Nominations open in a few days, which is plenty of time for you to shill your favorite canon and lure people into your fandom. Feel free to use the comments on this post to tell everyone why your canon is the best!
I'm here to rec the Astreiant series, by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett! It's medieval fantasy, set in a vague sort of pseudo-Low Countries. There are 4 novels and a novella, and all of them focus on some sort of mystery. Every novel after the first one has canon m/m. In addition, you only really need to read one of them in order to enjoy/write fic, though they're all pretty quick reads (other than the first one, which is the longest).
The worldbuilding does interesting things with gender dynamics (it's not perfectly egalitarian - women hold more power than men, but it's not at the same level that men had control during the medieval period) and has completely normalized queer relationships.
The two main characters, Nicolas Rathe and Philip Eslingen, are in a relationship as of the 2nd book. Rathe is sort of the hard-bitten detective type and Eslingen is a tall, handsome and rather chronically unemployed and underemployed former lieutenant. The books focus more and more on their relationship as they go on (but there isn't any get together scene - that's skipped over), BUT the overwhelming focus is still on the mystery. Rathe and Eslingen have a great dynamic with each other where they both respect each other a lot and they clearly love spending time together.
The early books are pretty cheap if you buy them used - later ones you have to buy as ebooks but they're about 6-7 dollars. If your library has a good ebook collection you can probably get them that way.
I enjoyed the books so much that I read them all in a row, and then my wife read them all in a row after me. They're really excellent! And there's so many starting off points for fanfic, like writing their original get-together scene or filling in missing time between the books.
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The worldbuilding does interesting things with gender dynamics (it's not perfectly egalitarian - women hold more power than men, but it's not at the same level that men had control during the medieval period) and has completely normalized queer relationships.
The two main characters, Nicolas Rathe and Philip Eslingen, are in a relationship as of the 2nd book. Rathe is sort of the hard-bitten detective type and Eslingen is a tall, handsome and rather chronically unemployed and underemployed former lieutenant. The books focus more and more on their relationship as they go on (but there isn't any get together scene - that's skipped over), BUT the overwhelming focus is still on the mystery. Rathe and Eslingen have a great dynamic with each other where they both respect each other a lot and they clearly love spending time together.
The early books are pretty cheap if you buy them used - later ones you have to buy as ebooks but they're about 6-7 dollars. If your library has a good ebook collection you can probably get them that way.
I enjoyed the books so much that I read them all in a row, and then my wife read them all in a row after me. They're really excellent! And there's so many starting off points for fanfic, like writing their original get-together scene or filling in missing time between the books.