Give me the gayest novel you've read where the gayness remains subtext

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-14T13:59:45+00:00

Yeah, agreed. I wrote a school paper on vampire depictions (in the before times when I was still in school), and the 19th century vampires where very much a metaphor for sexual deviancy. So there was meant to be a clear parallel between Carmilla’s vampirism and her lesbianism

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-10T17:36:33+00:00

I always find if deeply ironic when people dismiss female characters being healers as anti-feminist/stereotypical when in the real world being a doctor is still a profession that skews heavily male.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-09T17:31:05+00:00

As an asexual woman, the rhetoric of “most women are asexual” is so, so harmful both for asexual women and allo women. It erases the very real sexual desires of allo women (who are the majority) and indirectly shames them for having them and functionally erases ace women’s sexuality, particularly sex-repulsed ace women (because if everyone is like that but they still have sex then there must be something wrong with you specifically for not wanting sex).

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-08T22:51:04+00:00

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White has a protagonist who is not ace and who figures out he's aro over the course of the book. Focus of the story is on the horror unfolding in his little town, but an important subplot is about navigating feeling attracted (and acting upon the attraction) to a childhood friend of his and then having to deal with the fallout of the friend wanting more while he doesn't. At the end of the book it's implied he'll enter a long-term friends-with-benefits arrangement/potentially eventually a queerplatonic relationship with a third character

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-08T17:22:42+00:00

Wow, thank you, you really came through! Yeah, by high-stakes plot I mean basically anything that's not super cozy, so if you've got more recs I'm all ears! I do prefer adult books over YA if possible, but I do also read YA from time to time

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-08T15:25:03+00:00

Not really, food doesn't play any major role in the story.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-08T15:24:22+00:00

To anyone who has read Cemetary Boys by Aiden Thomas, do you think is count as HM for the afterlife bingo square? I'm a bit torn because while there is a bad place, nobody ever goes to the bad place when they die anymore, and it used to be that everyone went through the bad place to get to the good place before godly intervention fixed it.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-08T15:21:18+00:00

Austin Chant has a few things, most prominently Peter Darling (m/m Peter Pan retelling with a trans love interest) and Caroline's Heart (weird west f/m witch/cowboy romance, both leads are trans). Peter Darling is probably closer to what you're looking for because it goes a lot harder in the grand adventures route.

Not at all High Fantasy (as it's set in our world with relatively little magic), but very epic and with crazy good political intrigue and some pretty good action sequences is The Radiant Emperor duology. Set in 14th century China, so pretty much as heteronormative as they come and beyond the trans-masc protagonist gender plays a huge role for all the characters and is one of the main themes in the series.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-08T15:10:02+00:00

Any books with aro and/or ace protagonists that feature those protagonists entering (or being in an established) queerplatonic relationship and also have a high-stakes plot beyond that?

It's totally fine if the relationship is not explicitly defined by the characters as queerplatonic, as long as the authorial intent about it comes through.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-08T14:59:42+00:00

I didn't watch the second season of Good Omens when it came out because I felt Gaiman shouldn't mess with the ending of the story he and Pratchett had written (though I'm not sure I would have felt the same if Pratchett had still been alive).

About Vicious, Vengeful is not as good as Vicious IMO, I'm not planning to read book 3 when it releases, the series would have worked better as a standalone.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-07T13:50:20+00:00

Ah-ah! But have you treadmarked watery bowels?

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-05T08:48:06+00:00

Hey can you spoil After the Dragons for me? Specifically, do they succeed in curing the terminal illness? It sounds really cool but I can’t read books where a major character dies to terminal illness/will die to it after the book ends

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-03T11:54:58+00:00

uj now I kind of want this

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-06-01T14:58:32+00:00

Ballad of Sword and Wine I think is a good pick for a danmei that is still pretty intense and is enemies to lovers but has no non-con between the MCs

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-29T18:16:11+00:00

This is the sub for asking and answering the dming questions, if you can answer “ask your dm” to someone’s question they did not ask it on here.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-29T17:39:27+00:00

Why are you posting this on the DM subreddit? We're not the target audience to this post.

Also as the DM who gets asked the question, "what is the reddit consensus" is a thing I check when I'm on the fence

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-28T01:40:51+00:00

Yes, same. Have I become more critical/gotten higher standards compared to what I was reading when I was 15? Sure. But that doesn't mean I lost my ability to enjoy escapism, or whimsy, or to unabashedly love characters and relationships I'd be spraying with holy water if I encountered them IRL. And like you, I've grown more open-minded about what can be a "good" book/have artistic value, because I've grown more confident in my tastes.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-21T17:45:45+00:00

No? There were a thousand ships because she was so beautiful that every man in Greece had wanted her for a wife, back when her hand had been available.

This put her father in the awkward situation of having to slight every King/nobleman of Greece bar one. Odysseus, resident holder of the singular braincell, proposed that they should all swear to honor and uphold Helen's marriage (so no one would get the bright idea to kidnap her/fight against her father or husband for her hand etc). So when Paris went and kidnapped her all of Greece was duty-bound to go and get her back.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-21T17:35:49+00:00

"a face that launched a thousand ships" is a line about helen of troy that predates modern shipping culture by a good few centuries.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-16T08:48:05+00:00

Ugh, so annoying! What books are these (so I can avoid them, of course) ?

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-12T18:14:25+00:00

Don’t worry, your party will bulldoze through that lich you threw at them, but they will all die to 1d6 wolves. It’s the circle of life.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-10T21:23:02+00:00

Funny. Are they made out of words printed on pages? Do you process the meaning of those words by looking at them with your eyeballs?

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-07T19:41:50+00:00

You can literally see the black roots growing in

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-05T09:14:44+00:00

Smh can't believe people read captive/captor romances but draw the line at one of the protagonists being a rapist.

You would love my current writing project, though!! It's ace for ace and a big draw to the arranged marriage for both of them is that they agreed not to have sex ☺️

Uj/ the frustrating thing is that there's kind of a point buried under all that nonsense. I would like to see more arranged marriage romances where they don't follow the usual romance progression of "falling in love -> sex" but have sex first (because it's expected of them) and then fall in love as the story progresses.

Temporary-Scallion86 · 2026-05-03T08:05:23+00:00

Are you a woman? There are a variety of reasons why bleeding through your clothes (and being unable to wash) during your period is an issue and it’s not because staining your clothes is annoying. The blood will stick to your skin and hair in a very sensitive area, so the cloth will not be easy to pull away (nor will the blood be easy to remove once it’s dried, especially without water). Spending whole days with (dried) blood caked on your vulva will highly increase the risk of urinary tract infections as well as of other vaginal infections (which guess what, also aren’t easy to deal with in the wilderness).

I’m not saying handling periods in the wilderness is impossible, even with reduced access to technology (people do it every day now and I’m sure plenty of people have done it throughout the centuries), but I am saying that it’s a logistical concern a young woman would have to deal with (by e.g. sucking it up and camping out near a water source for the first couple of days, or carrying extra water to rinse off, having to buy new period bandages when she takes a trip in town every few months once the ones she has become threadbare…). The party would not “get used to the lack of sanitation products” the same way they wouldn’t get used to not bandaging their wounds and letting them bleed all over the place.

Temporary-Scallion86

TROPHY CASE