lareinedesviolettes

[lareinedesviolettes]

The Wayback Machine and the Quest for Deleted Fics

What is the Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine is the time machine used by Peabody and Sherman in "Rocky and Bullwinkle." It's also the nickname of The Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org/) which, since the late '90s, has crawled the internet and just. Archived everything it finds. (You can read their history here). People now can enter pages they want to save (I used it to preserve some censored Chinese gay books, for example, entering all the URLs myself to be sure that Wayback captured them), and I don't even know how else it finds stuff, but it's pretty amazing. How amazing?

This is their capture of my Tripod anime webpage from when I was in college. Some of the graphics are missing, yeah, but like. I made this website in fricken 1999, and stopped maintaining it in 2001 or 2002. Back then my e-mail address was still "unforth@penpen.com" and webrings were a thing and I was well known for creating Winamp skins in Jasc. That it's there at all is pretty fucking incredible.

Who cares about your old anime page?

Other than me? No one. BUT. Wayback's "catch all, save all, store all" approach to archiving means it's an invaluable tool for finding deleted fic. For example, here's their capture of "Rock Salt and Feathers," which was (as far as I know) the first Destiel-specific fic archive made on the internet, and many of the earliest Destiel fics were posted there or x-posted there from LJ.

The owner deleted it in 2010, taking all the fics with it, but many can still be accessed - and saved by my project, and read by anyone who wants to - because they're in Wayback.

Okay, that's way more interesting. How do I use Wayback to find stuff like that?

The key to using the Wayback Machine to find old and/or deleted fics is that you need the original url. Thus, teaching someone how to use Wayback to find deleted fics ends up mostly being about teaching someone tricks for finding ancient urls for fics that have been deleted (and occasionally when you find the url you actually discover the fic isn't deleted at all, which is always nice!). Once you have the URL, the "how to use" part is easy, you just go to web.archive.org and enter the url in the search box.

The bar graph of years shows every time Wayback Machine "captured" (archived) the specific page at that url. Often, each of these captures will be different, especially for websites that update regularly (like an archive or an author's works page). When you click on a year, you'll get a calendar, and then you just pick the date and time you want (I highlighted April 18th, 2009, as an example, and because it was my dad's 68th birthday so why not? It's also about a month before I personally started watching SPN, ah, memories...). Once you've picked the capture you want, it'll load the next page and show you a capture of it - so here's a (different than above) capture of Rock Salt and Feathers, dating to within a week of when the website was first founded! The same bar graph is now up top, and you can click on the bar you want to jump to that date and see how the website changed over time - so this capture on April 18th, 2009, is pretty bare bones; by the time of the May capture I screen capped above, things have moved along!

Further, once you're in an archive of a deleted webpage you can (or at least, you can try) to navigate it as normal, just...all within Wayback's interface. So like, on this page, I can access their list of new works (and find different ones by trying the different captures)...

...and I can even read them!

Uh oh, better watch out for those 4.20 spoilers. Anyway, the point is - if you've got the original URL, you can use it to load a deleted page into Wayback, and then navigate that website as normal...at least up until you try a link that Wayback didn't archive, and then you'll hit a "sorry, we don't have that one" page (I'm not gonna screen cap cause at this rate I'll hit Tumblr's image limit in about 2 more minutes). Not everything will be there, ever. Rock Salt and Feathers is unusually well-preserved; when I did a deep-dive and spent three days trying to find things there, I was able to preserve nearly 90% of all the fic I know of that was posted there, and some of the rest I was able to find by tracking down alts for the people who posted there - many (though not all!) had x-posted their works to LJ, and later some ALSO x-posted to AO3, once AO3 existed (Rock Salt and Feathers predates the existence of AO3 by about 6 months).

So, as you can see - using Wayback is the easy part (at least until it isn't - more on that later...it's easy on a simple page like Rock Salt and Feathers, hence my using it for examples, but it can get hella complicated for more modern, dynamic websites like AO3). The hard part?

(cutting to a read more...I hate using them cause then people don't read but this post is just. so long.)

Where am I supposed to get the original URL for a fic that's been deleted for 5 years or a decade or more?

Google search is your friend (or your preferred search engine I guess, but I always use Google). If you know the username and the exact title, it's easy - especially using quotes, which is also your friend. So, for example, I couldn't remember the URL for Rock Salt and Feathers and I didn't actually have it saved, so I just googled "rocksalt and feathers" (in quotes). It prompt got mad at me and told me rock salt should be two words, and so I changed it, and sure enough the first result was an ancient LJ post that included the links I needed. Which is to say, what you're really looking for isn't the "thing itself," but rather other websites that reference the thing in question. For works that were originally posted on LJ, FF.net, personal websites like Rock Salt and Feathers, or elsewhere, ancient rec lists tend to be winners for finding the links. Learning some search tricks can also help - like, if you don't know the exact title, try variations, or try just the part you're sure of. If you remember a quote, try searching for that. If the title is something super common, try adding the author name or, if you don't know it, search for it using "(name of fic)" destiel. Anything you can think of, remember, etc., will help. Sometimes, you just get as close as you can, and then look through the results, and often there'll be something close that even if it's not right, will lead you to a resource that'll help.

Alternatively, again for older works, searching for a different work that you know was released around the same time. So, like, looking for a fic by...idk...Fossarian? Or cautionzombies? Try search for aesc, or bauble, or obstinatrix, or annundriel - someone else who was active when Fossarian and cautionzombies were. (Obviously knowing some Destiel fandom history helps in this case, but there are enough fandom olds around that even if you don't know this info, learning it is an ask away). Especially, try searching for a contemporary whose works are still up, because you can get titles for those more easily (for example, in this case, aesc, annundriel and obstinatrix all have some works cross posted on AO3, so finding the titles is easier, and then you just...keep going til you find what you want). You can also try looking for works where they were betas or editors or gift-recipients, and/or you can kinda...map out...their old friends groups, by seeing who commented where. For example, looking for links to cautionzombies stuff? cautionzomes and annundriel were friends, which I learned by poking around a fuck-ton, and annundriel's accounts are still up, and some old cautionzombie links can be found in annundriel's journals. The links don't work but that's not the point, you just need something to plug into Wayback!

