Once you've learned the spot the historical signposts, it's interesting how many "generically medieval" fantasy settings manage to miss the actual medieval period on both ends. They've got the Roman Empire rubbing shoulders with the German Renaissance, skipping directly from the year 500 to the year 1500 with nothing in between!
(The one consistent exception is, of course, the obligatory Vikings-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off culture, who legitimately are medieval, but nobody they interact with is, so you've effectively got Vikings with time-travelling boats raiding both Roman-occupied England and Renaissance Italy.)
"Oh, they skip the actual middle ages because it's too Christian" listen. If fantasy authors are willing to hold their noses and elide the explicitly Christian dimensions of both the latter Roman Empire and the fucking Reformation, they can deal with Christianity in the middle ages just fine.
Firstly, one thing I'd want to quickly go over as reference is what it actually means to say that a "stock fantasy setting" is more rooted in the late middle ages/renaissance than in earlier periods. Generally, the traits of these settings that are characteristic of this time are:
Aesthetics generally. Like, castles in a "stock fantasy setting" are usually these big ornamented things covered in towers and turrets (consider, say, Neuschwanstein Castle, which was itself an early modern nostalgia piece rather than a genuine Renaissance fortress), while armor leans more towards full heavy plate (like these 16th-17th century pieces, for instance). These are all classically late styles.
Likewise, your classic fantasy merchant city -- you know, your Ankh-Morporks, your Lankhmars, that sort of thing, with tangled crime-filled alleys, probably a network of scummy canals, a huge bustling port, a guild of thieves, all of it ruled over by dynastic merchants in fine brocade and velvet and heavy jewels -- that's very heavily inspired by the merchant cities of the Italian Renaissance like Venice or Genoa, or North Sea merchant cities like Amsterdam around that time or a little later, or, frankly, even early modern London.
Also, generally, urbanization. Roman civilization was very urban. Renaissance-era European civilization was very urban also, especially in places like Italy, the North Sea, and other areas rich in commerce. In fantasy, too, the notion that cities are major centers of life and politics remains -- merchant cities bustling with commerce, capital cities with the king's fancy castle, fortified cities with huge bloody walls, these are all recurring archetypes. Crack open, say, a D&D setting sourcebook, and that assumption that major cities or city-states are major focuses of culture and economy while rural areas are clearly in their orbits is fairly evident, I think.
Also, in my experience, medieval fantasy monarchies tend to be fairly centralized affairs, with powerful monarchic kings, the royal seat in the capital or the king's castle as the bustling focus of governance, and a tendency for the edicts from the king's person and the intrigues of court to be the driving focuses of political life. Also, a lot of intrigues in a classically corrupt court. This tracks fairly well for the late period, historically, where European kings put a lot of effort into centralizing and strengthening their authority, some more successfully (the Iberian kingdoms at the end of the Reconquista), some less so (Charles I of England). Absolute monarchy was less of a factor in earlier medieval Europe, which operate chiefly under a network of looser, less centralized feudal ties.
By contrast, what would these things equivalents in the earlier Middle Ages be like?
Castle-wise, the really early periods were the time of the motte-and-bailey, aka wooden palisades on top of earthen mounds. Later, you'd tend to see squatter, more fortified constructions for defensive purposes (take the Krak des Chevaliers as an example). Even well into the later middle ages, though, a typical rural keep or castle was often a fortified house or manor more than what we'd picture as a castle today.
Armor was usually dominated by chainmail, scale armor, and non-face-covering helmets (a knight of the Carolongian Empire, for example, might have worn something like a scale or mail shirt and a helm with earguards or a noseguard, but certainly not the "classic" knightly set of plate you usually see in fiction). In terms of helmet styles, for instance, compare this 11th-century nasal helm or these illustrations of 12th-century styles with later forms such as the classic "bucket helm" that was popular during and after the Crusades period. Helmets with more articulated shapes and visors came later. What's called a close or closed helm, for instance, like these ones, was mostly a 16th-17th century style, although antecedent forms were already common in the 15th. Even the barbute with its distinctive T- or Y-shaped visor slit was a distinctly Renaissance Italian thing.
(Like, as a practical example in terms of helmets, this reminded me of a passage in the first Dunk & Egg story where Duncan buys a great helm/bucket helmet, and it's described as coming across as a goofy-looking and antiquated choice when other knights all use visored and often very ornate close helmets. And this makes sense! Westeros is very explicitly based on England during the Wars of the Roses period, in the 15th century, by which point medieval armor and helmet styles had gone out of use and most armored troops wore jointed plate armor and visored helms.)
