Books:
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

Games:
I Love You!
One Shot
A Garden On The Sea
Doreamon Story of Seasons

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This is a Japanese f/m dating sim about being a cop working against terrorists. It's pretty fun for what it is but it's...sure a game with that premise.

Content notes for the game: Violence, death, suicide, child harm, fantasy slavery, stalking and sexual harassment (just secondary characters), terrorism, life under a scary quarantine (not disease related), unfortunate treatment of mental illness, uncomfortable depiction of cyberbullying and gaming addiction, PTSD, probably other things I'm forgetting

Also there is a shooting minigame which requires some timing. I got the hang of it pretty quickly but if you can't you're locked out of all the happy endings.

I've put the rest of my review under a cut just because 90% of people will already have checked out by now. But there's no spoilers, just more discussion.
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This is a very fun Chinese fantasy m/m romance novel.

The main character is a dragon who's spent thousands of years cheerfully not really caring about anything...but then someone captured him and stole some of his bones, leaving him half paralysed and very angry. In the journey to get revenge and find his bones, he encounters an uptight amnesiac monk who he feels oddly drawn to tease. The two of them go on a mystery solving road trip, inadvertently making friends and saving innocent people along the way despite both considering themselves lone wolves above that sort of thing.
( Warnings, links, other details )

Anime: Comic Girls, Blend-S, Jingai-san no Yome

Western Animation: Centaurworld

Books: They All Say I’ve Met a Ghost, Artificial Condition

Webcomic: Survive as the Hero's Wife/This Villainess Wants a Divorce!

Games: GardenPaws, Calico

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There was another of those massive itchio bundles recently, this time for Palestinian Aid. Having bought a copy, I went through all FORTY THREE pages of games to compile some recs with half-assed notes. If you didn't buy the bundle the games might be worth checking out anyway.

If you have opinions on any of these please let me know!
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New Times, New Hell: This is a very fun Chinese m/m modern fantasy rom-com novel.

The premise is that Chinese government policies discouraging supernatural belief led to the collapse of Heaven and Hell, and now reincarnation is run out of a little office using Excel spreadsheets of everyone's karma. The protagonist is a new IT graduate who's been hired to update their system by the surprisingly hot King of Hell, who keeps spending company bonuses on gacha games.

There's a lot of cute shippy moments and surreal humour about ghosts dealing with modern life. The surrealness was only added to for me by the cultural differences, eg "communism" was used to mean something pretty different to any definition of communism I'm familiar with. It looks a lot like capitalism to me, but the book is clear that capitalism is bad, so I guess not! I have no idea how much of this is deliberate social commentary, a lot went over my head and I'm sure a Chinese reader would have a very different experience of the book. But the emotions of the characters were always clear and I got enough of the jokes to have fun.

I lost momentum once the main couple got together and never finished the book, but had a lot of fun getting to that point.

I've put some interesting quotes I saved about communism/socialism under the cut for anyone who's curious. No major spoilers.
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I recently stumbled across a bunch of very cute m/m romances which involve a guy with some sort of magic power/aspect he has mixed feelings about, but then it throws him together with a coworker/classmate etc he'd never noticed much before and love blossoms.

Japanese live action: Cherry Magic: 30 years of virginity can turn you into a wizard?! (telepathy)

American webcomic: Avialae (wings)

Korean webtoons:
The Best Smell (Psychic nose)
For Your Love (gaydar...ok this is a stretch but the dynamic felt similar!)
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So I was recced this as a sweet, funny fantasy m/f romance anime. And it is! ...if you're up for shota (sexualised tween boys) Which I generally am not! So my feelings are very mixed.
( Giving this it's own post so people who are squicked can more easily avoid it )

Review: a Japanese otome m/f dating sim about a sad ninja princess questioning whether her life has meaning. It's great! I haven't played all the routes but the ones I did were really well done. They're all ninja she has complicated quasi-incestuous relationships with and tend to involve a certain amount of Angst And Drama About Being A Murderer For Hire, and either you're into that or you're not. But the relationships are all also very sweet and romantic with plenty of light moments, and the stories fit together nicely.

Content note: suicide, emotional abuse.
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