Thundamoo's Fictions: I was originally introduced from a Tumblr post mentioning a really cool fic where a girl gets roboticized in a magical girl universe and also it has the best explanation of how pluralism works. Now that I've read a few fics, there's themes of what therapy can do even if your situation is Fucked, the importance of having queer friends to support you, power dynamics in violence and sometimes literal ownership of another's body, living with a body that is weird in mundane and fantastical ways. Plus, being given powers that are more than compatible with your personality. There's regular sections where I read them and kick my feet up and exclaim out loud and wiggle because they tickle my brain sooo right. The layered complexity in the magic systems, the cosmic level beauty in the world building the blooms like a rose as you read, the disturbingly relatable main characters who are directly better off reforming their flesh into anything non-human as like a nervous avoidance response. Absolutely nuts.
Magical Girl Mechanical Heart: A magical girl world with freaky monsters and a really cool emotion-based magic system. The main girl does get put in a robot form with some mental restrictions because she technically belongs to a villainess who learns she can burn up any of her emotions to both avoid feeling them and turn them into magical power. She has depression but it's partially solved by simply turning the panic spiral into fuel, which definitely has zero consequences. And honestly even outside a lot of the ways her situation improves, most days I wish it were me. I want to be the weird robot girl. Irregardless, the other main character is plural and her magic is twinned because of it. It's so fun and easy to digest, though Thundamoo's writing is just always like that I think.
Are You Even Human: The MC is a shapeshifter akin to the protag of [ Prototype ]. It's weird and fleshy and immortal, and explores like the guts (heh) of being a person that is so divorced emotionally from their body that they can reshape it like clay and only feel better about that. I love Ana the blood mage and Maria the recursive fairy (good luck queen I hope your body works one day). It's funny to see another take on a character that is so self-assured that it extends to their superpowers. It's soooo cool the way the super powers come from the fucked up creature in the moon, and directly match the kinds of magic that the aliens have, and like you get gods like Possiblity, Perfection, Failure, Blasphemy. I was like happy stimming reading the engagement between Julietta and the Queen of Blasphemy - and honestly the whole alien conversation style being different and weird and pure. The fact that Julietta gets to banter sooo much with inhuman creepycrawlies and they appreciate it.
Bioshifter (completed): Once again body horror but with a fucked up world tree, mind control magic, and physically transforming your besties. I love the multilayered relationship Hannah has with the Goddess, how you get to know their relationship to learn instinctively what a given conversation will yield even before you read the response. And then the magic backfires because fuck you. I absolutely adore Helen the chaos art mage and Sela the murderbot, being so 'unlikeable' as a defense against normal people, which Hannah is decidedly not in the slightest. I can't express how crazy I am about how Ida is transformed into a goddess's form as a climax, the level of ownership and intimacy - and then later the direct reminder that Ida's powers only work when she believes she has ownership back over Hannah/others. It's just soooooo ! Like I get like a cuteness aggression response to the idea of reforming someone so entirely and like heart flutters thinking about being on the other side of that. I absolutely was freaking out how at the end all of Hannah's closest friends/partners each individually express her influence and their specific loves for her, and how you get so many perspectives before she decides whether/how to kill herself. Magical HRT for Valerie, magical disassociation by Maddie, magical programming by Sela (obvi), full on Megumin-esque magical monologues by Helen, atomizing a unique art piece everytime Valerie casts, the way the Goddess literally takes your breath when upcasting to say something with your voice (bladeless knife with no handle shit), literally insane I cannot be normal.
Podcasts:
The Pleasant Green Universe: I found the Lovecraft Investigations through several reddit recommendations. And well deserved, too! Looking the series up on TV Tropes led to the Julian Simpson 'cinematic universe.' The stories I've listened to are below.
The Lovecraft Investigations: Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher are hosts of a true crime podcast, discover a guy who basically spontaneously combusted, and proceed to learn the ongoing history of reincarnating wizards and become bafflingly competent investigators of the cults that attempt to bring about the end of the world.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Whisperer in Darkness: this one I had to listen through the Internet Archive for some reason. I think the link for the series contains this one but in a baffling order.
The Shadow over Innsmouth: Holy shit, Kennedy is Welsh???
The Haunter of the Dark: Definitely a show that made me want a character name reference because there are a lot of moving parts to track.
Aldrich Kemp: Found under "Limelight," contains the adventures of Clara Page as she deals with a most annoying international "criminal" Aldrich Kemp. As the TV Tropes page says, much more spy thriller than its down-to-earth predecessor.
Who Is Aldrich Kemp?
Who Killed Aldrich Kemp?
Aldrich Kemp and the Rose of Pamir
Video Games:
YOU and ME and HER: I watched over 14 hours of playthrough so I'm spelling out the spoilers. This is a hentai game that deconstructs the genre and the relationship of the player to the characters. As you'd guess, you play male visual novel protag Cuckold McGee. Immediately, you find a cell phone and Aoi, who is literally Ms. Capture Target, ie the average of most women in these games. Oddly, this is played straight as she tells anyone who will listen that she is a game character, that she is trying to recharge her existence by collecting encounter (sex) scenes. This is like her day job. You encounter Miyuki shortly after, who asks if you called her to the roof of the school to kiss and declare your eternal love. The protag didn't. You hang out with Mikuyi and try her different routes: learning world details, trying to make Aoi and her be friends and building up that necessary context for the twists later. There are specific events like going shopping for cat-themed hair pins, or finding a cat on the side of the road, or watching batting cage enthusiast Miyuki participate in her school play. At the end of those routes, cuck-boy drifts away from Miyuki, and after warning him 'this is the bad end,' Aoi disappears. Return to a previous choice path, wherein Aoi summons a connection to God (a female entity that sent Aoi) to patch reality so that the protag and Miyuki can get together. You do that, and at somepoint you do the whole kisskiss confess your eternal love. Yay generic happy ending. This is 6.5 hours into the playthrough I watched. So, this being a visual novel, lets take a look at Aoi's route. This is spelled out in the tvtropes page, but the game offers choices that are "give up on Aoi" and "suffer through spending time with Aoi." Yes, its weighted against her. 4 more hours in (again video playthrough), cuckboy 'proves' he loves Aoi as a threesome, and at long last Miyuki puts everyone out of their misery (exceptional). She's mad because you, the player, clicked the button that said you love Miyuki forever. You enter the next 'chapter' of the game, and you're stuck in a montage of Miyuki-only events, raising or lowering her affection to break out of this loop of pointless days. Notably, saving is restricted for a bit, the UI is styled completely differently, and sometimes Miyuki talks to the player. There's a special April Fools intro cutscene for this segment.
Miyuki eventually calls God to patch Aoi out of the game. Things escalate: run-based security questions, a montage of fake endings where Miyuki is sad or whatever, she explains You the player allowing that first patch damned her and the protag together, though that's okay! Because she fell in love with YOU the player, and pleasures herself at length. Steal the phone again, call God to revert everything, enter numbers from previous runs and even IRL promo materials. You then choose which girl you truly love most, and thus which other girl gets atomized. I was grinding my teeth for the first T E N hours of gameplay of exceptionally subtle setup. I promise you could scale the game down by a quarter and you basically would lose nothing.
That said, it truly let you persist in a doomed world, and really hammer home your choices. The game commits and unfortunately for me, I will be referencing it against DDLC and such other games. See also Undertale's No Mercy route for permanently tainting subsequent playthroughs. Between this and DDLC, having a character fall in love with the player is less compelling to me than Undetale's Flowey.