Religiously, monasteries were often the center of religious life and, for rural communities, often more important than distant bishopric seats. They were also centers of, among other things, record-keeping, writing, and brewing.
Cities. The middle ages proper were a very rural time -- cities existed, and exerted political and economic influence, but took a significant dip in both size and importance for a time. For a good few centuries the center of life for most people was the manorial system, where you had a local knight or lordling living in a fortified house or a small keep and providing protection to a town or two around this in exchange for material support. Self-sustaining religious communities like monasteries were also important. All of these, for a long time, would have basically self-supporting.
(Well, alright, that's also an oversimplification. In rural France-England-Germany, that'd be about right, sure. In northern Italy and in Flanders-Saxony, though, you start to see... not urbanization as such, but, let's say, townization early on in the system of the medieval communes, where farming and trading towns left isolated by the collapse of Roman-era state systems formed confederations for mutual defense. So the main form of urban culture in this timeframe isn't really centralized around a single big city but more along the lines of fifty towns who formed a loose alliance because they're afraid of bandits and robber knights.)
Government. Centralized states and nations weren't... really things for a long time. Feudal governance was based much more strictly on the notion of personal debts and obligation between rulers and those who administered portions of land for them. A feudal noble had obligations towards his king, but he also had a tremendous amount of freedom in running his own affairs and could have gone for the majority of his life without every showing up in the vicinity of his lord's castle -- the idea of, like, the royal court as the focus and center of political life wouldn't really crystallize for some time, and this degree of independence meant that negotiation and re-negotiation (read:testing how much you could ignore the king or going into outright revolt) were very common.
Also, the notion of national identity -- of saying "I am French, I am English, I am Italian" -- also didn't really exist (I'd recommend Liah Greenfield's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity for a discussion of how this mode of thinking about group-and-land identity formed in the 16th-17th centuries). Before then, concepts of identity were either strictly local ("I am from this village"), based on loyalty systems ("I am from a village defended by Knight Whatshisname, who gives his tithe to Lord Whatshisface, who gives his tithe to King Whatshisproblem"), or based on religion ("I am Christian", "I am Jewish", "I am Muslim").
So, broadly, there weren't really "countries" the way that we think of them today, with clearly delineated cultures and borders and directed from a central capital. The most granular political units were the rural manorial keep and the free town, which gave their fealty to a larger lord or a grouping of peers, and the span and size of a kingdom or an empire was determined in large part by how many of these tiny units or groupings of tiny units you could claim tithe-right and allegiance from. And that's feudalism!
Event-wise, the Big Things in the medieval period proper were the Crusades, a series of primarily religion-motivated wars (or, well, religion-land-and-luchre-motivated wars, granted) and the Black Death. It really cannot be overemphasized how the terror of being struck by this mysterious dying dominated medieval thought for large spans of time.
One book I read recently which I'd recommend for a having a good look at how medieval people thought and lived might be Michael Flynn's Eifelheim... with the caveat that it's also a science fiction novel about first contact with aliens, but the medieval side of things is really well-researched and -written.
First spin This Wheel to get a companion(ish person), then spin This Wheel to get a Doctor. Feel free to spin until you get someone you're familiar with. Now.
Do they fit together?
traveled together in canon and yes
traveled together in canon and no
they would be fantastic together
they'd be fine. good. ok.
unsure. could go either way.
don't think it would be that good
bad. very bad. not good.
nuanced nuance
Remaining time: 5 days 3 hours
Feel free to interpret "fit together" however you want. Would they like each other? Would they be entertaining to watch? Could mean either or both. Whatever you decide.
Blacked out for 5 hours and this appeared on my screen
Okay so some surgeamy headcanons:
I think Surge develops feelings for Amy hard and fast but is very conflicted about the actual validity of her feelings, wondering if it’s a true, sincere love coming from her own heart or if it’s somehow a product of the brainwashing she experienced to destroy and replace Sonic. She wonders if she was rewritten to “replace” him in more ways than one. She doesn’t trust her head and can’t fight her heart forever.
I think Amy has a type (which is essentially Sonic and his copies lol) and so she can’t help but feel attracted to Surge. She still believes firmly in her love for Sonic but she can’t ignore these new and exciting feelings bubbling up in her heart. Amy is also curious if Surge’s feelings are sincere and is more than willing to help her discover the truth.
