#and when i went to the authors page all their other fics featured other ships i was so pissed

[lipstickontheglass1985]

i had a dream that there was ig a popular tv show the main character of which happened to share my name and some of my personality traits/life circumstances. and that was also the case for some people i knew irl like they could also be loosely matched to characters from the show. so anywayy what id do in that dream is read fanfiction abt the show in question and pretend its written abt me and like i could very easily self insert myself due to the similarities between my life and that show. also i remember being annoyed in that dream abt people "i" would get shipped with cause they didnt correspond to who i liked irl..... like yeah my dream self was trying to find fanfiction abt me and my crush what abt it 🤭

[xanthippe74]

Masterlist of my “12 Days of Fandom” recs, inspired by this post. As always, please check the tags and author's notes before reading. Enjoy!

🔸 Terminal Lucidity by @romaine2424 (Drarry, HD Career Fair, rated G, 3K) This bittersweet fic has Harry putting his abilities as Master of Death to good use by comforting those close to death themselves. We see him at work here, adeptly easing the way for someone dear to him with compassion and care. I found this story incredibly moving and a beautiful portrait of family ties in the face of an impending loss. Featuring older, established Drarry and the Black-Malfoy family.

🔹 Our Objective Remains Unchanged by @citrusses (Drarry, rated E, 46K) Gorgeously and vividly written, this university rowing AU drew me in right from the get-go, despite the fact that Muggle AUs are not my typical cuppa. The enemies-to-lovers tension is perfectly paced as Harry and Draco fight for the same spot on the Oxford team. Citrusses did a fantastic job translating their backgrounds and personalities (as well as those of other familiar characters from the books) into this world. Class divisions and the pressure of a highly-public sporting event stand in very effectively for Harry’s canon experiences. All in all, the story has the poignancy and drama of a lush coming of age film, and I can’t recommend it highly enough!

🔸 The Pile by @b-vul (Drarry, not rated, about 1.5K) This hilarious ficlet was born out of littlewinnow’s tumblr post about Veela!Harry performing an intricate mating dance to impress Draco. Delightfully, it’s from Harry’s POV as he blindly “trusts his instincts” to guide him into increasingly bizarre actions. And the evolution of Draco’s reaction is pure comedy gold. I’ve come back to reread this one a couple of times, and it never fails to have me in stitches. (The tumblr thread also contains adorable art by regretfulcorrine!)

🔹 Shine on, You Crazy Diamond by @lagerloutfic (Drarry, HD Mpreg Fest, rated E, 42K) This is one of those fics that you can’t stop reading once you start (something I confirmed this morning when I went to skim through it for this rec and wound up spending a few happy hours devouring the entire thing again). It’s laugh-out-loud funny and deliciously smutty, with a full cast of delightful side characters and just the right amount of feelings. The story begins with the discovery of Draco’s surprise pregnancy, then switches to a long flashback of Harry’s gay awakening and his fast sexual/slow emotional burn relationship with Draco. The entire fic has a joyful feel—banter-filled pub nights, chaotic family dinners, audacious curse breaking—culminating in the baby’s arrival, which left me in happy tears and wishing for another 40K of this fabulous story. Featuring confident Harry, supportive friends & family, hot Charlie, and some shamelessly kinky Unspeakables.

🔸 Silhouettes by @sweet-s0rr0w (Draco/Ron/Harry, Dronarry Fest, rated E, 16K) Draco/Ron/Harry is not a ship I’d ventured into before I read this fic, but I’m so glad I did! Sweet’s writing always hits the right spot in my brain, and her alternating POVs and spot-on characterizations of all three boys are delightful. I especially loved Ron’s sexy self-assurance here. The unique magical theory around sentient houses is fascinating and ultimately poignant, once Draco gets to the root cause of the Burrow’s behavior. Sweet-sorrow surely lived up to her username with this one, weaving grief with humor and a heartwarming resolution.

🔹 Harry Potter Gets a Job (A 106-Page Comic) by dustmouth (Drarry, HD Career Fair, rated M) Dustmouth’s comics never miss, I swear! In this one, we find Harry overcoming his distrust of Draco with the help of the Weasleys, especially Ron (who is definitely up to something himself). All of my favorite Dustmouth elements are here: the expressive characters, Draco’s wild wardrobe choices, and punchy dialogue galore. Also featuring drunken shenanigans at the Burrow, adorable Teddy, and some first-class Slytherin-ing by Draco to win his man (and find Harry that job). What a treat!

🔸 the earth from a distance by spqr (Drarry, rated E, 15K) A whirlwind time-travel fic with breezy humor, bedsharing, and spqr’s unmatched smut with feelings… What more could you ask for in a fic? Oh, yeah: fantastic worldbuilding for Hogwarts in 1599, brilliantly clever Draco, and a dash of enemies to lovers. I can never get enough of this author!

🔹 A Year In The Life by @ladderofyears (Drarry, HD Career Fair, rated M, 19K) I swear, the author conjured a little bit of magic to write this story. It’s told entirely with 50-word microfics, one journal entry for each day of 2006 (an impressive feat, by itself!), and yet it reads just as smoothly as any traditional fic. Draco’s voice is perfect here, full of wit and subtle emotion, as his and Harry’s developing romance takes a sharp turn with an unexpected pregnancy.  Draco’s anticipation, worry, and joy are mixed with deftly-chosen details of his daily life, all captured with Emma’s trademark tenderness and warmth. This fic is a perfect comfort read for family feels and gentle romance.

🔸 try to fix you by @maesterchill (Harry/Ron/Hermione, HP Snooze Fest, rated M, 2K) A beautifully and tenderly written hurt/comfort fic set in the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts. Ron is the glue that holds the trio together here, caring for Harry and Hermione with gentle devotion. There’s no dialogue needed to tell this story, just Ron’s perceptive POV that captures the grief and love that compel him. I have a soft spot for this triad forming immediately after the war, as a way of holding onto each other and holding themselves together. Maester’s fic makes their transition from friends to lovers feel like the first step towards healing.

🔹 The Scent of Soft Rains by @dodgerkedavra (Drarry, HD Career Fair, rated E, 20K) When Harry is left housebound and isolated by a traumatic injury, magical prosthetist Draco gets called into help. But Harry’s struggles go far beyond the physical ones. This recovery fic combines magical and non-magical therapeutic treatments in a way I can’t remember reading before. The hurt/comfort is just as it should be—both heart-wrenching and soothing—but there are enough surprising revelations to keep the story from feeling predictable. Draco is wonderfully unflinching and patient, and the ending left me crying happy tears. With lovely, restrained prose and vivid magical imagery, this one’s an absolute stunner.

🔸 Connecting Lines, Connecting Crimes by @sleepstxtic (Drarry, H/D Career Fair, rated M, 15K) With its intriguing careers, fascinating magical theory, and well-researched worldbuilding, this story captured my attention immediately, and the mystery at the heart of it kept me engrossed. This was one of the more thought-provoking fics I’ve had the pleasure of reading, exploring the intersection of magic, the environment, and colonialism. Harry’s first-person POV is lovely, and it feels like we’re learning to love India and the people he meets along with him. The getting-back-together romance is gentle but satisfying, propelled by pent-up yearning that’s palpable. There’s so much to enjoy here, all in only 15K words!

🔹 Waking Up Slow by @sweet-s0rr0w and @ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm (Drarry, H/D Wireless Fest, rated E, 22K) The first word that comes to mind while reading this fic is charming. First there’s the novel setting: a Christmas shop in the tourist destination of Cheddar Gorge, in the middle of a July heatwave. Next, there’s the shop itself, so imaginatively described and full to the brim with clever Muggle and magical details. Then there are the delightful OCs, Draco’s seemingly unhinged enthusiasm for all things Christmas (including ridiculous jumpers), and Harry’s complete disregard for professional behavior. But underneath the playful banter and humor, there’s also a layer of poignancy to tug at the heartstrings, especially when we find out the backstories behind Harry’s and Draco’s unlikely careers. And to top it all off, like the glowing star on the tree, are Joy’s exuberant, colorful illustrations. This is a Christmas-y fic I’d reread any time of the year.

Thanks to all these brilliant creators for sharing their work with us!

Happy New Year!

[ren-rambles-often]

"Love, or Something Ignites" might just be the best goyuu fic ever!!! let me explain!!! (Thoughts and Review)

Some quick context but cuz this review was already going to be pretty long without my flashback sequence so pls scroll down to the red text if you don't want to hear my history of opinions with JJK and its ships.

I've been deep in the goyuu tag since the beginning of the year, which I found kind of strange at first since I watched S1 way back in 2022 and did not give much of af about the whole show.

I kicked my feet a bit at SukuFushi,  tried to like it more, and even searched out a couple of fics but they just weren't giving AT ALL.

At the start of 2023 I watched jjk 0 and I was kinda hyped to get back into the show, but my shipping heart still ached for something to latch onto so I went on AO3 and picked up the first fic I found. Surprise, surprise, it was a goyuu fic featuring role reversal. I wouldn't say I liked it but it did tickle something in my brain I would have explored if I wasn't neck deep in my bakudeku era at the time.

Then S2 happened and it all just sorta clicked for me. Before then I'd mainly been a SukuIta believer, I didn't frequent their fics but I DID gobble up their twincest doujins like I was starved when I had the time. 2nd cour of S2 coming out practically sealed Goyuu for me, I'd always felt there was a bit of something I saw between them but Yuuji screaming out for Gojo in that last frame...just...*chef's kiss*

I didn't go back to rewatch S1 where a majority of their reactions were like some diehard fans would but the clips and screencaps I've come across now and again are enough to solidify for me that yes! They are made for each other!! (Hope the wrong stsg fans don't find this ◉‿◉)

I'd really love to go on and on about their dynamic but this was supposed to be about my February fic of the month, "Love, or Something Ignites" by lainebee.

Like I said, I've been deep in the tags and the only others I think that come close to this one are "No Sanctuary" by eddie01 and both world's sequels.

Now I'm not saying there aren't other good ones, like I'm just halfway through the hundred and something AO3 pages of their ship tag, so there's a lot I've yet to see. Still, this is a sorta subjective review and I just hope to spread the word of this masterpiece and maybe meet others who've read it so we can fan together in the comments.

(Now that's all out of the way, there will be mild spoilers and also warnings for; omegaverse, mpreg, and voyeurism so let's hop to it (✿^‿^)

The fic is set in a historical Japan au where Yuuji and Sukuna are brothers, with Sukuna being much older and ruling over a kingdom in the south. Thing is, he's constantly at war with the Gojo clan cuz these two mfs are just built like that in every verse. Shit happens and they come to a truce and as a sign of goodwill Sukuna offers Yuuji, his recently presented omega brother, as a gift (I honestly thought Yuuji was like 16 or 17 but he's 19 so like whatever idc (╥﹏╥)

"So what's the problem?" you might ask, well aside from the obvious marriage of convenience plot, Gojo doesn't give a fuck, he's still hung up on Geto (kinda tho, it's complicated but they aren't in love) and he's pretty much intended to go through it for show.

But that's not the end; not only do our boys have no feelings for each other and have never even met, but THING IS... Sukuna has demanded a public consummation cuz he's a bastard like that and we love him for it. Worry not there's no fucking on a stage for everyone to watch...just fucking in a 'room' for a handful of witnesses to watch from behind those dresser screen things (vocab not working lol).

The fic is definitely kinda long and tho there are some slow-burn vibes a lot of it essentially takes place in ONE FUCKING DAY. My first assumptions going into this were, "pacing issues???" and "oh the author is going to either insta love them, make them fuck and spend the rest of the fic doing fluff, or they will fuck with some angst then spend the rest falling in love."

Color me surprised when yeah, they did fuck but that was one or two chapters from the last of about nine.

You expect this kind of shit to feel rushed as fuck but the writing is so fucking divine that you never feel like putting it down. There's always so much going on but time is never wasted dwelling on one subject for too long, it's fast, it's funny, and the characters and setting are constantly giving the energy you know and love from the original show but probably two times better.

One of the things I noticed a few GoYuu writers struggle with is accurately reflecting Gojo cuz he's actually an enigma and arguably one of the most complex characters in the show with a broad range of emotions. He doesn't particularly fit one kind of vibe whereas for everyone else you can pick one or something close to it. Gojo on the other hand goes from one end of the spectrum to the other pretty quickly and that's super hard to capture and explore, especially when it comes to the shorter smutty fics (Not complaining too much tho, I live for the E rating.)

I love the direction the author chose to go with him, and it feels so true to his character, his immature but his teasing doesn't feel over the top or come off as exaggerated. His status as the strongest is just told but shown to us with the way he behaves and I like that we get instances of him getting work done despite knowing he's a rebel. It reminds us that yeah, he's working to make the clan the way he wants but he's just going along with what he has to in true Gojo fashion.

Yuuji, is totally something else, it's implied that he actually killed people...and I don't think we got a paragraph of him feeling guilt over it but that's somewhere toward the end so forget it. Yuuji is the absolute sweetest here and I adore every scene he's in along with how bratty he tends to be with Gojo. It's not frequent and most of the time he's pretty respectful but when he's not...Yeah. His inner thoughts and his conversations with most of the other characters really bring life to the story and you literally feel you're right there with him through it all.

Then there's the smut...oh. my. fucking. GOD. It's absolutely delicious. If you were iffy about it being omegaverse, I beg you to actually consider it cuz all probably more than four thousand words of it are fucking precious.

I had no idea I'd be into sex with some commentary when I began reading but the conversation from the characters picked was spot on and even added to the spicyness.

My favorite part is when Yuuji moans like a fucking pornstar and the zenin guy (forgot his disgusting ass name) goes "The boy is a whore."

Like boohoo bitch just say you wish you were getting all that, I wish I was (╥﹏╥)

If you're still iffy about the Omegaverse trust me it's not that big of a deal, the focus is mainly on Gojo and Yuuji trying to find some mutual ground to get on so the consummation isn't fucking awkward but by talking, joking, and getting to know each other something even more starts to blossom.

There are definitely traces of insta love but I personally see it as a weird mixture of attraction and possessiveness but this book is just like the prelude to the main course which is the second part in the series which I'm not done with yet but fucking hell...all the intrigue and tension that you will find in Love, or Something Ignites, gets doubled with more angst and mystery in the second fic, along with goyuu being stupid as well as stupidly in love.

So give it a try, and if you have, let me know what you think. I'd usually say where the tiny flaws are but for this book there are none...unless you count Yuta being Maki's mate instead of Rika's but that's my personal hill to die on. Let me know if there's a fic you want me to write about and I'll maybe get to it

Well, that's all from me today, it's 3 am and I'm fucking exhausted.

[worldismyne]

Kirona fics recs.

"@worldismyne thank you! I'll check it out! Yeah, I'd love some recs. I prefer Crona as a boy (trans or cis) but I still like fics with them as non-binary or a girl."

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Alright, it's been a hot minute since I read some of these, so any ff.net recs are vaguely remembered through rose color glasses, but they def left an impact on me.

Masc recs...

The Lycan and the Vampire (T - Incomplete)

Summary: Crona is a lycan via bitten. Kidd is a vampire by birth. Kidd hates the lycans. Crona doesn't know how to deal with a vampire. Male!CronaXKidd. Rated T for sexual references mentioned mostly by a Lycan

Review: I am paranormal romance cringe. I remember this fic being the first I remembered when thinking of good MxM Kirona. The AU was fairly well world built as well.

