they had parted ways and Harriet was thinking about the things she said and her expressions that made her go insane and at that moment she realized, I’m fucked. 

[cherrybomb107]

Okay, so, y’all already know I’m one of “those” Jinx stans(I don’t think she did anything truly monstrous and would defend her with my life). I feel this way for two main reasons: I see myself in her, and my personal biases kick in when it comes to my girl.

Now, I don’t consume fiction to make moralistic judgments of the characters; I’m here to have fun and be entertained. But, because stan culture has affected us all and made fandom discussions so personal and emotionally charged, I’ll bite. There are ppl in this fandom who won’t even call Silco a proper villain because of how nuanced he is. As if two things can’t be true; it is perfectly possible to be both nuanced AND a villain. Yet this same sympathy is not always expressed when talking about Jinx. Why is that?

Answer: misogyny and the demonizing of ppl with mental illness imo. Cause that’s the only plausible explanation I’m willing to accept why so many think of Jinx as a monster for killing cops, gang members, and asshole politicians, yet give all the grace in the world to Silco, who flooded the Lanes with Shimmer, had children working in his factories, was ready and willing to kill Powder before she hugged him, and waxed poetic about revolution when he never had any real plans of helping Zaun. He just wanted to be in charge. Like I said, I don’t consume fiction to make moralist judgments of the characters. But Silco’s actions are WAYYYY worse than Jinx’s, by a long shot.

And to my second point: my personal feelings. Disclaimer: ofc I don’t think killing ppl is right, nor am I an advocate for mindless slaughter. However, that is not what Jinx does. Her views on violence are incredibly warped due to the environment she grew up in. But even still, she NEVER harms innocent, non-combatants, much as some parts of this fandom likes to act like she does. I love the Firelights! I sympathize with their plight! But, they are literally a gang. And the ones that Ekko rolls with(Scar and the others) have inserted themselves into armed conflicts with Jinx before. They have been shown to be willing to use lethal force.

Silco is a drug kingpin. Jinx is his daughter. So no, I don’t think the daughter of a drug lord engaging in armed conflict with gang members makes her “monstrous”. It’s a street fight. Anything goes. If you pull up with bats and fists, and somebody else pull up guns ablazing, I do think that they’re responsible for escalating the conflict. I also think that in a street fight, you can’t pull up on someone and expect them to abide by the rules you set for yourself, yk? To continue this, as I said, the Firelights were willing to use lethal force. In episode six, when they interrupted Vi and Jinx’s reuinion, Scar knocked Vi out cold. He then raised his spear and was about to stab her in the back before Ekko stopped him. They then proceeded to kidnap Vi and Caitlyn. All of this because they followed Vi and THOUGHT that she was working for Silco! Is assaulting, almost killing, and kidnapping someone just because of your suspicions not “monstrous”? Or is it different because the Firelights are the “good guys”?

Now onto the Enforcers. Jinx sees the Enforcers as monsters who killed her parents right in front of her, and brutalized Zaunites all throughout her childhood. I know the show is fictional, but it touches on real life political themes. And our real life experiences inform how we consume fiction. I’m Black, female, queer, and from the US. The Enforcers are incredibly reminiscent of cops in my country. And if you know anything about the history of policing in this country, then you’d understand why I don’t give nary a fuck, nor a shit, nor a damn that Jinx kills Enforcers. Same sentiment applies to the Council. Fuck em🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️

Tldr: I don’t think killing someone is the worst thing you can do to them. It’s about who you kill and how you do it. Jinx quickly kills cops, gang members, and politicians. I never have, nor will I ever, consider her doing so “monstrous”

[orpheusdrinkinga40inadeathbasket]