The only adaptation I'm aware of to engage w the hanging of the unfaithful maids is Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and I actually really didn't like the way she handled it
@platonce would love to hear more about your thoughts on the penelopeiad/how you would want to see it done
ok brief context first for any readers not aware: in the Odyssey, the unfaithful maids are a group of enslaved women in the house of Odysseus who are hanged for 'betraying' Odysseus by having sex with Penelope's suitors. In the Penelopiad they are instead Penelope's most faithful and trusted maids who she enlisted to spy on the suitors.
my issue w the Penelopiad on this subject is just that I think making it so the maids weren't actually 'unfaithful' carries the implication that if they had done all the things the Odyssey says they did then in some sense they would have had it coming.
as to how i would want it done, i suppose the main thing i would like to see acknowledged is that given that they were enslaved women the sex they had with the suitors would have been inherently coercive. (nb i think the Penelopiad does acknowledge this but as stated above I have other problems w its handling of the subject matter)
#the problem is so many try to make Odysseus a good person by modern standards#and he's not#and he's not even that great in the original context#his crew dies because of him#so many modern adaptations strip away everything that makes him not a hero#instead of adapting the source material accurately and letting the audience decide if he's still a hero or not
yeah I haven't seen the Nolan film but i read the summary bcos i was interested to see if they kept in the Unfaithful Maids and not only are they out but the film also seems to have really played down the massacre of the suitors?
which is another thing where like, even in the original context, we are not supposed to 100% agree with that!! its followed by a sequence where the suitors' families are all like 'dude what the fuck'
part of the emotional impact, to me, of the Odyssey is that we spent the whole epic being encouraged to sympathise w Odysseus as this almost everyman-type main character who just wants to go home and then at the end of the poem he murders a bunch of people. yikes!!
also i just stumbled on this essay talking about the unfaithful maids which I would recommend
Recovering from autistic burnout as a high-masking adult:
To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler
You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it
If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life
If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.
Go through a sensory checklist.
SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights
SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.
TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?
TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?
SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?
INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.
Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.
This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.
If you want to recover, you need to relearn your whole body. And get over your idea of "normal" and just wear the damn sunglasses and put on the headphones. If people stare, fuck em. You're disabled and they can deal with that.
LGBTQIA+ Literature Recommendations by WritingWithColor: 2025-26 Releases
Happy Pride!
I decided to do this post for Pride to help fellow creators. Finding an audience for our creations can prove difficult, especially when we are marginalized artists that don’t fit the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) mold. We creators need to look out for each other so we find an audience.
It is hard to find new titles by queer authors of Color. We can attribute this to the attacks on such authors thanks to certain conservative parties in power and legislative threats. It’s all the more reason why we have to protect these titles and make sure they come out into the world. And we are more than happy to hear your recommendations of which titles felt cathartic for the LGBTQ communities and individuals online.
If you are queer and scared of the present, please stay alive. We need you out there, living, feeling, and finding your true self and friends.
2026 Releases
Buy links:
You’ll Never Forget Me by Isha Raya
Shimmering Lake: Summer Camp Collection I by Laika Wallace
Journey to the Heartland (Second Edition) by Xiaolong Huang
On Sundays, She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield
The Forest Bleeds by Rachel Kitch
The Perfect Match by Adiba Jaigirdar
The Obake Code by Makana Yamamoto
The Case of Elmwood Ranch by Deanna Grey
Milk & Mocha Comics Collection: Our Little Moments by Melanie Sie (USA release)
The Covenant We Cut by tzipporah-creates AKA WWC Mod Sci (ongoing webcomic)
Honey Bee and Lemon Balm 1 by Jil Hashikura (USA release)
Perfect Princess By Bambi Nieves, illustrated by Alison Nieves
The Most Magnificent Me by Chitra Soundar, illustrated by Sophie Bass
I Don’t Wish You Well by Jumata Emill
Love, Gods and Sinners by Camille Chong
Lake Life by Tanya Boteju
Good Luck, Babe! by Erin Baldwin
Love Makes Mochi by Stefany Valentine
Adult Books
You’ll Never Forget Me by Isha Raya
I’ve been trying to study noir. It’s a gritty genre where people rarely get their justice, and cruel people escape the consequences of their actions. We see a 2020s take on Hollywood noir when rising star Dimple Kampoor in a fit of rage pushes her Asian-diaspora actress rival down a flight of stairs in her own house during a party. She didn’t mean to kill Irene, but she can’t admit she’s sorry when offered a great acting role that Irene had won. The rival’s family hires private investigators, believing the fall was no accident; disgraced P.I. Saffi returns to the US to help the investigators. Despite the two women engaging in a high-stakes battle of wits, they also demonstrate a mutual attraction. Saffi promises to deliver the proof when she’s a hundred percent certain after a botched investigation five years ago, but getting to that hundred percent is the rub. Dimple will do anything to keep her acting career, no matter how many bodies ensue.
