lil bit. some of them are pretty good! but when you're in the mood for von lipvig and dearheart lovingly snarking at each other over golem rights and showmanship, even the best torchwood fic doesn't satisfy. the good news is, the discworld fandom is still going strong, so the search is actually worth doing! which brings me to another of my delights: venerable fandoms that keep on trucking. jeeves & wooster, original flavor sherlock holmes, even moby dick! back when you first read moby dick in high school, did you ship ishmael/queequeg with the force of a thousand suns? so did everyone else, and the fire shows no signs of dying. :D
ps that's one of my favorite het ships btw few het ships really resonate with me but these two hit the sweet spot
someone asked the author of this fic where they got the idea for present mic to be a techie villain and they were like "a plot hole, tbh" and i'm that reply gave me fucking life. why is he like that? a plot hole. there was a hole in the plot that needed to be filled, and a techie villain!mic did the job perfectly
https://archiveofourown.org/works/18451967/chapters/43713959 i didn't actually finish it and don't intend to - i think i noped out a little past 2/3 through? i like the writing, i really loved the initial concept, and the type of villain mic is in this is my favorite (so i have a thing for villains getting yandere crushes on their hero nemesis) buuut i think it starts dragging pretty badly after about halfway through, mic and eraser have had basically the same fucking fight (about their future together) like six times by then? and it's very. meh. oh! okay but there's a reveal in mic's tragic backstory about halfway through and mic is like "...why does that matter. even if i'd known that then i'd still be a villain" and man, that was also good so it's a mixed rec on this particular fic (many good points! ending third dragged too much for me to finish it), and i read this last night, so i haven't read any of their other stuff but i do definitely plan on it eta: i might have been more willing to finish it (it looks like i actually noped out at chapter 28, so almost 5/6 through) if the author hadn't constantly reassured the readers that there was going to be a happy ending in the author's notes. it took out a lot of the tension in mic's murder plots, which is probs a big part of why it dragged so much for me. why am i reading the same fight over and over, like it can't be solved, when i already know by word of god that i'm getting my happy ending? felt very fiona - "skip ahead, skip ahead!"
I appreciate that even in domestic fluff fics people do try to incorporate Bayonetta's weird fucking lore. I can't say that it's all successful but the stupid lore is part of the appeal of that franchise's world. So like yeah make Jeanne and Bayo's kid the rebirth of some god that plays into the chaotic mash of Norse and Abrahamic myth that this world works on. In a fic that is otherwise 90% just standard babyfic.
SLOW BURN, SLOW BURN, SLOW BURN But yeah, two or more goofs figuring out they love each other more than they realized is just,,, magnifique,,,,,,
Also curlique's cyberbunny apocalypse Homestuck au is magical, I've been a fan for Years and reread it fairly often
When people want to do their own thing and just straight up tag fic "Canon Died" and similar - it fills me with glee
i'm trying to figure out how to shut down my Autistic Nitpicking Gland enough to do that myself. it's so exhilarating to read.
On one hand I’m going “well it would have been damn hard not to” and on the other hand I’m abstractly relieved I’m not the only one.
And since I’m here, hmmmmmmmm good things in fic. There’s so many. If your crossover is strange enough that the concept, tags, and/or description make me laugh, I promise I will at least give it a look even if I’m pretty darn sure it won’t be my cup of tea.
I really like the cliched porn setups. Being snowed in is my favorite variant of it. Though I do also like the depressing variant of that where the couple dies in the cold instead. There was some Lyn/Florina fic I really liked that went that route. They were making a trip to Florina's homeland. It was not a successful trip. Shit hurt but it was a good hurt.
Fandom-specific delight: PearlRose fic where their relationship is portrayed as the messy tragic toxic garbage fire it is in canon. Tragically rare for some reason, but it’s such a treat when you can find it. <3
The fake dating trope. No matter how many times I see it I'm always like 'fake dating... but... REAL FEELINGS??? :O'. I am a simple creature. Also, a less common plot device where one character thinks they're dating and in a happy and loving relationship but the other character either A) doesn't think they're in a relationship or B) thinks that they're being used/this is an elaborate prank/they're just making an ex jealous, etc. and is sad because 'I actually love them but... they don't love me'.
I love NOTHING more than 'beautiful closet key helps self-loathing queer mess love themselves and beautiful people of their own gender' and it's basically all I write myself, with variants between 'and they lived happily ever after' vs 'and that was the most beautiful transient experience of my youth vs 'we both had a lot of issues and were really bad for each other in retrospect but I fuckin worshiped them.' But Kinks Aside my most favoritest kinds of fanfictions are the ones that take canons with only a little bit of cultural lore and dig the fuck in making cultures, religions, hierarchies, social relations, ect that fit into the canon lore as we know it, invent a little, and expand magnificently. That's what my own brain does, I always wonder so much about what various cultures are like in fiction, so it's a treat when someone else was doing it. I fell hard into This Zelda fic the other day and read it in one go even though I've never finished a full fucking game and didn't know half of what they were talking about, I just fell into the expansive worldbuilding--and even better, expansive magical system building--so fucking hard. Nothing like someone spending ridiculous time and care making a system for how magic works in their setting. Homestuck was a fandom really known for doing that, playing with the setting and making something bigger, which is why I personally ended up as such a sucker for it. If I really want to take it back, A Long, Hard Road made me realize what you could fucking do with transformative fiction Back In The Day though of course far better examples have been written since. Ahhh, memories.
Really nothing suckers me in like fanfictions for video games that try to explain what's just cool/pretty/a plot device in the games, whether it's the battle system, the magic system, the weird insular cultures, the insanely close distinctive biospheres, whatever is videogameish about it. Taking that and giving it its own, new due. THAT is a good shit.
