what are your fanfic delights?

I go absolutely ham for worldbuilding in media where there is Cool Stuff but it's not, like, expanded on. that's why birchbow's "price of forgiveness" is my all time fav homestuck fic: the clown church worldbuilding is so fucking cool!! or any dragon age fic that explores "what is the qun, how is life there and how does it affect tal-vashoth" in detail, or life in orzammar. or worldbuilding concerning How Does The Species Work (specifically shit like horn care gets me, the little everyday routines of people who arent humans)

 

i once read a harry potter fic that, while not very long, had a point about The Old Ways -- of where magic came from, of wizards being Different in kind of a fey way, with all the unspoken laws and the ways things are done and hmmgnhf i was so goddamn floored because the words good!! good words!! also grimmauld place was Pissed and Bitter and tbfh mood

 

Incredibly self-indulgent research fests are super up there for me—you wrote this entire fic specifically to explore the nuances of a particular set of wine vintages? More fucking power to you bro, I am absolutely enraptured by how much you love writing about this.

 

not about fanfic, but I love how every single Good Omens fanvid ends with that one clip from the end of the final episode, you know the one. if it's not at the very end it's somewhere near it. the entire fandom decided as one that this was The Perfect Moment and it shall always make its deserved appearance (and they're right, and it should).

 

References to things that I recognise! I will die of joy if a fanfic about something I love quotes or mentions or invokes another thing I love. (There was even a certain glee several years ago when a fic in a non-magical fandom casually dropped in references to a character knowing a unicorn which made no sense at all in context, because the reference was to a thoroughly obscure book series I love - Spellsinger, to be exact.)

 

@garden i need u to kno. i am reading that fic now. INCREDIBLE. I LOVE IT. THIS IS AMAZING THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SHARING IT

 

fic that takes the female side characters from canon and either rewrites (parts of) it with them in focus or just dives in real deep with the introspectiveness
or just! plotty canonverse stuff where the girls get to shine! please!

 

I actually absolutely love fics that take fantastical world based characters -- like giant robot space pilots or magical mages riding dragons -- and plop them down in mundane settings but go absolutely ham on the drama to offset it. Like the more soap opera and off the wall dramatic it is, while the characters are absolutely still themselves just...broader and more enlarged (? is that a proper word to describe it lol), the more i'm like yessssss drown me in it rub it all over my body.
It's a hard balancing act to do that and not make the characters wholly OOC but those people that can walk that tightrope deserve awards and have my love.

 

Oh hell yes. Give me that sweet sweet mundane soap opera drama. <3

 

seconding the hell yes. when someone manages to pull off a good coffee shop au or high school au, it’s absolutely divine.

 

I love "Turn Left" AUs where characters make different choices than they did in canon, or where characters survived when they didn't in canon. (Feather has this really great mini series where Lily lives and goes to her sister, where they reconcile for instance.)

 

Well done roleswap gets me good.

Also this includes doujin comics as well as fanfic but I really love when you can tell that someone has a very specific way they conceive of certain Touhous. Even if I don't necessarily agree with their interpretations I like seeing those interpretations. And I love when you can tell that there's been a lot of care and time put into how a particular artist does a particular set of these characters. We're all building our own perfect little Touhou dollhouses and some of us share them with others and it's just really cool that you can tell apart, say, different creators Sakuremi stories not just by art or prose or any of that but also just...how they conceive of the characters. What sorts of traits Sakuya and Remilia have and how they relate to one another and what their history is even if it is only alluded to in the stories proper. And you see this over courses of works which aren't necessarily chronologically linked, most of them. It's like looking at an ever expanding story quilt. It's beautiful and unique and it's something Touhou creators are really, really good at doing because Touhou is uniquely well set up for that as a source material and as a culture.

 

Well handled in-canon concepts. (Okay this is mostly about quadrants.) If you can give me kismesis that is more than just really bad pain porn and is an actual relationship you have my axe (buried in the wall close enough to slightly nick your ear). I love well done quadrants okay. (Someone mentioned Price of Forgiveness previously. OH. MY. GOD. I was so initially reluctant to read it because I was terrified that the GHB/Karkat would be kind of terrible because GHB. But it was so good. It was/is an actual relationship. Goddamn. I also love the HIC/Karkat, mostly because this Meenah does seem to be less self-centered than standard HIC. Still horrible, but with a wider range of emotions and affections.)

 

i like bnha fic but not the canon material, because there's something so wonderful about the multitude of fics that go "okay. what if deku never got a quirk and was awesome anyway"

idk, it hits something really satisfying to have this character be told over and over that they're worthless and useless but they're not, and they don't need any external magic to prove that either

 

This this this.

 

I really enjoy fics that take a m/m couple and make them f/f. I dont know why, it just makes me very happy for some reason.

 

I love the sort of Sufficient Velocity flavored fic that takes a peculiar or sometimes downright bizarre setting and just... goes full Tom Clancy mil-SF nerd on everything. Lovingly detailed descriptions of fictional (war) machines? Yes. Take the weird and expand on it, make it grounded and real while keeping the things that make it unique. (By contrast, I find actual Tom Clancy books kind of meh - perhaps because the fic authors are willing to write more than one protagonist).
Examples being things like Peptuck's Tiberium Wars (yes, on The Pit); An Entry With a Bang (the actual Clancyverse crosses over with Battletech, of all things, forum collab); or The Next Frontier, a somewhat less militant, crossover of, uh... Kerbal Space Program and Firefly. Actually KSP has a surprising (i.e., nonzero) amount of really good fic.