The story establishes itself as LGBTQ noir in a racist Hollywood with double standards against women. No good person wins in this story, and we know that from the outset. It is fun to read though, and delivers on the noir promise. The “dead dove: do not eat” labels are very clear, however, and this time the dead dove has a red carpet.
Shimmering Lake: Summer Camp Collection I by Laika Wallace
Shapeshifters, vampires and werewolves are too absurd for some families, but not for the ones featured here. A bullied child with a narcissistic mother gets bitten by what looks like an injured wolf, and the decision empowers him, while another is determined to photograph what they call a frogcruncher. Pride parades show promises of friends banding together despite a few insensitive remarks, and vampires debating the power of LED versus the sun.
Be prepared that plenty of stories occupy these 530 pages. It’s a long time investment, but fun and going by fast.
Journey to the Heartland by Xiaolong Huang (Second Edition, originally published in 2023)
Content warning: This story covers grooming, parental abuse, and child sexual abuse.
Oy, what a hard story. And yet a necessary one, as a boy named Hanwei endures an abusive father who beats him for crimes like not brushing his teeth. Neighbors gossip about how Gaoming Zhu brings men home and how cute they are, embarrassing Hanwei and his mother Rulan. Rulan never loses her temper, but she also refuses to accept needless blame when Gaoming rails at her. Hanwei starts emulating her as a teenager, protecting his mother from Gaoming’s abuse. Gaoming then leaves when Hanwei is seventeen; a situation that should freak them both out becomes liberation.
A grown-up Hanwei explores his sexuality in California after a grad school program accepts him in Los Angeles. Though Rulan remains reticent, reminding Hanwei how his father hurt them all, she listens when he cites statistics of same-sex behavior and attends Pride with him. Settling in a new country brings its own woes, however; Rulan can’t speak English when she attends Hanwei’s doctoral graduation ceremony while wondering if he’s emulating his father, and immigration law along with systematic homophobia dog Hanwei’s partners. Bankers also screw up the US economy, adding only more woes.
On Sundays, She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield (reprint; first published in 2020)
A sinister and surreal Southern Gothic debut novel, about a woman who escapes into the uncanny woods of southern Georgia and must contend with ghosts, haints, and most dangerous of all, the truth about herself.
When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own. Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, she blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer. But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline. Written by a Black lesbian author, with a Black lesbian lead.
The Forest Bleeds by Rachel Kitch (Oct 13)
A dark academia horror novel about a group of PhD scholars held hostage by a billionaire in his remote mansion in the Appalachian mountains, who must use their combined knowledge of bioengineering and occult spellcraft to save themselves. A very eerie, claustrophobic and grotesque horror thriller, great commentary against big-pharma and unethical research in biomedical research–it's just refreshing to see dark academia that is centred around STEM disciplines for once!
The horror fantasy elements are inspired by both Appalachian as well as South-East Asian folklore. It's also quite a visceral study of exploitation of racialized labor, and the marginalization of Asian-American women in academia. Saige Chambers, the protagonist, is a disabled bisexual woman of Thai descent, and her love interest is an Indian-American lesbian!
The Perfect Match by Adiba Jaigirdar
Dina is done. She's burnt out after years in corporate London and now is working in her family's struggling Bangladeshi restaurant. The last thing she expects is to be roped into coaching a football team of disadvantaged amateur players–or to say yes.
Maya is back. She could have had a brilliant career, but it all went wrong. Now she's back home, back in her childhood bedroom. Her only escape is agreeing to coach her old secondary school's team.
It doesn't take long for them to bump into each other again and for as long as anyone can remember, Dina and Maya were rivals. But will the very game that tore them apart bring them back together?
The adult debut of popular Bangladeshi-Irish YA author Adiba Jaigirdar (The Henna Wars, Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating), this is an enemies-to-lovers, angsty queer sports romance set in London, featuring Bengali bisexual and sapphic leads.
The Obake Code by Makana Yamamoto
An all-new, standalone sci-fi heist thriller about a bored hacker named Malia, who is forced by vicious gangsters to take down a crooked politician, only to find herself up against a code she might not be able to crack. This novel is part of a series of generally connected “lesbian heist” stories, each featuring an all-lesbian and trans cast, set in the Kepler space station–basically a futuristic Hawai'i. While I preferred the first novel in the series, Hammajang Luck, I also thought that the cyberpunk thriller plotline in this one was more interesting and impactful, using popular tropes like sentient AI systems and evil clones to criticize gentrification, unethical data surveillance and the many exploitative practices of big-tech companies. Malia is a Black lesbian, and Yamamoto is a Native Hawaiian and multiracial lesbian author.
