I take a certain glee in working inappropriately humorous parts into serious fics. Among other things I have a running gag of a serial killer being mistaken for a twelve-year-old in my current big thriller project.
oh hell yes. winter soldier fics where bucky's got an internal quip track while he's murdering his way through hydra mooks make me flail.
We've just written a scene where the terrifying murder cult is listing the alleged sins of their next victim, and in struck-out small text after such things as Fornication and Heresy is the cultist bitching about how hard the guy's name is to spell. (The victim survives - I think we couldn't pull off something like that if they succeeded with him.)
I love fanfics that take a character that has, like, 3 sentences about them in the main canon, and manage to spin out novel length character studies out of that. It's so good!
Co-writing fanfic gives me the opportunity to confuse and disturb my co-writers in new ways every day. A conversation about which Disney characters could be aro and/or ace led indirectly to me linking mine to this.
Does going into a freeform tag for something moderately weird and just scrolling through the summaries count as a delight? Because it's a thing I do.
A little bit fanfic, a little bit origfic, a little bit callout for myself: Lovingly rendered foodmaking scenes. Be it a bartending scene where the cocktails are mixed in exquisite detail, a baking scene where the author writes it like they wanted to be running a cooking blog instead, or a 4k chapter where the MC makes pasta and sauce from scratch while tenderly making meatballs and contemplating the wines to go with it--food as a stand-in for romance/sexual tension is a tried and true standard of m/m romance especially that I just. Love. Yes, author, regale me more with which wines pair with this delicate white fish our MC is making for his romantic partner. I want the it.
i'm the same way with building stuff and other engineering type processes. are you building a homemade tank in your garage? make me smell the welding flux and hear the sizzle as it melts! throwing a bridge across a raging river? i want to hear the suspension cables sing in the wind! repairing a damaged helicopter behind enemy lines? oh YES please.
I like when people get science at least sort of right eta: if of course they're trying for something that's meant to be at least somewhat realistic, i'm not going to complain if things work differently because Magic or something similar. But when there's references to, say, specific techniques or ideas or theories, it's nice if it's apparent that a bit of research or thought went into it.
BIG same. My self-indulgent SU humanstuck includes a bit of silly playing with the narration at one point, during a serious scene, and it’s possibly my favorite thing I’ve ever written.
I have a soft spot for working in bizarre ships to everything. My current writing project/RP now has a weird kismesissic relationship between Professor Ratigan and Bill Cipher, based on competing to see how many geniuses' lives they can ruin.
Convincing crack ships mixed in can make me like fics with my NOTPs. I'm not a fan of Davekat but I love one fic which focuses on it because it has background blackrom TavFef, RoseGam, and JadeEq, plus recipes as metaphors, Vriska getting called out but not bashed, and a ton of puns which the author continues in review replies. So much to love.
The filtering options on Ao3 make me happy. Exclude crossovers in particular is really helpful if you want Bayonetta fanfiction. Due to Smash she's very common in crossover stuff. Also I mean her general deal works well with other monster hunty settings. I also always really like when I find a fandom that is predominantly f/f in terms of the ships. It's really hard to find f/f stuff in abundance so I deeply treasure fandoms where the scales lean in favor of f/f. Thank you Bayonetta. But on the subject of Bayo fanfic I do like when people write weird idfic for no other reason than my brain said so and I wrote it I dunno. Like even if I don't read those things or even if I dislike the thing in particular I do like finding shit that someone wrote because their brain just said Do The Thing We Need It and then they did it. I like that people can just feel free to write shit. Makes me happy.
Oh man, yeah. I saw someone writing idfic with a character i love and while it was 100% not my jam I was so fucking thrilled about it anyway bc I hoped they felt good writing it (cause i had done the same fairly recently with the same character and boy it felt damn good)
that blessed moment when you click on a fic expecting to be disappointed from prior experiences and then the fic turns out to be a great one that fills you with feelings instead :D
i should try the exclude crossovers option on 'discworld' fic, to filter out all the fics where the only discworld element is that death talks in allcaps.
