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DID YOU THINK I WAS DONE?? I STILL HAVE AT LEAST ANOTHER POST LEFT AFTER THIS.

(I know I could just NOT review everything but I do always like having done it)

Past (just finished):

I finished it:
My New Boss is Goofy
Tearmoon Empire
I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness
Our Dating Story: The Experienced You and The Inexperienced Me
Heaven Official's Blessing

I dropped it:
Frieren
Migi & Dali
100 girlfriends Who Really Really Really Love You

Current (just starting):

Delicious in Dungeon
Doctor Elise: The Royal Lady with the Lamp
Villainess Level 99: I May Be the Hidden Boss But I'm Not the Demon Lord
Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!
7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!
A Sign of Affection
The Demon Prince of Momochi House
Cherry Magic

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I am MASSIVELY behind on reviews so some of these are based on vague memories but lets go! I realised trying to remember which things I'd reviewed before was getting in the way of reviewing anything, so some may be doubles.

Live action TV: Our Flag Means Death S2

Live action movie: Semantic Error

Animated TV:
Cherry Magic
Heaven Official's Blessing S2

Manga:
Tsurumaki-sensei no Sakka Seikatsu
Haru Kakete, Uguisu (Warbler, Sing of Spring)

Books:
Evil as Humans
Married Thrice to A Salted Fish
After I married the disabled war god as my concubine
Paper Lover
A Simple Way To Give Money
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I decided that if I could review the game about ALGEBRA BEING FUN I could probably review some things more of you might actually be interested in. So! Off the top of my head without overthinking, let's go!

Lots of m/m, some m/f, and a little f/f and gen.

Live Action TV: Sandman, Old Fashioned Cupcake

Games: Nurse Love Syndrome, London Detetctive Mysteria

Anime: My Dress Up Darling, SpyxFamily, Sasaki and Miyano, Hirano and Kagiura, Umibe no Etranger

Prose fiction: Light Tea and Sweet Wine, The Wrong Way To A Demon Sect Leader, You Boys Play Games Very Well, spit_kitten
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Tagged by elwing and also I think phlebasphoenician ages ago but I was really tired that day and forgot until now.

last song: The Devil's Part, All Our Exes Live In Texas. The problem with this band is I like their songs (so many weird breakup songs!) but I find Australians trying for a Folksy American Vibe annoying on principle (idk maybe this is unfair and that’s just what aussie folk sounds like). I have to admit this one is pretty good, though, with an enjoyably creepy, femslashy video.

last movie: Probably 'Seeing Red'. I liked it, for all the reasons mentioned previously!

currently reading: Devil Venerable Wants to Know by Cyan Wings, a Chinese m/m xianxia romcom. This question usually trips me up because I tend to either finish books in a day or so, or give up entirely. But I've been stalled halfway on this one for a while. It's a fun premise: the amoral immortal secondary romance lead of a cheesy romance novel comes across a copy before he meets and falls for the heroine, and is horrified. Both because his love leads to him dying at the hands of the heroine's dickish boyfriend and his second in command going mad with grief, and because becoming such a mushy pushover feels preposterous. He decides the best solution is to (a) get the heroine to find a different better boyfriend and/or self actualisation (b) get to know his second better and encourage his mental health. His idea of 'helping' involves a lot of like...pushing the heroine off a cliff to speed up her arc etc which is darkly funny, and there's some great amoral female characters who are enjoyably femslashy with the heroine (she just keeps being so NICE and they DON'T UNDERSTAND and also it's not like they care or anything but her boyfriend is a DICK and she can DO BETTER). And it has a lot of fun poking at genre conventions. But the romance between him and his second is VERY slow burn and the rest of the plot is a lot of amusing but repetitive silliness. It it was half as long I probably would have loved it, as it is...maybe I'll finish it one day.

I think I'm up to three? Something like that.

Movies: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Live Action TV: Word of Honour
Anime: Life Lessons with Uramichi Oniisan

Games:
Mushroom Cats
Antichamber
Cat Quest
Thimbleweed Park
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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 )

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, disclaimer: not only did I read this book for free but I'm dating the author.

BUT I CAN OBJECTIVELY SAY IT'S REALLY GOOD AND YOU SHOULD BUY IT

My reaction to Pia while reading was "these two traumatised repressed self sacrificing workaholics are trying so hard and they need to kiss" And then they did and it was amazing :D

It's a m/m romance, set in an alternate Perth where a small proportion of the population are 'shifters': able to turn into wolves, with omegaverse-y biology where asides from regular gender there's also being alpha, omega or beta. I'm usually not super into omegaverse, but Pia writes it in a really interesting way, with believable worldbuilding(*), and they complicate biological imperatives without undermining the things that make the tropes fun.

The other thing this story explores thoughtfully is trauma, I can't think of a hurt-comforty romance about two people helping each other through their respective traumas that I've connected with more.

But also it's just a really nice romance about two really likeable but complex characters who I ended up shipping SUPER hard by the end: demisexual omega chocolatier Aodhan, and his quiet regular customer, the beta Thomas, who RUNS A LITTLE MUSEUM :D As a former museum science communicator, those parts were super cute and believable. The parts about being from a family of fucked up activists was believable and wrenching. And while I can't judge the chocolatier parts from personal experience, they certainly made me hungry, and Pia's love for Perth's bush shines through just as much as in the previous book.

(This is a sequel to the previous Perth Shifters book, Blackwood, but you don't need to read that to understand this one, and the dynamics are pretty different)

SO YEAH. GO PRE-ORDER IT.

(*)they gloss over the whole "people turning into wolves" thing pretty painlessly and if you can roll with that you're good.