A Baldur's Gate 3 Femslash Fanzine

From the bisexuals in Baldur's Gate to the lesbians in Luskan, from the dykes in Daggerford to the asexuals of Amn, from the femmes of Firedrake Bay to the trans women of Tethyr, from the pansexuals of Phalorm to the butches of Beregost... and who could forget the women of Waterdeep? Or the non-binary of Neverwinter?

Sapphic love comes in all flavours, and we want to celebrate it all with you, with the wonderful women of Baldur's Gate 3.

Welcome to the blog and central social media page for Sword Coast Sapphics: A Baldur's Gate 3 Femslash Fanzine! On this blog, you'll find all the information you need to learn how to get involved and get excited about our new community project.

What is this project?

This is a planned digital zine for Baldur's Gate 3, made by fans for fans. We are looking for artists, writers, poets, musicians, cosplay artists and photographers, VP artists — whatever you have to offer, we'd love to see it, as long as it's centring the sapphic experience of Baldur's Gate.

What is 'the sapphic experience'?

The sapphic experience is whatever you want it to be. For some people, that means they want to see an explicitly gay relationship between two women. For some people, they want to see something more queer-platonic and more community focused. Some people want to see Shadowheart's journey as a trans woman, and how that shapes her relationships with Shar, faith and other women. Some people want to see Lae'zel at the centre of a gith gang-bang as part of Vlaakith's initiation rituals.

This zine is about women, and the love, lust, affection and friendship they share with other women. We are trans positive, queer positive, non-binary inclusive.

Important links:

Frequently asked questions

Creation and publishing timeline

Technical specifications

Creator application form

Moderator application form

Bluesky

Carrd

Links to our Discord and any other social media presence will be added here in the coming weeks, so please check back often!

What a wonderful weekend we've had compiling all of your absolutely fantastic applications - by now, we've emailed everyone who sent in an application with the result, so if you haven't heard from us, please check your spam mail!

If by some sheer bad luck you've not received anything (one of our mods had her email eaten by internet goblins), please feel free to reach out to us and we'll see if we can track down your application and your outcome

Only a few hours remain to get your applications in to be a zine contributor! Does your heart yearn to paint a sapphic masterpiece? Do you have some femslash porn hiding up your sleeve just looking for the right opportunity to come out? Have you been known to try your hand at poetry?

By now, I assume that the news of Discord's intention to roll out global age verification has reached most of you. There have been many, many opinion pieces and a great deal of outrage, and I will leave those discussions to people who are far more concise and far better educated on the subject than myself, but having said that, I am obviously disappointed to see the further nannification of the internet continue

As stated in our Frequently Asked Questions, we did ask that all applicants be over the age of 16. These new arrangements by Discord require applicants to be over the age of 18 in order to access certain content deemed NSFW. I will formally state here - at no point will I or my mods be performing age checks. If you as an individual have applied and are under the age bracket we set, and have also managed to bypass Discord's age verification, we will not be double checking that. I will ask that you exercise discretion, and please do not do anything that could jeopardise your involvement or the project discord in general

In regards to the censoring of material of a sexual nature - I have personally already encountered this in other zine discords, and while frustrating, there are obvious work arounds such as sharing links to third party uploads, establishing a shared zine WIP folder off of discord, and so on. Things may go slightly slower as a result of this, but it is manageable

If you are personally intending to boycott Discord and do not wish to partake in the zine discord community as a result - absolutely fair, and I respect that. I can make arrangements to liaise directly via email instead, as we have already set up such an arrangement for another participant who could not use discord for reasons that are their own. While my intent was to build a community to foster a genuine love and desire to encourage and uplift femslash works in the BG3 fandom, I also understand that for some people, the request for government ID is a step wildly too far

Our acceptance emails will still be going out on the weekend as planned, with links provided to the discord. If you would rather not participate in the discord, simply reply to the email and we will arrange a workaround for you

I appreciate your trust and your patience while we navigate this slightly bumpy start to the zine, but look forward to getting to know you all in the coming weeks

Hello nonny! Thank you for your query, and all excellent questions.

In terms of qualifications, prior experience is always a bonus but is not a necessity - after all, creator and head mod @defira85 has no experience with running a zine either! She's done a lot of team management over the years in IRL space, and has taken part in plenty of fandom events and zines, but this is her first too

Having prior experience running other fandom events is excellent, because it gives you an idea of the scope of things and how to potentially wrangle a large number of people who all have very different ideas on how a theme should be approached. It gives you experience in event promotion, and how to manage fandom expectations and public communication

In terms of what I (Defira) specifically am looking for? I'm looking for people who are enthusiastic about the concept, who want to bring a fun and joyful experience to the fandom. I want people who are comfortable directing a group, because if you're selected you'll be personally assigned 5-10 individual creators who you will be their main point of contact. You'll be responsible for checking in on them to make sure they're progressing and hitting their check in targets, chasing them up if they're late, supporting them if they're falling behind. You will be giving creative advice and encouragement, but you won't be their only port of call if they need beta-reading/feedback, so don't stress too hard about being under pressure there

Hello dear anon!

If you're excited enough about the characters that you're interested in making art, that's no small thing! Obviously there's a lot of debate in fandom about what degree you must engage with a piece of art/book/game/movie in order to partake, but our head mod believes that in our modern artistic landscape, there are any number of ways to engage with games outside of actually playing them. Some people don't have computers or consoles that can play the game, after all, and their exposure is entirely through others via Tumblr or Instagram or AO3 and so on. Twitch wouldn't be such a popular platform if people didn't enjoy watching others play games that they have no intention of playing themselves. The entire concept of a Let's Play video revolutionised access to games for people who can't play, either due to accessibility limitations or cost

Which is all a long way of saying, we'd love to have you! You're excited about the characters, and you're interested in contributing, and that is more than enough in our books. I (head mod again) have definitely made art for fandoms I'm not in before, as a gift for friends

We've got just under two weeks left in our submission period, how many do you think we'll get in total?

Either way, love that you're doing this and I can't wait to see the final product! Thank you! ❤️

Hello! We are happy to accept a piece you have already started work on, as long as it meets the specifications of the zine:

Cannot have been posted publicly prior to the zine launch in September

Meets the word limit of minimum count 1.5k and maximum word count of 4k

If you are planning a longfic for Minthara and you think that your first chapter might be under 4k, we can certainly have a chat about whether you'd like to submit that first chapter, and we can then link onwards to AO3 for our readers to find the rest once you've posted it publicly.

But we couldn't fit the entire longfic in the zine, and we also realise it's a long time to sit on a whole fic without posting it. So if you don't think you can wait that long before starting to post chapters, we would recommend submitting perhaps a side chapter, a scene that doesn't fit in the flow of the story you're writing but nonetheless adds to the overall story you want to tell for Minthara

We are only a few days in to applications and we've already got 18 fanfic writers, 17 fanartists, 4 VP artists, and a poet! What an absolute EXPLOSION of BG3 lady-lovin' content we've got coming in September!!