And, as a side note - just because an old LJ link is dead, don't assume that the work is lost! Many of those authors x-posted onto AO3 once they had AO3 accounts (heck, Gedry was continuing to back up works to AO3 as recently as last year), and even among those who didn't (such as annundriel or CloudyJenn, who each only backed up a few) they often simply ported their accounts to Dreamwidth, so you can find their works just by reformatting their LJ url (username.livejournal.com) to a dreamwidth url (username.dreamwidth.org - works for me too, if you want to see the awful shit I wrote in 2005). Also, sometimes you'll find they x-posted to FF.net but not AO3 (which, granted, presents FF.net own array of challenges for backing up, but that's for a different post - drop me an ask if you want me to write that up sooner rather than later, otherwise I'll just do it whenever I remember). All of which is to say - before you assume a dead link means a deleted work you can save yourself some trouble (and some heartbreak, Wayback isn't great for LJ in general because of how LJ posts and blogs were structured) it's worth your while to take a little extra time and check - okay, was it x-posted? Did the person have alternate usernames they used on different platforms? Did they have a writing community on LJ where they posted (for example, a lot of authors posted their works directly to deancasbigbang.livejournal.com or deancas-xmas.livejournal.com, and also a lot of authors made communities even just for themselves, and those communities remained even when they deleted their personal accounts). Even if you find they deleted across all platforms, it's easier to find full works from AO3 or FF.net on Wayback than it is to find works from LJ, so it's worth a try. And, honestly, with really old stuff? Finding the old work x-posted somewhere, or just asking someone like me, or the folks at @destielfanfic, is more likely to find it for you than putting an LJ url into Wayback, though in a pinch that of course is an option too.

Unforth, stop babbling about LJ, I care about deathbanjo, or apokteino, or TamrynEradni, or...

...or anyone who posted on AO3 exclusively, and deleted more recently, yeah, I get it. Of course, the tricks for finding the urls remain similar - rec lists are your friends! But, for AO3, there's another super handy trick. It doesn't always work, but it's by far the best place to start.

Go to @ao3feed-destiel.

Search for the author's name, and/or the fic title, and/or anything you can remember about the fic.

Since mid-2013, the Destiel AO3 feed Tumblr has logged probably around 75% of all the Destiel that's been posted. There ARE gaps - works that weren't initially tagged Destiel, or times when the feed was down and just caught nothing, or "oops the author changed their name four times and I don't know which one they were using when they posted That Fic," or "there are three people with very similar usernames" or "the fic is called 'carry on' and there are a bajillion fics with the same title." It's not perfect, but as a first step it's essential. Because, whatever you find, it'll have:

The link to the original AO3 post

The link to the author's name page at the time

The exact date and time it was originally posted

The original title, tags, etc.

If the work was in a series, the series link

And all of the links can be put into Wayback to help you find The Thing You Want. So, to use a recent example from someone I know doesn't mind having their stuff distributed (or, in this case, discovered on Wayback)...

When you click on the tinyurl, you get an AO3 error page, but, more importantly, in the enter-the-url bar, you get the original url for the fic! Which, in this case is:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/8447584

And then you can go over to Wayback, and...

Well, lookie there, it's the fic that HazelDomain locked! (Note that you'll get a "do you agree to the terms of use" and potentially other pop-ups. Just say yes and click through, there's no way to avoid them because there's no way to access these pages in Wayback as if you are "logged in as you," so the notifications and, in the case of Mature and Explicit works, the "you must be 18+ to proceed..." warnings will pop up every single time (and the 18+ one will cause you depressing issues, which in general just make Mature and Explicit deleted works MUCH harder to find, more on that later, yes this post is really gonna be that long, sorry...)

Now, suppose you weren't looking for this fic by HazelDomain, but instead were looking for one that ao3feed-Destiel didn't have on their list. Well, now is when that link to HazelDomain username comes in handy!

http://archiveofourown.org/users/HazelDomain/pseuds/HazelDomain

You can put this directly into Wayback, and it'll show HazelDomain's home page or, alternatively, if you loaded the fic above (for example) you can just click where it says HazelDomain below the title, and you'll get to go to their main page, which'll list their most recent works (on the date that the capture was taken) and some other links. Tada! You've found HazelDomain fics on Wayback.

(Side note on all of this: AO3 links are stable and permanent, which means that they do not change even if the nature of a fic changes. If the fic's posting date is edited? If the author changes their username? If the title changes? If it's added or removed from a series or a collection? If it's orphaned or added to an anonymous collection? The link will never change. That's how I know that the so-called "orphaned" version of With Understanding is actually a fake - it doesn't have the same URL as the actual version of With Understanding that apokteino posted. So, if you find a link to a work and it turns out that work has only been orphaned, not deleted, that link will still work! For example...

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13063581

One of sir_kingsley's link, with the exact same link it had before it was orphaned!)

Okay, but the one I want isn't on the author's page even after I checked!

As I mentioned, a basic old site like Rock Salt and Feathers? Very easy to use on Wayback. A complex website like AO3? Much more messy, which means there are a bunch of tricks you can use to try to "get at" the data. There's always the chance it's not there at all; a random ficlet by a little known author? Unlikely to have made it into Wayback, unfortunately, especially if the ficlet was Mature or Explicit rated. But, there are bunch of things you can try, and there's never any guessing which will work until you try. When I'm looking for something that's been deleted? I try them all.

Trick 1: The "/pseud" trick.

See how in HazelDomain's author link, it's listed as "users/HazelDomain/pseuds/HazelDomain"? There's a few tricks you can use related to this. First, on AO3, both "users/(username)" and "users/(username)/pseud/(username)" function as links (even if the second instance of username isn't actually a pseud and is just a repeat of the same username, as in the HazelDomain example). As such, they are different urls for Wayback machine searching purposes. Sometimes, when you search "user/(username)" you'll get results but get none when you search for "users/(username)/pseuds/(username), and vice verse. To Wayback, these are two completely different urls, so you have to check them individually - AO3 knows internally that these links route to the same place but Wayback is just basically taking screen caps (well, HTML text caps) so it doesn't know they're equal - so check both!

Trick 2: The "they changed usernames" trick.

If you know that an author changed usernames, try plugging every single one into those "user/(username)" and "user/(username)/pseud/(username)" links. Is it a lot of work? Yes. How bad did you want that fic, again?