The Beatles invigorated the role of the fan because they were the first cultural product to engage holistically with the figure of the teenage girl. They emerged onto ground broken by Elvis and then outpaced their predecessor creatively and commercially. Elvis supplied an avatar for the forbidden promise of sex, but his appeal rested in how easy he was to objectify, his obviousness. Cartoonishly handsome, he was a body onto which the teenage girl could project unspoken and illicit desire. He inspired adoration, but it could not compare to the ferocious awe frothed up among Beatles girls. There is no Elvis equivalent to the term "Beatlemaniac." "To younger teenagers, the Beatles' cheerful, faintly androgynous sexuality was more approachable than Elvis's alpha-male heat," wrote Lynskey. The Beatles offered something more complex than an empty sexual template. They presented an opportunity for identification. A girl could invest her desire in the band, but she could also discover herself there. The gaze cast on the Beatles was a queer one from the start. Before American women looked at the Beatles, they had been seen by Brian Epstein, the closeted gay record clerk who discovered and ferociously advocated for the band when record executives failed to give them a second glance. Watching them play a lunch hour show at a grimy club in Liverpool, Epstein picked up on the magnetic potential of the four young men. In Vivek Tiwary's graphic novel The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story, artist Andrew Robinson closes the frame around the future manager's stunned face as he beholds the Beatles for the first time, as if he could sense his life pivoting around that one rapturous moment. "There was some indefinable charm there," he wrote in his 1964 memoir A Cellarful of Noise. "They were extremely amusing and in a rough 'take it or leave [it] way' very attractive." Upon becoming their manager, Epstein was tasked with convincing the world to see the Beatles the way he saw them: via a gaze that desired its objects without othering them. Heterosexual desire spans a chasm, coveting difference. Queer desire pulls together like elements, finding attraction in affinity. That teen girls could even feel the kind of active, demanding sexual desire evinced by their screams was still a novel concept in the early '60s, which carried vestiges of the prior decade's postwar conservatism. "In a highly sexualized society (one sociologist found that the number of explicitly sexual references in the mass media had doubled between 1950 and 1960), teen and preteen girls were expected to be not only 'good' and 'pure' but to be the enforcers of purity within their teen society—drawing the line for overeager boys and ostracizing girls who failed in this responsibility," wrote Barbara Ehrenreich in a 1986 essay. "To abandon control—to scream, faint, dash about in mobs—was, in form if not in conscious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture. It was the first and most dramatic uprising of women's sexual revolution." Befuddled by the Beatlemaniacs' exuberance, interviewers and critics (who were more often than not men) pinned the scream to a desire, of all things, to mother the band. "It has been said that you appeal to the maternal instinct in these girls," began an interviewer in 1964. John cut him off: "That's a dirty lie." Joking or not, he was right. The dynamic at hand did not correspond to a mother/son model. Beatles girls wanted the way men were expected to want: unabashedly and directly, as active agents in the exchange of desire. There was nothing coy about their hunger.

Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

[pinchinschlimbah]

There's some bullshit afoot and I don't really feel like engaging but what I'll say is this: -acknowledging that someone who has had a drastic change in appearance over the past decade to appear more feminine, is in fact more feminine now, is not an act of violence or misgendering -calling someone they/them who seems to be intentionally presenting in an ambiguous way (both visually and in ways such as coming up with a feminine nickname for themself that they've repeatedly used to speak about themself in third person in place of using a first person gendered pronoun) because you're unsure of their current identity even though they might still be cis, is not misgendering on the same level that intentionally calling a trans person the wrong pronouns is -I can only speak for myself on this one but I come from the world of drag and queer nightlife where she/her is basically a gender neutral pronoun so me calling someone she/her doesn't necessarily mean I believe they're a woman, it's more a term of endearment than anything else

-Assuming cis/het identity as the default and refusing to acknowledge any potential for otherwise is just as invalidating as insisting someone is queer or trans when they're not -holding space for the potentiality of queer identity in someone who seems to be possibly having non cis/het feelings or expression but has not officially vocalized a coming out is not the same as deciding someone's identity for them -"If this person was queer/trans they would tell us" With how repressive and conservative Japanese culture is when it comes to this stuff??? There's a reason you can count the amount of officially "out" queer people in vkei in one hand and I can assure you it's NOT because there's actually that few queer people in vkei -"Yeah but Kyo said he's not gay in an interview several years ago so we should believe him and respect that" First of all see above point. Second, his visual presentation has changed SO much since then- specifically in the direction of queer/drag/femme aesthetics! And third, there are multiple reports of him saying on mic at a Sukekiyo show this past summer "I want to be loved by both men and women" and he has also made multiple posts about not caring about gender, so again, ignoring real sources that don't back up your belief that a person is definitely cishet is just as bad as insisting someone is queer or trans when they've said they're not -Are we reeeeally gonna pretend this person has not had ANY shift in gender expression and that there's NO chance these changes might possibly mean anything? Or are, as several people have suggested, just some sort of "joke" to amuse the fanbase? Come on nowww

Anyway that's all, have a nice day <3

[ariaste]

*sidles up to* hello! I need you to know the absolute death grip Running Close To The Wind has on my psyche. I have listened to it at least 9 times and read it at least twice. As a disable polyamorous kinky queer with 1 nb partner and one golden retriever boyfriend I have never felt more more lovingly courted by the narrative.

I thought it had been long enough for me to be normal about my emotions but it has not!!!! Instead please have this list of things i admire.

Every Single Character clearly has a rich internal life and develops and changes!!! I can't think of a single character that speaks in more than one scene that doesn't develop. Even Lt Viyan goes from cheerfully neutral to "stressed about the cake festival"

This goes double for how much of Tev's we can see even without the Captain's Log!!!! Tev has SO MANY FEELINGS.

