#the guild codex: spellbound | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

princesscolumbia · 1 year ago

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Ah, I see it's my time...

Published Fiction

Hearts of Heroes

Three going on four books, the author can be found on Tumblr and this series is very ghey. Book 1 is fun and interesting and a solid locked-time-loop romance, and by the time I got to book 3 I was a die-hard fan. This is one I'm going to be snapping up the next book without even knowing more than, "It's the next book in the series."

Each book has a basic pattern; Average Civilian™ in a world with supers gains powers, meets super (not necessarily in that order), sparks fly, shenanigans ensue, happily ever after. How each MC handles their challenges and the way each book changes the formula just slightly to get different results is one of the big draws for me.

The Lost Fleet/The First Fleet

If you think "hard" sci-fi is just a boring speculative futurism essay with plot elements tacked on, take a look at The Lost Fleet and prepare to have your preconceptions destroyed.

And now, a 100% spoiler free synopsis of the setup, including nothing more than the narrative and events in book 1, chapter 1:

John "Black Jack" Geary happened to be leading a convoy of merchant ships through a border system of The Alliance when, for the first time in decades, The Syndicate attacked. Geary managed to save the entire convoy and most of his crew, but the ship was toast. He pointed it at the lead Syndicate ship and climbed into a damaged escape pod. The pod did its job and put him into cryosleep, but the emergency beacon was damaged in the battle, so when the Alliance fleet came along to collect survivors, they missed him entirely. 100 years later, the bruised, battered, and very much war-weary Alliance fleet is on its way through the system when the much more sensitive equipment on these newer warships were able to pick up the signs of an active cryopod. They pick him up and thaw him out, and he discovers he's been turned into a Legendary Hero™, used to keep up morale and be a Perfect Example™ for the Alliance. The fleet has with it a Syndicate Hypernet key, allowing the fleet to jump straight to the Syndicate Homeworlds...only for half the fleet to be blown out of the sky. It was a trap, and now John, being the captain with the longest service record in the fleet, is responsible for getting the staggering remnants of the fleet home.

Yes, that's just the intro. These books have SO VERY MUCH that you'll finish a book and wonder how an author can pack so much action, intrigue, drama, and character growth into a paperback novel...and then there's MORE TO THE SERIES!

Not very queer (there's a few mentions of tertiary characters being some brand of LGBTQIA+ and some of the alien species' genders are treated with kid-gloves by the author), but an absolutely fantastic read!

The Guild Codex

Seemingly almost too formulaically urban fantasy, this series does some magnificent things with the fallible narrator and first-person story telling that keeps me coming back for more and earned multiple re-reads.

Tori is a regular human. Almost too 'regular,' her one stand-out feature is her stubborn nature that's matched by a temper that gets her in more trouble than it's worth. Desperate for work after retaliating when a Karen tried to scam for free food, she finds a help wanted ad by pure luck; the paper the ad was printed on blew into her face. Taking her shot, she finds herself in a bar with a very...odd clientelle, but it's only after she's hired that she discovers the world of magic hiding under everyone's nose...and she's right in the thick of it at the Crow & Hammer.

With four "sub-series," four MCs and their love interests, a distinct and memorable supporting cast, and enough mysteries to keep you guessing even after making it through all the currently available books, this is on my "re-read regularly" list.

Quick note: If you grew up in the system (especially if you were there because of domestic abuse situations), book 2 of Spellbound will be hard, as will large chunks of Unveiled. The author actually apologized to me on her official discord server when I explained how book 2 was so hard for me to re-read even if it's extremely well written.

Some queer coding, though not intentional on the author's part. Queer friendly, though, and a fun read.

Oh, and they have a webcomic!

Mystic Bayou

The one of three series by Molly Harper I absolutely love. This is The Monsterfucker Series. Full stop. Each book features a woman and a man protag, at least one of them is an honest-to-goodness Monster that Gets Fucked, and the narrative switches between them. It's a bit tropey and most of the drama comes from the ol' "miscommunication/misunderstood" end of the romance drama spectrum, but, IMHO, the reason you read Harper's work is the interesting characters and the urban fantasy settings.