(side note: having trouble figuring out if they had alternate usernames? Yeah, it's a nightmare. Checking old rec lists is one way to find out. If the work is in a series, there's also a trick - even if the person changes username, the "Series created by: (username)" thing at the top will still show the username they had when they created the series. Or, if they had a fic with a really unusual title, try doing a google search for that title specifically, even if it's not the one you're looking for, because the odds that two people used that crazy-specific title are low, and you'll be able to see results that might give the different name. Or-or, as yet another option...my master spreadsheet lists every alternate name for a given user that I know of...for example, deathbanjo has also been loneprairies, beenghosting, and tumbleweeds. Also note - unlike WORK links, which are stable even if the person changes their username, orphans, etc., "user/(username)" links are NOT stable. If you search for, idk, bellacatbee...

https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellacatbee

...you'll get an error, even though fairychangeling is bellacatbee and still active...

https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairychangeling)

Trick 3: The "/works" trick.

Hope you're not done giving those "users/(username)" and "users/(username)/pseuds/(username)" links a work out, because you're not done yet! Those links will just give you their home page, which will only list their 6 (...I think it's 6???) most recent works. And then you click on "works" at the side and...oh no there's nothing there! Whelp, whichever link Wayback tried to use ("users/(username)/works" or "users/(username)/pseuds/(username)/works") ...try the other! And then try it for all their username changes, if they had any! Getting frustrated yet? If you're lucky you'll have Found The Thing and you can stop, but if you haven't, we're not done yet, cause yes, there's more...

Trick 4: The "?fandom_id=27" trick.

So, I'm writing this guide specifically for Destiel, so this trick is being shared in the SPN-specific format. Every single fandom on AO3 has a fandom ID number. Supernatural's is 27. If you're looking for a different fandom, you'll just have to find it's number - you can do this by going to any author you know wrote for that fandom, going to their home/main page (users/(username) or users/(username)/pseuds/(username)) and clicking on the fandom - the results will show the fandom_id in the link. So, like, I've still got fairychangeling's page open, Thor is fandom_id 245368, MCU is 414093, Good Omens is 114591, etc. Again, these IDs are stable - fandom_id=27 will ALWAYS be Supernatural, no matter who the writer is. AND, since Wayback treats every single one of these urls as unique, even if "users/(username)/works"/"users/(username)/pseuds/(username)/works" don't work, "users/(username)/works?fandom_id=27" or "users/(username)/pseuds/(username)/works?fandom_id=27" might. And you know what comes next - yes, it's try every variation again!

Trick 5: check every capture!

Captures on Wayback are a moment in time, which means there's always a chance that each one will be different. Trying to find a work that a user wrote in 2011, but Wayback /works is only showing works from 2021 on the first page, and going to page 2 produces a dead link? Try going to the oldest capture. Try going through every single capture, until you find the title you want, if you find the title you want. The /works page wasn't captured at all? Go through every old version of their main page, and see if there's any version of it where the story you want was in the 6 most recent works they posted. Etc. Try every capture on every variation of the /users/(username) links. Test and test and test until you either find it or you've exhausted your options.

Finding lost fics is about patience and about exhausting every option before you give up. All these small variations that look like nothing? Are another chance that Wayback may have captured the work. Skipping one isn't gonna do you any favors. There's never a guarantee. Lots is simply not there. But - more is there then you'll think if you just try one link then give up.

But I'm not looking for a list of their works, I'm looking for a specific work!

The above tricks are what I use when, for example, I've just heard a person deleted their account, and I'm trying to build as complete a list as possible of the works that have been deleted. Further, even if Wayback hasn't captured the actual work, the /(username) page and the /works page will have the links. Sometimes, those links will help you discover the work was orphaned or moved to anon instead of actually deleted. Other times, you'll click it, and bam, the fic will be right there in Wayback! Still other times, it won't be...or at least not apparently. But, sure enough, there are tricks around that too. Before you give up and assume a fic isn't in Wayback at all, you can try...

Trick 1: Remove the chapter part of the link

So, you've got the link to your fic - lets use, idk, "Carry On" by TamrynEradani (I haven't actually tested this as an example yet, hopefully it works lmao for everything I need to do here... lmao).

The original link to Carry On (found on ao3feed-destiel):

http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352/chapters/1458361

AO3 assigns every work a unique number AND every chapter a unique number. If you put in a work without the "/chapters/####" part in AO3, it auto-routes you to chapter 1 and fills in the chapter number. But, not to beat this dead horse again - Wayback doesn't know how to do that! It's entirely literally. It captures only the link, exactly as the link was fed to it. Thus, if you put that link into Wayback? It gets no results. BUT, if you remove the "/chapters/1458361" part (it actually DID loop me to the chapter ID, but when I put it in WITH the Chapter ID, it found nothing - welcome to the joys and vagaries of searching for deleted fics in Wayback...)?

There's Carry On...at least sort of! Because yes, there's still a problem - that pesky "Proceed" button. Because you can't log into Wayback as if it were AO3, and Wayback is (again) literal, you can often end up in annoying cycle where (with Mature and Explicit works) you just get looped back to the "Proceed" page over and over again. There are a couple ways you can try to bypass this.

Trick 2: Check past captures!

Are we learning yet? Yep, this is a repeat. Often, going through every capture will find one or more where, for whatever reason, the Proceed page just...isn't in the way. I have no idea why that's the case, but it works - it's how I opened that HazelDomain fic above, for example. And, it works for Carry On, too - when I tried a different capture of the exact same URL?

There it is!

However, even if that doesn't work, you still have recourse.

Trick 3: the "?view_adult_work=true" trick.

When you hit that "Proceed" button, AO3 auto-adds on "?view_adult_work=true" but (hits the horse with a stick again) Wayback doesn't know that necessarily, unless you tell it. So, you can sometimes bypass the endless-loop-of-proceed problem by giving it the direct link instead. In this case...

http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352?view_adult_work=true"

or

http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352/chapters/1458361?view_adult_work=true

(this trick actually DOESN'T work with Carry On, but it DOES work sometimes, especially with one shot mature/explicit works. That said, the "check every capture" trick works more often, so definitely try that first).

Okay, so...getting somewhere, but! Carry On is 34 chapters, and this one I've found in Wayback (it's here by the way - Wayback links? Also stable. https://web.archive.org/web/20131126180609/http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352/chapters/1458361) is showing just the first chapter. And when I try to go to Chapter 2? It gets caught up in that goddamn "Proceed for 18+" thing again, and there are only two captures now, and WHAT DO?"

Trick 4: The "?view_full_work=true" trick

There are two ways to implement this trick. One is easy - when you're on the page in Wayback, you see that "Entire Work" button over the tags box? YA JUST CLICK IT! It's like magic! At least, it's magic when it works. (It does, in this case - if you want to read all of Carry On and don't want to track it down? https://web.archive.org/web/20130911072416/http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352?view_full_work=true tada!)