I love the implication that the thing that finally broke their relationship the last time is that Avra sung a song in public that talked about Tev's body, and he never cottons on to the problem! Tev's body and Tev's gender are so thoroughly uncoupled to him that it never even crosses his mind it could be a problem, but it destroys Tev's trust. You would not believe the amount of time I have spent chewing over that one.

And all of that is before the story!!!!! There is never a moment of "Tev and Avra had been fucking off and on for 13 years, since Avra first came to the island of Lost Souls for work etc etc etc" but there is so much backstory that rewards you for paying attention, plus the tension of not knowing things at first.... beautiful

Julian is one of the things I have not processed sufficiently yet. I love him and his dom voice and how his emotional Journey starts off much more oblique to the reader because Avra doesn't know him as well and then the bar scene and and and. Aaaaaah. Special mention also to the lake scene

They're all adults with careers!!!! Not just adults, but adults of diverse ages and life experiences. Except Ellat, who is baby.

Pirate Society really does feel like a it's own distinct cultural group while also maintaining the sense that all of the Pirates came from somewhere with their own traditions, names, and values. You're so good at diversity that doesn't feel like just checking boxes and also doesn't fall into stereotypes.

You have made your own posts about disability in this book and I have been at this for an hour so I will leave it at: yes, thank you

The possibility that the goddess of luck is directly interfering with Avra (possibly deliberately trying to expose the secret) not just making him lucky, for example Avra's overwhelming need to go for a walk when they get to the hotel. I like that this is ambiguous mainly bc Avra just refuses to engage in that conversation

Avra is very smart actually!!!!! He talks about keeping his head empty but he is clever, insightful, educated, and curious about the world

Tev and Avra's murkey understanding of BDSM and aftercare - they have been doing both! But they are not good at it and Avra clearly has no idea what Julian's dom voice is doing to him. Tev knows enough about aftercare to cuddle Avra through the worst of it but also is Anti Touching. Cat's line, "and every so often having the honor of being entrusted quite profoundly with caring for you for an hour or two," implies a lot of trust and some hardcore emotional fallout!

I am going to send on this now before I lose my nerve about being perceived but thank you for writing My Favorite Book

[Second message postscript] Also I forgot to mention the absolute scathing critism of captialism, imperialism, and institutional power. Those things are. Also. Important to me.

I am truly and genuinely honored by these messages. Thank you for the absolute cornucopia of lovely compliments, thank you for taking so much time to write them out, and particularly thank you for all of your excellent insights! And listening to it NINE TIMES and reading it at least twice!! that is so many!!!! It only came out eight months ago! Wow, that is incredibly flattering. <3

I will respond to a couple of your points with the number of your comment: 1 & 2. Yes, Tev has SO MANY FEELINGS, thank you for noticing! I think it is easy to overlook how many feelings Tev has because most of them are expressed as Angry, but that doesn't mean they are Angry. Tev just copes with every emotion by also being mad at whatever caused it.

3. Y'know, I was about to say "To me it was more about Tev feeling shame and humiliation because Avra had exposed part of their sex life and one of Tev's kinks (their collection of spooky dildos)" but then I thought about it for two seconds and! No yeah, you're kind of right actually! Because that IS related to Tev's contentious relationship to their body, isn't it. And so is the Tev Doesn't Like Being Touched thing as you mentioned later -- it is all bound up in the trauma and psychic damage they took from growing up in Tash. Avra's song in particular I think just hit one of those triggers that is both personal/individual and cultural, and... as stated before, Tev copes with every emotion by also being mad, and those were some very, very big emotions they had. But yes, all that was going through Avra's mind was "Breaking News: Captain Teveri az-Haffar is so fucking hot, you guys, let me tell you ALL ABOUT IT" -- because to him, that's a praise song, that's the sort of thing people say about Xing Fe Hua (that he was an incredible pirate and "he kissed me full on the mouth") so why would it not be fine to also say it about Tev? He was using very Scuttle Cove culture-logic, and in THAT contexts, he was right, it does increase Tev's word-fame. But he also stepped on a major landmine in the Tash culture-logic. So... I feel like that illustrates one of the great tragedies of human interaction -- you can set out with the best of intentions and nothing but love in your heart and still manage to hurt someone you care about. That shit keeps me up at night, let me tell you what.

7. Ahhhh THANK YOU! This is something I work very hard at, because I too really dislike the "checking boxes" approach to diverse representation. It never feels sincere, for one thing -- as if the authors care more about diversity (the abstract concept) than they do about people (the living, breathing individuals they're writing about (or the ones who are reading the book)). I think it was particularly easy to do in the case of Pirate Society specifically because I went into it thinking, "Man, every single person on this island has a Story. NOBODY is here by accident except for the people who were born here, but even that is a Story in this context. How many different reasons can I come up with for someone having to throw their life away and move to the Isles of Lost Souls as one of its eponymous lost souls?"