Mystic Bayou is a unique place, even among the non-human races. Humans, werewolves, bear shifters, selkie, thunderbirds, and even dragons all living side-by-side in...well, not necessarily 'harmony,' but close enough to it the League for Interspecies Cooperation chooses the town to study it for the inevitable moment when the larger world of humanity discovers they've been living side-by-side with monsters the whole time.

Not gonna say much more 'cause there's a LOT to unpack with this series, but, like The Guild Codex, it's worth noting that there's not a lot of direct queer rep but plenty of queer coding. (The mayor is a bear. Literally. Sadly, the author chose not to go the admittedly obvious gay route with that character.)

Jane Jameson/Half-Moon Hollow

SO MUCH QUEER CODING!!! The author isn't even shy about it!

"Have you tried not being a vampire?" "Yes, for the first twenty-six years of my life."

You may think you've found all the ways this series matches the queer experience every time you start a new volume, but you'd be wrong.

Premise: The world was rocked when it was discovered vampires were a real thing. Also, nobody expected the revelation to come in the form of an ADA lawsuit, but that's America for you. Years later, Jane Jameson is a small town librarian in the place where she grew up, Half-Moon Hollow. Fired by a boss that used budget cuts as an excuse (but really just did it because she hated Jane), she goes and gets drunk, mistaken for a deer, shot, and is 'saved' by a vampire she met while sloshed.

It gets weirder from there.

Small town and 'Good Southern Family' dynamics make this probably the best, funnest, and freshest take on the vampire/urban fantasy genres I've ever read and I have some of the books pretty much memorized. The audio books are a treat, and the reader does accents so well you'd think she grew up with it.

Black Flag

And we're back to the specifically queer stuff, and as a bonus it's sci-fi queer stuff.

If you ever wanted to see the "two lesbians go cross country on a motorcycle...IN SPACE!" thing done fairly well, definitely pick up this series. The first book is...rough. I strongly urge you to power through it in order to get to the more enjoyable sequels. The second book suffers slightly in the author trying for a political intrigue a little too early in the series (we just got done with the intro book which was a heist, what are we doing with this Cold War era stuff?), but it does a decent job of telling a good and engaging story even so. Everything after? So far, at least, gold IMHO. My favorite of the series so far is Book 6, Hempen Jig which is Two Lesbians Go Cross Country on a Motorcycle IN SPACE...as a Western!

Phule's Company

IMHO, Asprin is a FAR better sci-fi author than his contemporaries, and this series is some of his best work. Focusing on the people instead of the 'sci-fi,' you wind up with a complex tapestry of story threads that come together to make a complete picture, even if you don't see how each individual item could interweave with the rest at first.

Every military organization has that assignment. The one that gets the fuck-ups and rejects and antisocial types. The place where you wind up if you mess up but not in such a way as to get you drummed out. After one such (colossal) fuck-up, Captain Willard Phule is assigned to be in charge of the flippantly named Omega Squad with the intention of giving him a task so monumentally impossible to succed at that they'll have a reason to drum him out of the service. Kinda sucks that he succeeds, then, doesn't it?

Published at the dawn of the 90s, this book and its follow-ups don't really have much in the way of overt queer rep, but it DOES have plenty of what we'd now call neurodivergent rep, especially in the case of Mother. (The name makes sense, promise)

Urban Fairytales

For a lesbian romance series written by a cis-het dude, Urban Fairytales is still pretty damn good. Going into it, know two things:

It's self-published by the author, so there's spots where the editorial process would have taken the series from "good" to "OMG" and it shows

It's a lesbian romance series written by a dude, so it leans heavily on tropes and misses some parts of the queer experience entirely

That said, there's characters who are systems, ND, CPTSD sufferers, etc. There's a LOT more good than bad about this series, so if you understand where it falls down and can deal, then you'll be rewarded with a really good story.

Werewolves have been steadily claiming the Earth from humans for three centuries. Cities are built with walls lined with silver and police spend every full moon stationed on the walls with ammo belts full of silver shot in the hope of stemming the tide. Wolf Hunters are both feared and revered; they're crazy enough to take on the wolves directly and face to face and the ones that live past the first month are legendary. Even among the legends, though, there's those who rise above even them, and the greatest Hunter of all time wears a red hood and is rumored to have lived for hundreds of years. Her next stop is in Seattle, where The Red Hood will be joining the mayor in negotiations with one of the few silver mines still active...so why is she taking such interest in one of the detectives?