Kid x Crona : Hades and Persephone (G - Hiatus)

Summary: Have you ever wondered if there was more to the story of Hades and Persephone? That there was more than what was said in stone?

Review: This is a mythology AU. I just got started with this one, but I'm a sucker for greek mythology. Seems pretty cute so far.

The Difference Between Us (M - Incomplete)

Summary: An ongoing Death the Kid x Male!Crona fanfic. Kid shows Crona what it means to be loved. Slow paced and many chapters long.

Review: tldr, have not read this one, 1st person is not my jam. But, the people for people who do like it (according to other reviews) it's got solid characterization and is a decent long fic to settle in with.

NB recs...

Beneath All the Hate and Despair (T - Incomplete)

Summary: Even after switching sides and making peace with most of Maka's friends, Crona has a rocky transition into Kid's good graces. Things get even more difficult when traces of Medusa crop up. An exploration of two wildly different but curiously similar people that come closer together. Mostly canon compliant, but an AU of sorts. NB Crona. (Revamped fic)

Review - This is the OG for me, and by that I mean how young me found out about they/them pronouns. (I didn't really get it at the time, but I still read the whole thing AND the author went back 10 years later to do another copy edit once they had more expirence. Mad respect.)

Stir the Cauldron (T - Updating)

My summery: A continuation of the manga where Kid uses his new powers to help save Crona.

Review - Really nice getting to see Kid adjust to being the new Lord Death, the internal dialogue is really on point. Bonus points for addressing Ragnarok and having Crona be artificially made (gotta be one my fav HC).

Devestation Rots (NR - Complete)

Summary: In which Kid is shattered by the loss of two people very important to him.

Review: Cute hurt/comfort two-shot. Bonus points for Liz/Patty + Kid in a sibling dynamic.

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I read mostly fem!Chrona longfics way back. So The Birth of Scelus the Kishen and Child Born of Love are the absolute classic longfics that have survived (I could have sworn there were four or five others, they may have been deleted). But both of them are complete and rated T. I have 0 clue how well they've held up, but they got me through many a class and roadtrip growing up.

There is 10 pages of fics on ff.net (the ship predates the ship filter feature. So just pop in romance into genre and only have them as the listed characters). There used to be more, but like I said, people like to delete their old stuff.

キックロ or Kikkuro is the ship name in Japanese if you ever want to look for art on other sites. I know there were a few doujins back in the day, but very few were translated to English at the time.

It's so interesting to see a ship that used to be in the main trifecta of ships fall out of favor. I'm mostly writing for other ships now too, so I'm not complaining lol.

Daughter of Madness is the longest fic I ever wrote and now with the sequel, they've fully transitioned from she/her egg to they/them god X'D

I still love these two together in any interpretation. So if you ever get brainrot or wanna talk headcanons, my inbox is open lol.

EDIT 10 Pages of fics when browsing on mobile, 28 if you're on web.

[forkanna]

Betty Cooper had an easy time suppressing those rainbow thoughts in the back of her mind - right up until Veronica Lodge transferred to Riverdale High. It's been two years, and she's still suffering in silence. Senior Year, however, the status will no longer be quo.

WARNINGS: Not many, other than some homophobia (shown as negative) and a few chapters of smut.

NOTE: Welcome to the ship of ships. The one that I had been trying to work on for at least twenty years, and never could quite latch on to the exact direction I wanted this plot to go - until now. Betty and fucking Veronica.

Fun fact about me, I'm not exaggerating when I say I've been an Archie fan since I learned how to read. My mother would purchase the little digest magazines from supermarket checkout lanes as a means of shutting me up and keeping me occupied while she went about her daily errands. I still have a couple of digests from those days, even though most of them are gone - but believe me when I say I have dozens and dozens more. Needless to say, as hyperactive as I was, she gave me a lot of them, and I got to know the Pals and Gals better than most of my real life friends.

Even in my youth, when I still bought into the heteronormative framing of the world around me, I still found myself fascinated with the blonde and brunette pair, who could often switch between best friends and worst enemies on the same page. They regularly seemed like an old married couple. The older I got, the more often I started to wonder, “If this comic is called ‘Betty & Veronica’, who needs Archie?”

By the way, this is not a Riverdale fanfic. I'm only gently poking fun at the Riverdale TV series with a few references here and there. I liked the series for what it was and thought the cast was phenomenal, even though it got a little out there from the second season forward. But this is a Comicverse fic and not a CW!Riverdale fic - even if I might grab an idea or two from the show. Just don't expect for Jughead to become a leather-clad biker and hook up with Betty in this particular story.

Also, since both of their names are in the title of their comic, I decided to alternate between their perspectives every chapter. Hopefully it's not too annoying.

Anyway, this is a very long-winded author's note, I know. Just you wait and see how long-winded the actual story is! I don't expect very many people to stick with me for the entire ride… but trust me when I say, it's going to get gay as hell.

Jessex

---------------------------------------------------------------------

PROLOGUE

"ELIZABETH COOPER!"

Betty's head jerked back from where she had been leaning in to examine her fair-but-plain features in the bathroom mirror. At least her makeup was alright again - understated and basic, but flattering; no rouge, no heavy eyeliner, no seductive wings. Just foundation and mascara, and pale pink lip gloss.

So very unlike the racy red of the other girl's lips, scowling her down from the doorway. It seemed to fit her luxurious raven hair and her more voluptuous figure, hugged by her blouse and skirt as if painted upon her fit, flawless form. 

But that certainly wasn't rouge on her cheeks. No, that flush was all natural rage.

“Of course it’s you! I should have known!”

"Veronica!" Betty finally gasped, dropping the tiny mascara wand to clatter against the countertop and into the basin. That would never be the same. "I… what are you doi-"

"Where do you get off?!" The force of nature strode up to stand directly in front of her, the ladies' room door banging shut behind her as she poked Betty in the chest with her manicured finger. "You knew - you absolutely knew that Archiekins and I had a date tonight! And here I find you, skulking around in the powder room like you're lying in wait to pounce on him! I oughtta box your ears!"

"I… what?! Ron, I am doing no such thing!" Betty fired up, balling her hands into fists and standing on her tiptoes - to look her bitter rival in the eye. They were the same height, evenly matched, but those heels gave her frienemy the tiniest advantage. It didn't seem fair. "Archie and I are hanging out tonight - not you and he!"

"Him! He and me!" 

"Yee and hoo?!" Betty shook her head and snapped, "Stop - what are we doing? Why are you here with him - how did he do this to us again?!"

Veronica rolled her blazing brown eyes and started tapping her expensive black pump. "He didn't do anything! You, the sneaky little blonde snake - you knew I would be out with him and hornswoggled him into making a second date on the same n-"

"Come on, Ron, you know that's not-" She threw both hands skyward. It didn’t matter to Veronica why they were in this situation - or that what she and Archie were doing didn’t even really count as a “date”, in Betty’s book. Veronica just needed a target for her fury. "Why do you always make excuses, always blame me? That crumb just can't remember how many dates he has lined up!"

"Stop trying to pass the buck! I know it was you - and it's my birthday! And why are you even out with Archie, anyway? This is just too far, Betty, I-" Even though still furious, pain started to creep into Veronica's gorgeous, supermodel-level features. "I can't do this anymore! How are we supposed to be friends if I can't even trust you not to steal my date out from under me on my birthday?!"

"I don't know!" Tears began running down Betty's cheeks. So much for her perfect mascara. Not that she really expected to go back to Archie's side tonight; that ship had sailed. She could never compete with Riverdale's favorite rich girl, even if she still wanted to. "You never care what I say, you don't listen to me! I could say 'Archie was beamed into my movie by moonmen' and you wouldn't even blink! I don't know what to do to please you!"

"What do you want from me?!" Veronica shouted, making Betty flinch from the volume. "You're ruining my birthday! I never get to turn eighteen a second time - you even said that yourself at my party! What is wrong with this town?! Those other clods already loused the party up, Cheryl couldn't even stay out of my hair - and all I wanted was this one date to actually… and you show up, and take everything from me AGAIN!"

The words reverberated off the porcelain and tile. Betty's chest was heaving with the effort of not panicking. She had seen Veronica lose her temper so many hundreds of times that it had become routine, but this wasn't at all the same. She was both distraught and furious.

Moreover, Betty was alone with her. She couldn't endure this again.

"I'm sorry," she barely whispered as she pushed past her, heading for the door - until a grip tightened around her arm through her cardigan. "H-hey! Stop, don't- don't hurt me, I-"

"What?!" After they blinked at each other for a few seconds, Veronica tugged her in close and hissed, "Cooper, I can't believe you just said that. I can't believe how you're looking at me right now - like I would ever lay a finger on you!"

"But you have! And you're hurting my arm right now! Let go of me!"

"I…" Veronica did let go - only to pin her to the nearest stall door by the shoulders. "Don't run off, we're not done here! I have a right to be upset about my birthday getting ruined, and you had better listen!" 

All Betty did was nod.

"Stop crying!" Another flinch, and Veronica's face became so much more pained. "Betty… we've both fought like alley cats over the years, but you know I'd never legitimately hurt you… right?"

No answer.

"Oh my God! " After blinking at her a few times, Veronica let go and took a step back. Her eyes remained wide as Betty's tears flowed freely, as if they could never be stemmed. "After everything we've been through… you don't even know me. Some 'best friend'." She cleared her throat and turned away. "Forget it. This whole day is shot. You can both soak your heads; I'm going home."

Her hand was barely resting on the door when Betty said, "You came with Archie. Didn't you?"

"Yeah." 

"Then you have no ride home."

"I'll… call Smithers. He can bring the car around. Or maybe I'll hoof it."

"Don't crack jokes like that," Betty said soberly as she walked closer and rested a hand on her shoulder. "You can't walk all the way home from the theater - I… I'd never forgive myself if anything happened to you 'cause of me."

"You already ruined my day. Why don't you just let me ruin the rest of my life?" Veronica's bottom lip trembled as she stared up into Betty's baby blues. "What do you care? I'm just the resident rich bitch."

Blinking in shock at the word, she sputtered for a moment - then said, "You're my best friend."

"Your best friend who wants to hurt you?" Her head shook a few times before she whispered, "You've been acting spooked by me for a while now. Ever since we broke into the school. I tried to pretend it was nothing, tried… but I knew something was amiss, even before the bake sale, before the car wash. Just what are you afraid of me doing, Cooper? What is it about fashionable li'l ol' me that has you so far out of your tree?"

And exactly three seconds after that question was uttered, one tiny mistake changed their friendship forever.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

    BETTY & VERONICA: UNATTAINABLE

CHAPTER ONE

From the moment Veronica Lodge landed in her life, Betty Cooper couldn't stop her from getting under her skin. It was almost as if some higher power had seen how flawless her idyllic little life was and decided it could really use a diamond-encrusted monkey wrench thrown into the works.

Growing up in the sleepy little upstate town of Riverdale was as close to perfect as a girl like Betty could hope for. Not just because she had wonderful parents and a sweet big sister, good friends, and never wanted for anything - but because Riverdale itself was one of the best places to live in all of America. Affordable housing, clean air, gorgeous forests and parks and rivers and lakes. The neighboring towns of Greendale and Midvale had their share of issues, and they couldn't compete with how ritzy Pembrooke was, but nothing bad ever seemed to happen in her own hometown - certainly no grisly murders or dangerous cult activity. Most major crises usually centered around one particular individual, and they were always rather tame.

That seemingly cursed individual was Archibald Andrews. The boy next door, both figuratively and literally, was a freckle-faced ginger all-American young man with a heart of gold. His heart certainly wasn't the problem; no, his wandering eyes and two left feet were the parts that made him almost as infamous as he was famous among the citizens of their fair hamlet. The well-meaning klutz couldn't stop chasing any pretty girl that drifted into his field of vision, and usually wound up causing minor property damage in the process.

And Betty had always loved him. Ever since they were little kids, running around and playing softball and going swimming in the old watering hole, she had her sights set directly on the same boy. Nobody else came close to holding that space captive in her soul the way Archie did, all the way into their high school years.

Enter Veronica. 

Though the whispers of a well-to-do family from the Pembrooke area deciding their child would slum it in the far more blue collar Riverdale didn't make any sense, they persisted the entire summer between Betty's freshman and sophomore years in high school. Then, on the first day of classes, she waltzed into everyone's lives and upended them soundly.

She could remember it like it was yesterday…

  ~ o ~

  "Who is that?"

Betty's blonde ponytail bounced as she whirled to face the direction in which Nancy Woods was pointing. She had been busy neatly taping a picture of Archie to the inside of her locker and hadn't wanted any distractions, but she thought it was only polite to see what her friend was talking about.

A brunette walking down the hall wasn't altogether unexpected. Even the fact that it was actually the rich girl everyone was talking about; she had heard the whispers as much as anyone had, even though she didn't like to put too much stock in gossip.

What Betty didn't expect was the immediate reaction she felt in the pit of her stomach. She had never seen anyone who looked quite so perfect in her entire life. Not Archie, not any of the other boys in town - even Reggie Mantle, who would tell anyone who listened that he was the ideal specimen of manhood. They all paled in comparison. Only people on television looked that good. 

Here was Veronica Lodge herself, with her effortlessly conditioned curves and silky raven locks falling a few inches past her shoulders, decked out in a blue dress that barely hid everything between her collarbones and the middle of her thighs, and the matching strappy heels on her dainty feet. Her earlobes, fingers, neck, wrists, and even one of her ankles were adorned in gold and glittering gemstones that could easily have paid off Riverdale's budgetary deficit - with change left over to treat everyone to a burger at Pop Tate's Chocklit Shoppe.

Yet more than those other details, her face looked as if it had been chiseled from marble by the finest Greek artisans. And the worst part was, she could tell there was no creative cosmetic surgery to thank; she was just that beautiful, all on her own.

Betty had thought women were beautiful many times before, of course. Especially her own mother; she was one of the prettiest in town, and she thought the world of her mom. None of them had ever hit her like this . Not in a way that reached down deep and touched her very soul, and made her question everything she thought to be true and certain.

At least that existential quandary had only lasted right up until the moment Veronica first opened her mouth and spoke to her.

"What are you looking at, Townie?"

As she walked off down the hall with her head held high, Nancy let out an exasperated sound. "Wh… excuse me? Where does that heifer get off, talking to you that way? What's wrong with her?!"

Betty had no idea. All she knew was that some little bud sprouting up within her heart had just been crushed flat. Though she would never admit it to anyone else, that pain took her into the little girls' room, where she spent at least ten minutes trying to figure out why she was crying, and how she could stop the tears so she could get to class.

  ~ o ~

  And so it went. Over the following couple of years, she watched as Veronica turned Archie's head as easily as flipping on a record player. Though he would occasionally remember Betty existed, and never minded hanging out with her for a while, if he had to choose which girl he wanted to go out with on a date, it was always the new girl from the affluent side of the tracks. He would save up any money he could spare from whatever after-school job he happened to have that week, just so he could treat her in the manner to which she had become accustomed over a lifetime of being spoiled rotten.

Not that Betty could blame him. What red-blooded male wouldn't want perfection? She was just some tried and true, dependable friend, and Veronica was Veronica . Any time she set her sights on a boy, Betty got steamrolled even worse than the Riverdale Bulldogs at every other football game of the season that year.

