“When people see tears, they stop listening to your hands or your words or anything else you have to say. And it doesn’t matter if the tears are angry or sad, frightened or frustrated. All they see is a girl crying.”
[I.D.: A gifset containing four gifs of the game Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery.
Gif 1 is a shot of the player character reaching towards the camera. Wind brushes her hair and clothes in the air as the background behind her fades from her painting studio, to white, and then to nature outside.
Gif 2 shows two scenes. One is the player’s paint brush strokes laying down yellow paint on a drawing. Another is the player’s pencil strokes leaving behind a sketch.
Gif 3 shows three scenes. One is the player solving a puzzle to unlock a door, sliding through letter combinations. Another is a puzzle where the player must slide through different color swatches to complete a picture. The third is a scene of the player’s neighbor, his back faced to them, as he works on his painting.
Gif 4 pans across four different settings: a room with the player’s paintings hanging on a wall, the player’s canvas sitting in their studio, a meadow of pink plants blowing in the wind and the canvas easel standing amongst them, and a wider shot of the player’s studio.
end I.D.]
Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery is an interactive fiction game about an aspiring artist creating her masterpiece! Under your brusque neighbor’s gaze (and with his pesky cat around), paint and sketch artwork that conveys emotional tones. Solve puzzles, take the occasionally coffee and breakfast break, and uncover an emotional tale about chance!
For Nintendo Switch, PS4, Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac.
Developed by Silver Lining Studio, a Taiwanese company that wants to energize players using heart-warming and hopeful games to aid them in gloomy hours. They partnered with Akupara games, a publishing company that’s worked with other titles such as Mutazioneand The Choreographist.
Hi hello good afternoon I am supplying you with wlw book recs because we all deserve them. Please reblog with your own recs because I’ve only been reading sapphic books for a few months so haven’t covered loads of amazing ones, and hopefully this can become a massive rec list of wlw books :)
Also please please please check the TWs for all of these so that you can stay happy, healthy and safe 💗.
Fantasy:
- The Priory of the Orange Tree: [“We may be small, and we may be young, but we will shake the world for our beliefs”] Look I know you’ve all heard of it. Now read it. Swords. Queer women. Queer women with swords. Dragons. Castles. Battles. Many many many pages of beautiful words. There is nothing missing from this book.
- Cinderella is Dead: [“I don’t want to be saved by some knight in shining armour. I’d like to be the one in the armour, and I’d like to be the one doing the saving.”] Fuck the patriarchy. Dystpian. Gay. Fantasy. Cinderella is dead (wow). Badass main character. Fighting for rights and fighting for eachother. 👩❤️💋👩
- Girls of Paper and Fire: [“Instead of disappearing, she makes me feel reappeared. Reimagined. Her touch shapes me, draws out the boldness that had been hiding in my core.”] We said learning to heal! We said finding safety in eachothers arms! We said fighting the oppressive government! We said fuck the patriarchy! We said fantasy women with swords! We said (kinda) enemies to lovers! We said please check the trigger warnings for this book!
- A Dark and Hollow Star: [“The number one law of the universe is choice, after all — bad things happen to the people who take that option away from you.”] Fantasy that actually uses the words bisexual and lesbian and gay and genderfluid!!! Urban fantasy. Four main characters: two mlm, two wlw. Swords and monsters and fae and powers and tension and fate. Read for the pretty cover, stay for the characters.
- Gideon the Ninth: [“I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it”] This book is dark and horror-y and gory and weird as fuck. This book has skeletons and necromancy and a huge weird haunted house and everyone dying under mysterious circumstances. This book has enemies to i-dont-even-know-what. You will not know what is happening in this book but you will love it. Trust me.
Dystopian:
- We Set the Dark on Fire: [“Maybe this was trust … Giving someone the power to ruin you, betting your life on the belief that they wouldn’t.”] once again, repeat after me: fuck the patriarchy. Rebellion. Enemies to lovers. Dystopian world where every man gets two wives. Guess what happens 👀
Contemporary:
- The Henna Wars: [“I’ve never really thought about having a type. I guess my type is….beautiful girl. Which is a lot of them. Most of them? Pretty much all girls”]. Girl dealing with the aftermath of coming out to her parents has a crush on a girl who is competing against her in a school competition. Main character is muslim, bangladeshi and lesbian and love interest is black, brazilian and bisexual. Just read it. Don’t do it for me. Do it for yourself. You deserve to smile.
- Her Royal Highness: [“PERRY I’VE FOUND AN AMERICAN!”] Look this book may be cliche and predictable and a little ridiculous at times but it made me unfathomably happy so I don’t care. Scottish boarding school+royalty+an american. Enemies to lovers but not im-gonna-stab-you enemies to lovers (which ive read my fair share of truet me), more like why-are-you-so-unbearably-irritating enemies to lovers you know?
- Written in the Stars: [“I’ll break into your apartment and move everything three inches to the left and fuck with your flow, okay?”] Good, solid contemporary new adult romance. Enemies to lovers. Grump x sunshine. Actually has a sex scene (this might not be everyones thing i just noticed wlw books often skirt around them so thought id point it out). Ugh its just so cute.
- You Should See Me In a Crown: [“When I open my mouth, everything happens so fast—the way I can feel her everywhere, the way my hands steady instead of shake where they tangle in her hair because I’ve maybe never felt so grounded before, so rooted in a moment”] What happens when a black queer girl tries for prom queen in a weird, cliquey prom-obsessed school? What happens when one of the other competitors is the unabashedly gay cute new girl? This is what happens. Guys. Guys. Guys. Read this one oh my god. I say this about every book but seriously READ THIS ONE. So so so so so good. Everything you could ever want in a queer coming of age book.
- The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: [“You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until someone stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.”] I know you’ve all heard this but you’re about to hear it again. Queer women in the 50s? Sign me up! Sign yourself up! Buy this book and then read this book! Freak out about this book! Cry about this book! Tell everyone you’ve ever met to read this book! Cry some more about this book! Make this book your whole personality!
Thriller(?):
- The Girls I’ve Been: [“There is no normal. There is just a bunch of people pretending there is. There’s just different levels of pain. Different stages of safe. The biggest con of all is that there’s a normal.”] Thriller. Guns. Menstrual cups. Con artists. That awkward moment when you’re stuck in a bank robbery with two murderous men, a child, your ex boyfriend and your current girlfriend. Not romance but has romantic themes (established relationship). Coming to terms with childhood trauma and abuse. This book is short but deceptively heavy with the themes it deals with so, again, please check the TWs.
Ones on my TBR:
- Last Night at the Telegraph Club
- The Miseducation of Cameron Post
- A Memory Called Empire
- This Is How You Lose the Time War
- Girl, Serpent, Thorn
- This Poison Heart
- One Last Stop
- She Who Became The Sun (omg i want to read this so so so badly)
Not in the first book (though you are, of course, welcome to interpret them as trans) – but in the next Priory book I’m writing, yes.
One of my own criticisms of the first book is that it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of people outside the gender binary. There will be trans and non-binary characters in other instalments, and I’ve invented gender-neutral titles to make the world as inclusive as possible.
