There are no stars at all for some of us

[sovay]

Hey! Internet! I've just been talking about how much it sucks when a novel kills off its queer characters. Especially when there's, like, one of them and they're the one who doesn't make it. Can someone point me toward a list of books where that doesn't happen? Spoilers, whatever.

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[rosefox]

I'm still angry about the end of Half a Crown. In case you couldn't tell.

Somewhat relatedly, Jim Hines's first fairy tale princesses book has a "sad lesbian" ending: everyone else is happy-ever-after paired off or happily single, and she's left to yearn for a straight woman. But he apparently wrote about much nicer things happening for the lesbian character later on in the series. (Haven't read them, so I don't know specifics.) And his Libriomancer series centers on a F/F/M love triangle that turns rather awkwardly into an attempt at poly romance. He doesn't know how to write it, but that's okay because the characters very much don't know how to do it--as in, in the text of the book they're like "we have no clue but this sounds better than breaking up so let's try it"--so the clumsiness feels appropriate.

[sovay]

In case you couldn't tell.

I thought maybe just a tad.

That one had the weird effect of not really registering with me at the time: I finished the novel, thought, "Well, that was awful, but Carmichael was bound to lose someone and Elvira was the co-protagonist," and then about two days later I was really upset by it. Especially since the same novel had taken care to establish that Lucy and David Kahn did get away from Farthing successfully and were safe in Canada; the dystopia level of the world wasn't automatic death to outsiders. So now I'm still upset about it and expect to remain that way.