Still, she fought back when she could. They had so many bickering matches that a person could think they did it for sport; maybe they should have signed up for the debate team. Somehow, they had even become friends when they weren't at each other's throats. Of course, they vacillated wildly between extremes, but they always seemed to come back to a central location of "gal pals" eventually.

For a while, everything was something like copacetic. But as they say, the good can only last so long - and their luck ran out when their senior year arrived. Turned out, Riverdale was host to more than one diamond-encrusted monkey wrench.

  ~ o ~

  "Ahhh, it's so good to be back!" 

Archie chuckled good-naturedly as they strolled in through the doors of Riverdale High. "Is it? I don't know about you, but I was kind of enjoying my summer."

"Well, okay, so was I," Betty hedged as she trod the familiar path to her locker. "A lot more than I thought I would."

Which was largely due to the absence of her primary rival. Veronica had spent almost the entire summer in Milan, shopping and hobnobbing and otherwise being wealthy. Though she had told Archie to keep holding a candle for her, and threatened Betty with bodily harm if she took advantage of her absence to try to woo him away, she hadn't exactly kept that promise. Nothing more noteworthy than a few snuggles had transpired, but neither had she behaved like a hermit; if Archie wanted to hang out with her, then she would hang out. Simple as that.

There had only been one other complication. But she was doing her best not to get caught up on thinking about it; so many days were spent down at the old watering hole - trying not to ogle each other now that their interests had evolved from cartoons and video games. At the drive-in, fingers brushing deep in a bucket of popcorn. One soda, two straws, at the Choklit Shoppe. Though Archie had never said those three little words she longed to hear - "No More Veronica" - and he had definitely been distracted more times than she could count, it had been a magical few months. 

"Well, I didn't," Jughead Jones sighed as he left his hands stuffed deep into his jeans pockets. He had no backpack or stack of books, which wasn't unusual for the easygoing slacker on the first day of school. "While you guys were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, I was the only one who showed up for the Fourth of July hot dog eating contest."

"So what?" Archie said with a roll of his eyes. "You won by default."

"Yeah, and where's the fun in that?! They still gave me a plate of hot dogs, but that only had five on there. FIVE! Compared to the several dozen I planned on mowing down, that's just an appetizer!"

"Listen to the bottomless pit over here!" Reggie chuckled as he snagged Jughead around the neck and yanked him in to give him a noogie, knocking his trademark crown beanie off. He managed to snag it out of the air before it fell, even if he couldn't quite slip out of his friend's grip. "You nerds can't find anything better to do than eat competitively?"

"As if there is anything better," Jughead griped as he finally wriggled out of the headlock. "Arch spent the whole time running after girls; we didn't even go fishing."

"Oh no," he gasped theatrically. "You mean… you mean you didn't fish?! Ye gods! Whatever will Loon Lake do without you controlling its population?!"

"Can you be somewhere else?" Archie finally sighed with a roll of his eyes. "We're already in school, and you're draining every drip of fun out of it that's left."

Raising both hands defensively, Reg rebutted, "Chee, who died? Forgive me for trying to liven up this party."

"The party has arrived."

They all turned to see Veronica standing there, and looking as bronzed and glorious as she ever had. And there was very little they could miss, given that she was wearing practically nothing at all: a bikini top and cutoff jean shorts that barely covered her lower asset. Not a single tan line in sight - even under the straps of her flip-flops. The designer sunglasses completed her pinup look, as if she had stepped right out of a page of a swimsuit magazine.

"Gaaaahhhhleeeeee," Reggie groaned weakly, not even bothering to hide where his eyes were pointed. "You look… cheese and rice, those Italian beaches didn't hurt you a bit!"

"Uh-huh," she giggled, sashaying past him. "Hey, Archiekins, Bettykins… Juggiekins." 

"I'm no kin of yours," Jughead sneered.

"And thank the Lord for that!"

"I hope you remembered to use sunscreen," Betty said - in a carefully mild voice. She wished she knew why she felt so lightheaded right now. "Too much sun isn't good for your skin."

"Oh really? Is that what happened to yours, Cooper- tone Girl?"

As Reggie chuckled, Betty just pouted. She was still too flustered by how different Veronica looked after only a few short weeks to come up with a killer rebuttal.

"Lay off her, Ron," Archie chuckled as he gave her a huge hug. Betty could see that he intended to pull away after only a second, but Veronica held on - humming when the hum wasn't at all necessary. "I, uh… it's good to see you! Glad you had a… nice vacation? I hope?"

"Mmm, almost perfect," she sighed as she pulled back, finally sliding her sunglasses up a little higher on her head so she could look him in the eyes. "If only you had come along with me like I offered… but it's alright. I had the time of my life, even without my bumbling beau."

"You offered?" Betty demanded, now that her voice had returned from the Twilight Zone.

"I did, Cooper." She grimaced slightly. "Except Daddy un-offered on my behalf. Said he didn't want Archie to trip over a stewardess and force our plane to crash in the Alps."

"That's Arch to a T!" Reggie guffawed, clutching his sides as Archie scowled at him. 

"Oh, gee, thanks, Mantle. Anyway, I wasn't even sure about winging off overseas for the whole summer - not when I needed to help Pops around the house with a bunch of projects. Plus, I'd miss the rest of the gang!"

Betty only had about three seconds to feel her heart flutter at knowing Archie had chosen her over Veronica - before Veronica herself scoffed, "Uh-huh. So that wasn't you hopping up and down, raving about how bad you wanted to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa?"

"Uhhh, well," he chuckled nervously as he tugged at the collar of his Riverdale sweater-vest. There went Betty's flutter, dead as a door-nail.

That was as much time as they got before that pesky little complication reared its not-so-ugly head. They were still laughing at Archie having stepped in it again when they began to realize everyone around them was whispering behind their hands, looking further along the hallway. They could only pretend not to notice for so long before curiosity got the better of them. 

"Nobody should be making a bigger splash than me," Veronica grumbled as she dragged Archie along behind her. The others followed, forcing their way past the mob until-

"Oh no," Betty groaned weakly, feeling as if another year had just been shaved off her lifespan. "Not her again! I hoped she was joking about transferring here!"

"Wait, who is that?" Jughead asked with a raised eyebrow.

The very "that" was a curvy redhead with sparkling emerald eyes and a boisterous laugh that seemed to fill the narrow hallway. Somehow, her khaki shorts were even shorter than Veronica's, and her green keyhole halterneck top showed off nearly as much skin. Though she wasn't all softness; the interloper was a few inches taller than she or Betty, even without her wedges, and the little stripe of midriff visible showed off some serious abs.

"She really came," Archie breathed, a look creeping into his face like that of a little kid on Christmas morning. "I… I thought there was no way…!"

Even as he gawked, she finished chatting with Moose Mason and swatted him on the brawny shoulder with another boisterous laugh - just before she saw the group gathered to gawk at her a half-dozen feet away. The minute she spotted Archie, she grinned even wider. 

"ANDY!"

As if summoned by sirens, Archie bounded forward and threw himself into her arms. Not only did she accept this rather forward advance, but she kissed him. Not just a little polite peck on the cheek; she practically swept him off his feet, locking their lips together. They stopped just short of crossing into French territory.

A blood vessel was pulsing somewhere on Veronica's forehead. "What… fresh… Hell…?"

"Veronica, meet our new competition," Betty sighed, folding her arms tightly over her chest. "Cheryl Blossom." 

"Blossom, hmm?" For just a second, a change came over Veronica's face as she watched Mrs. Grundy show up and start berating the two for their public display of affection getting out of hand. She was a lot more contemplative than upset. However, what she said was, "Betty?"

"What?"

"I think you and I are going to have a lot of work ahead of us this year."

With a relieved sigh, she stepped up to stand next to her rival-and-friend. "I'm so glad you agree. Ever since she's been sniffing around Riverdale more often, I've had to keep prying him off her! We really have to stick together and scoot her out of the picture, I think."

"We do," Veronica hissed as she finally turned to look straight into Betty's eyes. "I may not trust you when it comes to Archiekins, but in all other areas, I know I can count on you, True Blue Cooper. Let's team up and take her down!"

"Let's do!" Betty said with a little smirk that she could scarcely believe she was wearing as she and Veronica shook hands. Her palm was so silky… "Riverdale isn't ready for the combined forces of Betty and Veronica!"

"Hmm… I think I like 'Veronica and Betty' better," Ron replied thoughtfully as she slung her arm around Betty's shoulders and led her down the hall, away from their pet project.

"But 'Betty and Veronica' flows best. Plus, it's alphabetical."

"Details, details. You and I have work to do - and when we're done, Archie won't know what hit him!"

Which sounded wonderful. If only Betty knew whether she was more excited to pry Cheryl off their Boy Next Door with a crowbar… or to be working so closely alongside the Greek goddess herself.

  To Be Continued...

[sineala]

How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authors’ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines weren’t where I was doing most of my reading.

I think in terms of generally “what it was like to be in fandom,” the big-picture stuff hasn’t changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, y’know, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If you’ve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like “providing warnings might be nice” (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure won’t say we’re perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.

There are some fights we actually don’t have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen the “real person fiction is wrong” battle, but also I don’t hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so it’s possible that’s still going and I just don’t see it.

There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasn’t a question because there weren’t canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder “does slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?” Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but that’s because what appears to have happened is that the term “ship” (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, “oh, I ship that.” For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.

Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much don’t exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we don’t write a lot of now. Like, I haven’t seen smarm in years! I also haven’t seen We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where you’d basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. You’d have to motivate this decision. You’d have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasn’t straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think he’s not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, “Okay, Captain America is bisexual, let’s go!” It’s... different.

Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I don’t know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think they’re too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didn’t have your own email address, so you couldn’t sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, you’re probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people don’t have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they won’t get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how you’re doing that? You’re going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but it’s going to take people hours to download them!

(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and I’d have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)

And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?

There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that don’t seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, y’know, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and I’m sad they’re pretty much gone now.

I also don’t think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.

Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldn’t you be able to?

This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. I’m currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didn’t, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely weren’t readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still haven’t! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.

Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then you’d better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you weren’t watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadn’t seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So you’d get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic they’d read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someone’s fic once. Like “Jim and Blair’s apartment has a small water heater” (not actually canonical) or “Blair is a vegetarian” (there’s an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).

Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadn’t seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. I’d seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didn’t get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!

I think also one of the things about fandom that’s not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if you’ve been in fandom a while, you’ve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if you’ve been in a lot of fandoms, if you’ve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. You’ll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.

But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you don’t know when the site it’s on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. It’s a site where you can put your fic up and you don’t have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they don’t allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesn’t like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.

So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but it’s a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldn’t have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think that’s great.

[ajaxwrites]

Genshin Impact Fanfic Rec List

(because this is my most current obsession~~)

The Narwhal of Dihua Marsh by GreyLiliy

Childe hears of a strong Adeptus living at the Wangshu Inn. Despite warnings from Zhongli that fighting Xiao would be a deathly mistake, Childe seeks out the Adeptus living in the Dihua Marsh eager for a proper fight.

However, Childe severely underestimates his opponent, and the consequences of his actions may keep him from returning home to Snezhnaya.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: This fic is interesting primarily because it's not necessarily what you would call an easy story to read. The content can surprisingly get quite heavy as the relationship between Childe and Zhongli isn't healthy and it becomes increasingly obvious as the story progresses. You swing between wanting to separate the two and also desperately wishing that they'll work out because there is something there. The story snowballs from what seems like an innocuous, if stupid and rash, decision on Childe's part to a complicated mess that you can’t help but be enthralled in. I went in expecting your typical romance and ended up in something that was more complex than I expected but also beautifully thought provoking.

Entirely Out of Spite by Bgtea

"Welcome to a new user experience! You have triggered this interface with the keywords, ‘Stupid game! Stupid devs! I want my f*****g money back!’ You are now bound to the character Tartaglia, the Eleventh Harbinger of the Fatui, codename: Childe! We hope you have an enjoyable user experience and we welcome you once again to Genshin Impact 2.0!”

Those are some of the first words Ajax, starving college student extraordinaire, has the misfortune of hearing upon waking up in a brave new world from what he's fairly sure is a very, very fatal accident involving water and a shit ton of electricity.

Okay, so he's not dead. That's good. But what's this about him being stuck playing the character Tartaglia? Tartaglia, as in the shitty, one-dimensional, cartoonish villain who met his untimely, gruesome death in the first act of the original game?

Fuck that noise. Like hell Ajax is going to share that fate.

And so begins one man's journey to unfuck himself.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: Whenever this updates, I squeal. If you’re a fan of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System or just transmigration/reincarnation plots in general, you’re going to love it. Bgtea does a beautiful job in balancing humor with the trauma that comes with the whole reincarnation plotline. The whole of it is beautiful written and watching Childe/Ajax interact with the other characters (and the perspective of those characters) is a delight! 

the sister by glassdrachma

The tragic and unexpected death of Zhongli-xiansheng of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor occurred to the sorrow of many and the deep skepticism of a few.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: glassdrachma has a gift for humor and romance. In short, Zhongli fakes his death for plot reasons and comes back as Jianlao, the bereaved twin sister. Shenanigans ensue, featuring overprotective Liyue-ians (?), chaotic gremlin Venti, and Kexing. Very light hearted, good for the soul.

The White Cicada Society by clementinesgulag

After his little brother is bundled back to Snezhnaya, Childe makes good on his promise to the traveller and takes the first boat out of Liyue Harbor. Any sense of homecoming lasts about as long as an uncooked steak in front of Xiangling, however, when his boat sinks, grounding him back in the mainland.

It's just as well, because the next morning, a body is found in the Northland Bank. A visit from a fellow Harbinger reveals a far more insidious plot than anything Childe could concoct with a god of the vortex and twenty minutes without supervision. The murders aren’t limited to the one Bank. They’ve been trailing down the Liyue border, getting closer and closer to the city. The Tsaritsa has a new mission for him: to figure out who, or what is targeting Fatui forces.

Against his best wishes, Childe is forced to see Zhongli again at the morgue. It becomes clear that he’s going to need a guide, and Childe resolves to quash his pride, and their differences to request his help to navigate Liyue and solve the case.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: A diamond in the rough that I slept on and then stumbled back to by accident. I had it marked for later on AO3 and forgot about it for like a good week to my utter self-disgust. It. Is. So. Damn. Good! The mystery is intriguing but I live for the realistic portrayal of the aftermath of the whole gnosis plotline. The betrayal, the bitterness, but ah, the sexual tension. The harbinger interactions in this fic make it gold though.

Lungs full of Roses by SecretlyACatLady

Childe had always assumed that he would die young. He had accepted that a long time ago, ever since he accepted the mantle of a Fatui Harbinger. However, he always thought that he would die in a glorious fight, his body broken but spirit relishing the strong opponent that had bested him. He was okay with that type of death.

Unfortunately, it seemed like Fate had decided to add one last insult to injury, because, here Childe was, dying because he had fallen in love with the ex-Geo Archon. The same Archon who seemed to have discarded him like an old toy ever since the Osial Incident. --- In which divine beings are cruel and a cursed Childe starts preparing for his inevitable death because no Archon could ever love a mortal.

…Right?

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: The fic that started it all for me, the one that sucked me into the fandom. This fic is heartbreaking. We always do love a hanahaki plotline but something about the way it frames the disease and the shame that comes with it...I highly recommend giving it a read. The angst is real I tell you.

The Bride of The Golden Dragon by Erika_Bee

“You’re to be sent on a special mission, Tartaglia.”

