A character being totally canon LGBTQ+ and disabled was not required to be in this competition. Please check qualifications and propaganda before asking why a character is included.
Check out the other polls in this wave and prior here.
Amara-Otherbound
Qualifications:
Amara is canonically bisexual and mute (due to mutilation)
Propaganda:
She's a bi character, written by a bi woman, who's shown to have relationships with a man and a woman, also she has healing magic but it doesn't really work right. She uses signing, and is learning to read and write despite it being super against the rules.
Anything Else?:
tbh i don't expect her to get very far at all even on the off chance she gets in bc like nobody knows about this book, but i love it, so a few hundred people even seeing that it exists would be awesome
Do you have any recs for books that are along the same lines as Merlin or Prince/King x Bodyguard/Wizard adventuring? Bonus if LGBTQ+ and they smooch. <3 I love your blog!
Oddly all the books that come to mind in terms of "queer bodyguard romance" are sapphic!
Otherbound by Corrine Duyvis
Starless by Jacqueline Carey
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn
Some non-queer bodyguard romances you may like are Blade of Secrets, The Bodyguard, and maybe even The Merciful Crow.
btw if you still want recs for sapphic/-adjacent books: The Jasmine Throne; A Dowry of Blood; Girl, Serpent, Thorn; The Abyss Surrounds Us; Girl Made of Stars; Priory of the Orange Tree (this one's really long and probably doesn't need to be as long but I personally don't mind so); She Who Became the Sun; Otherbound;
Truth be told, I don't read nearly as many sapphic books because unlike m/m romances they don't hit the immediate personal appeal note, but I'm always open to check out a few…though granted the issue is that my TBR is always more full than I'm able to work through it.
In this list, three of these were already on my TBR (The Abyss Surrounds Us, which I'm pretty excited to check out just because Emily Strutskie Bloodright series has been so good so far; She Who Became The Sun and Otherbound), but I'll have a look at the others!
And in case anyone else wants to follow these recs here are easy Goodreads links:
She had gone from having no choices to having too many. What did you do when life wasn’t just choosing the lesser evil? What did you do when you were the only one to decide where to walk, what to say? She didn’t know where to start.