11. Yeah the problem that Tev and Avra run into with their sex life is that they're both profoundly bad at intimacy. All the fraught bits of their relationship stem from that underlying wound they have to work around. Fortunately Julian is very good at intimacy. It is Julian's whole jam.

Anyway THANK YOU AGAIN for the truly lovely message -- the points I didn't respond to were only because I was like "mmm [sage nod] yes that's true" or "ah what a kind comment!" or both. :)

(Side note, but if you would enjoy talking to some other people who also love this book very much, there is an official fandom Discord server here: https://discord.gg/DTyee9HRR9 Come join us!)

[pagan-corruption]

Figured out radqueers. This is probably obvious but I'm thinking.

Romance and marriage are important aspects of our culture. So if you are going to go through life engaging with romance differently, it'd be important to tell that to others via coming out. This is what being LGBT is. Trans people are either bisexual, or considered gay before or after they transition, so they are considered in this group. Also this is why I consider asexuals LGBT+. Because by not engaging in romance / sex / marriage, they have to navigate these rites differently.

Radqueers see this as a conscious rejection of social conventions. So they think by being a paraphile, they too are breaking the status quo.

What they don't understand is they aren't breaking the taboo of marriage as queer people are. They are breaking the taboo of violence. As paraphilias are inherently violent. It's different. Being violent has obviously different, more serious, ramifications than not getting straight married.

"What about trace and circumgender?" You look at the non violent rq identities for longer than a second, there's a bunch of posts saying how those identities don't actually mean anything and that the rq identities that have any real meaning are the paraphiles.

[acertainmoshke]

Intro Post!

Special interest (90% Doctor Who) sideblog is @presidentdisastraofgallifrey

Non-writing reblog sideblog is @whenmoshkeisntwriting

Updated: 02/07/25

Published work

7 Days for Fae: A low-stakes realistic middle grade story about an autistic girl learning to accommodate her own needs, making a new friend, and helping her aunt understand that having a nonbinary parent isn't that big a deal. MC is also physically disabled and her new friend is ADHD-coded.

Why You should read it: here's a review from my friend Heartshaven and another from my friend Etta, plus an interview about it with Etta!

Available now as a paperback from Amazon or Booshop.org, and in paperback or ebook form from Lulu.

In Progress

Cracks in the Stone: A steampunk high fantasy following a royal bastard prophesied to save the kingdom when all they really wanted was to have a normal life. Set in a kingdom with an entirely different gender system, MC is physically disabled, important side character is intellectually disabled. No one is white.

Word count: 43,555/150,000

Story intros: Legends of Halara series, book 2, book 3, book 4, book 5, book 6

Character intros: Ko'a, Nalki, Azja, Sunka, Lila

Worldbuilding: magical illnesses, pantheon, gender conceptualizing

Tag list: @amielbjacobs @starsoughtfrost @rbbess110

Emerald Outpost: A found-family sci fi that focuses on a crew engaged in less-than-legal activities. Cozy vibes but also stakes that matter.

Word count: 524/50,000

Character intros: Esther, Nasir, Val, Euyla, Minerva

Cold Iron: A dark urban fantasy set in the 50's about two adult changeling siblings on a quest to release from captivity the humans they replaced as infants. MC is autistic and both are trans.

Status: first draft done (85,039 words), second draft in chapter 18

Character intros: Shaka, Kris, Maggie, Zuri, Cassie, Sparrow

Tag list: @stesierra @amielbjacobs @ettawritesnstudies @the-inkwell-variable

Future/Hiatus Projects

The Taken (Cold Iron book 2): A dark urban fantasy set in the 80's following the same characters from the first book and their new found family in underground queer culture as they investigate the mysterious disappearances of changelings with no one to miss them, people the authorities won't look for.

Stage: Planning

Character intros: Shaka, Kris, Maggie, Cassie, Sparrow, Vick, Mal, Megan, Jun

Falling Petals: A historical story covering 100 years and 4 generations in a family that loves each other but is living in a world they don't fit into in very different ways and find themselves hurting each other instead. Entire family is Jewish and all 4 MCs are autistic-coded (except for the last one who is able to realize she's explicitly autistic).

Stage: Planning

Character intros: Ira, Daniel, Shoshannah, Naomi

To Die Among the Stars: A dystopian sci fi in which people no one is supposed to miss—the poor, mentally ill, outcasts, and inhuman—are quietly stolen away to experiment on. But each of those people left behind someone who cares, and they won't rest until they've unraveled the mystery and saved their families. All of the 5 POV characters are disabled and/or mentally ill, and 2 are trans. The group is also racially diverse.

Word count: 19,569/85,000

Dragonfly Wings: A middle grade fantasy about a changeling girl who is taken back to faerieland but finds she no longer knows how to stop masking as a human. MC is autistic-coded.