The young man’s eyes gleamed in interest. “How special?” He asked as he wiped the blood off his daggers.

His superior grinned. “Special enough to put your name in Snezhnaya’s history books.”

—

In which the Archon War ravaged the land of Liyue and to ensure the people’s survival, the God of Geo established the Harvester Contract: One bride per village, every year, in exchange for protection and a good harvest.

Or: Childe is sent on an undercover mission to kill the Geo Archon, but things don’t go as planned.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: Don’t let the title scare you off--this isn’t one of those fics where they feminize one of the male characters and reduce their personality to a mindless submissive bobblehead to the point that I want to throw my laptop out of the window. Not that there’s anything wrong if you like that kind of thing, just not my cup of tea. This fic though---READ IT! There’s just something refreshing about the writing and the plot, the way that Childe’s character reads off the page. I live for the interactions between the characters and how the author has mapped the relationships. Warning that recent chapters have swerved decided into NSFW territory though.

the brothers grim by izabellwit

Left in an unfamiliar land with a mission he never wanted, a young Kaeya lies, survives, and somehow finds a family in the process.

Or: How Kaeya came to Dawn Winery, and why he left it. Includes lore, sibling bickering, found family struggles, and a more in-depth look at the years between Kaeya’s arrival and Crepus’s death.

Ships: N/A

Notes: Ahh, little Kaeya. Cheeky ass little shit that’s too angsty and adorable for his own good. I don’t have words for this fic. It makes my heart warm but also makes me want to weep because god, this fic covers exactly how traumatic Kaeya’s situation is and why child soldiers/spies just shouldn’t be. And the dynamic he has with Diluc and Crepus--do me a favor and read it. Screams found family.

the wind through the mountain tops by glassdrachma

Boredom brings Barbatos of Mondstadt to bother a certain ex-Archon of the Earth.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: A light-hearted, humorous and fluffy as hell piece. Short word is that Venti comes to Liyue for some fun, causes chaos, accidentally plays matchmaker, and steals some vegetables. A get-together fic for Childe and Zhongli that includes a surprisingly self-aware (if blunt and snarky) Zhongli and jealous Childe that gets increasingly flustered.

melt (speak or forever hold your peace) by anatakana

Falling into bed with Diluc was an unbelievably bad idea given their tumultuous shared history, but Kaeya’s impulsive urge to amuse himself knew no bounds.

It’s all fun and games until emotions got involved.

Ships: Diluc/Kaeya

Notes: THIS IS NSFW. With plot though? This is THE FIC that got me shipping the two (though the game did a good job on its own). The angst is real here and we love the sheer gal of both of these two stupid men.

Cascading (In a good way) by Hubbleablubble

Kaeya is a fascinating annoyance.

(Or: A series of events in which Albedo gets to know Kaeya, and they slowly go from strangers to acquaintances to something more.)

Ships: Albedo/Kaeya

Notes: Sweet fic. Not my typical ship pairing. Loved the Khaenri’ah mentions. Kaeya is Trans FTM here though it’s only briefly mentioned. There is also an incomplete sequel (as of May 2021) featuring an Overprotective Big Brother Diluc on a warpath giving shovel talks to everyone except apparently Albedo that’s also worth reading.

The Language of Flowers by Jules (Penwyn)

Kaeya Alberich has made a habit of lying—after all, the only truths he’s ever spoken cost him everything—but there are only so many lies a man can tell before the truth comes spilling out.

Ships: Diluc/Kaeya

Notes: Hanahaki! Except not! Basically, Kaeya pukes up flowers that say the truth whenever he lies. Cue, angst! Lovely and quick read--love Kaeya’s voice here.

i know i'm where i'm meant to go by paperclips (pastel_paperclips)

"Childe," Zhongli says suddenly. "I am enjoying myself greatly."

Childe’s face breaks into a grin. "Then-"

Zhongli gasps, grabbing his wrist and tugging him over to an unsuspecting peddler with a cart full of rocks. "Is that an intrusive igneous pegmatite formed in the Inazuma regions?"

Childe’s grin smooths into a small, adoring smile. He has all the time in the world to figure the other man out.

OR: Finding the Geo Archon is on Childe's to-do list but hanging out with Zhongli is significantly more fun.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: Childe, you idiot. Humorous and funny, very light hearted. Makes you wonder if Childe has an IQ. He’s too busy pining/lovesick to realize that he told his target that he’s going to kill him for his gnosis. Zhongli and Liyue remain confused on how Childe still DOES NOT get it but half-ass hiding his Archon status anyway.

the bird without wings by Anonymous

"Kaeya!" someone yells. Small arms wrap around his waist tightly, red hair spilling out of the ponytail, and Kaeya's heart almost stops.

He's talked his way out of all types of situations. From placating international disputes to buttering up his informants, he's always had a quick response to everything.

But for once, Kaeya is speechless. He stares down at the boy with puffy cheeks, slightly crooked teeth and sparkling bright eyes.

Eight year old Diluc beams back.

Ships: Diluc/Kaeya

Notes: Diluc gets de-aged and Kaeya gets angsty. The interactions between the two are heartwarming and will induce tears. Childe makes a brief appearence that *chef’s kiss*

call me "lover boy" by Anonymous

Zhongli turns back, eyes bright with amusement, a stray lilypad still stuck in his hair, and Childe thinks, wow. I want to kiss him stupid.

Childe's not into the whole "swooning maiden patiently waiting for his beloved to swoop down and smooch the daylights out of him" thing. Nah, that's not his style. He's Tartaglia, eleventh of the Fatui harbingers, and he's going to kiss Zhongli right now.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: FUNNY AS HELL. Childe is straight up just trying to plant one on Zhongli but fate and people just keep interfering. It’s a weird trope aversion where the character is actively trying to confess rather than avoiding it but life gets in the way. 

springtime in snezh-nya-ya by miaomaomei

Tartaglia’s body moves before he can even think about it. He arches his back and flattens his ears against his head, baring his teeth in a hiss. Considering he barely even reaches Scaramouche's knees — Scaramouche, of all people! The guy is practically the size of a fourteen-year-old — he doubts that he is cutting as imposing a figure as he hopes.

It isn't a surprise, though. No one could become a Fatui Harbinger if they were scared of a little cat.

OR

Tartaglia is turned into a cat and he goes to Zhongli for help. It goes about as well as expected.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: TOO ADORABLE FOR WORDS. This is just pure fluff I swear. Love how Childe is written and the interactions between the two are just ahhhh. A balm on the soul.

Melt by tanktrilby

“My name is Diluc,” he says. A scowl naturally furrows his brow, and Kaeya looks like he wants to laugh.

He’s looking at him through his lashes again, blue eyes teasing and warm. “Diluc,” he says. “A knight in overalls isn’t quite where I thought my preferences would lie, but here we are.”

(or: Kaeya loses his memories and makes some assumptions. Diluc can't honestly tell him that he's wrong.)

Ships: Diluc/Kaeya

Notes: As the summary says, Kaeya loses his memories. Diluc plays babysitter for plot reasons. Meanwhile, Kaeya freaks out and has an essential crisis because his instincts freak him out which = angst. Simultaneously, sort of love confessions? 

you are cordially invited by ktenologious

When the Traveler receives a mysterious invitation from a Snezhnayan businessman, they seek out help from the only Snezhnayan they are on good terms with. They decide it is a wonderful idea to go to this business party in the middle of the ocean because, well, what could be better entertainment than watching a Fatui Harbinger at work? It is too bad Childe couldn't come with them...

Meanwhile, the Tsaritsa needs someone to track down the source of a brand new drug at a party on a cruise; it just so happens that she has two Harbingers who specialize in causing chaos and sinking ships. Scaramouche is a sadist and loves this, and Tartaglia... Well, Tartaglia just wants to know why is he the one in the dress again.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe, sort of Diluc/Kaeya & Scaramouche/Childe

Notes: Features a crossdressing Childe and Kaeya for plot reasons. Funny as hell. Love Fatui dynamics/interactions. Highly recommend. Go read it. I’m serious. It’s so beautiful, I can’t. Also Zhongli is so love-sick and jealous, it’s hilarious.

The Road to Snezhnaya by paranoid_fridge

Everything's done and over. Now, Zhongli only needs to adjust to living like an ordinary mortal. Or that is what he thinks until a familiar face shows up in Liyue. Teucer comes looking for his brother who failed to return to Snezhnaya on the Fatui ships. And as Childe's declared "friend", Zhongli must help Teucer find him.

Or: Teucer drags Zhongli on a cross-country goose chase looking for Childe. Zhongli just happens to find a bit more along the way.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: I have no words for this fic outside of the fact that it is clear that Teucer has the only functioning brain and should be Best Man because he obviously did all the work here. Features an oblivious Childe and overprotective Zhongli, plus bystander Kaeya that is getting allll of the gossip. And also the most destructive group of children ever.

basket of knives by oronine

“I just want to be loved,” Childe says to himself, to whoever is listening. “Is that too much to ask?”

They are on the roof once more, this time Childe’s foot touches the edge of the building as he daydreams of something that cannot be. The sky is blank and cloudy and perhaps Lumine fears it’ll all end when he takes a step.

“Not at all,” she says. It’s still the truth.

Contrary to popular belief, Childe hates his family but loves them all the same.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: TW for suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, self-harm, depression, etc. Not a light read by any definition. Set in a modern AU, not in the genshin impact universe. Features a Childe that is Not Okay, good friend but also probably traumatized friend Lumine (and her brother Aether), and Zhongli. Family dynamic is messed up as hell and explores mental health quite well in my opinion. I’m not sure how healthy necessarily Childe’s relationships are but I think that’s a given considering the context and how derailed his mental health is in this fic. Definitely angst as heavy, made me tear up quite a bit. Read, but pay attention to the content/trigger warnings as it does get quite explicit.

Bane of All Evil by tzitzimeme

When Chongyun unintentionally offends Liyue's second most powerful adepti, he vows to mend the thorny relationship between Adeptus Xiao and human exorcists-- even though no one has succeeded in currying Xiao's favor for over a thousand years.

His best friend Xingqiu offers to come alone, mainly because he's worried about what kind of trouble Chongyun will run into. Along the way, they receive help from others: Xiangling packs them meals for their journeys, while Zhongli gives them advice on what demons to track.

Childe is just there because he thinks the whole thing is hilarious.

Ships: Chongyun/Xinqiu

Notes: JFKLFJS I LOVE THIS. I love Chongyun’s characterization and the interaction between all the characters. The dynamic between Chongyun, Xingqiu, and Xiangling are to die for. Also, this line: “Stuck-up Persnickety Bastard.” Random note but Xiao throws Chongyun off a balcony yet is also 100% a softie.

Talks about Nothing by tzitzimeme

In which Zhongli unlocks the Memory of Dust, only to find out:

1. Guizhong is 100% alive (just disembodied) within it, 2. Guizhong has been watching over him this whole time, and 3. Guizhong is very excited by the prospect of Zhongli getting a cute Snezhnayan boyfriend.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe, Venti/Xiao

Notes: The pure judgment that Guizhong unleashes on Zhongli (as well as her sass in general) is pure comedic gold. The dynamic between Xiao and Venti are also adorable. Meanwhile, Childe misunderstands and also just wants to know what the fuck is going on.

xi wangmu by tzitzimeme

Xiangling scales entire mountains to satisfy the palettes of her two pickiest customers.

(Or, two men who are emotionally stunted by their own immortality inadvertantly turn an overly enthusiastic chef into their messenger pigeon.)

Ships: Zhongli/Xiao (?)

Notes: Not sure if it reads romantic exactly, can definitely be read as platonic. The fic boils down to Xiangling trying to expose Xiao to variety because just eating plain almond tofu is a no no. Zhongli gives advice/uses Xiangling as a messenger pigeon. Backstory is explored!

Falling (Fallen) by asinglecrow

It’s only when Childe finds himself in front of Zhongli, a spear protruding from his stomach, that he thinks oh I might have fucked up.

Or: The worst (best) day of Childe's life.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: Funny and lighthearted! Gets sort of NSFW with passing mention of mpreg but otherwise, it’s just pure humor/fluff. Get-together fic featuring deadpan dragon Zhongli and Childe that is just done with everything. 

the louvre by morisuke

Here in Liyue, the air is filled with the ocean, and the sun shines through the mountains like it’s flowing through a crack in the sky. Here in Liyue, there is a man with no wallet at a vending machine that is going to waste the rest of his day showing a stranger around their school campus for a pocket sized can of iced coffee.

It’s interesting here in Liyue, Childe thinks.

or

Where Childe flirts with a stranger at a campus vending machine.

Ships: Zhongli/Childe

Notes: Set in a modern/college AU. This is a relatively quiet, soft kind of story. Childe comes to Liyue because reasons and falls in love quietly. It’s more of a snippet of life type of fic that’s sweet and peaceful. Love the change that comes over Childe as he finds a home.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with bugs

bugs has 40 stories at Gossamer. They mostly focus on Mulder and Scully, but there are also some goodies featuring Reyes and Doggett. I’ve recced some of my favorites of her fics here before, including The Link. She also co-ran WhyIncision, a fun, smart X-Files mailing list that dissected fics like a book club. Big thanks to bugs for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

Not really. While I was still in high school, I started watching the then 20 year old OG Star Trek and became a Trekkie of a sort. Starlog magazine, James Blish novels and the other novelizations, and while I was working as a library page, I found fanfiction one day among the periodicals.  Who knows how fanfiction ended up as part of a library's materials, but there it was, this tattered mimeographed collection. The fic that had the most impact on me was one where Nurse Chapel wrestled a giant alien snake to save Spock's life.

So when I got into XF, one of the first things I did was look for fanfic, knowing somewhere out there, Scully was wrestling a big snake for Mulder.

That experience showed me the power of fandom, that even without the internet, how the second generation of Trekkies joined the original group to advocate for the franchise to be revived. I remember sitting in the theater for that first awful Star Trek movie, choked up with what we'd done.

Tragic backstory way to say, no I'm not surprised that a well-produced show like XF would beget future generations of fans, and that they'd be chewing their way through the fanfic archives still being maintained.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I'm so grateful to the fandom. Literally formed the life I have today through the confidence it gave me. Many of my friends to this day are 'pocket friends' from the various fandoms I've been in, and the longest friendships were formed in XF. I learned how to write, both technically and finding my voice. I learned how to think analytically, more than any college courses.

The two most important things I took away were, write for yourself first and always, and shit ain't that damn important. In the end, it's a TV show.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

YIKES.  I came in at the Fight the Future summer hiatus, so the waning days of ATXC, then we moved to mailing lists, right?  Yahoo Groups was in there somewhere. Finally message boards. Live Journal rose up at the end of the run which began to fragment the fandom even before the show ended, along with the migration off our individual websites to Archive of Our Own, fanfiction.net and such. We went from group discussion platforms to 'come look at my blog for my thoughts'. It was different and I didn't particularly like it, but in the end, when I came back to fandom for a new show....I had to get a Live Journal. That's the most interesting part of fandom, that a platform doesn't mold a fandom; we use the platform and when it's no longer useful to us, we abandon it en mass.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

I've touched on that a bit, but to elaborate, I'm glad I started in the XF fandom. It had such high standards and I hope that I maintain those standards for myself to this day. These days, I don't usually have a beta reader, but that took a couple hundred posted fics to get to that point.