Temeraire

An alternate history where you're presented with, "What if Napoleonic Wars but Dragons?" Also of note; the author is one of the founders of Archive of Our Own, so worth the look for that reason alone, IMHO.

The MC is, IMO, heavily queer coded, similar to how Star Trek TOS Kirk & Spock were queer coded. It's never explicitly said, but there's points where you're all, "...wait, is he...?"

Mercy Thompson

Similar to Jane Jameson/Half-Moon Hollow, the Mercy Thompson books are set in an urban fantasy AU of our own where the Fae 'come out' before any of the other supernaturals...and the normies react so much like a certain group of red hat wearing conservatives it scares the other supernaturals into staying firmly in the supernatural closet.

Noteable for the MC being an imperfect, fallible narrator, the world created for the reader feels remarkably real; remove the supernatural elements and a lot of the world events could have taken place in our timeline.

One bit of content warning; this series was started before the cultural push to refer to Native Americans as such instead of "Indians," and it's implied in later books that the coming out of the fae put a lot of cultural issues like that on the back burner while humanity dealt with the supernatural, meaning that the in-universe explanation of, "Well, the Indians aren't actively being hunted by white people like the fae are, so the fae civil rights are the bigger issue" does hold water, but can be jarring to a modern audience that grew up after the cultural shift.

Werewolves, vampires, witches, gods, demons, you name it this series likely has it.

Queer friendly with a smattering of gay characters. The MC isn't queer (though, given she's a minority and supernatural herself, somewhat queer coded), but one of the major recurring supporting characters is, and his story is just as compelling as the MCs.

Accidentally Paranormal

If the Mercy Thompson series is the major motion picture with several award nominations in the "Urban Fantasy" category, this series is the Direct to DVD trashy romcom that you get because it's movie night and everyone's bored with the stuff they've already seen and you picked this up because it was there.

And then you find that one character who becomes your blorbo and you can't get enough of it.

The protag of the first book is nice, and she does very First Book things and a lot of it is "A Very Hallmark Cis Het Wish Fulfillment Special." But Nina, the MC of book 2 and, like, THE saltiest bitch in the universe for the entire series? She's my homegirl and can do no wrong even when she does. Even if she says "fucktard" a little too much.

All of the books follow a pretty standard formula: MC is accidentally'd by the supernatural of the title and shenanigans ensue. MC woman meets Love Interest man and they clash but are drawn to each other (sometimes destined, sometimes not). By the end of the book they're integrated into the extended family of misfit supernaturals and it's a cute little ending for a cute little book.

However, book 3 WILL catch you by surprise and it's the supporting cast that steal the show in this series. The MCs are often So Cis-Het White Girl™ they can feel very same-y, but the supporting cast are pure gold.

Anything by Gerri Hill, with special mention of One Summer Night

Sapphic romance, usually with a Hard Boiled Detective plot. Not all of Hill's work are detective novels, but I like her detective books the most (but then, I'm a die-hard Butch4Butch lesbian)

One Summer Night remains my favorite even if it's not the book that drew my attention to the author in the first place. Hard boiled ex-cop meets a younger woman who wants to be a detective and they fall in love? This is like catnip to me and I wish there were sequels.

Self-Published

You didn't think I was finished, did you?!

Troubleverse by QuietValerie and Trashlyn

Masterfully interweaving both sci-fi and fantasy, the series is set in a dystopian post-war future where VR "pods," devices that allow fully immersive virtual experiences, are as ubiquitous as cell phones. All the protags are trans, but unlike a LOT of trans characters, they don't start out knowing they're trans. The MC of book one (see picture) is one such individual. After an apparently random series of events, they wind up in the latest new VRMMO in a girl's body. Instead of being disturbed and needing a regen of the character, she feels remarkably positive, euphoric, one might say.

There are, at the time of this writing, five books in the series, with a sixth on the way. (And, if the authors like mine enough, my own entry into this series might be considered canon...I hope...Please!!!)