After the War: An urban high fantasy following a war between the human and elfen countries, as people struggle to return to a peaceful normal after 30 years of violence. Werewolves, vampires, and mers were unwillingly affected by a conflict that wasn't theirs. No one trusts each other. But they have to move on somehow. Basically everyone is physically disabled and traumatized.

[peppermint-rat]

Now that I'm thinking about it have another exmo ramble

One of the most damaging things for me was the message that it was sinful to even like, witness/hear "unholy" things. Went to a movie not knowing there was cursing or sexual content? Repent. Downloaded a song that had the fuck word in it? Delete it immediately, repent. It created this constant state of fear about the world outside the church, as it was meant to. Don't look outside, just stay where it's safe and be grateful for that safety.

As an autistic person who had a hard time relating to other kids in general, this added a level of resentment toward non-member kids at school. Because they could swear and talk about sex and drinking/drugs around me and there was nothing I could do about it. I felt like they were harming me. So I snapped and lashed out a lot, which worsened the bullying I was already getting.

It also affected my relationships badly because in order to feel like I could keep those relationships without sinning, the other people had to also follow the standards of the church. To everyone else, I was just super controlling, and maybe I was. But at its core, I was afraid that I would have to lose those connections if I didn't try to keep them safe for me. I'm sure y'all were told a thousand times not to spend lots of time around people who did not fit church standards, because they would eventually infect you. Imagine my horror, then, when my best friends started dating boys before they turned 16. Imagine how hard I pushed my first boyfriend, who was a non-member, to not swear and keep himself "clean" and come to church, knowing I wouldn't be able to stay with him if he never got baptized and properly joined.

In a way, the church was right, because as soon as I stopped caring about what my friends did, I realized their choices weren't actually threatening to me, nor were their identities, which made me relaxed about non-mormon standards and allowed me to realize I was queer which led me to leave the church. So yeah, engaging with forbidden things and forbidden people will absolutely lead you away from the church. They just have to make sure you view that as scary so you don't find out how much happier and how much safer you'll actually feel if you leave.

And of course all this is why the neo-puritan internet culture bothers me so much. It's the same shit all over again. Don't tolerate a second of behavior that might be considered "impure" because it will rub off on you and make you a bad person. Police everyone else or you're at risk of becoming evil. Fuck that, fuck that so hard.

[spitblaze]

Tumblr fucking sucks ass and I'm not joking. I think I might hate this place actually. I hate the shitty circular queer discourse that ALWAYS assumes malice or disgust and nobody is given the benefit of the doubt and if they do are also presumed guilty, I hate that every single statement needs to be couched in qualifiers and conditions and speaking on One Topic about One Group is not fucking allowed, I hate that this website has built a transphobic surveillance culture around itself, I hate that people will see ONE POST that sucks and spend the next several months publicly ruminating over it and extending the discourse long after it's run its course and assuming the worst about everyone involved, I hate that seven out of ten posts about feminism are made by the terfs who run rampant on this site and have nothing better to do than spew vitriol and hate because they don't care to develop the emotional maturity to see anything from a point of view other than their own, I hate that the moment a transgender person dares to have sexual wants and desires outside of the vanilla ideal you’re a freak and a deviant and a pedophile somehow, I hate that for SO LONG we let depressed anti-recovery teenagers dominate the attitude regarding mental health and self-improvement here and it has had lasting effects TO THIS DAY, I hate that as the internet has gotten meaner and crueller and less accommodating that the place that loves to pat itself on the back for its openness and tolerance has 100000% followed suit, I hate that every single fucking topic is dominated by overconfident white shutins who do not talk to other people irl let alone queer ones, I hate how every interesting and important topic of social justice is co-opted and bastardized into an unrecognizable cudgel that only further enforces the status quo rather than challenging it as they're meant to, I hate how often the gender binary is re-invented and deviations from it are punished, I hate that we love to say shit like 'be cringe be free uwu' but the second a member of the cringe queers du jour makes something twee or says something stupid everyone jumps on the dogpile to talk about how that entire group should be prevented from speaking or making art or associating with REAL queers, I hate that making points about double standards and discrimination always involves using people we should be in solidarity with as a gotcha if not throwing them directly under the bus, I hate that for all the talk about engagement with fandom we have nobody ever decides to actually examine their engagement thereof and how so much of it is still a cesspool to this day, I hate how everyone makes such huge generalizations and expects everyone to agree (guilty but I'm pissed), I hate how people take fucking everything personally (including myself), I hate that people are going to read this and get mad at me because everyone here has worse reading comprehension than the average fifth grader, I hate that people cannot self-express without other people getting indignant because they didn't see themselves in it, I hate that the only other regularly inhabited parts of the internet anymore are fifty times worse about ALL of this, I hate how much of a fucking nightmare for my mental health this has become, I hate that people are probably gonna give me sarcastic or smug 'yeah you should probably just log off king's in the comments or to me personally, I hate how much of this I personally am guilty of, and I especially hate that I'm still fucking here.