And see the difference there? it's the same link, just with ?view_full_work=true added to the end! So, if you've found yourself in a position where you can't get by the "Proceed" loop, OR where you try to go to Chapter 1, try every link variation, and get nothing? You can always still try:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/######?view_full_work=true

Because there's always a chance that Wayback captured that even if it didn't capture the other variations.

Unforth...I've read all this...I've tried everything...I still couldn't find the thing! What can I dooooooo....

At this point? You've mostly exhausted what you can try in Wayback. But! Wayback actually isn't the only way to find a lost fic, it's just the most obvious and most easily used by the public. There are a few others!

1. I already tagged @/destielfanfic, so I won't again, but they're a great resource for finding deleted fics that authors have said "yes you may distribute," and they've also got a list of authors who've indicated "no." I used their lists as the base for mine (and their head mod and I trade notes, and fics, semi-regularly and have for years). So, I mentioned Fossarian above? Well, you can find Fossarian fics for download by going to destielfanfic, searching for author Fossarian, and going through the links - for example, "All the Hours Wound" is available in ePub format right here!

2. If you're willing to delve into Livejournal, spnstoryfinders (https://spnstoryfinders.livejournal.com/) is a still-active community that helps find all sorts of missing SPN stories (not just Destiel) and often posts will have links for x-posts, help with finding alts/different names people have used, or have people volunteering to distribute if contacted. Honestly, personally, I'm too shy to actually contact those people, and even if you're braver than I if they haven't posted since 2015 it's anyone's guess if you'll still be able to reach them, but it's always worth a try!

3. Me. Ask me. Even if it's not on my list. Drop me a note. I know tricks, as you can see, and I'm just really experienced at this point. I've been doing this for years. And, even if I did list most of the tricks I know above, I probably forgot something, and I also have the time (...well, sometimes I do, like when I'm not spending 2.5 hrs writing blog posts about how to use Wayback lmao), and I might know pseuds for a person you don't, and I have contacts who have collections, and, and, and...

4. Speaking of collections, the Profound Bond Discord mods graciously gave my archive a chat room (it's #fic-archive-project in the collections section of the server). AND, people who are on that server who have large private fic collections can opt to give themselves the @/archivist role, and when things get deleted or when we look for things, even if I can't find it, I can tag the other archivists and see if anyone else has it. When I exhaust MY options? That's where I go. So. You can too, you don't need me to mediate that, just join the Discord.

5. There's a smaller, Wayback-esque archive webpage called http://archive.is/. It has way less in it, but I've occasionally had luck on there finding LJ stuff that Wayback didn't have.

6. As a last ditch, you can always try Google. For example, if I google: tamryneradani "carry on" destiel download - the only damn result (I made this search up off the top of my head without testing it so I'm glad it worked lmao) is shiphitsthefans's master post of TamrynEradani fic which includes download links, because Tamryn made it clear from the moment they deleted that they didn't mind distribution (I was here then, which is how I know that...). So, like, literally, you want to read Carry On, yes I linked it above on Wayback but you can also just download the e-book from this post. There are all kinds of things in all kinds of pokey places on the internet. There's a small old archive that got permission from LJ authors to PDF their works and posted about it, with links, on Tumblr, and now a lot of those originals are deleted (I don't have the link sorry, I didn't bother to save it after I downloaded everything they had) but the Tumblr posts are still up and the DL links that still work. There's master posts for fics that have been deleted but the master post still has a functional link to a full PDF. Stuff is everywhere and you don't know unless you check.

There's so, so, so much Destiel, and so much as been deleted over the years. When you look, sometimes you'll strike gold right away by just plugging the link into Wayback and YAY THERE'S THE THING, and sometimes you'll spend an hour looking and think you finally finally have it and get so close and that last PDF link on the last place you had to check after everything else didn't pan out will be broken and you'll kind of want to burn down the internet, but...you'll know you tried.

This is how I built this archive - that, and downloading as much as possible before it was deleted, so that once it was gone, I didn't have to find it, cause I already had it. Basically every fic marked as "deleted and looking for copy" on my list? I tried all of this and still couldn't find it. Not always - sometimes I just don't have time - but. When I have the time, I check, and I even occasionally check again, just in case I missed something the first time. This is how it goes. You try, and you hope, and sometimes you'll succeed, and sometimes you won't. It's hard, but if you want the fic bad enough...you do the thing.

So. This is my general tutorial on how to use Wayback. What you do with that information is up to you. Don't ask me for help finding links for things I've said I won't distribute, but if you're willing to do the leg work and try the above strategies...well, authors can't do much about Wayback, they lost that level of control the instant they posted their works, and it's there to be accessed by anyone who knows how (if it's there at all, anyway, which, well, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't).

Now you know.

Go forth and get the fic.

(And if you know of, or learn, some tricks I don't know? PLEASE DO TELL! I am always ready to learn more!)

[lareinedesviolettes]

Y'all ready for this?

The December 2021 Edition of the Destiel Fic Survey is Now Live!

Want to tell the world what your favorite Destiel fics are?

THIS IS YOUR CHANCE! Every year, I (hi, I'm @unforth) do an anonymous survey to help bring attention to lesser-known-but-no-less-loved Destiel fics. This survey is not a popularity contest; the idea is to highlight works don't make the "usual" rec lists, especially newer works or works by lesser-known authors. Vote tallies are never shared; instead, every single work that gets at least one vote gets added to the Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection on AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/collections/TheDestielFanSurveyFavsCollection), which serves as one HUGE rec list of "the best and the brightest" in the fandom, both on and off AO3 - and it can be sorted and searched (don't forget to check the bookmarks!) to help readers find something new-to-them!

There are a few notes on what I'll include:

The story must have end-game Destiel. Non-Destiel elements are fine as long as they're the final ship. I'll sometimes make exceptions for gen fics that heavily imply Destiel but anything that ends with an OT3 or different ship(s) for Dean or Cas won't qualify.

Works in series are fine, though most of the time I'll only include the first work in any given series in the collection (AO3 doesn't let me add entire series to a collection).

Works-in-progress are welcome!

Works posted on non-AO3 platforms are welcome!

Yes, you may vote for your own fic - it's anonymous, I won't know anyway. You can also add your fic to the self-rec collection, if you want - you can fill out the self-rec form here.

This is your once-a-year chance to suggest new works for me to add to the collection! You'll be able to vote for up to 5 favorite authors and up to 10 favorite fics for the survey.