To Owb the Libs

I've expounded on Zoe Storm's work before. Go read this, it's SO much fun!

How Can I Save the World if I'm No Longer the Hero?

You're not ready for this.

A completely original work, and one that is still, technically, ongoing. You can also support the author by buying volumes 1-7 on Amazon.

"The Hero" (you don't even know their name for most of the series) has failed. Fate gives him another chance...but he fails again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Every time he meets the Fates he remembers all his failures, but while he's reliving that life? He doesn't remember ever doing it before. The Fates can guide and nudge things, but The Hero, the fated savior of the world, keeps failing. Finally, he begs to be able to remember what he did so he can correct his mistakes. The Fates agree, but at a cost; he'll no longer be The Hero, he'll just be another person, subject to the same weaknesses that required The Hero in the first place. When Joan awakens and remembers EVERYTHING from all her previous lives, she must set about correcting all that she'd messed up before, and hopefully convince the most important people to her of the truth of who she is and what she's saying.

Think "Groundhog Day with a Twist" and you'll start to see the bigger picture of this fic.

Fanfiction

...did you really think I'd stop there?

When it comes to fanfiction, there are FAR too many created even daily for there to be an exhaustive list. For every one or two I might highlight, there's going to be dozens that I liked just as much (if no more) and had to pick, sometimes at random, which I'd list. With that in mind, away we go!

Phoenix by AnneOminous

Ranma 1/2 - Divergence - The Phoenix Pill is destroyed, leaving Ranma 'locked' in girl form. Now rejected by everything she knew and homeless, she wanders into a bar that has a help wanted sign...and her life changes forever.

Ongoing, super sapphic, obviously transfemme, go read. Just go!

The Lighthouse by Ecrooked24

She-ra (2018) - AU - Katrina "Catra" Weaver returns to her home town as the inheritor of her abusive adoptive mother's estate. Struggling with buried trauma and a dark past, she seeks refuge in her favorite hiding spot as a child, an abandoned lighthouse on the coast. Her trip down memory lane is interrupted by an unfairly attractive blond woman who bought the property and just started renovations to move in.

I cannot tell you how good this is. For being the kind of thing I'd have likely skipped over if it weren't a fanfic of one of my favorite series of all time, it managed to just capture me and lives in my head rent free.

The Enchanted Library by Monochromatic

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - AU - Rarity lives in a world without Princesses, where Discord betrayed the Four and turned the world into a darker, though not horrible version of what could have been. One night Rarity winds up chasing after her younger sister into a part of the forest she's never seen and discovers a ghost. Further, it's the ghost of one of the long lost princesses.

If you like sapphic romances with pining, there's so much pining in this book you could make a flotilla of sailing ships and still have enough pine to re-make the entire Ikea catalog twice over.

Long Road to Friendship by Albi

My Little Pony: Equestria Girls - Divergence - Sunset Shimmer is given the Liar Liar treatment, but with Friendship instead of just not lying. This fic is so good it's on my list of 'comfort' fics. It inspired my own story with a similar premise. It's one of the best fics on FiMFiction and probably a better fic than you'll see anywhere else for any other fandom.

And, of course, my own work

I mean, hey, you made it this far! Check out my stuff!

Fission

Sailor Moon/Ranma 1/2 - Crossover - WIP - Ranma is having A Day. The usual wacky relationship hijinks wind up with him tripping while running from his self-declared love interests (it has to do with martial arts, several foreign laws, and an okonomiyaki cart...long story) and falling off a roof (...again, long story) to pass through a stream of water from a broken pipe, triggering the magic that cursed him to turn into a girl with a splash of cold water. But today the wacky cranked right up into the weird when he DIDN'T collide with the other person who also happens to be standing in the spray of water.

Usagi is having a pleasant day, actually. She's spending time with her boyfriend, taking in parts of Tokyo she doesn't normally get to, and in all enjoying herself when she gets a call about a monster attack. She ducks into an alley and starts to transform into Sailor Moon when a pipe bursts and sprays her with water right as someone...doesn't collide with her falling from the roof above.

The destiny of both Ranma and Usagi has been altered by a random accident that nobody could have planned for or anticipated.

Nobody around them is even remotely prepared.