[hanzajesthanza]

I love your blog and recently watched your amazing YouTube essay! In a nutshell it blew my mind. Having the historical context of 2th century Polish history leading up the the publication of this work, in addition to your detailed analysis of Orwellian and Huxlian societies has helped me gain a whole new level of understanding and appreciation for The Witcher.

I read the books years ago and am beginning a re-read. Being someone who didn't receive the most thorough education on reading media critically or analytically as a younger person, and now trying to redress this fact about myself as I read works like this going forward as I approach middle age (I'm a bit of a "late bloomer" in several aspects of my life including building this skill set), I unfortunately missed a lot of allegory and subtext in my first reading. I enjoyed it mostly fannishly and getting into the characters at that time in my life. Your analysis has been really helpful on this journey of getting back into the books.

My question for you is that I've seen a few random references online to people theorizing that the Dopplers are an allegory for the LGBTQIA+ community. However, I've not been able to find any detailed analysis of this possible allegory and only finding people mentioning it in passing on forums and such.

As a reader who is also part of the LGBTQIA+ community, I would love if Sapkowski had intentionally injected allegory and commentary on queerness and the othering of our community in his work, but I'm reluctant to get excited about something that might not actually be there.

Of course I know a lot of these things are up to the interpretation of individual readers. But I'm also extremely curious to know what you think. Are you of the opinion that there is any queer subtext or allegory in the Witcher saga?

Thank you for your time if you get a chance to answer my ask! And thank you as well for your beautiful work on this series so far, I'm really looking forward to more!

thanks! and honestly, though i'm younger i also have a mixed relationship with reading and media literacy. so you're certainly not alone, also related to witcher/all things fantasy and pop culture, i think it's normal to engage with it for only the characters and story, especially on the first read.

as for LGBT subtext in the witcher...

the first thing to acknowledge is that LGBT subtext is preceded by actual LGBT text in the witcher. we already have some lesbian, gay, bisexual characters and relationships, and at least one trans or gender non-conforming, androgynous character.

the second thing to acknowledge is that this text isn't particularly meant to empower or represent, either in a positive or negative light. it's less about actually being LGBT, and more about how LGBT identities have been represented in the genre.

usually, it goes along with the regular practice of the witcher, its "guiding principle" as i might call it, being to subvert reader expectations, parody, or satirize elements and popular tropes of the fantasy genre. so, for example, mistle rapes ciri not because sapkowski wanted to depict lesbianism as predatory -- he wrote it because he was familiar with the trope of female heroines in fantasy being ahem, "claimed" by male warriors, and wanted to subvert this trope by having a woman do it instead.

so, we get a lesbian relationship, that, like the M/F relationships he was referencing, begins with a rape and turns into a romance by the end of it. this isn't to say that this is a logical sequence of events, but just that it was inspired by other texts -- it was never intended as commentary on lesbianism itself, but instead, of some fantasy texts that sapkowski had criticism of.

speaking of the author's perspective... i'm certain that if he was asked about any of this he would say he doesn't have any opinion, but this is just what i'm collecting from reading him... i'll go from best to worst.

(ŚKA = Świat króla artura, HiF = Historia i fantastyka, RZwSJ = Rekopis znaleziony w Smoczej Jaskini)

the good: his opinions on same-sex female relationships are... neutral to somewhat... positive? he seems to correlate lesbianism with feminism (aka political lesbianism). though he's denied identifying with feminists and feminism, saying that he does not intend to appeal to feminists or read feminist publications, in ŚKA and HiF he starts explaining unprompted ideas about the prehistory of matriarchy, associations of magna mater, and the relationship of wicca... and in RZwSJ includes an entire paragraph with recommendations of fantasy featuring lesbian relationships.

so i think any opinions he has about lesbianism are entirely conflated with his ideas of female power and worship, and/or as previously mentioned, challenging fantasy tropes - both are huge themes across all of his writing. which... i guess is a good thing?

however, i think that this interpretation of lesbianism through the lens of politics can be problematic because he fails to understand that a lot of lesbians like other women for kind of the same reasons straight men like them: because they are fucking hot. (but i guess he did acknowledge this a little with philippa and her countess, so whatever)

i'll also allow myself a small tangent about neratin ceka here, because i feel like his representation was not bad at all, and yet he's entirely missed whenever these discussions about sapkowski's views on LGBT happen, probably because no one read as far as past chapter 2 of tower of the swallow.