It looks like this:

As you consider what to vote for, please consider looking at the collection and selecting works that are not already in the collection, ideally by authors who are also not in the collection. You'll only have room to vote for 10, so make those 10 count by picking works you want to share with the Destiel reader-verse that they might not see otherwise! In the vast pool of Destiel stories on AO3 and elsewhere there are many fantastic works that don’t get as much love as they deserve, authors who are wonderful but never seem to make rec lists, and stories that have been overlooked. Those fics deserve as much love as the "well known" works, so lets help them get better known!

Everyone is someone’s favorite. Let's help authors see that they're loved, by reccing their work into the collection and helping bring new readers in!

Feel free to ping me at this account or on my main (@unforth) if you have any questions!

Signal boosts help spread the word, so thanks in advance for re-blogging.

The survey will remain open until Sunday, December 26th, 2021.

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE!

Thanks, everyone, and I can't wait to see what new stories we'll be sharing with the world this year!

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does the fact that dean wears (and enjoys) a nightgown in scoobynatural count towards his female coding?

this weird thing happened with dean where they wrote in a bit where dean likes girly stuff -- you know, cuz it’s funny? cuz it’s funny the macho guy has a kink about wearing satin. haha, that’s edgy for the cw. listens to Taylor swift. funny. and if it was Chris hemsworrth or Jason momoa it’d read like that. but the thing is. come here. listen to me. the thing is it never read like that with dean. it never fucking read like that. not once. it ended up just highlighting how much he performs things which AREN’T the things he actually likes. and my question to you is why. why did it always land just queer of center? is it frequency? was it played too much? are we really so vapid and it’s just because of how he looks? was it some strange nuance he telegraphed in his acting without even meaning to? how did dean Winchester come to be? he is not what he was meant to be. he is not that thing at all. dean’s the comedy man. the sidekick. dean isn’t the protagonist, isn’t meant to be who we relate to -- that’s sam college boy, that’s sam overcoming the inner darkness. what was dean supposed to be? what was dean supposed to be? John Wayne wannabe, cool kid, hot horror movie girl; slut, settle-down type, childish, cool, just cool. too many things so he turned into water. 

the horrifying thing about dean is that he is so earnestly written. the room had some cognizance dean was a power fantasy, had some cognizance that there were efforts being made to shade him and that they were perfunctory. believe me, this writer said here. believe me when I tell you everything you are looking at is true. come with us, it’s a western. it’s a road movie. it’s a steel horse. live in that fantasy. but you can’t have the biker boots and the bowie knife and the colt and the smile and the pack of reds. no one has the biker boots and the bowie knife, etc. and the more you tell us someone does (can must will) have them, the more we look for cracks, and the more we see them. it skirts the uncanny, skirts drag, becomes a performance nonetheless, and the one thing we all know is that performances are very believable lies. 

Kripke literally wrote the line what’s dead should stay dead and didn’t realize this western action hero is dead. in trying to resurrect him anyway, the one character who was everything -- lovable fucker, always fuckable -- he compressed the perfect hero so tight that he vanished into thin air. and in place of him, dean, just dean: juggling his accoutrements, dropping them inevitably, the last great failed straight american male but a genuine instance of reality occurring where it did not have a place, demanding to be felt 

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[Image description in Alt Text.] [ID: Red, block text on a transparent background. The text reads: ‘Fanfic Author PSA’. The dark red Archive of Our Own logo is depicted on either side of the lettering. End ID.]

Many people who read fanfiction also require the assistance of text-to-speech or audio description software. Blind and visually impaired people are very much present in the fanfiction and fandom communities, but are so frequently disregarded or forgotten about.

If you are writing a work and like to utilise paragraph breaks, please do not use combinations such as the following:

[Image description in Alt Text. I have used an image to avoid what I will describe below.] [ID: Four examples of punctuation and icons that are disruptive when used as line breakers. The first line is a series of O letters. The second is a series of asterisks. The third is a series of dots, circles and stars. The last is a series of tildes. End ID.]

The software will read these combinations out loud letter for letter or symbol for symbol. For example; it would read to the user the word ‘asterisk’ six times in a row, or the word ‘tilde’ five times in a row.

This is unpleasant, confusing and often irritating for blind or visually impaired readers. If you would like a similar sample of what it would sound like, enter one of the above combinations into Google Translate and use the audio button.

Here is a post by @ao3commentoftheday​ that also details this difficulty and provides links to downloadable audio transcribers and fanfiction audio readers. These are also helpful for if you simply wish to listen to fanfiction but can’t find a podfic of the work.

Screen Reader Friendly and Screen Reader Compatible are AO3 tags that help visually impaired readers track and access fanfiction that is consciously created with their needs in mind. Please consider adding these tags to your works in order to expand the range of works that visually impaired readers can safely and confidently access.

Alternatives to these are:

Utilise HTML or embedded line break functions where possible, such as the feature on the Archive’s editing functions. Most screen readers should be equipped to understand these.

[Line breaker] can also be read by most screen readers. While not as aesthetic, it’s still functional.

Use an image divider/breaker and utilise the Alt Text or [ ] descriptor functions to label it as a line breaker.

Reminder: ‘liking’ this post does not spread awareness.

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Well folks I've been sitting on this little script for ages and finally decided to just go ahead and publish it. What does it do?

you can enter any ao3 link - for example, to your bookmarks or an author's works page - and automatically download all the works and series that are linked from that page in the format of your choice

if your format of choice is epub (sorry, this part doesn't work for other file formats), you can check your fanfic-savin' folder for unfinished fics and automatically update them if there are new chapters

if you're a dinosaur who uses Pinboard, you can back up all the Pinboard bookmarks you have that link to ao3

don't worry about crashing ao3 with this! this baby takes forever to run, guaranteed. anyway ao3 won't let me make more than one request per second even if I wanted to so it's quite safe

I've been working on this for about two years and it's finally in a state where it does everything I want and isn't breaking every two seconds, so I thought it was time to share! I hope y'all get some use out of it.

note: this is a standalone desktop app that DOES NOT DO ANYTHING aside from automate clicking on buttons on the ao3 website. Everything this script does, can be done by hand using ao3's regular features. It is just a utility to facilitate personal backups for offline reading - there's no website or server, I have no access to or indeed interest in the fics other people download using this. No plagiarism is happening here, please don't come after me.