Having seen the same exact flamewars and divides and squabbles over and over, seen how the taste of 'fame' can drive someone to be rather unpleasant, has given me a much more 'whatever' attitude. It's sort of comforting when joining a new fandom to know what's going to happen next in its natural progression.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

There's a meme "I have a type," and XF definitely had that type, but it just took me a while to get there. I was away at college then working on the road when the show started, and wasn't home on Friday nights most of the year. My mother has always been a big sci-fi fan, so she actually was watching before me. I don't like scary things, and would leave the room if it was on when I'd visit her. I was home for Christmas when Christmas Carol/Emily aired and I remember standing tentatively just inside the room so I could flee if necessary, and watched Scully go through the wringer, and ranting, "What the hell is this? Why are they putting that poor woman through this!?" I also saw how the show was doing the big ship tease, and I was like, uh, I don't have time for this. Even by my 20's, I'd been done wrong by so many shows that I'd become bitter. But the first film trailers suggested they were actually going from UST to RST, so I figured I could give 2 hours of my time for that.  And yeah...but I was hooked, and WENT TO BLOCKBUSTER AND RENTED THE VHS TAPES TO CATCH UP....this interview is making me feel very old.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I've always been a shipper and have no shame in that, as I think forming and maintaining a relationship is the most conflict-ridden enterprise humans can attempt, and thus is the most challenging thing to write about. Like many fanfic writers, I'd 'told stories in my head' ever since I can remember about the characters from books, shows and movies. It was just a matter of then writing it down for the first time.

After I was sucked into the show and it was still the summer hiatus, I got on my first computer, dialed up that screeching modem, and went on Netscape to search for that fanfic I knew had to be out there from my Trek experience a decade ago. Like many people, after inhaling much of the delicious fics out there, I decided I can do that. I'm someone who's very methodical on my approach to something new, so I studied what worked/what didn't, the expected formatting, got a sense of the culture I was entering, acquired a critical beta reader, so when I actually submitted the first chapter to AXTC, I was calm and confident.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I watch from the sidelines, with a vague little smile on my lips.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

Yes, I have. Battlestar Galactica had a lot of Philes, but it was still a big step away from the very organized fandom in X-Files. Plus, with so many characters, there could be lots of little groups focused on their favorites. Same in the Downton Abbey fandom. Just a different dynamic.

On the other end of the spectrum, one of my most popular fics is in the Silence of the Lambs fandom which I've never been involved with any other fans or their fandom, if it exists. It just sits out there on fanfiction.net and chugs along with the reads. My current fandom is The Doctor Blake Mysteries which is tiny but mighty--the saying is, we're six people and a shoelace. It's shown me that it's not the size, not the 'fame' possible, but the passion that makes a fandom.

Sadly, at least at this time, I don't think there will ever be an experience like The X-Files heyday. It was such a golden moment of the rise of internet and home computer use by the general public, a large generation of educated women having the time to participate in fandom, and there wasn't the amount of 'noise' that is distracting us all now. I'm so glad that you're doing this exercise to record our thoughts. We've already lost so many of the OG folks. My first beta, Janet Caires-Lesgold; Trixie, way too young; Shari, also too young; Brandon D Ray, leaving his family too soon; and many more.

(Posted by Lilydale on March 9, 2021)

[daredevilexchange]

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See what this is about here, or if you’re using the app here.

What’s your fannish ID? I'm AnnaHawk on AO3 and Anna-Hawk on tumblr. Anna is a name that I've always liked and thought of using if I have a daughter one day. Hawk is the English translation to a part of my actual last name. Now, I have 2 daughters, but I went with different names because Anna has become a part of me after having that handle for several years. 

What types of fanworks do you create? I write fics. I've always been an avid reader. Since I started learning how to read, you would always find me sitting somewhere with a book. I love to be able to immerse myself fully in a story. When I discovered fanfiction, I knew that I'd found my special universe because it gave me the possibility to stay and discover new stories in the fandoms that I loved. It never mattered if it was canon or not. Just the fact to have a sort of continuation in that world was amazing. Some fanfic authors have moved me more than any published authors have been able to. It took me nearly a decade of reading fics to finally sit down and write one myself. I had a lot of ideas (the number of plot ideas that I've garnered of the years and have been sitting in a folder is huge), but I didn't have a writing process. I would sometimes sit down, start writing, and when I stopped, I wouldn't be able to continue. As for branching out, I don't have any talent for any other craft.  

What are your favourite types of fanworks, when you’re not creating? Definitely fics. It's how it all started. Ever since I started writing more, my time for reading has lessened a lot. But if I need a break, I'll go to a different fandom than the one I'm writing in and vanish in a fic. Fanart would be the second one. I've discovered so many absolutely wonderful artists over the years. Some drawings can get me just as hard as thousands and thousands of words. 

What do you like in particular about this fandom? The short answer would be Frank Castle, hahaha. When I saw Frank Castle on Netflix, it was love at first sight and after more than a year, I finally sat down to write down one of my favorite fantasies. It took me forever to write those 4K but after that it was like a revelation and I couldn't stop writing anymore."That's how it happened for me, anyway. I could never seem to write anything or at least, finish it. And then Jon came along as Frank and wham, I just did it. The longer one would be this: the MCU is pretty much the only reference I have for this fandom. I must have read maybe one comic, but that's it. When Daredevil came out, I was very curious because I enjoy this genre (superheros. People with powers. Fantasy. You name it.) Netflix really did an amazing job with this show, pushing the rating up. Very satisfying to watch, and the cast was amazing. And then Daredevil S2 happened. Frank Castle was an immediate crush. Frank is the one who got me into writing. My favorite ship is by far Fratt. I just love the dynamics between Frank and Matt. I've only written two fics for them, but I want to write more. 

Do you like participating in fan events? Both? I think that fan events are amazing. Bringing people with the same love for a fandom together is wonderful in my opinion. But at the same time, I can stress easily about it and put some pressure on myself because I'm not sure if I can deliver. In time. Writing for @frattweek was easier because I had the choice to go for anything I wanted. A gift exchange is more complicated because OMG, what if the giftee hates what I wrote for them? Those are my thoughts right now since I entered my first DDE, hahaha. 

What about your creating process? I can write during any time of the day, but I'm usually more active at night. And my life being what it is now, I don't have much choice BUT to write in the evenings. Music has definitely helped me write. At times, when the house was just too loud or simply because the melody would be in synch with what I was writing at the time. It's not a necessity, though. What I need, is my peace, especially when I'm stuck. I write in chronological order. I will write down ideas for future scenes, but I will always finish the previous one before completing the next one. I've tried writing whole scenes that happen later, but in the end, they wouldn't really fit because I would have made some major changes in the story along the way, and they would just feel off. 

Do you interact a lot with other fans? Before I started writing myself, I would very rarely leave a comment on a fic. Even if I liked it. The fic would have had to really move me to get me to comment. It wasn't until I started writing myself that I realized how important comments/feedback can be. I know that not everyone wants or need comments and I know that they aren't mandatory, but to me, it was suddenly clear that I needed to let people know that I enjoyed their writing/art. It's after I started doing this, that I met some wonderful people. I spent over a decade reading fanfics without ever really interacting with anyone. Such a shame because now I've found a wonderful fandom and amazing and talented people. There's a true feeling of "belonging" that I've never felt before. Find me as anna hawke#2609 on Discord!

Do you have other fandoms you'd like to talk about? Oh, there are a TON of fandoms that I enjoy. The list is never ending. I have several ships in the MCU but the other fandoms I enjoy are different from this one. My first fandom was the Harry Potter one. It's the fandom I've been in the longest, but I've fallen a bit out of love with it. Some parts of it are just plain nasty and I don't want to deal with that. Then there's the Teen Wolf fandom. I was already 30 when I started that ridiculous show, but I stayed for my OTP. The only time, where I knew about the ship before watching the show. I didn't expect to fall for it the way that I did, though. A more recent love but no less fervent is the Detroit Become Human one. The only video game that made me go look up fics and give me the desire to write for it. I really don't think that the fandoms or the ships have anything in common with DD, Punisher etc. I can't really say what will get me into a fandom. Sometimes I just see two guys and go: Oooooh! XD Because I need a ship to get into a fandom. 

Is there any particular piece you'd like to showcase for this post? Why not mention that first ever fratt fic? I'm really happy with how it turned out. https://archiveofourown.org/works/24556855 Nice Suit . Always time for Coffee, is my reader fic series. It started as a fun way to get a fantasy out of my brain and transformed into something huge with feelings and angst and... well... a lot of smut XD. It's been ongoing for over 2 years now and it sort of shows my, let's say, growth as a writer who's first language isn't English. https://archiveofourown.org/series/1366675

Is there anything else you want to tell us about yourself? I ramble, I rant. Don't get me started LOL. 

Where can your fanworks be found?  https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaHawk/works

Thank you, @anna-hawk !

banner by @context-is-for-kingpins !

[ID on a white background, four black triangles that look like spotlights from above. Each illuminates one of the Defenders silhouetted in white: Jessica, Luke, Danny, Matt. A hand on the left is holding a pen writing the words Content Creator Spotlight. There is a little Punisher skull on the pen. End ID]

[kyber-queen]

Like Real People Do (Rex x Reader) Pt. 2

Summary: Jedi!reader and Rex fall in love but are separated by the war. They meet again two years later, weeks before the Siege of Mandalore. This chapter takes place two years after the prologue--Jedi master!reader is stationed in the outer rim and is currently kicking ass alongside Aayla Secura. Reader n Anakin are gonna be bros, Rex runs from his problems.

Rating: Everyone

Word Count: 1.5k

Warnings: None

Author’s Note: The first real chapter is up !! ALSO I do have a taglist for this fic so lmk if you want to be added !! This chapter is a bit exposition-y, but it’ll pick up soon !!

Previous | Next

************************************************

Your lightsaber cleaved through the battle droid, leaving a bubbling mess of metal in your wake as you leapt to your next target. You were efficient, your strokes short and effective. You deflected a final blaster shot from a fallen droid before sprinting back to where Master Secura stood. She was perched on the only clear slate of ground amidst a sea of demolished battle droids. Realizing that, for now, the fight was over, you sucked in a few greedy breaths as you wiped your brow. Noting your gesture, Aayla shook her head with a smile.

“Tired already, Commander?”

You laughed breathlessly, rolling your shoulders and giving your lightsaber an experimental spin. “Just warming up, General,”.

You switched on your datapad, reviewing the strategy you had composed. Your eyes flicked from the battle plans to your surroundings, noting the rocky terrain and sparse vegetation. A grunt to your right drew your attention—a few troopers dragging one of their wounded to the medevac. Your stomach clenched. Thanks to your constant planning and preparation, the 327th had the lowest casualty count in the GAR. Even so, every loss hit you personally. Due to your position as a strategist, you took credit for every victory and every defeat—if you lost a man on the battlefield, it was due to your planning.

The beeping of Aayla’s commlink interrupted your dwellings. Master Windu’s voice cut through the steady thrum of the battle tanks’ generators as Aayla paged him through.

“Master Secura. Master—” A shout from one of the clone troopers drew your attention. The separatists’ reinforcements had arrived.

Windu carried on despite the interruption. “General, your auxiliary commanding officer is required on Coruscant immediately. You may proceed with your mission as planned,”. He addressed you next. “Commander, please be advised as to commandeer a starship as soon as possible. Upon returning to Coruscant, meet me aboard the Venator,”.

Your brow furrowed, and you turned to Aayla, concerned.

“Grab a starfighter, Commander. We’ll be fine,”.

“But the reinforcements—”

“Are accounted for in your plans, no? Go,”. Aayla patted you on the shoulder.

You gave her a reluctant smile and headed toward the starfighters.

Once you had piloted out of the atmosphere, you set your hyperdrive coordinates to Coruscant and settled into your seat. You bounced your leg nervously. You hadn’t been back on Coruscant in years. You hadn’t been back since—well, since you were with Rex. You doubted he would be there, you doubted he was even alive at times. Hope fluttered in your chest just the same.

The journey was easy enough—you arrived at Coruscant within the hour. You disembarked from your starfighter, and immediately sought out the Venator. Windu was waiting for you at the ramp, and he motioned for you to walk with him.

“Since your appointment as Master, you’ve excelled at both strategy and diplomacy while assigned to the 327th.Your success within this unit is undeniable, but myself and other members of the council feel that your talents could best be used elsewhere,”.

You nodded in understanding. You were aboard the Venator now, and you found yourself distracted by the steady stream of troopers flowing through the halls of the destroyer. You searched each face, looking for someone you knew was probably long gone. You didn’t even know if you would recognize him now. So much time had passed since you first left Coruscant, yet thoughts of the man you left behind still occupied your mind. With each new unit you encountered, you hoped to catch a glimpse of blond hair within the crowd. As you focused more and more on their faces, Windu’s speech faded into the distance.

“Are you listening, Master?”

You shook yourself back to attention.

“I’m sorry, Master Windu. Could you repeat that?”

“I said that you’ll be assisting the 501st in tactical preparation and risk reduction. You’ll report to General Skywalker—he’s brilliant, but his plans often lack forethought. Your emphasis on preparation before action will serve him well. Meet General Skywalker on the bridge—he’ll be waiting for you,”.

Your eyes went wide. The 501st? Images of Rex flooded through your mind. It’s been just over two years since you’d last seen him—the systems in the outer rim had dearly needed republic support, and your year-long tour had been prolonged indefinitely. So much had happened, so much had changed. You were a Jedi master now, but you couldn’t repress the way your heart fluttered at the prospect of seeing him again.

“Oh, and Commander?” Your eyes flicked to Windu.

“Yes, Master?”

“Good luck,”.

Windu turned, and you watched as he disappeared into the crowd. Where were you supposed to meet Skywalker, again? Remembering your purpose, you set off for the bridge. Skywalker was waiting for you at the entrance, as Master Windu had said. He gave you an appraising look.

“You’re the Commander, right?” His tone was guarded—you could tell he was uneasy about you. He probably didn’t appreciate your intrusion into his unit. You knew from the republic reports that Skywalker was one of the most skilled Generals in the GAR—the 501st had a surprisingly low casualty rate, rivalling the 327th. Skywalker seemed to be handling his troops just fine. Why were you here?

“Guilty as charged. Forgive me if this is forward, but I’ve read your reports. Your loss numbers are low despite the relative spontaneity of your strategies. You clearly have control over your battalion. Why am I here?”

Skywalker grinned. “That’s what I said. The council thinks my strategies need more structure—I guess that’s where you come in,”.

“Well, General, I’ll do my best to align your tactics with the council’s ideals—but considering how high your success rate is, I think it would be best if I left most tactical autonomy to you. Would you agree?”

“Absolutely,” Skywalker paused, before laughing to himself. You cocked your head.

“What?”

“You know, you’re not at all what I thought you’d be,”.

“I’m going to assume that’s a good thing,” you smiled.

“It is. I guess I should go over our specifications—”

You should have been listening as the General gave you the rundown of his battalion. You couldn’t. All you could think about was Rex. Was he here? Was he alive? You should ask—you doubted Skywalker would know the answer. Did he have a directory of his troops? Maybe you could ask to look through his records.

“—my clone captain, Rex, will be meeting us here to take you on a tour of the ship. Oh, and we don’t do numbers here—my men have names, and you’ll use them,”.

Your eyes widened. If you were any less shocked, you might have been touched by Skywalker’s sentiment. Did he say Rex was his captain? You must be hallucinating now.