we even get the joke cliche of "i'm a bad guy, but i'm not a bad guy" with stefan skellen, who fantasizes about banditry and rape, and wants to kill ciri out of reasons of state, but, when he's told that ceka's gender doesn't really matter unless he wants to marry him, its his being a good soldier which counts, skellen's like, "yeah, ok, that makes sense to me, you're right." so the story doesn't make a joke about him at all, only for a moment raising the "what's his gender??" question in the mouth of a villain -- other than that, neratin ceka is treated by the story just the same as all the others of skellen's hanza (well, except for the fact that he was an imperial spy... but see, he was given an interesting role in the story).

anyways, here's the bad: LGBT characters being the butt of a joke, and not even "characters" but the concept of, for example, the only representation of fat GNC women being antagonistic, stupid, and gross (season of storms, the guardswomen of kerack), or homosexual quid quo pro committed by the guy who is so fucked up evil he will do anything to get political influence, including gay sex (season of storms, sorel degerlund) or attempted homosexual rape (narrenturm, the werewolf), or... homosexual sex slavery (lux perpetua, szarlej trying to "buy" reynevan).

it's... cringeworthy. though i will say the last one i mentioned here read like a monty python sketch rather than punching down, it is more making fun of the discomfort of the slavers themselves at the idea of homosexual desire and sex (which is ironic, because... they are slavers).

with an overview here, i feel like in terms of same-sex male relationships, more often than consensual relationships are jokes about rape, situations like pederasty, actual rape but this time treated as a serious threat (it was either in warriors of god or lux perpetua, one of the times in which reynevan was kidnapped). ... i don't know if i can name one positive, romantic gay relationship from any of his writing (whereas i might be able to name a couple of lesbian ones)

at the same time, he's never said that being gay is wrong, immoral, or espoused fears of gay people taking over, which... is notable as we look amongst his contemporaries in the polish SF/fantasy space of the 80s-90s. (that, and that he's so staunchly pro-choice). but that also doesn't make him some champion of LGBT rights, lmao.

when it comes to the subject, i think he is mostly just a contrarian who seeks to challenge conservative sensibilities and what is considered socially acceptable... so this sometimes results in accidental representation, and sometimes it results in offensive situations or "jokes". i don't believe he has an agenda either way for LGBT rights or condemnation, he generally is against oppression of any sort, but he doesn't put himself on the frontlines of advocacy. and at the same time carries his own biases of LGBT topics, some of which i don't agree with. (ik you didn't ask for this whole review, anon, but i wanted to include it to clarify the topic).

so, finally, about eternal flame.

i wrote this out years ago (with more of a gerlion spin to it, and i kind of roll my eyes at it now) but the basis of the dopplers as an lgbt allegory analysis is that:

dopplers are entirely innocent beings which are persecuted for no reason other than they're different, so they change shape amongst society to remain undetected --

and they've done this successfully, so much so that at the end of the story we realize that more people than one might have assumed, including chappelle, the head of the church of the eternal flame (coughs, catholic church, coughs) who was persecuting the protagonists for relation to a scandal involving a doppler, is in fact a doppler himself who took the persona after the real chappelle died two weeks ago.

so... i think that if one chooses to see it, they can -- though i probably wouldn't argue that this is a certain meaning, it's only one possible interpretation.

and again, it's not like positive representation, hah, i think one can draw their own conclusions from that short summary (especially the part about high-ranking priests being gay... hmmm...), but the fact that the dopplers are innocent and being persecuted and tortured for no reason, and we hear tellico's side of this at the end of the story putting them in a sympathetic light, and the entire moral of the story being acceptance of the other (with tellico even being adopted as dainty's cousin, lmao) i find it palatable because of that.

sapkowski has also denied that he includes any allegories in his writing, but because this doesn't make sense when looking at the first/second nilfgaardian war, i think to interpret this more as there is no specific representations of people or historical figures in his writing (the quote went something like "please do not look for the alter-egos of stalin or bierut amongst my characters...") rather than allegories to real life events or social realities, because those he certainly does include.

[f0point5]

Your take on Chappell so wildly misinterprets literally everything that has happened to her in the last few months. She lives with Bipolar disorder for 1, and that means it can be very hard for her to navigate her mental state. She also has depression. Cancelling shows and making mistakes is going to happen when you are a new artist, but you are also a young person in general.

She never wanted the level of fame she has now, she's a queer artist, who makes music for queer people, of course she's overwhelmed and trying to navigate a world she never intended to enter. I think it's easy to hate on successful women who stand up for themselves and are honest about their problems because we don't like to see women succeed. Period.

You have alot of people who engage with your blog, I would imagine probably a lot of girlies, just based on F1 tumblr vibes, If I were you, I would wonder how I'm supporting and uplifting women in an world where we aren't especially supported rather than spend my time hating on a girl who makes music you don't like...

She's a vocal, passionate defender of art and culture, she donates money and time to Palestine and speaks up about LGBTQ and Trans issues, she rightfully called Kamala Harris out while still maintaining that she will never stand with republican values and will still vote for her and everyone wants to pretend they don't understand that tribalism is bad and she is completely right.

