Web Crush Wednesdays: Dungeons, Dice, & Everything Nice

My obsession with Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t seem to be going away. Playing it is so much fun, and there’s so many great D&D stories told in various podcasts and webshows, that I just can’t stop watching and listening and looking for more. I especially try to look for shows featuring female DMs and female players since most popular D&D productions, such as The Adventure Zone and even Critical Role, are male-dominated. And so today, I want to tell you about about a cool and funny all-women D&D actual play podcast: Dungeons, Dice, & Everything Nice.

Some spoilers below.

Eric’s TBD RPG Review: The Little Doctor Who RPG That Could

Image via cubicle7

Discovering Critical Role led me to find a form of media entertainment and storytelling that I didn’t know existed before: a world of tabletop RPG streams and podcasts. Many of the popular shows are set in original fantasy worlds, most often running on Dungeons & Dragons rule sets. However, today I want to tell you about one of my most unexpected finds, a little hidden gem in the landscape of RPG streams—Eric’s TBD RPG, a show on Geek & Sundry’s streaming services, currently playing the official Doctor Who RPG. Although it was initially conceived as an anthology show to run short adventures in different RPG systems, the creators got so attached to their very first characters that it turned into a full Doctor Who campaign. The show combines the best things about the original canon material — wanderlust, curiosity, saving the universe, and whimsy — and it’s carried out by creators who appear to be very mindful of issues of representation.

Some spoilers below.

Web Crush Wednesdays: The ‘Other’ Love Story

It’s quite difficult to find stories set in non-Western settings in mainstream media, and LGBTQ+ stories are even more rare. So, today I want to share with you all a little gem of a webseries called The ‘Other’ Love Story. Set in India in the 90s and featuring two young women falling in love, it’s sweet, tender, and, yes, sad, but beautiful.

Some spoilers below.

Web Crush Wednesdays: Check, Please!, the Internet’s Most Adorable Soft Bro Webcomic

This week’s Web Crush is one of those “I can’t believe it took me this long to write about this!” type of deals, since I’ve been reading and rereading and sighing over this webcomic for months now—but let me back up a little and actually introduce it. Today I want to tell you about a sweet little thing called Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu. It has cute art, soft bros, young men falling in love and having a healthy relationship, and for those of you who are into that sort of thing—ice hockey.

But let me elaborate (with some spoilers!) below.

Fanfiction Fridays: but do i want to know? by iswearitt

The [locker] door bursts open with a metallic clatter, and an innocuous piece of paper flutters to the ground. Kamala reaches down and snatches it up, eyes already burning with righteous anger.

“Don’t people get sick of sticking mean crap in your locker because you decided to wear hijab? It’s been over a year, I wish they’d get over it already,” Kamla says, unfolding the piece of paper and scanning it.

“Some people have nothing better to do,” Nakia replies, turning to empty her book bag into her locker. “It doesn’t bother me, you know.” It does, of course it does, but Nakia has always had a thick skin, so she doesn’t let it show.

Kamala lets out a strangled noise of death in response. “Nakia,” she whispers reverently. “Kiki. Read this. Please.”

Nakia faces Kamala, but her retort dies on her lips at the expression on Kamala’s face. It’s two-fifths mischief and three-fifths unrestrained glee, which is a combination that Nakia’s afraid of, at least when it comes to Kamala. She reaches out and takes the paper from Kamala’s outstretched hand carefully, like it’s dangerous.

If the look on Kamala’s face is any judge, it might as well be.

Nakia sighs and begins to read what appears to be a letter.

And stops abruptly, eyes going wide, face flushing with heat, gaze flickering between the letter and Kamala’s face. “What.”

Kamala nods, bouncing up and down in place. “Yes. Yes, it is. “

“This is–” Nakia can’t say it. She can’t say it aloud, but Kamala evidently can.

“It’s a love letter,” she says with relish. “From some mystery admirer to you.” Kamala grins again, shutting Nakia’s locker for her and grabbing her arm to drag Nakia down the hallway to the open door beyond. “This is going to require a sleepover.”