“I’m sorry, what did you say his name was?”

“Rex—oh, speak of the devil, here he is now,”. Anakin looked over your shoulder, oblivious to the emotional tailspin he had sent you into.

You turned to follow Skywalker’s gaze, and your heart stopped in your chest. He’s here. The same honey-brown eyes, the same blonde buzz, a little older, a little wearier, but it was him.

“Rex—”

He snapped into a solute, his features set in a stoic gaze as he addressed Skywalker.

“General,” his eyes shifted over to you, his expression imperceptible. “Master,”.

Rex turned, and Skywalker motioned for you to follow him. The general took a few jogging steps to catch up with his captain, and whispered something to him that caused him to sneak a momentary glance over his shoulder at you. You were perplexed. Did he not recognize you? You were certain it was him. Skywalker retreated back into the command center, and Rex’s gruff baritone interrupted your thoughts.

“Barracks’re this way,”. Rex motioned to his left before setting off in the direction he indicated.

You enlarged your steps to avoid trailing behind. Rex walked faster. Spotting what looked like a maintenance room, you grabbed at his arm to stop him.

“Sir, what are you—”

You dragged him into the closet and closed the door.

“It’s really you, right?”

Rex nodded, slowly.

“Do you remember me?” You studied his face, watching as he slowly raised his stare to your knit brow and wide eyes. He sighed, and you watched his shoulders fall slightly.

“Yeah, ‘course I do,”.

You were at a loss for words. You took in the kama and pauldrons, the score marks on his vambraces.

“You’re a captain, now?”

“You’re a master, now?”

You laughed, and you noted the creases in Rex’s cheeks when he smiled. His smile disappeared far too soon for your liking. War had aged you both, but he wore it well, you thought. You opened your mouth to speak, but the buzzing of Rex’s commlink interjected.

Rex looked up from the commlink with an apologetic smile. “Duty calls. I’ll see you around, right?”

You nodded. There was so much you wanted to say.

Rex clapped you on the shoulder and walked out the door.

*************************

Like Real People Do Taglist: @pinkiemme @callme-eds @dinpoe 

[hogwartsfirebolt]

Hello there! I’m finally here with the third and last part of my favorite drarry fics I read in 2019!!! In the first part and in the second part I recommended 10 stories that made my year, and in this post I’m recommending 10 more that I absolutely adore. The banner art is by @spielzeugkaiser who was really kind and let me use this GORGEOUS piece, which you can (and totally should) reblog right here. Now, without further ado, here’s my,

FAVORITE FICS I READ IN 2019 PART THREE

1. The Company of The Rose - @lower-east-side - 31k - E - Six years after the war, Draco Malfoy has been restoring magical estates, while sidestepping his mother’s plots to marry him off and resolutely avoiding his issues. An advert in the Prophet takes him to a remote island, where a mysterious stranger has purchased an abandoned retreat. But the house has a few secrets of its own, and Draco will be forced to deal with not only his past, but the possibilities of the future.

We’re starting out this list with one of the last fics I read last year, and undoubtedly one of my absolute favorites. It’s gorgeous, sweet, breathtaking, a dozen other adjectives I can’t even think of. Stories that take place in beautiful, secluded places have a special place in my heart, and with a sure hand the author leads us through some of my favorite aspects of the trope: slow forming friendships, the feeling like they’re living in a world of their own as they get to know each other for who they really are, wonderful, delicious sexual tension keeping me breathless until the moment it snaps. The sex pollen element is also worked in a way I had never read before, with an exploration of what happens in the aftermath, addressing the issue of consent it creates. It’s just absolutely phenomenal, every single word of this. 

2. I could be wrong, I could be ready - @harryromper - 57k - M - At first Harry wonders if they’ve managed to destroy his vaults and are trying to tell him in the most oblique way possible. But when he turns the page he realises they’ve found a vault. A vault in the name of Lily and James Potter.The parchment trembles a little in Harry’s hand. He takes another gulp of wine. Harry Potter left Britain after the war and didn’t look back. Ten years later, when Gringotts discovers a vault containing his parents’ belongings—including their badly spell-damaged wedding rings—he’s forced to face up to friends and family who’ve grown in ways he could never imagine, a wizarding London rebuilt beyond his expectations, and the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s the entirely unforeseen problem of Draco Malfoy. Featuring pureblood wizarding traditions, ancestral magic, open mic nights, marriage equality, a diner in Brooklyn, and the return of Fleamont Potter.

Explorations of Harry as a character and his post-war issues never fail to hook me right in, and this beautiful fic takes us with him on a journey where he changes so, so much, and at first he does it by running away, thinking everything will remain unchanged as long as he doesn’t acknowledge it, which, of course, isn’t the case. We see him having to face his past, reconnecting with his friends, finding and coming to terms with pieces of himself that he forgot about, or never knew existed in the first place, and it’s absolutely exquisite. The tremendous amount of character development, the regaining of trust in himself and others, the way we can witness a love story blooming slow and steady, and see Harry grow into a confident, wonderful man. God, I have feels for this one, for every detail, every character and setting and emotion. It’s absolutely fantastic. 

3. What Real Thing? - @l0vegl0wsinthedark - 12k - E - They don’t cuddle, they don’t talk about their relationship (or lack thereof) and they certainly never fall asleep in each other’s arms.

This was my year of falling in love with l0ve’s fics. I had read some of her work before, but it was a few months ago that I found myself deep into her ao3 page, nearly weeping with the amount of emotion every single one of her stories stirs up within me. Picking just one was extremely difficult, but I finally chose this one, because the way she paints the relationship between Harry and Draco is masterful, their dynamic shifting and changing little by little, baby steps that become full-on sprints, single-minded and hesitant all at once, until we see them elbows deep into a feeling they don’t even know they’re experiencing, and it’s just brilliant, scorching hot, all-encompassing in a way that made me feel caught up in the whirlwind that is their relationship. If you haven’t yet read anything by l0ve, then I strongly, strongly recommend you start right about NOW. You won’t regret it. 

4. Teeth - @amelior8or - 5k - E - Potter’s been practically begging for it, for months, constantly staring until the air crackles with the intensity of it. Draco always stares back, until all it takes is a brush, a spark, before they go up like flash paper. The crash into each other is inevitable. Draco’s heart has got teeth. And there is nothing he won’t do to keep up the fight with Harry fucking Potter.

I am absolutely, 1000% weak for werewolf stories, and in just 5k words this one managed to enchant and entrance me. It’s hot and fast-paced and intense in the way I love, with their relationship charged with emotion and intensity that transform bickering into passion in the blink of an eye. The moment I reached the end, I went back to the top of the page and reread it that very second, because I had to experience it all over again. Amazing characterization, banter to die for and explosive chemistry are all present in this gem. I kid you not, I’ve read it about six times at this point and just keep going back to that moment in the showers because THAT DIALOGUE IS JUST- wow. 

5. Hush, darling - @magpiefngrl - 23k - E - Draco is in trouble. To get out of it he needs to seduce Harry Potter.

My god what a story this is. Absolutely unique, 23k words that felt like so, so much more because of everything they made me feel. There isn’t a single line of dialogue in this story that doesn’t feel purposeful, the characterizations constructed with such skill that every step the characters take rings true to their essence and gives us another clue to add to the puzzle that is Harry Potter, vulnerable man, powerful man, and Draco Malfoy, in all his darkness and his light. It also features some of the best sex scenes I have read, EVER. I could go on and on about this one, so let me just refer you to my long, individual rec for some more flailing. 

6. The Pirate and the Prince - @nerdherderette - 49k - E - Draco can't believe that fate and circumstance have made him a stowaway on the Master of Death's ship. He doesn't know what's worse: the dread pirate's legendary vendetta against the aristocracy, or the fact that his captor is the most infuriating yet irrefutably fascinating man Draco has ever met.

YES!!!!! YES!!! The moment I saw the cover art for this fic on tumblr my entire being just screamed YES, and it was everything I could’ve hoped for and more. Listen, there is nothing I love more than fics where I get to see Harry as a powerful, ruggedly handsome man who’s not afraid of getting his hands dirty, and in here there’s some of that and MORE, because he’s a freaking PIRATE. And not only did I adore that aspect of it, but the writing pulled me right in, the setting so vibrant I could feel it in my bones, and I just genuinely enjoyed every second of reading this so, so much. There’s ships and adventure and fighting for what’s right, there’s lovely kisses, heated kisses, secret identities and parrot Hedwig. Just, all in all, a great freaking time. 

7. Falling for a Golden Boy - @rockmarina - 44k - E - Merlin. Why couldn’t Draco have moved to a forgotten village in the Alps? He could have turned into a shepherd, learned to make his own damn cheese and given up his damn magic. But no, he’d had to come back to his Eighth year, hadn’t he? And this was his life now. Draping himself over Potter to hear words from him that he knew Potter wouldn’t ever mean.Great. The school year ahead of him looked simply great.“All I know is—when I’m with you, I…” Potter, the heathen, grunted when he read the rest of his line. “Do I really need to say this?”“What, scared of believing your own words, Scarhead?” Draco spat.“Boys,” O’Neill warned them.“All I—all I know is you’re the most amazing person with weak ankles that I've ever met, Meg.” Potter scowled. He was blushing again. “And when I’m with you, I feel less alone.”

My favorite eight year Drarry of all time, probably. I had never before experienced such a beautiful balance of the aftermath of the horrifying events of the war and how they impacted each character, and the light feeling of youthful fun. There are so, so many things to love in the 44k words that make up this masterpiece, so many details that warmed my heart and made me melt inside, so many moments that had me laughing or clutching my chest. In here, you’ll find quite a lot of Hercules references, wonderful teachers, drama club, healing, characters learning to trust, learning to love, learning to cope, beautiful friendships, hopeful romance. It is everything. I talked more about this fic in this individual rec, and I will absolutely talk MORE about it if given the chance. Everyone should read this. 

8. Tease Crossed, Eyes Dotted With A Little Heart - @diligent-thunder - 18k - M -  Draco's a curse-breaker, Harry's an Auror, and they're... something? Maybe? It depends. Harry definitely wants to get laid, Draco wants to follow procedure, and their work wives just want them to stop hiding from the truth. 

I hope you’re not sick of my rambling yet because oooooh boy, THIS ONE. It’s funny, in the way that makes you cover your mouth because you’re about to burst out laughing on the bus, it’s hot, in that casual way that makes you clear your throat and shift your phone just a little, just so the screen can’t be seen by the person sitting beside you because like HELL are you going to stop reading now, it’s sweet, in the way that makes you smile so hard your cheeks hurt, and it’s so detailed and all around so, so much fun to read, in the way that grips you and doesn’t let you go, only to release you when it’s over so you can go and recommend it to your friends, IT’S. SO. GOOD. Real quick: auror + cursebreaker pairing, are-they-friends-with-benefits-or-more, guess-they’d-have-to-actually-TALK-to-know-that, teasing each other in public, getting trapped together for a bit there, powerful female characters, should you guys really be flirting right now? and MORE. Listen, just go read it now and thank me later. 

9. That which hurts (and is desired) - @shealwaysreads - 19k - E - Draco was lying still, and pale, on a bed in a private room in St Mungo’s. The sheets were white, clean, enchanted against stains, vanishing the blood that kept spilling out of him. He hadn’t moved in two days. Not a twitch of his elegant fingers. Not a blink of his fierce eyes. Harry couldn’t even see the faint flutter of his pulse in his throat from where he stood at the foot of the bed, helpless, impotent, furious.

This fic is written so, so beautifully that it aches and leaves such an impression that, thinking back on it, every emotion hits me just as hard as it did when I was reading it. Everything Harry felt, I felt, every moment where he found himself just a little bit more in love with Draco, I was there, every moment of his frustration when Draco is hit with a curse nobody can decipher, I was there for it. With non-linear storytelling, it is evocative, a masterclass in narration, pacing, characterization and beautiful, lyrical writing. I nearly have no words for it. It features: auror partners that work together seamlessly, a dash of pining, a helping of very, very hot sex, and a love story that feels soft like a dream and thrilling like a race. This was the very last story I read in 2019, and I could not have ended the year on a better note. Definitely check this one out.

10. For Thine Is The Kingdom - @kedavranox - 66k - E - On a secret mission, Draco is Turned. With no memory of what happened, he learns that to save his missing Auror partner and regain what he’s lost, he must uncover the long-buried secrets of the vampire covens. To do that, Draco must open his mind and heart to what he has become, the new-found family that surrounds him, and the man who has remained steadfast at his side through it all.Harry spent five years avoiding the man he fell in love with, but when Draco needs his help, he cannot refuse. As they race against the clock to find Draco’s partner, Harry discovers that the bond they share is nothing to hide from, and that he'll never outrun the pace of his own heart.

And last but absolutely not least, there’s this freaking diamond of a story. I swear I want to squeal whenever I remember it. I’ll be brief: it is one of my absolute favorite fics of all time. In here, there’s vampires, unspeakables, a big investigation, wonderful side characters and information given in small little doses as we learn alongside the characters and piece together an entire picture. It’s dazzling, incredibly detailed in every way, with shades to each character and nuances to every interaction and bit of magic we get to see. I feel like anything I can say is not enough, I can never do this story justice. I have tried before, and written the gushiest individual fic rec of my LIFE but just- I honestly have no more words to express how much I think everyone needs to read this. Please, check that rec out, please, check this story out. There is absolutely nothing like it.

----

And that wraps it for 2019! Thank you to all who take the time to check out my lists, and THANK YOU specially if you give these incredible stories a chance, because they deserve all the love in the world. Once again: All the way from here, behind a username and a few tumblr posts, I can honestly say that these 30 stories made my year. I hope they can make yours, too ❤️ If you ever want to discuss these (for tag concerns or plain flailing) (or any story really) my DM’s are always open!!!

[tales-of-spring]

morning siren | Chapter  1: The Bakery

Pairing / Ship: Steve Rogers x neutral reader

Featuring: Steve Rogers

Words: 1710

Category: Writing Challenge, Fic, Vanilla, Soft Fluff

Warning: Startled reader, baker!reader, being alone in a shop, reader POV, fluffy tension, blushing messes

Summary: You open up shop on a early Saturday morning, but you’re not prepared for who walks in..

Author’s Note: This is my first entry for @finleyjayne​‘s Rainbow Writing Challenge! I chose the prompt ‘’Apples and Oranges’’ paired with Steve Rogers, enjoy! Part two will follow soon, I promise! Divider credit; @finleyjayne​

You woke up by the sound of your alarm going off. You hastily roll over, grab your phone and disable it, then proceed to roll back so you were facing the window. It was five am on a Saturday morning but the sun was already softly dancing through your blinds. You smiled because you felt today was gonna be a great day. You had to be at the bakery in about an hour so you got up, put on your bathrobe and proceeded to go to your kitchen to make yourself some breakfast. 

You ended up at your breakfast table with a bowl of cereal and a hot cup of tea. You were slowly eating the morning cornflakes while turning the pages of the newspaper that was laid out on the table. Nothing unusual or strange has happened according to it, so you continued with your routine as calmly as ever. You showered, got dressed and packed your bag for your shift. You, as usual, went out the door at 6 am, just in time for the bus to take you to the bakery. 