The Case of Elmwood Ranch by Deanna Grey (Release date: July 15)
A Black bi4bi sapphic indie romance between a legacy paranormal investigator and a loner horse rancher, set on a haunted ranch.
Octavia doesn't believe in ghosts, but she can't deny something's wrong with the land she's sunk her entire savings into.
Rae Jones is in the business of ending nightmares. She comes from a long line of paranormal investigators. One of four, she's set herself apart from the Jones sisters by making their legacy into a commercial success. After years of enjoying said success, she's hit a wall. Whether it's burnout or a full-blown existential crisis, she doesn't know. One guaranteed way to avoid a downward spiral? Take every interesting job she can get. And that includes one from a very stand-offish, non-believing rancher who thinks she's a scam artist.
I read Grey's sapphic romance Outdrawn last year; it was the sweetest story, so I'm definitely excited for this.
Speaking of BIPOC sapphic romances:
Tanya Boteju also has a Christmas romcom coming up: Setting the Stage for Christmas (Oct 13, pretty rare to find a festive lesbian romance with non-white leads), and Zakiya N. Jamal has a Black sapphic sports romance coming up: Two Can Play That Game (Nov. 17).
Graphic Novels and Webcomics
Milk & Mocha Comics Collection: Our Little Moments by Melanie Sie
The title characters aren’t explicitly labeled as queer, given they are mascots for an international messaging service LINE. Milk and Mocha live together, however, ordering food and sharing their sleeping space. They enjoy the little moments together, from playing video games together to vibing. Love doesn’t mean being happy together all the time, but it can mean putting in the work to not let little conflicts become big ones. Also, these two are so CUTE.
The Covenant We Cut by tzipporah-creates
One of our WWC mods (Mod Sci) created this one! Content warning: This story covers mental illness and the parental abuse that results from it.
We see a queer Jewish adaptation of Tanakh (Sh'muel Aleph (Samuel I) 20:1-20:42). Caught between his lover David’s safety and his father King Shaul’s suspicion of David, Yonatan comes up with a plan to assess the danger. However, things quickly go awry at the New Moon banquet when his father finds out. You can tell how much Yonatan and David love each other and what Yonatan will risk to prevent losing him. The coloring adds to the tension while the two meet in secret.
The webcomic comes in two languages: an English translation from Everett Fox (more text) and the original Biblical Hebrew (less text).
Children’s Picture Books
Perfect Princess by Bambi Nieves, illustrated by Alison Nieves
I knew this story would be good when Princess Amina winces when giving knights hi-fives but being too polite to offer constructive feedback. Her childhood friend Keiran opposes how Amina has come out of the closet, expressing it with a spell that sends her far from home. Amina has to find her way back without her cosmetics, sword, or silverware. A blue rabbit agrees, joining her and a tiny dragon on the long walk home. Amina has to accept her lack of perfection when not having silverware for a snack or a sword to handle enchanted townspeople. Likewise, Keiran has to accept that his friend has become her real self and watch what his magic does.
The Most Magnificent Me by Chitra Soundar, illustrated by Sophie Bass
This book is more LGBTQ+ coded than LGBTQ, but it does the job with internal validation and positive affirmations. Plus, if you have a toddler with doting parents, they will love hearing how magnificent they are; I can verify this courtesy of a video call with some younger family members. Babies have big egos, and they need to sustain them as they grow older.
Manga
Honey Bee & Lemon Balm 1 by Jil Hashikura
I was on the fence about this manga because the situation seems contrived at first: a yakuza in a nighttime district gets a job at a flower shop following a stint in prison -- where he took the fall for some superiors -- and getting booted from his old gang. Kaoru Mitsuya tries to be tough but starts falling for the owner,
The manga went from standard romance to great writing when we meet Yuichiro’s siblings -- and one very clearly defies gender roles. You can see a family that cares about each other but doesn’t know how to communicate their concerns, with Yuichiro working 24/7 and refusing to take care of his health and his siblings forcing him to rest.
Young Adult Literature
I Don’t Wish You Well by Jumata Emill
True crime can hit or miss for me; in this case, the hit comes from a fair-play mystery. College student and amateur podcaster Pryce gets a lead on a seemingly closed case. Five football players were murdered, ostensibly by a gay classmate they drugged and assaulted. One witness, however, has stated for years that the ostensible serial killer had an alibi. Pryce thinks he can expand on the story after recording the witness’s story, especially when finding out other witnesses are still alive.