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BOY KING: the story of Sidney Crosby before the NHL

76,929 words, 387 sources, and 3 years later, here's my biography on Sidney Crosby, the boy wonder. From the end of Troy Crosby's brief hockey career to the day Sidney landed in Pittsburgh, BOY KING is the story of how a boy from the Maritimes became the most famous 17-year-old hockey player in history.

☆ READ BOY KING ON MY WEBSITE

Join me at torchtoburn.com and enjoy BOY KING as a multimedia experience with illustrations, photographs, and four videos.

☆ READ BOY KING ON AO3

The ideal method for readers who prefer streamlined, simple text or those who are reading on a small screen/mobile device. Though this version of BOY KING includes no photos or illustrations, the four BOY KING videos are embedded within the pertinent chapters.

☆ READ BOY KING AS A PDF

In which you will find bonus photos and a more traditional biographic format, available both to read online and to download.

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Since there's been a lot of fandom history on my dash tonight, I want to tell you about something I've referenced before, and which always gets funny notes in my inbox whenever I do:

The day fandom collectively lost its shit after logging into Delicious and finding it was like, a horrible mix between MySpace and Reddit.

Like AO3, it's a story of fandom using a space that wasn't intended for fandom, and then being utterly destroyed when that space decided to adopt hostile policies.

Delicious was a social bookmarking site, which was basically a way for users to save content from around the web. This was during a time when browsers were notoriously awful, and saving bookmarks locally was guaranteed to end in you losing everything because Firefox updated and did something weird, or Internet Explorer just randomly shat the bed and reinstalled itself when you weren't looking. And it was superior to browser bookmarks, because it had tags and organisational structures that were set by each, individual user.

And it happened to be perfect for fandom, because at the time we were primarily using LiveJournal, another site that didn't want us, and was actively trying to push us out. Delicious was used in two primary ways:

Readers of fic would use it to save the ones they liked, often using their account to curate reclists.

Community owners would use it to organise posts to the community.

Free LJ accounts only allowed so many tags, and even paid accounts often didn't have enough for large communities. Roleplay was huge on LJ, and users would often want tags for all their characters so they could find old threads. Some megafandoms with huge ensemble casts would very quickly run out of tags on their communities, especially if they tagged for content creators, tropes, kinks, etc. With Delicious' tag system, it was a perfect site for both of these purposes.

And then one day, without warning, we all logged in to do our thing, and it was a completely different site. Tale as old as time, Yahoo! bought it, decided it wasn't profitable enough, and decided to rebuild it from the ground up without any warning. They got rid of the tag system entirely, and I don't think anyone ever truly figured out how the new site was meant to be used.

But fandom was utterly and truly in a mass panic, because this backbone of how so many things were run just evaporated. Ever wonder why AO3 has the tag system it does? It was built by the same people who used Delicious. Before AO3, fandom had collectively decided that the information AO3 displays on fic headers was what should always be displayed. People would have to build their own headers, but they always included the same general gist of fandom, characters, pairing, rating, word count, warnings, kinks, and summary. You could browse a stranger's Delicious account, and would have a reasonable certainty of seeing these same, or very similar prefixes in their tag system.

So. Fandom is panicking. Entire communities are un-searchable, reclists are broken, people have lost years of bookmarked fic, and we were all scrambling to find something that worked like Delicious, or build something like it, but it had happened so abruptly that there wans't time to really coordinate.

Then, from the shadows came Maciej Cegłowski, aka Pinboard Guy. (Not to be confused with Pinterest.) Pinboard Guy had heard that Delicious had shat the bed, because fandom wasn't the only group that used the site, and weren't the only people who lost their bookmarks, but we were certainly being very loud and obnoxious about it. Pinboard Guy reached out to fandom on the whole, with a glorious gift. He had his own Delicious clone, that he built from the ground up and maintained for better privacy and security, and he sold accounts. At the time, it was around a $5 one-time fee, with a structure that increased the fee by a fractional amount for each new account. Basically, as server load increased, so did server costs, and this is how he managed to keep up with that.

He also understood that by its nature, fandom is very social, where his site was very asocial.

So he asked, what does fandom need? And someone opened up a Gdoc, and a lot of people put together a very well-written and organised (and enormous) list of ways in which fandom used social bookmarking. How we needed prefixes, and bundles, and a way to discover other accounts, along with detailled explanations of why. A lot of work was put into this, which was basically a fandom manifesto explaining to an outsider everything he would need to know to rebuild Delicious. For a lot of us, we didn't expect anything, but just being humoured was validating.

And then this man implemented these features for us. When you go into your account, you can tick a box that says you're part of fandom, and it will open up an entirely separate part of the site, that he built, just for us. He didn't have to do this. But he did it anyway. He's changed the pricing model since then, and it's now a yearly fee instead of one-time, because Pinboard is still run by Pinboard Guy, and no one else. No ads, no sponsors. Just Maciej Cegłowski and his ancient-ass code that still looks like the internet did in 2009.

And then, a few years down the line, like the fucking baller he is, Cegłowski bought Delicious and shut it down. Just killed it dead.

Not a lot of people within use Pinboard anymore, because AO3 also serves the first reason people used it: bookmarking fic. Allowing for external bookmarks meant that the reclist people didn't need to rely on a service that might not always be friendly to us. And then, well. LiveJournal kicked fandom out through a series of hostile policy changes, and Dreamwidth failed to take off, so we no longer really needed that community archive aspect.

But 2009 was a rough year for fandom, because it was the year fandom pretty much everything changed. While we gained a huge, centralised archive that wasn't the Pit of Voles that FFN is, we lost that centralisation when fandom fled LiveJournal for this fucking hellsite. Some of us vainly tried to make Dreamwidth happen, and clung to it in the desperate hope that Tumblr would fail and people would miss journals and communities, but it never happened.

And I'm telling you. When this Post+ thing finally drives fandom off this site, I'm gonna be torn between sitting back and laughing because it's the same shit all over again, and collapsing into utter despair because I am too goddamn old to learn how to use another site that isn't built for the way fandom likes to shove square pegs into round holes to make sites suit our needs.