The bakery was called ‘’The Mad Batter’’ and it was a cute and warm place tucked away on a busy street corner. Flowers grew outside, people could sit outside and still smell the scent of the kitchen, the inside was cozy but not in a suffocating kind of way. You have worked there for yours and through hard work and loyalty, you rose through the ranks all the way up till executive manager, while still maintaining the baking work on your own wishes. Baking was your life and you couldn’t imagine a world without it. 

You waved goodbye to the bus driver, stepped off of the bus and proceeded to cross the street. Traffic was almost non existent at this hour, which wasn't unusual. You unlocked the backdoor and stepped into the building, the scent of yesterday’s baking still lingered in the air; French orange tart with whipped cream, cinnamon buns and cherry pie. It was heavenly to you. Everything in this place was.. old and familiar to you. Comforting, you liked it that way. You smiled as you got ready to bake. The store wouldn’t be ‘’officially’’ open until eleven, which means you had a few hours to yourself which you always spend singing and baking. 

You followed your usual routine of turning on the shop lights, even though no one was there, you didn’t like working in a bright kitchen and looking out to a dark and grin shop plus, it didn’t look approachable from the street. You then proceeded to switch out yesterday’s meal plan for today’s which consisted of apple pie, raspberry and white chocolate cookies, blueberry muffins and coconut treats. 

You decided to put on some music, a vintage playlist one of your friends recommended to you. You recognized some songs, others you didn’t. But no matter, you sang along and swayed your hips to the beat of the music anyway. You decided to start baking the apple pie, and would later continue with the muffins. The recipe was already ready for you on your station so all you had to do was gather the ingredients. 

A few minutes in and you were working in the dough, kneading it on the flowered counter with your hands. God, you could already imagine how the kitchen will smell once the pie would be baking in the oven. Once the dough was done you started on the pie filling; mixing the diced up apples, cinnamon, sugar, raisins and salt in a bowl until it became a nice filling that would stick together. The hardest part about the pie, for you, was to make the top layer. You had to measure up and cute six long strokes of dough and carefully place and fold them over and under one another to create the classic apple pie look. You did this with great patience, using your experienced fingers to complete the job. The pie was done and ready to be put into the oven. You snapped out of your focused mindset and finished the last step. 

🎶’’Put your head on my shoulder..’’🎶 Hey, you knew this song. You heard it when you had put on the same playlist while you were cleaning your apartment and since then you loved it. So naturally, you started to sing a long. Swaying your hips while cleaning up your station.  🎶’’Whisper in my ear, baby..’’🎶 You were so caught up daydreaming and used to the quiet, lonesome, usual morning routine that you didn’t notice the front door of the shop opening, making the little bell ring, followed by a set of footsteps. Still, you kept on singing.  🎶’’Words I want to hear..’’🎶 The tall man was wearing a blue blouse tucked in his beige pants with a brown-ish leather jacket and classy shoes. His motorcycle was parked out front. For a second, he looked around confused. The shop was open, the light was on, but no one was there? He searched for an employee but stopped once he was right in front of the kitchen door, which was open, the counter blocking him from going in but he could still hear what was happening. That voice.. that beautiful voice.. 🎶’’Tell me, tell me that you love me too..’’🎶 You had finished cleaning and decided to go out to the front to see if there needed to be any work done. You threw the cleaning cloth in the sink and made your way to the front of the store, your voice still hanging onto the words you were singing. The second you walked in, you gasped and stopped in your tracks. Oh my god, there was a customer here and you were just out and about, singing and doing your thing? How embarrassing, you felt your cheeks flush red and you began to apologize to the customer, the man. ‘’I-I’m very sorry sir, usually no one comes in until 11 and I was so caught up in my routine that I-..’’ 

You broke off your apology the moment your eyes had a good look at who you were really talking to. This man was cute, as you would put it. Tall, with dirty blonde hair and gorgeous eyes. You could tell his frame was broad and muscular. The redness on your cheeks intensified. The man was smiling, one of those sexy half cooked smiles, damnit. He shook his head and told you it was okay ‘’It happens to the best of us, it’s really no problem.’’ You smiled and felt yourself staring at him, almost daydreaming. The both of you were actually, until you snapped out of it.

‘’Uh- uhm, can I- can I get you anything?’’ 

The man snapped out of the trance as well and fidgeted his wallet out of the pocket of his pants. ‘’Uhm, yeah, what’s your uh, your specialty?’’ You two were an awkward, blushing mess. You had to think for a second, usually you were quite sharp when talking to customers. ‘’Oh we uhm-’’ You walked over to the edge of the counter to point out what you were referring to. ‘’We still have yesterday’s which is a French orange tart with whipped cream, and the uhm, today’s apple pie is in the oven was we speak.’’ You chuckled nervously and put your hands in your back pocket. The man had a strange effect on you, but you liked it.  

He doubted for a few seconds, licking his lips, his eyes darting back and forth across the counter. God, was he really this sexy naturally or is he just trying to tease you? You swallowed, trying to ignore your attraction to him. You got curious for his name and tried to carefully examine his face, questioning if you have ever seen it somewhere; tv, movies, the news. Nothing came to mind though. 

‘’I can also- uhm, put down your name and reserve a piece of apple pie for you if you’d like.’’ His eyebrows jumped up in surprise and seemed to think about it for a moment. ‘’Uh- yes. Yeah, that would be great, thanks.’’ He chuckled to himself. ‘’In the mean time I think I’ll just get two of those..’’ He knelt down a little to see the cookies that were laying inside the glass counter. ‘’Chocolate chip cookies, please.’’ You nodded confirmingly and wrapped the cookies up for him, putting it on the counter. You felt your heart beating in your chest but you remained calm, you couldn’t wait to know his name. 

‘’That’ll be 2,50 please.’’ You opened the old fashioned register and immediately proceeded to grab a notepad and a pen, multitasking was a thing you had learned to do over the years. The man handed you a five dollar bill and said you could keep the change, to which you shyly looked at the ground and thanked him. He gaze lingered over you for just a moment when he thanked you for your service and turned around. 

‘’Wait, sir!’’ The dingus had forgotten to give you his name. ‘’I need your name for the- the apple pie.’’ He cut himself off from leaving the shop and walked back, almost an equal blushing mess as you were. ‘’Of course, my apologies, it’s uh..’’ There he did it again, licking his lips and looking up to you from the ground. ‘’My name’s Steve. Steve Rogers.’’ You wrote the name down with a note to hold back a piece of apple pie for him. ‘’I’ll come back later today for the piece, okay?’’ You nodded and put down the notepad, leaning on the counter. You didn’t give him your name, should you? He was already walking towards the door. He would come back anyway, maybe you could give it then. But what if he forgets? Oh what the hell-

‘’Steve.’’ He stopped again, turning halfway so he faced you. ‘’I’m Y/N.’’ Steve smiled at you and nodded. ‘’Gotcha, so you’re not just a pretty face?’’ You chuckled nervously and fidgeted with your apron, looking down at the ground. But when you looked up to answer back, Steve had already left the shop. You bit your lip and couldn't wait for when he returned. 

[dctvcollector]

Why I almost gave up on my SPN OTP

So today seems to be the day for Sastiel fans to step up and admit how frustrating it is to ship this, so yay us! As such I feel like I can share my experiences as a Sastiel fan trying to find fanworks before I discovered Tumbler over a year ago. 

Spoiler alert it SUCKED. I started shipping Sam and Cas in Season Nine when I returned to watching the show full time. That is a story in of itself for another time. Anyway I was floored by their dynamic and I went searching for fic and art to sate my desires.

But the thing was finding fic that focused on Sam and Cas alone was hard. Either Sam’s love for Cas was unrequited in favor the more popular ship or Sam was in a threesome situation or worst and more recently encountered by me is Sam was taken out of the story all together due to death, suicide or some other factor in favorite of again the more popular ship and then Cas and Dean break up  saddened over their treatment of Sam. 

I still wade through AO3′s Sastiel tag or the Tumbler tag and encounter this but thank Jack it’s slowly happening less and less as shippers find each other. But back in the old days I had to keep my...”unhappiness” over the more popular ships in the fandom, one of which I quietly shipped just to be able to to find decent Sam fics. 

I still enjoy wading into the second ship tag, which I will not name because I realize it makes some uncomfortable and I want my page to be a safe peaceful place.

But finding my OTP fics became more and more difficult because the most popular ship in the fandom had a louder fanbase and the toxicity of their reactions to not “adoring” or even “liking” their ship was seen as a horrible thing. So I hid my dislike of said ship and considered giving up on my ship and almost the fandom itself all together. 

Then I discovered a beautiful series that featured Sam and Cas over the 12 days of Christmas.  It had everything I wanted to read about these two, sweetness, slow burn and Dean in the background in favor of focusing on the characters I cared about. I lost that series and would love to find it so I can thank the author for writing it and giving me hope. I still ship Sastiel to this day because of that story and because of the fans I’ve met as a result of coming here to Tumbler.  I don’t feel stupid for choosing to ship Cas with Sam and disliking the other option or Dean Winchester. I do wish those opinions were more welcome in the fandom, but it’s fandom and the louder more insistent voices rule the roost as unfair as that is. 

[destielfanfic]

Lost and Found, #2

Lost and Found, vol.2 (more about this new type of post see here) 

Here are some asks that we have already answered privately but we hope that our answers could be useful to other followers as well. Some asks may contain spoilers for the fic, proceed at your own risk!

When possible, fic links go to posts on our blog, if the fic is not featured on the blog, we link to the hosting site. If you think that some other fic is a better fit, let us know! Gif from the gorgeous gif set by @magnificent-winged-beast​ , original post here, SPN, 15x12. Used with a permission.

Lost and Found fic, #1 

I’m looking for an old epic Destiel fic (LJ era). Castiel was Dean’s guardian angel since he was a child. On one of the first scene Castiel was fascinated by Dean excitement for a storm. Castiel was very fascinated by Dean in general. Castiel was able to see souls. Sam and Dean had a very strong bond partly because Castiel had touched newborn Sam’s soul. When Dean was a teenager Castiel possessed Jimmy’s twin sister and went to a date with Dean to the cinema.

Our answer: The Soul Piece by cloudyjenn [M, 138,000 (abandoned? WIP), SU]

This fandom classic used to be hosted on all popular fic hosting platforms of the day - Live Journal, FanFic Net and Dreamwidth. Times have changed , the author has deleted their LJ and FF accounts, and the fic is now hosted only on AO3. See our PSA about cloudyjenn here.

Lost and Found fic, #2

I’m looking for a fic called “Return” but I cannot remember the author. It is a story about Dean being a space soldier and Cas is his husband back on earth with their son. Dean’s ship gets blown up but Cas can’t move on even when Sam tries to talk him into it for his own good. Turns out Dean is alive and enslaved. He is rescued 5 years after he is presumed KIA and returns to Cas and son. It also has two smaller fics in the verse “Meet” and “Ask”.

Our answer:  Return, Meet and Ask by cloudyjenn (unofficially recced on an ask about fics where Cas thinks that Dean is dead) [8,000 word count, 3 parts, AU]

Another fic by cloudyjenn, which is now hosted only on her Dreamwidth. On our blog this fic is recced on 2 asks, the second ask is about fics with soldier/civilian families; both asks are tagged with the #war tag. Since cloudyjenn deleted her LJ 3 years ago, many links to her fics on our blog were broken. Thanks to this ask, I had a chance to look them up and fix them. ;)

Lost and Found fic, #3

hey! what’s that fanfic where cas is a spanish professor and dean is an MA student doing spanish literature? thanks xxx 

Our answer: Inevitable Homoeroticism in Spanish Romantic Heroes by prosopopeya [NC-17, 41,700 word count, AU]

Gosh, this fic was the talk of the town when I joined fandom and started reading destiel fic 8 years ago.

Lost and Found fic, #4

hi! I've looked through your fantasy/demon dean tags and used the search engine, but I haven't found the fic i'm after. In the fic Dean was a demon/Cas was an angel, I think it worked out like angels and demons were different kingdoms? As far as I remember they had to work together, an arranged marriage may have been involved but I'm not sure. Demons had tails/wings, and angels had wings but i'm not sure about tails. There's a scene where Cas watched Dean train his demon team. 

Our answer: This is All Life Really Means by gedry [NC-17, 90,000 word count, AU]

Gedry is another popular author from the good old LJ times. The link on our review goes to their LJ where fic is marked as complete. Recently, gedry has started to repost their fic to AO3, so I added AO3 link to our review as well. It seems that some timestamps are still not transferred, and for this reason only the fic is marked as a WIP. Please be assured that the main destiel story is complete and you can enjoy the fic and give it more love on AO3. Btw, the fic is on our demon!dean tag which we use for both, AU and SU fics. 

Lost and Found fic, #5

[TL;DR lost fic: SU S10 (Post Demon!Dean), Dean PoV, hunting, angst, on Ao3, medium length] Newly-human Dean struggling to control the MoC and TFW hunting at a hotel. Demon!Dean told Sam & Cas that Dean was molested as a kid by a coach at his school (who paid for the brothers' hotel room). Monster looked like Cas, but didn't speak. Not written by kelpie, xylo, komodo, salty, peridium, or other usual suspects. 

Our answer:  Autrement, Danger - Or the Account of an Exceedingly Long Day by awed_frog [M, 30,600 word count, SU]

If awed_frog is not yet among your usual suspects when looking for a canon verse fic, she must be added to the list asap!

Other stuff to remember:

If we answered your lost fic ask and you never responded back, we are assuming that we have found your fic. If you have sent us an ask and never heard from us again, privately or via our Group Asks, don’t hesitate to send us another message!

Lost fic asks that we couldn’t answer privately, are added to our Group Ask for our followers to help!

We also answer more general questions about fics, fanfic tropes and suggest recs when necessary.

When looking for lost fic, check out our Tags Page! We have more than 300 tags to explore. Or use our Search engine from desktop to search for specific or unique terms.

If you enjoyed the fic, please drop by the archive (AO3) and let the author know with your comments and/or kudos! And if you found our recs useful, let us know by Liking and/or Reblogging our posts.

[olliya]

SasuSaku ship dynamics and history

The stats I’m immensely proud of: the complete SasuSaku ship stats!!!! I think I managed to deconvolute how many SasaSaku fics are really there and how it changed over the years. I also took a detailed look at the times before and after ship canonization, and I tell you, it’s interesting. At least for a nerd like me 😊

As a sneak peek, I’ll let you see my pride and joy:

Explanations, and much, much more, under the cut.

So, let’s start from this graph:

As I already explained here and here, on FF.Net there exist two types of independent systems for tagging romantic relations ships: Ship Names and Pairing Option (for explanation see here). The graph in Figure 1. shows the dynamics of SasuSaku ship where Ship Names are marked dark blue, while Pairing Option is light blue. However, without manual check there is no way to know how many fics tagged with one system are also tagged with another. I.e. we cannot know if we can, and if yes then to what extent, add these values together.

This issue was bugging me for a very long time, especially as the introduction of Pairing Option (October 2013) lies unfortunately close to the end of manga and canonization of ships (November 2014). And it’s super interesting to know how did the fandom (the Sasusaku part of it, as well as those parts of fandom whose ships weren’t confirmed) reacted for the end of manga and canonization.

So, I set off to untangle the double-tagging issue, and I’ll start with SasuSaku. NaraSaku and KakaSaku are next in line.

Additionally, since it seems that the center of gravity of Naruto fandom shifts towards AO3 (as can be seen in this analysis), I included SasaSaku dynamics on that platform as well.