Lost Little Wolf (Alt Link)

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - AU - WIP - Our protagonist's life (mine) turns from dramatic to tragic in a single moment...but then an out-of-left-field event happens, and I find myself in an alternate universe version of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic where the only difference seems to be Queen Chrysalis hatches a new queen years before the 1,000th Summer Sun Celebration...and I'm that new queen.

Star Trek: Strike Team Valkyrie

Multi-fandom - Fusion - WIP - When the admiralty of Starfleet get reports of anomalies that indicate problem with the timestream, they gather a strike team to investigate.

My Empire of Dirt/Music Box Blues (Alt link/Alt link)

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Equestria Girls - Divergence - Completed - One week after the Fall Formal, Principal Celestia is surprised to learn that a near-catatonic Sunset Shimmer has been calling out for her in the girl's sleep. Sunset has been unresponsive even to professional medical authorities, so what could have prompted her to call out in her sleep for an educator who had only occasionally interacted with her?

Deviation (Alt link)

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic & Equestria Girls - Omegaverse - WIP - Sunset Shimmer has the misfortune to stumble onto a human world that mirrors her home to an uncanny degree, save for one thing; it exists in The Omegaverse. These humans developed traits commonly associated with wolves. Alphas become the leaders and find mates with Omegas, Betas are the majority of the population. When Sunset Shimmer transited to this world, she did so via a magical portal that "rewrote" her base form, but there's a catch: Where any human to transit into this universe by a similar method, their own mythologies and histories usually include werewolves and the magic could pattern the visitor after the visitor's native Archana-canid Sapiens. Equestria has no such being in its history or legends. But there is one intelligent species in Equestria that is quite common and has the traits in its biology, social structure, and power dynamic to match the human world. Sunset must navigate an unfamiliar world in a strange body that seems to be betraying her at every turn, and Celestia must deal with challenges never before faced by an Alpha to keep her pack members and the secret to Sunset's unique nature hidden from the world. Because Sunset Shimmer is not an ordinary Alpha, she's a...Deviation

Joketsuzokunichuaan

Ranma 1/2 - AU - Completed - What if there was a "Spring of Drowned Warrior Woman?" And what if the Amazon tribeswomen were obligate impression procreators instead of just having a silly law about marrying outsider men who managed to defeat them? And, most importantly, what if you could write such a series without it being squicky 'bad end' fetish porn?

Double Isekai

Ranma 1/2 - Isekai - WIP - We all know the isekai, the most common being a person dies in our universe and awakens in another, often fantastical universe, very often in their favorite fiction media. To even have an isekai event, the multiverse must, by definition, exist. And in the multiverse, if something can be imagined, it exists somewhere in the multiverse. So what if one person who's an avid fan of Ranma 1/2 dies? What if they die in two separate timelines? And what if both deaths triggered an isekai? And what if both variants wound up isekai-ing to the same timeline of Ranma 1/2, but in different people? ...and what are the odds of that? i = infinity ^ 4 ^ infinity:1, repeated infinitely. Welcome to the Double Isekai.

Ānzhuōniichuan

Ranma 1/2 - Divergence - WIP - Thousands of years ago, long before anyone keeping records even knew of the place, Jusenkyo created one of the more exotic pools in its repertoire. This pool would go unnoticed and undiscovered...until an idiot hauls his son through China under the guise of a martial arts training trip.

Return to Recipient

Ranma 1/2 - Continuation - WIP - Ranma hasn't been feeling right for as long as he can remember, and he just figured that's normal. But after Jusenkyo, and especially after Jusendo, the feeling of "wrongness" has been getting more and more noticeable... ...because he doesn't feel it in his cursed form. He continues to just cope, keeping his struggle to himself, until he finds a letter tucked into his old travel pack addressed to him, written by him, from a 48 hour period that he doesn't remember and nobody will talk to him about.

Plus, go to my AO3 page to find two "adults only" fics if you're into that sort of thing.

Since it'll be a while longer until alecto releases (take your time tamsyn) I think we should try to avoid the usual insanity that befells a starved fandom by doing something unheard of: Reading another book. So uh.

What books would you recommend to your fellow locked tomb fans to help with the urges until we get alecto?

#do you like the color of the book recs?#which one?

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