Music taste is completely subjective, no one said you have to like it, it's definitely a select audience it caters too, but disrespecting it and disregarding her entire discography because one song annoys you, is crazy.

First of all, I’m not here to uplift and support anyone. That’s not my sole purpose in life, my goal or my vocation. I like or don’t like or have my opinions regardless of the gender of the person concerned.

Second, I’m not here to hate on anyone. Saying that I think she’s unprofessional is an opinion. Hateful? I personally don’t think so. But you can disagree that’s fine.

Third, I haven’t listened to her entire discography and I don’t claim to have done so, I’ve listened to several songs, none of which are my vibe. Now, did I sardonically link that to her professionalism? Yes. It was tongue in cheek, but if that offended you, I can take that on board.

Fourth, she can defend or not defend or spend her money on whatever she likes. All I’m saying is, she expressed her opinions in a way that was not easy to understand twice. And I think that if you decide you’re going to be one of those celebrities who wades into politics, you are taking on the responsibility of being eloquent enough to articulate your point because people are listening.

But on the actual subject of the main thing I said - I think she is unprofessional. And I think that matters regardless of age and diagnosis. I think you have a responsibility to manage your health in conjunction with the job that you do so that you can still do your job. If that is not happening, you might be in the wrong career. I highly doubt that any singer starts their career thinking or hoping they’re never going to aspire to any level of fame and influence. I simply don’t think that’s why you do that job. And if you don’t want fame, maybe do your small shows instead of performing at the VMAs, maybe keep a low profile instead of getting involved in the most polarising conversation in the country. My point is, fame is a trauma. No one deserves that, and certainly not everyone is equipped - for whatever reason - to handle it in a way that will be good for their health. All I’m saying is, from the outside, it seems like she falls into that camp, and if I were someone who spent their money supporting her, I would find it annoying.

[bonesandthebees]

hi bee :) semi-new anon here just hoping that you’ve been doing okay <3 i wanted to say that i absolutely adore your writing, and will happily read it, no matter what fandom it is you’re writing for, or if you’re just writing original works /gen!! your writing has always inspired me heavily hehe, it’s wonderful.

also, on the topic of original works, do you have any good novel recommendations? i’ve recently gotten back into reading and have been super into fiction, but i’m down for any sort of recs. one of my favourites at the moment is good omens :)

here’s your daily message to go have some water or tea and take care of yourself !! 🌷

hello hello!! I'm doing pretty alright now, feeling a lot better than I was this past week :) and that's so sweet of you to say, it's so reassuring knowing I have so many of you guys willing to read my silly stories no matter which fandom they're about (or even if they're original)

and yes I do have some recs!

I made a post about two months ago now talking about books I'd read that I really enjoyed so there'll be some crossover here but also some new ones I've read since then

one of my new favorite novels is The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. it's a heavy fantasy story following 4 different intertwining POVs. the fantasy world itself is made up of several different countries all inspired by various real world cultures that's not just limited to western europe which is incredibly refreshing. the world itself is incredibly fleshed out and interesting, the characters are all very diverse and have so much depth, and there's also a very beautiful sapphic romance <3 I'm reading the prequel to priory right now and I'm also loving it so far

another book I really enjoyed is actually a duology—The Radiant Emperor series by Shelley Parker-Chan. the first book in the series is She Who Became the Sun which I really enjoyed, however the sequel book He Who Drowned the World is the one that absolutely blew me away. just letting you know in case you're not comfortable with it, both books contain sex and some graphic violence. the story is set in 14th century China when it was ruled by the Mongols, and it's an incredibly well done queer retelling/fictionalization of the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, the Emperor who ushered in the Ming dynasty. the text engages with so many themes of the expectations of masculinity and femininity and how they restrict people, and really dives into gender expression and how it can be wielded in different ways. again the first one was really enjoyable, but the second one was on a whole other level and I'm still reeling over how good it was and how much it emotionally hurt me.

ok and then last one for now

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - I know we all heard about this one thanks to the iconic bigolas dickolas wolfwood on twitter but also they were so right about this book. it's gorgeously written. the book itself is mostly written as letters exchanged between two women who are time traveling agents on opposing sides of a war for who controls the timelines. it's a beautiful love story, it's sci fi but with a heavy bend towards spec fic which I personally really like, the world concepts are incredibly fascinating, and it plays around with time travel in a very intriguing way. it's a very short book so it's an easy one to burn through. I checked this one out from my library but I'm highkey tempted to go to a bookstore and actually buy a physical copy for myself just because there were so many gorgeous lines I want to highlight

hope this helps!! my taste in books is usually: sci fi/fantasy/spec fic with sapphic women so hopefully that's something you enjoy as well lmao