Wizards Vs. Lesbians

What if you took a standard romance novel setup - girl abducted and made to serve in the harem of the handsome prince - and really leaned into how awful that would be in real life? You'd get this, a YA novel whose major tone is the suffocating dread of violent sexual assault, but with forbidden lesbian romance and a clan of secret ninjas thrown into the mix. It's a challenging one.

We've been doing this for a year! Unbelievably! To celebrate, it's time for one of my favorite podcast tropes: the silly award show, in which we discuss who the best lesbian is, who the best wizard is, and so forth.

There's a girl trapped in a tower, a handsome prince comes to save her, and then everything goes wrong. Thankfully there's a lesbian moth demon there to help.

I mean, what is there to say?

It's our 25th episode, and so we're going to discuss an anime that is very important to us, and which is absolutely a foundational text in the wizards vs lesbians idiom. We could fill up multiple podcasts talking about this show, and just might, if provoked.

It's another retro episode! This one to takes us back to gay London in the 1990s, where a queer cab driver named Rainbow is being haunted not only by her variously-kosher gaggle of aunts but by an actual dybbuk, unleashed upon her to fulfill a centuries-old curse. It's Good Omens but Jewish and with lesbians - what's not to like?

It's an accidental holiday episode! The Raven and the Reindeer is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen by T Kingfisher, AKA Ursula Vernon, furry webcomic artist of the old school. And it's great - keeps all the weirdness of the original and adds a whole shovelful of gay.

The rare modern contemporary wizards vs lesbians novel, set here and now. It's about a young woman of Malaysian Chinese descent who returns to Penang under difficult circumstances and has to deal, among other things, with the ghost of her grandmother. An extremely solid piece of work: If you have any litfic snobs in your circle, this is the one to break 'em in with.

It's Foundryside! This is a book that we think might have been better as an anime, or an action movie, or a miniseries, or a comic - pretty much anything but a very long novel that seems to care mostly about setting up the pieces for the very long series of sequels to come. But we might think that because it has the best action sequence writing of any book we've discussed so far, and also because the lesbian has a wisecracking inanimate object companion to help her in her anti-wizard cause.

In a slight departure for us we are discussing a romance novel - a romance novella, in fact - a romance novella starring a werebear who works at Vogue. It's self-identified "chick lit" but it's also Wizards vs Lesbians, or at least close enough, so we discuss it (and also spend quite a long time talking about the theory that queer desire itself is the revolutionary moment.)