Love, Gods and Sinners by Camille Chong
Harper and Tia are roommates, and interns at the same tech company. They clash, they fight, they flirt. And, under cover of night, the two of them adopt secret identities and head out on missions across the city for their respective magical clans. Tia is the beautiful descendant of the Moon Goddess, and Harper is secretly Raven, the leader-in-waiting of the feared and villainous Foxes. When each is tasked by their clan to kill the other, a deceitful game of cat-and-mouse begins. And Harper and Tia will start to understand that the concepts of right and wrong can be just as complicated–and dangerous–as falling in love.
Set in an alternate futuristic world, where descendants of ancient magical clans don secret identities and battle on the streets of Singapore, this debut novel, the first in a planned duology, is a glittering, action-packed urban fantasy, with an enemies-to-lovers romance at its heart. Singaporean author, Asian lesbian and bisexual leads.
Lake Life by Tanya Boteju
A charming sapphic summer romance with environmental activism themes, about two teens who agree to fake-date when stuck together in a quirky, scenic lake town. Written by a Sri Lankan-Canadian author, and featuring an interracial sapphic romance.
Good Luck, Babe! by Erin Baldwin
Reality TV enthusiasts Noelle and Yumi spent a decade attached at the hip—until one ill-fated night (and one awkward kiss) ended their friendship. After a year of no contact, fate throws the girls back together when they’re offered a last-minute spot on their favorite race-around-the-world reality show.
It’s a chance to put their superfan status to the test, a dream come true. Except for a few snags: it’s an all-couples season, filming starts in two days, and Noelle hasn’t spoken to her “girlfriend” in a year. But she already has plans to use the prize money on her ailing father’s medical expenses, and she would do anything for him—including fake dating her ex-bestie on national television. This sapphic YA romcom is written by a Filipino-American author, and features Filipino sapphic leads.
Love Makes Mochi by Stefany Valentine
A cute sapphic YA romance between a goth fashion designer and a tattoo artist. Written by a Taiwanese-American author, featuring Asian-American and Japanese lesbian leads.
Lilyn Jeong is living her best life—in Tokyo! She gets to learn from the legendary yet notoriously terrifying tailor Mrs. Matsumoto. Getting a glowing recommendation from her could be Lilyn’s ticket into her dream fashion school.
So when the latter is tasked with designing an entire collection, panic sets in. She has only weeks to figure out how to mix her goth aesthetic with traditional Japanese style. Thankfully, Mrs. Matsumoto’s rebellious, tattooed, rainbow-haired daughter Yua offers to help. But going on cozy dates with this cute girl is way easier than sewing yukatas. Can Lilyn find a path forward in fashion and love? Or will she watch as everything falls apart at the seams?
Keep reading to see our recommended 2025 releases!
2025 Releases
Buy links:
Angelica and the Bear Prince by Trung Le Nguyen
Before You Go Extinct by Takashi Ushiroyato
Good Soil by Jeffrey Chu
Graphic Novels
Angelica and the Bear Prince by Trung Le Nguyen
Angelica has anxiety. Lots of it. So much that she’s burned out, and her mother allows her to work in a theater to recharge. Her childhood friend is also working at the theater, though neither of them can explain why they stopped being friends. They each blame the other, but the truth is more complicated.
Trung Le Nguyen’s The Magic Fish captures what it feels like to be queer in an immigrant family. Thankfully, Tien’s parents weren’t like mine about children still in the closet. Angelica and the Bear Prince adds burnout and generalized anxiety disorder to the mix. It understands how repairing mental health and ghosted bonds can be super difficult.
Manga
Before You Go Extinct by Takashi Ushiroyato
Another queer-coded story rather than obliquely rainbow, this one-volume manga with six chapters provides a melancholy existential seduction. A penguin couple attempts to deliver a mercy extinction to their flock, only to die and reincarnate into several endangered species runs the risk of Bury Your Gays. Pen and Merle, rather than suffering the typical fate of gender-ambiguous creatures fiddling with life, keep discovering new incarnations and approaches to death’s inevitability.
Entropy is scary. So is knowing when creatures like us are dropping like mosquitoes after an industrial spray. How we react to it, though, can be healing and help with that melancholy.
Nonfiction
Good Soil by Jeffrey Chu
If you had told me I would enjoy a memoir about a gay magazine editor finding solace at a Christian farming seminary, I would have looked at you funny. Jeffrey Chu, editor at Travel+Leisure, might agree; he had sustained a complicated spirituality due to being queer and Hong Kong diaspora. After some crises, however, Chu decides to attend the Farminary to figure out his spiritual side. The experience provides perspective on our relationship with nature and agriculture. For example, he thinks how we disparage worms, but worms revive the soil, and the ways in which we distance ourselves from killing the meat needed to feed a society. Killing chickens actually takes more effort than one may think, and it can bring tears to the people who raised them.