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Season 8 Gag Reel

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this got so stupid long for no reason so no need to even read this but like……..see THIS is why thee most powerful moment of supernatural for me personally is “you know what every other version of you did after gripping him tight and raising him from perdition? they did what they were told. but not you.” it’s the closest we get to explicit and loud confirmation that this is who castiel is: a bastion of free will that guarantees freedom of choice in this universe alone; a shining illustration of all that could be without the machinations of an ambivalent God. that speech, tucked away at the end of cas’s second to last episode, in the literal eleventh hour…. stands alone as nearly the only time in the latter half of supernatural where castiel’s singularity is acknowledged, that his power (just in being) is referenced, that his intrinsic connection with dean is woven into the narrative as something textually More Powerful Than God. it’s a rare return to form for his character, a single moment he’s an individual whose desires shape the narrative, and it only happens in the direct lead up to his ultimate demise (important in that it can only be Voiced when dean is about to be away from cas and thus safe). 

cas was introduced to us as a barely contained wave of cosmic intent, capable of raising dean from hell and throwing him back, a soldier unafraid to bloody himself and others in service to a cause (humanity, dean), a being with constrained desires so strong that even breathing the barest hint (doubt) was enough to catapult castiel (willingly) from the hold of heaven. he’s tactile, he’s forceful, he’s physical, he’s more powerful than any of the humans around him are capable of perceiving, and it’s all focused around one thing: want want want want want. dean. dean. dean. dean. from the moment he enters the narrative, castiel is bristling with energy, he’s a Threat, and it’s dean who is magnetized to him. it’s dean he allows to (sometimes) overpower him, and it’s dean he crowds. it’s dean who becomes the unknowing object of divine worship (and with that, divine desire). castiel was never meant to be a fixture on supernatural, simply because the things he Wanted were so Huge and so tenuously held back, that if allowed to continue on the trajectory they set him on, would have wholly consumed the entire narrative, or at least one of the two leads. 

so then we have the wife-ing of cas. we have his raw, sexual, worshipping, unavoidable, all-consuming, decidedly-actionable desires quieted into something more palatable, more neatly controlled. cas’s magnetized orbit around dean becomes subservient rather than consuming. cas’s masculine strength gets muted (he’s a damsel through a set of increasingly complicated plot contrivances). cas’s desire to serve (dean) is shifted to a safer outlet (fatherhood), and cas and dean’s connection is minimized, often through the only means strong enough - having cas literally offscreen. love becomes sacrifice rather than freedom, it becomes unassuming usefulness rather than worship. the power to act on desire, and nearly all trace of desire itself, is wiped away, and Having turns into Being. the i want i want i want i want that has been present for 12 years is only referred to as “The Thing”. 

but ultimately…………………….. the soft, gentle, nonthreatening, platonic nerfed cas is still the castiel who raised dean from perdition, is still the castiel who wrote his own chapter and never went back on script, is still the castiel who knit dean’s bones back together and glimpsed his soul through his own grace, is still the castiel who built a new faith inside of a man who didn’t think he deserved to be saved. and the show, at the end of it all, had a cruel and petty God look his former angel in the face and say your love is the one thing that is different. they needed to make cas less of a threat so the show could continue on without being sucked into the vortex of unchecked (masculine, homosexual) desire, but that desire (love love love love love) STILL ended up being the single most important act of free will IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. and they don’t bring it up again, they take cas away and they don’t allow dean to mourn or articulate or breathe more life into this Thing they’ve tried to squash. but cas remains the most powerful being in the entire show, after all of that, because of his unwavering, celestial love for dean. 

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Supernatural is a weird, clunky pile of assorted ideas of variable quality where every single concept with a good potential gets inevitably undeveloped, which makes it perfect because it’s like a giant sandbox. The writers never ever brought to fulfillment a single thing, including the entire show itself, and that makes the material extremely elastic and malleable. This is why Supernatural is so successful in terms of fandom. It’s a brainstorming session chalkboard with a list of interesting ideas on it. That, and Jensen Ackles.

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spn really said men on their knees with bloody faces looking up at someone

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clicky noises amv, in case it gets taken down off twitter too

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not to beat the horse to death but dean and cas's story is like the only aspect of supernatural that escaped its circular narrative because they actually let them evolve. the sam and dean dynamic got boring approximately ten years ago and you can Tell that no one in the writer's room actually considered it the heart of the show anymore they just kept the focus on them out of loyalty to the show's roots. and like.... you did that to yourselves kings because if they had had the courage to actually evolve and reinvent their relationship sam and dean could have stayed relevant but instead it was always "these two brothers are the core of the show :)" and then sam doesn't even pass the ugly lamp test in half the episodes. kripke era sam and dean were so good because their dynamic was about peeling back the layers of childhood trauma it was about being the underdogs it was about treading the line between love and codependency but all those things have already been SAID and they just kept repeating them over and over again without actually making a point. and then john winchester gets a house down the street like are u even listening to yourselves ? what was the point of watching cptsd destroy sam and dean's lives for 15 years if they're gonna end up where they started. what was the point

meanwhile cas is such a good character because he's only in a handful episodes per season so when he has screentime he actually has shit to say and because he doesn't have the redneck fanbase that sam and dean have he just gets to do whatever he wants. and his and dean's relationship is so complex and layered and contradictory yet somehow the most coherent narrative in the show like i can't think about it for more than two seconds without blacking out they are eve and the snake they are david and jonathan they are bird and fish they are an encyclopedia of romantic tropes integrated into one narrative and somehow supernatural, infamously bad television show, made it Work. their dynamic (romantic, organic, accidental) is so contradictory of the show's central themes (family, fate, duty) and it's so contradictory of the way the show spent 15 years running in circles like it's the antithesis of the show itself and they wrote themselves in so deep that they had to remove their relationship completely from a series finale because the finale was supposed to close the circle and there was no way to close the circle with cas present because a dean with cas by his side does not fit the circle anymore. when i say the most show of all time