The Marvel Universe has been a bit of a mess lately thanks to yet another all-encompassing event, but even Civil War II hasn’t been enough to drag Ms. Marvel‘s quality down below “pure awesomeness”. And yet, despite its protagonist’s love of fanfiction, I don’t often find myself reading fanfiction set in her Jersey City-shaped corner of the Marvel Universe. After a (semi-)recent reveal in Kamala’s series, however, I found myself racing to AO3 to see what fanfic I could find supporting my new Ms. Marvel OTP.

Spoilers through issue #9 of Ms. Marvel below the jump.

Sexualized Saturdays: Magnus Bane, the Lovable Freewheeling Bisexual

Over the past several weeks I have become hopelessly obsessed with Magnus Bane. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this fabulous bisexual character, Magnus Bane is a warlock in The Shadowhunter Chronicles books by Cassandra Clare and the Shadowhunters TV show. I liked him even before I started reading the books a while back, but it is his wonderful TV portrayal and finally reading The Bane Chronicles that has elevated Magnus to one of my favorite bisexual characters ever. Not only is he the leader of a warlock community, he is a good and caring person, always ready to help others and to fall in love despite the many heartbreaks he’s had before. He is glittery and flamboyant and unapologetically bisexual, but he’s not hypersexual and he doesn’t use his sexuality as a tool to get what he wants. This may not seem like much, but such a combination of character traits is pretty darn unusual in a bisexual character.

Some spoilers for the Shadowhunters TV show, as well as The Shadowhunter Chronicles books, below.

Sexualized Saturdays: Bisexuality in Lost Girl

Lost Girl may not be the greatest show out there, but it had quite a lot going for it with the intricate urban fantasy world of Fae and lovable characters, quite a few of whom are LGBTQ+, B in particular. The representation wasn’t without its problems, of course, as in any other show, but over the course of it, we were introduced to Bo, Vex, Tamsin, and Mark, all of whom are bisexual main/recurring characters with compelling character arcs, including the female protagonist. And, sadly, you hardly ever see this much bi (or even generally queer) representation in fiction that’s not specifically LGBTQ-themed.

Spoilers for the concluded series below.

Love in the Time of Global Warming Is the Queer Sci-Fi I’ve Been Waiting For

… Or it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten.

Let’s start at the beginning. Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block is a dystopian sci-fi story—which is actually quite light on the sci-fi and heavier on literary magical realism, in my opinion, but I’ll get to that in a minute. We follow a teenage girl, Pen, on her quest to find her family through the American Southwest, which has been devastated by a giant earthquake and tsunami. During the course of her journey, Pen picks up a rag-tag group of friends and they have to battle monsters and mesmerizers, which mimic the obstacles the hero had to face in Homer’s Odyssey. And the best part—all the kids are queer and have superpowers!

Spoilers after the jump!

Sexualized Saturdays: The Curious Case of Transferable Sexuality in iZombie

Usually, when I write these posts, I get the ideas for the topics from something I’ve seen recently, but for some reason nothing I watched over the past couple of weeks has made me think about gender/sexuality representation. So, I had to cast my mind further back, and then I remembered iZombie, the fun, entertaining little show with a different spin on zombie fiction.

I’m always looking for LGBTQ+ representation, so I was somewhat disappointed at the show’s lack of actual queer characters. However, the show’s premise does lend itself to some interesting opportunities for representation—when zombies eat a person’s brain, they temporarily acquire some of that person’s traits, and apparently, these traits include sexuality. But, since you’re essentially mixing two personalities, things can get complicated (and sometimes lack continuity). There are only three instances in Season 1 when Liv or Lowell eating a brain affects their sexuality, so it’s not the largest sample, but I still think they’re interesting to look at.

Some spoilers for iZombie after the jump.

Book Review: Pantomime by Laura Lam

Lately, I’ve been on a young-adult-books-featuring-LGBTQ+-protagonists kick. Pantomime by Laura Lam, which came out two years ago, was on the outskirts of my radar for a while, because how often do you find a fantasy novel about a bisexual intersex transgender teen? Pantomime was definitely the first for me. It surprised me quite pleasantly with the inclusion of many other queer characters in a rather fascinating world, despite the fact that both the LGBTQ+ representation and the worldbuilding leave a little something to be desired at the end. But Pantomime is the first book in a trilogy, so here’s hoping that some of the potential will still be realized. Spoilers after the jump!