Chu is quite honest that his family has a mixed relationship with queerness and Christianity; missionaries converted his family decades ago, and his mother and father refused to attend his wedding. He also feels that exploring religion through the Farminary has improved his life, even with the ups and downs of co-op farm life.
Honorable Mentions; aka Handful of White Queer Authors Who Published Books 2025-26
Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition by Maia Kobabe (2026)
Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle (2025)
Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell (2025)
Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition by Maia Kobabe (2026)
Maia Kobabe didn’t expect a firestorm when publishing a graphic novel about eir gender exploration. This very personal story shows Maia’s journey through an AFAB childhood and latent body dysmorphia. (I relate about the leg hair considering a penguin bit me to grab one of them at a local ecoadventure park.)
The annotated edition has notes from people in Maia’s life, from college professors to dear friends and fellow artists. Maia and Phoebe Kobabe, the latter doing the book’s coloring, also contribute. Each note feels so meaningful. Especially knowing how certain people really hate individuals not fitting into narrow gender molds, the contributions remind us we are not alone.
Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle (2025)
Okay to be fair, we don’t know Chuck Tingle’s true identity, but it’s best to err on the side of caution. While I could list Fabulous Bodies, as I’m currently reading it, I still have a ways to go. Lucky Day is about a leading expert on chaos theory surviving the possibly unluckiest day for anyone on the planet shortly after coming out to her mother, and how Vera fares a few years later when asked to do more calculations about the cause. Vera wants nothing to do with a world that took everything but her life, but finding out why the Low-Probability Event happened might give her closure. It is grim and ominous, with biting humor puncturing the tension. Mind the body count and violence.
Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell (2025)
John Wiswell is the queer short fiction writer you need to follow online. With stories like “D.I.Y,” “Welcome to Heroism” and “Bad Doors,” you can’t turn your eyes away. Wearing the Lion is his second novel, the first being Someone You Can Build A Nest In, published in 2025. Hera takes offense when Zeus announces that his next affair baby will be the best hero of Ancient Greece; she’s further insulted when the baby is named for her, Heracles. The irony is that Heracles is a nice guy, calling Hera “auntie” when praying to her, and thanking her for the many monsters that she sends his way. He’s basically Disney’s Hercules, a nice guy whose world abruptly shatters when Hera’s machinations lead to his sons’ deaths. And like that farmer boy Hercules, Heracles finds himself doing the right thing and believing in his namesake, despite the evidence piling up. While not an obliquely queer story, Wearing the Lion focuses on found family and those othered as monsters. Also, it has a lion which acts like a housecat; what is there not to love?
I drew this for my batfamily fantasy au that I wanna write a fic for but….the chances of that happening aren’t exceptionally likely knowing myself. More about stephcass in this au under the line if you’re interested
SO
This au is essentially like, if all of the Wayne kids had some sort of “curse” and that’s what brought them together. Yk, all outcasts, it’s cute
Cassandra in this au is essentially me taking the whole “raised to be a weapon” literally and she’s a magic sword. She is sentient and can somewhat possess whoever is wielding the blade and fight for them if they allow her. She was originally wielded by her father but she managed to escape and, eventually, ended up in the hands of Stephanie. Steph, in this au, is on an adventure to save her homeboy Timmy from a dragon (it’s Bruce…there has been a severe misunderstanding here). She is way out of her depth but she is determined, scrounging together enough money to get some small pieces of armour to go on her quest. While on this journey she ran into some people trying to mug her and she ran, stumbling upon Cass who helped Steph win the fight and this is where they began their journey together, Steph trying to find her friend and Cass trying to break her curse
In other news, we got a “Tim distraughtly pointing at lesbians” doodle sequel (the other one is from my karababs piece). I’m so glad another has been added to the collection
If and when Doctor Who does return, how would you acknowledge the possible original intention that Billie Piper was to take over from Ncuti Gatwa if more was greenlit?
Since there's a fair chance she wouldn't be free or able to return whenever the show resumes now, and anyone who takes over as showrunner now has the baggage of having to explain it.
My only idea is that The Doctor has a line in the first episode or season that they trialed a few faces during the moment before settling on what they have now, since you'd have an explanation at least as to why the original tease of Billie Piper not returning hasn't happened aside from wanting a soft-reboot not immediately tied to existing things like UNIT, Daleks, or Cybermen.