[lareinedesviolettes]

constantly, constantly thinking about how there has never been anything like destiel before and there never will be again. that this, by all means, should not have happened. that this show, in 2005 when there was no queer rep except for the taboo, stereotyped content that existed on premium channels like HBO, set out to create this all-american masculine straight character to such an extent that it read as compensation for a hidden truth - and then!! 3 years later, enter another male-presenting character who was only supposed to be there for a handful of episodes. but then the producers and audience saw this weird, interesting chemistry between these two characters which steadily grew into something that made people go “oh?? maybe there’s something here??” and then!!!! it was met with resistance at every turn. it was cut off by the writers, the network, the production company, even a subset of fans. they tried to give dean a love interest and then cas a couple love interests that fell flat. they tried to kill cas off and watched their ratings tank. they tried to put these two into two totally separate plotlines to keep them apart by all means necessary, which only led to their moments on screen being rife with such potent chemistry that it was almost too much to bear. and it just kept organically building and building despite all possible intention until it became abundantly clear that this was a part of the narrative now. it was baked into the story. and these characters suddenly built a home and a life and family together. and it became such an intrinsic part of the story that they simply had no other choice than to lean into it and bring it to culmination. and then!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in order to have some semblance of plausible deniability, they had to kill off both these characters in the most shocking and blindsiding ways possible and ensure they were never seen on screen together ever again because, if they were or if they were allowed to live separately, there would be no natural way to end their stories without addressing the elephant in the room. but in doing so, it created the most soulless and unsatisfying ending of all time for the show as a whole. and then!!!!!!!!! after the show itself ended, it proceeded to canon more times than any other ship ever. in a show about defying the author’s intent, this ship was the absolute antithesis of everything this show originally set out to do - and we will never see that again in the age of representation when queer and slowburn love stories are intended in every piece of media where they exist. but!!!!!!! while we’ve also never seen anything like this before, it’s important to note that destiel was built off generations of storytelling and societal norms that have existed since the dawn of time. and like, ok. ok. did we get everything we wanted at the end of this show? hell no. but something was achieved here, and its something that will never have to be achieved again. and it wasn’t just for dean and cas. it was for kirk and spock. it was for sherlock holmes and john watson. it was for patroclus and achilles. hell, it was for gilgamesh and enkidu! i need to lay down

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Want to tell the world what your favorite Destiel fics are?

Then take this survey! In the vast pool of Destiel stories on AO3 and elsewhere (92,500 works and counting) there are many fantastic works that don’t get as much love as they deserve, authors who are wonderful but never seem to make the “standard” rec lists, or stories that have been overlooked.

Everyone is someone’s favorite. The Destiel Fan Favorites Survey is your opportunity to share your love of your favorite authors and stories - up to 5 writers and up to 10 tales featuring Dean, Cas, and their love!

You can see the AO3 collection that is home to all currently included works here.

Write Destiel fanfic and want to submit your own work? There’s a collection for that - fill out this survey and tell me what your favorite story you’ve written is, and I’ll add it to the Destiel Favs Self Rec Collection!

This survey is not a popularity contest! The purpose of the Destiel Fan Favorites Survey is to highlight the wide variety of amazing works created by the remarkable people in this fandom. I ask that everyone who completes this survey does so with that in mind!

The 2021 edition of the Survey will remain open until December 31st, 2020.

Feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions!

Please signal boost to spread the word!

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Unofficial Rec Bulletin #174, Promo Edition, November -December, 2020

Hello guys! The show is over and we all hoped for some peace when we are done, but alas. 15x18 invigorated fandom and caused creative outburst like nothing before. Season 16 is here and we all are winging it. Destielfanfic is bringing back our retired Unofficial Rec Bulletin to keep track of and to promote the latest events. 

Contents 

Fandom promos

Favorite Destiel Fic Survey (submission deadline December 31, 2020)

@destieltropecollection‘s Trope Voting (deadline December 24, 2020)

DeanCas Big Bang 2020

How Supernatural Buried Its Gays documentary by @some-people-call-it-tragic

They call us …. destihellers.

@destieldailynews

Destielfanfic stuff

15x18 coda fic rec list Happiness Isn’t In The Having

Destiel Fic Starter Pack

bartender Dean rec list

My First Destiel Fic survey

Fandom Promos

The annual Favorite Destiel Fic Survey held by destiel fic writer @unforth is taking place right now and will be accepting submissions till December 31, 2020. This survey is geared towards discovering less known fics. Every submission counts, every submitted fic will be added to The Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection on AO3 which contains more than 2400 fics and 550 bookmarked fics that were chosen by destiel readers in previous surveys. Check out this vast collection of popular vote fic!

There’s still time to cast your vote for your favorite fanfic trope in Trope Voting 2020 organized by @destieltropecollection

The one and only, the oldest destiel fanfic challenge  DeanCas Big Bang 2020 organized by @deancasbigbang finished posting it’s 2020 round. Check out their Master List here on tumblr or wander off to DCBB 2020 collection on AO3.

How Supernatural Buried Its Gays by @some-people-call-it-tragic​ - a fan documentary born out of spite, made by a fan for all destiel fans. It features video clips from destiel fans sharing their experience about the show.

They call us …. destihellers. They meant to insult, we took it back. 2020 will be the year when destiel fandom reclaimed the insult destiheller and started wearing it with pride. We are all hellers now. We also have art and an entry in Urban Dictionary. ;)

to help fandom to keep up with all new episodes of season 16, a new blog was born to check all the facts - @destieldailynews. Give them a follow! 

Destielfanfic stuff

Happiness Isn’t In The Having - 15x18 coda fic rec list. Castiel’s confession inspired destiel writers to pour their hearts and souls into writing coda fics and this floodgate has not been closed yet. This rec list is just a small sample of hundred upon hundreds of coda fics. I’m planning on posting at least one more coda rec list for 15x20, just give me time guys. 

Destiel Fic Starter Pack was created to help new fans to get around destiel fic and I’m absolutely floored by the love and attention it got. After 15x18 our blog is also experiencing a hike in new follows and we are happy to welcome all newcomers. You can learn more about the history of this blog by going through our Seasons Change tag. 

for absolutely no reason whatsoever I wanted to mention that we have a bartender Dean fic rec list Living That Dream which was recently updated with a fic about a bar owner and brewer Dean W. who brews new beers and names them after Cas. No reason at all, but check out our Group Ask #185 and #186!

My First Destiel Fic survey - a fun little project where every destiel fan is welcome to share their first destiel fic experience. See this post for submission rules and follow this tag for all relevant posts! All submissions will will be posted, starting tomorrow.

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Amazing meta on the struggle for control of the narrative on Supernatural, by Deirdre T., the author of Supernatural's Legacy: The Trauma of Silence.

"And so Supernatural’s metanarrative plays out clearly. A repressive creator punishes his subjects, angry that they won’t fall into the narrow lines he has drawn for them. Angry that their queerness became too loud, that they found families he didn’t plan for, that they chose to love outcasts, monsters, those who are different — the people meant to stay in margins of his story who fought their way to the center. A creator angry, above all, that they chose to love themselves, to love the people they managed to become despite his writing, not because of it. External controls force a story back in line when it begins to give voice to what threatens them."

my friend who wrote the trauma of silence article is at it again with some good food about spn’s finale, found family, and the fight to break from god’s (the network) control.