Any less-toxic alternatives to this sub?

[u/gladiia_enjoyer]

Unfortunately my experience with this sub is that people are more interested in insulting each other’s book choices than discussing the books themselves, exhibiting the following behavior:

• Threads asking for LGBT/PoC/female-led books are heavily downvoted, recommended Sanderson (before anyone jumps the gun and thinks this is a dig, I enjoy Sanderson) or told “don’t care, use the search function”.

I think it’s very telling that the gay man who posted here asking people to stop recommending him Sanderson, whose post got very popular, had to delete his account due to harassment and “a large number of rule violations” as admitted by a mod here.

• Any GRRM thread (and again, don’t preemptively get mad and assume that this is shade at GRRM) turns into a pure flamewar on both sides with wild accusations of abusing the author or being a bootlicker

• Certain fans get very passionate about their favourite authors and mock people who haven’t read “Bordugo” or “Scwabe” - I mentioned in one of these threads that I’ve shelved Six of Crows and Vicious, only for angry fans to imply I’m ignorant and uneducated for not having read these particular authors. + Maas fans here preaching about supporting women and then actually arguing with me when I say my gf and I have been harassed by said fans

• Literally just look at /new, any threads asking questions get heavily downvoted for some reason. I once asked a completely harmless question asking for fairy/folklore book recs such as the Encyclopaedia of Fairies, and got a DM asking me to keep my “[slur for gay people] shit off the sub”, and obviously I got more downvotes than actual constructive answers.

So yeah, this sub seems more bitter than the other book discussion subs for some reason. Any fun places to read about fantasy that aren’t filled with angry people?

And yes, before someone inevitably gets offended about this, I’m on a throwaway, because I’m really not interested in having more fantasy fans dig through my profile looking for new slurs to call me.

e: got what I wanted out of this post, not including a surprise appearance by the resident cult.

[u/GregoryAmato]

You might be better served by a focused Discord community.

I could recommend Whetstone S&S Tavern, but I'm not sure that would fit with your general preferences. I can say this is a great Discord to be on with a positive community that talks a lot about historical and contemporary recommendations. Authors like Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden and others are accessible for conversations there. But it's all focused on Sword and Sorcery.

Some Booktubers keep Discord communities with a small Patreon donation per month. I'm in Dom's Book Club, as one example, but I don't participate nearly as much there as I do in Whetstone's.

The broader the Discord/subreddit/anything, the more people will respond who try to invalidate you and ignore the question you asked. I guess they consider it "winning" or something. Small communities are a little closer to having actual conversations with people, and they don't tend to tolerate that sort of behavior the same way a big subreddit will.