Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty and sequels. I can count on the fingers of one hand the books I've picked up in the library/bookstore because they had two girls holding hands or exchanging intense, smoldering looks on the cover that didn't turn out to actually be about sisters or straight girls who are platonic friends/social or romantic rivals, so when they finally weren't Just Friends, I didn't expect it.
I was so certain that all the femslashy subtext I thought I was seeing between Felicity and the other girls was only me seeing what I wanted to see (after all, there's always someone eager to jump up and tell me exactly that every single time I see slashy subtext in anything, including some of the authors themselves, you know? And the heroine was straight and had a het romance-type subplot, so, yeah) that when I read further into the series and discovered that there actually were bi and lesbian girls in my mainstream YA historical fantasy novel, I think I might have actually cried.
I think in that case, though, and in most modern cases (i.e. not books written by queer writers in pervious eras where they had to pull the literary equivalent of the celluloid closet) where I thought two characters were kind of slashy and then they turned out to be canon, it was less that I was distracted by "slash goggles" and more that I was so sure that a writer who wasn't either explicitly LGBT or a slasher gone pro just wouldn't bother to include queerness that I kept thinking "they really seem attracted to/in love with each other, but of course you never get that kind of thing in actual canon. It's either the result of that peculiar kind of utter blindness to how homoerotic something looks that makes some people unable to see even blindingly in-you-face canon gay relationships (ex: like those fanboys who insisted that the gay couple in The Authority had to be straight even after you saw them in bed together and they'd kissed on panel) or it's fanservice the writers are never going to deliver on; the writers will never actually go there, I shouldn't get my hopes up, it's too good to be true," right up until they actually did go there.
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I was so certain that all the femslashy subtext I thought I was seeing between Felicity and the other girls was only me seeing what I wanted to see (after all, there's always someone eager to jump up and tell me exactly that every single time I see slashy subtext in anything, including some of the authors themselves, you know? And the heroine was straight and had a het romance-type subplot, so, yeah) that when I read further into the series and discovered that there actually were bi and lesbian girls in my mainstream YA historical fantasy novel, I think I might have actually cried.
I think in that case, though, and in most modern cases (i.e. not books written by queer writers in pervious eras where they had to pull the literary equivalent of the celluloid closet) where I thought two characters were kind of slashy and then they turned out to be canon, it was less that I was distracted by "slash goggles" and more that I was so sure that a writer who wasn't either explicitly LGBT or a slasher gone pro just wouldn't bother to include queerness that I kept thinking "they really seem attracted to/in love with each other, but of course you never get that kind of thing in actual canon. It's either the result of that peculiar kind of utter blindness to how homoerotic something looks that makes some people unable to see even blindingly in-you-face canon gay relationships (ex: like those fanboys who insisted that the gay couple in The Authority had to be straight even after you saw them in bed together and they'd kissed on panel) or it's fanservice the writers are never going to deliver on; the writers will never actually go there, I shouldn't get my hopes up, it's too good to be true," right up until they actually did go there.