Ruoxi Chen

give me queered AF xianxia & wuxia fantasy in this vein. give me tender eye contact, back to back fighting, tilting your gf’s chin up w/a blade, painting her by firelight while you walk the jianghu together w/strong talismans and BDE. dream of red chamber meets MDZS. #MSWL

#MSWL day: I'd love to see more F/F in my inbox. give me your adult WILDER GIRLS, your righthand women fiercely defending their gfs, the claustrophobic intimacy of friendship where you might just take a bite out of each other, your SF/F Elena Ferrante, your swordswomen in love.

this is both a perfect description of a book I’ve already loved & acquired (@emilytesh_uk’s Silver in the Wood, which is out this very week) & the type of manuscript I will ALWAYS go for. romance as a failure of taxonomy, yes please. #mswl

I need this. breakfast club meets agatha christie in the ming dynasty. #MSWL

ICYMI for the Monday crowd. a day later, any version of this is still firmly on my #MSWL

& in general: more f/f fantasy where the main pairing has a complicated history & maybe they're escaping narratives that weren't worthy of them please

chatting panels w/the brilliant @CarolinePerny and it occurs to me I crave a WOC take on the basic Hulk trope that plays with how complicated it is to be angry as a WOC, especially a BWOC. that gives permission for fury & recognizes that yeah, you're always fucking angry. #MSWL

nüshu magic—ink witches sending spells and messages through hidden script that changes on the page, empires crumbling on the strength of a carefully wrought character, sworn sisters taking vengeance for their own—I want every iteration #MSWL

this has now fixed in my head as an actual #MSWL

BANSHEE PALACE: soap opera energy, palace intrigue, queer banshee romances, dialogue worthy of a Chinese period drama. misandry in the time of vengeance. I want it.

mostly this entire thread that is rapidly getting out of hand with publisher duels & puppies but also a genuine #mswl for the general concept of an old school auntie vampire hunter—if we can have 25 van helsing adaptations we can have 25 of this!

selfishly expanding this into a #mswl for adult SFF that hits that Dead Like Me sweet spot of charming sardonic & reserved w/a deep undercurrent of heartbreak & stunning empathy that will break into the main storyline without warning. high concept but make it lump in your throat

in light of recent snake news, I'd *really* like a queer own voice retelling of Bai She Zhuan where Suzhen & Xiaoqing fall in love while on their rescue mission & realize that striving for an immortal human soul is the patriarchy & being a snake witch is better. #mswl

YES except also as adult fantasy about the rash decisions you made as an impetuous youth & an impetuous witch but now you're falling in love in your grumpy 30s over a magical contract you didn't think though w/lots of resigned sighs & awkward eye contact & netflix #mswl

#mswl so hard I almost dropped my phone into my coffee. decolonize Indy! remove the specter of defunct masculinity from the character’s hallmarks. make her a bulwark against the dying of a hidden world. make Indiana Jones the auntie we deserve.

Co-signing. Show me characters falling in love for the fourth time, with all the warts, while quietly and competently figuring out the galactic war/revolution/dystopia. #MSWL

Ah now I want this for real! Low fantasy magical realist House of Leaves meets Divine Cities trilogy about a historian from a conquered place discovering her own history via marginalia and then rewriting the colonizers' version by weaponizing it. #mswl

Would love a mythical take on PERFUME (Suskind) with paints instead of scents: historical/secondary world fantasy where True Ochre requires the hair of a just man who's never known bitterness, True White the tears of a serpent who's lost her love etc. Art, blood, hunts. #mswl

YES. I'm just going to sit on my hands and wait for this to show up in my inbox. Heroine who finds her highly skilled profession out of resistance to stereotypes & SPITE! 5 levels deep code switching banter & hijinks! Alias meets Curb Your Enthusiasm meets Chang-rae Lee! #mswl

Someone write pls write me the bone-dry acid-quick novella about an As-Am jiangshi who's scammed a yoga class full of white women into thinking the hopping is an exercise trend (& not slow food vampirism) that's really about the commodification of WOC in white spaces #mswl

Same. #MSWL for above.

Sidebar: someone write me an sf/f story where your baby eyes falling out is a rite of initiation that presages the loss of innocence and the onset of true eyes and true Sight. Happy nightmares, everyone. #MSWL