Well, if we weren't soft-rebooting, one of two ideas:
-He has the face... for 5 seconds, and then it changes. Again. And again. And again. Something is going wrong with the regeneration - possibly a result of going beyond the original 13 lives regeneration limit (and yeah, ignoring Timeless Child stuff - a continuity thing to fix later or possibly tie into it - that the Doctor is not actually the Timeless Child, but carrying the memories/form of them and thus their memories have mixed together). The Doctor spends most of the episode changing actors and personalities. None of them are "official" doctors because the regeneration cycle hasn't completed. He's just in a state of flux, even throw in some previous actors in there. Something in the plot, involving the new companion, finally gets them to settle on a new regeneration - big reveal in the episode where they emerge from smoke or something and save the day.
-Similar to the previous idea in that their regeneration isn't stable - it turns out the mere presence of the Toymaker and how they "rearranged their history like a jigsaw puzzle" or however he phrased it caused "Bigeneration" to be a thing - Billie Piper works with Ncuti for a special. Both are the Doctor, but with time jumbled up, they're fracturing - the regeneration instead of rejuvenating them is shedding them of more and more of themself, splitting off not only more of their own personality, but their own history. The Doctor is forgetting more and more of who they are and what they've done, the Toymaker using that to reduce and destroy the entire IDEA of the Doctor until they're nothing. They have to remerge - hell bring back David Tennant one more time to merge them back in, too, if they've got the budget for it. Eventually, when remerged, the actual new Doctor comes out of it.
Official writers: I hereby toss aside any legal right to these ideas and swear to not sue you if you wish to steal these.
See, the way you make good Doctor Who is you set out a mission statement that you're going to make the show more serious or toned down, and then you accidentally hire the exact wrong people to make that version of the show.
1970 they went "we're going to make Doctor Who a more grounded adult action series" and then they got a hippie with a fetish for psychedelic chromakey to produce it.
1980 they said "we're returning Doctor Who to Real Hard Science" and our new head writer is The Computers Mystic.
1987 they had a mandate to take the show in a lighter more kid-friendly direction, and then brought in a bunch of 20-something comic book nerds who wanted to kill Margaret Thatcher.
Because I'm a biologist and a complete freak, I sometimes amuse myself thinking about like a super ultra advanced alien race that 'conquers' our planet, but instead of being all 'War of the Worlds' about it, they aren't even conquering, as far as they're concerned. There are no inteligent life forms on this planet, after all, just little animals, and they're clearly on the endangered species list. A perfect place to study rare wildlife on an untouched planet.
So there's an alien research station in space. Humanity's worst attempts to destroy it amount to a bear turning over the trash can. Aliens occasionally abduct people and return them with a clean bill of health and an ankle bracelet. It takes them forever to figure out those bracelets are screwing with their data because humans who carry them are curve-wreckingly popular.
Disaster strikes somewhere, I dunno, Japan, and there's an uptick in abductions, but of people stuck in collapsed buildings, and yeah the giant octopus tree that looks straight out of Call of Cthulhu is scary but it's also using tech you can't even comprehend to find survivors and teleport them out of the rubble. You see humans with absolutely 100% deadly injuries wisked away and a good number of them even return. There is now a new consent form specifying if rescuers can take you to the aliens, because they will probably try to save you but if they can't your family will never get your body back. You decide if your life or your body is more important.
Little by little, pragmatism wins out. The aliens aren't attacking, but they ARE abducting and doing weird tests. But the survivors mostly return unharmed with a Big Mac in hand and a weird piece of tech. There have been less valid excuses to miss school. The aliens are clearly researching humanity just as much as we are researching them, and until communications are established this status quo isn't the worst.
Ofc, then one of them actually attacks. Knocks the statue of liberty clean off. The military starts to deploy fast, and even wounds the attacker a lot, but before they can shoot the second missle it bounces. And it turns on the shooter. Every military person in the attack dies, suddenly and through means you cannot comprehend. The other aliens whisk the attacking one away. Construction materials appear as if in apology, but that's it.
The attacker was a hooligan who thought destroying wildlife was fun, and ran into something they can't handle. But even if the bear is perfectly within its rights to defend its territory, the ranger will atill have to shoot it to save the stupid brat, and hope the idiot learned their lesson.
But the bear is still dead. And the forest critters who had just started getting used to the ranger are now having second thoughts.
But the abductions continue. There are no hooligans for a while. And what else can you do? This is your home, but if the invaders really want to take it, what can you do?
So you try to stay out of their way, if you are in some serious trouble and your chances are already less than 50/50, maybe you seek them out. Sometimes they help. Sometimes they don't.
And sometimes the abductees catch glimpses of something that looks like it might have been human once, but eyes and skin all wrong, speaking incomprehensibly, and rubbing its head on the alien's 'knees'.
You go home to your dog and try not to think about it.