Methods

FF.Net

I based my analysis on already collected data (published here) on ship dynamics by year. Those data gather number of fics published in a given year for the following tagging systems:

Pairing Option

Ship Names (Ship Names examined: SasuSaku, SakuSasu, SasukexSakura, SakuraxSasuke, SasuxSaku, SakuxSasu, Sasuke x Sakura, Sakura x Sasuke, Sasu x Saku, Saku x Sasu)

Basing on those data, I set off to excluded the double-tagged fics.

For practical reasons (minimalization of amount of clicking around I had to do), I approached the issue from two different sides.

A.     To exclude double-tagged fics tagged with Pairing Option and with Ship Name SasuSaku (main Ship Name used by the fandom) I used the Filters Tool (settings: Character A: Haruno Sakura; Character B: Uchiha Sasuke; Pairing Option: On, Sort: Publish Date). I went through resulting list of fics page-by-page, taking note of the year of publication and searching for the phrase “sasusaku” (using Ctrl+F key combination in the browser). I took note of number of times the phrase “sasusaku” appeared on each page and summed up those numbers for the fics that were published in the same year.

B.     To exclude double-tagged fics tagged with Pairing Option and with minor Ship Names, I searched for the minor Ship Name of interest (for example: “Sasuke x Sakura”) using Search Window, and, after sorting the results according to Publish Date, I searched the for the occurrences of square brackets (“[“) on the result page. Square brackets are used by FF.Net as an indicator of characters paired together through Pairing Option. However, it also was and still is used by the authors in summaries to describe romantic pairs, writing status of the fic, tropes, AUs and various other, mostly house-keeping purposes. Therefore, it was necessary to manually check if occurrence of a square bracket meant Pairing Option (and if the romantic pair indeed was SasuSaku!) or if it was merely featured in the summary. For all the minor Ship Names, I manually checked each occurrence of square bracket and took note of those that indicated romantic pair Uchiha Sasuke with Haruno Sakura, along with the publication year of the fic that was double-tagged.

Using this method, I searched through years 2006-2019. I skipped years 2003-2005 due to previously made observations about general messiness of the data from the very early years of the fandom (people weren’t tagging particularly diligently…)

Using the data collected as described above, I could subtract the double-tagged fics from the sum of fics tagged with Pairing Option and fics tagged with Ship Name.

To get better data resolution for the decrease (years 2011-2012) and subsequent rise of SasuSaku popularity (years 2013-2014), and in order to be able to corelate fic production rate with canonical events, I performed the same analysis month-by-month for the years 2010-2015.

AO3

I searched the AO3 archive by clicking into Uchiha Sasuke/Haruno Sakura tag and sorting by Publishing Date, and took note of how many fics were published per year. I did the same for the character Haruno Sakura (as I didn’t have these data yet). On AO3, authors can freely set a publication date, and the chosen date is then displayed in the header of the fic when one clicks inside it. However, the user-defined date doesn’t influence the sorting order, i.e. fics are still sorted according to their date of addition to the archive. When such an “unclear case” happened on a border of two years, the fics of uncertain publishing date were assigned to the new year (i.e. if a fic dated as from June 15th 2006 appeared between fics dated December 31st 2017 and January 1st 2018, it was assigned to the year 2018).

Limitations of the method

The elimination of double-tagged fics concerns only fics tagged with Pairing Option and one of the Ship Names. It does not eliminate the fics tagged with more than one Ship Name. I.e. a fic that has in its summary two of the Ship Names it will be still counted twice. Also, if it has one of the Ship Names in the summary and another in the title, it will also be counted twice. In an extreme case, if author used all 10 Ship Names, then the fic would be counted 10 times.

In the same time, due to mechanics of elimination method A. if a fic (that was additionally tagged with Pairing Option) contained multiple occurrence of phrase “sasusaku” in the summary or title, such fic will be subtracted multiple times (as many times as there have been repetitions of the phrase). Also, if an author had a phrase “sasusaku” in their name, their fic will also be falsely subtracted even if it wasn’t double-tagged at all (falsely, because my initial harvest of “sasusaku” fics was defined as “search story” and not “search writer”).

Results

Figure 2. presents the number of SasuSaku fics tagged with different systems (shades of blue) and the unique number of fics published per year (magenta).

Figure 3. compares the numbers of fics published on FF.Net and AO3. Please take note that simple addition of fics from the two platform can actually be misleading and incorrect. This is due to the fact that many authors publish in parallel on both platforms, and fics uploaded to FF.Net are de facto the same fics as those published on AO3. Additionally, some authors move from the older FF.Net to the newer AO3, where they re-post their older works in bulk.

Unique fic numbers on FF.Net show a main maximum in 2008 (in line with the maximum of total Naruto fics, see here) when 3308 SasuSaku fics where published, followed by steep decline with a minimum in 2012 when only 1409 were produced. There is a significant increase in fic numbers forming a secondary maximum in years 2013-2015 when ca. 2000 fics were published yearly. After this increase in activity happening around the end of manga and canonization of SasuSaku ship, a steep decline is continuing until the present day. In 2019, SasuSaku ship noted its historical minimum when only 540 fics (on average 45 per month) were published on FF.Net.

The steady increase of SasuSaku fics on AO3 is in line with the general increase of activity of Naruto fandom on this platform. It is noteworthy that in 2019, for the first time, there were more SasuSaku fics published on AO3 (779 per year, i.e. 65 per month) than on FF.Net.

Due to highly fluctuating numbers of Naruto fics published per year it is difficult to assess ship popularity basing on published fics only. The percentage of shipping fics in relation of total Naruto fics, or total fics featuring one of the romantic partners (I used Sakura) are better indicators of ship popularity. For this part of analysis, see Discussion.

To analyze the effect of canon events of the fic production, better resolution is necessary. Figure 4. summarizes SasuSaku ship dynamics during the years 2010-2015 on monthly bases.

It can be seen that with introduction of Pairing Option, the main Ship Name tag (SasuSaku) slightly lost on prominence while the Pairing Option gained acceptance, and already in January 2014 there were more less same number of fics using Pairing Option as Ship Names. However, most fics used either one type of tagging or another (double-tagging ratio was 25%-33% in years 2013-2015). Interpretation of the curve and correlations between the canon and fandom events and monthly publishing rate will be elaborate on in Discussion.

Discussion

Figure 5. shows what percentage of all Sakura’s fics consisted of SasuSaku fics in years 2006-2019 for FF.Net and 2011-2019 for AO3. This approach allows for correction for the effect of general fandom activity decline (see this analysis) that took place after year 2008.

SasuSaku of FF.Net shows two maxima, divided with a strong minimum in years 2011-2012. On AO3, after a slow start (12% in 2011) SasuSaku quickly reached the level of 20% which it held since 2013. Currently, both platforms host a very similar percentage of SasuSaku fics.

I would like to focus primarily of FF.Net, as it covers entire timeline of publishing of the manga.

The way how canon influences fandom was one of the focal points in this analysis. Sakura’s ship with Sasuke was very prominent during the earlier years of the fandom (2006-2008) when it made more than 30% of all published Sakura’s fics. And if one takes into account that not all the fics are necessary shipping ones, the dominance of SasuSaku ship becomes even more massive.

However, during later years SasuSaku lost at popularity, reaching its minimum in 2011 and 2012 when only 17,1%and 17,5% of all Sakura’s fics featured romantic pairing with Sasuke. In 2013 we see already an increase, that continues until 2015, when SasuSaku reaches a second maximum (almost as high as the first one) achieving once again 30%. After 2015 there is a decline, as this effect is independent from the general fandom decline. In last years, SasuSaku makes ca. 23% of Sakura’s fics. That might be an indirect evidence of popularity increase of others, non-canonical and more exotic ships.

To put the timeline into perspective:

Sasuke kills Itachi in chapter 394 published in March 2008; and, informed about Itachi’s true motives, declares intention to kill Konoha Elders in chapter 404 published in May 2008.

Sasuke attacks Kage Summit in chapter 460 published in August 2009.

Sasuke’s and Sakura’s encounter and mutual assassination attempt on the Bridge in Iron Country happens in chapters 482-485 published in February/March 2010. Afterwards Sasuke virtually disappears from the manga for many chapters, appearing only briefly in chapter 553 (published in September 2011) with fully evolved Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan in his eyes.

His next prominent appearance is already after the beginning of Fourth Ninja War and implementation of Edo Tensei, when Sasuke encounters Itachi in chapter 576 (published in March 2012) and after Itachi’s revelations, declares the will to destroy Konoha in chapter 589 (published in June 2012).

After the meeting with the previous Hokage, in chapter 627 (published in April 2013) Sasuke changes his mind, declares will to protect Konoha and joins Shinobi Alliance four chapters later (May 2013).

Figure 6. presents percentage of unique SasuSaku fics (in respect to total Sakura’s fics) in context of manga events. During Sasuke’s quest for revenge the popularity of the ship was constantly dropping. Interestingly, it reached its low during the time period when Sasuke was basically absent from the manga. His declaration about destroying Konoha in 2012 happened also during this minimum. However, despite this declaration, already in 2013 the ship gained popularity, possibly in response to anticipated changing of sides that indeed took place in May 2013. After that, SasuSaku was on steady rise that continued throughout ship canonization.

In order to see the effects of specific manga events it is necessary to look at more detailed picture. Figure 7. presents number of unique fics published (not percentages, because gathering monthly data for total Sakura fics exceeded my capacities) and puts them in context of manga and fandom events.

Data of this high resolution tend to be choppy, nevertheless some trends can be detected. Most prominently, SasuSaku Months (fandom events held every July in years 2011-2019) give rise to sharp peaks. There is a similar peak in July 2010 but I didn’t find any evidence of SasuSaku Month that year. @sasuxsakumonth and @sasusakumonth – maybe you know more about that?

After Iron Country Bridge disaster, the number of fics indeed falls. The effect is blurred by the peak in July (if it was indeed an event), but afterwards there is a decline. During the second half of 2010 and the first half of 2011 the number of fics oscillated between 100 and 150 per month, and even SS Month didn’t produce a big increase (182 fics only). During the second half of 2011 and first half of 2012 the number was 100 fics per month.

Sasuke’s re-appearance in March 2012 seemed to revitalize the fandom and in autumn and winter of 2012 the fandom was already on the rise. In 2013 and 2014 there were already 150 fics regularly published every month, and SS Month in 2013 and 2014 reached almost 300 fics (of course not all the fics were produced specifically for the event).

A sharp decline in September - October 2014 may be an after-effect of a successful SS Month in July (and certain writers’ fatigue) or can be caused by canon events, as directly before the canonization, in chapters published in September/October 2019, Sasuke announces his “revolution”, places Sakura under death-by-Chidori-genjutsu and fights Naruto.

And finally - in answer to my initial question – canonization of SasuSaku ship in November 2014 resulted in a very prominent (comparable only with strongest SS Months), sharply rising maximum, that, additionally, tailed at least until January 2015.

As general observation, it seems that fandom reacts to “negative events” (canon moments decreasing the chance of characters canonically getting together, absence of character from the story) with a certain delay. It is understandable, as one can imagine that negative feedback from the side of canon doesn’t make people to abstain from publishing the fics that they’ve been already working on, but rather acts demotivating which results in a diminished output of fics in subsequent months. In contrary, positive events (like ship-supporting canon moments or canonization) bring very fast reactions, as writers tend to get inspired by new, ship-supportive material.

As always, all comments, hints, suggestions and critique is absolutely welcome! Please share this post, as I think it may be of interest for relatively large group of people, while I, myself, tend to dwell in a bit different corner of the fandom.

[holidaywishes]

not all monsters do monstrous things...

Part 2: The Girl

  Summary of Series: Delly Cartwright lost her best friend, Peeta, to the games. Now, the one that took him seems to have a soft spot for her.

  Summary of Chapter: Delly’s P.O.V of the events of the last chapter.

  Warning: Some fluff, some angst, some violence

  Author’s Note: I’M BACK WITH ANOTHER CHAPTER! These two obviously were easy because they’re just P.O.V’s of the same events but I still had fun writing them whether anyone reads them or not! I’m aware that the Hunger Games Fandom is almost entirely asleep but I’ve reread the books and re-watched the movies, so I’m back in it. I’m also going to put in here again that the story idea is from a fic I read by Ophelia Tate (I believe that was the name) on FanFiction.net -- so full credit to her! If anyone does end up reading this series, I hope you enjoy it and ship Delly and Cato as much as I do! Also, have to make another note about the GIF. Credit goes to whoever made it, I found it on Google and it wouldn’t bring to the page where I could give credit, but whatever, it’s not mine don’t @ me. You know the drill!

  masterlist

  the other masterlist

xx

Delly’s P.O.V

  You sat beside Peeta’s youngest brother for most of the games but as more and more tributes lost their lives, you invited the Hawthorne’s and the Everdeen’s to watch with you. It helped a little, having everyone together, and the closer it got to the end, the more it seemed like Katniss and Peeta might both make it home.

  “It’s just a role, you know,” you said to Gale, who had abruptly gotten up in the middle of the viewing to put his empty glass in the sink, “they’re not actually in love.”

  “He is,” Gale stated with a hiss, “maybe he knows it can’t work so he’s playing it up more than he would, but Peeta is definitely in love with Katniss”

  “But she’s not in love with him...” you said

  “Does it matter?” he asked and you furrowed your brow, “if they both get out of this alive, it will be because they’ve convinced everyone they’re in love. Which means--” he stopped himself, not wanting to admit his feelings

  “Which means you can’t be with her”

  “And you can’t be with him”

  “I gave up on Peeta and I being together a long time ago,” you smirked, “he was always in love with your dear Girl On Fire.”

  “I just want her to come home safe. If she has to pretend to be with him, so be it. At least she won’t be fighting for her life.” A few days went by and the district couldn’t focus on much else other than the games

  “I think they’re going to make it” someone would say

  “They’re so in love” another would coo

  “I’m so excited to see them back home” another would sigh. The feelings were echoed by everyone in the district but it was still too early to say, at this point there were still six tributes left. You couldn’t deny that you thought Peeta and Katniss’ chances looked good because of what they were selling but you didn’t want to get ahead of yourself. And then, the moment came, when you knew it was over.

  “CATO!” the girl, Clove, from District 2 screams, “CATO!” she shrieks once more, crying out for her district partner but he is nowhere to be found. Tears begin falling from her eyes as she accepts what is now her last moment before a rock is crushing her temple. You could’ve sworn you heard something as her lifeless body fell to the ground; something in the background, a whimper or a scream. You couldn’t quite tell but when no camera’s focused on it, you assumed it was nothing. After Clove died, you knew, as well as anyone you watched the games with, that Cato would come after Thresh, then Katniss and Peeta. He was too strong for either of them to fight off alone, so you made your peace with your loss. Choosing to leave the games early that night and look at a picture Peeta had drawn for you years ago.

  “It’s a sunflower!” His young voice rang in your ear, “it reminded me of you. So lively, so bright. Always pointed toward the sun.” You cried for him, this version of Peeta you’d lost long ago, and the boy you’d lost to the Hunger Games.

  “Goodbye, Peeta.” you whispered to yourself, holding the image close to your chest. You remember it too well, the final day of the Hunger Games. You clutched Prim’s hand tightly as her sister fought Cato atop the large, steel Cornucopia where the games had begun; only for Katniss to be flung into the large pile of ravenous mutts below. Prim whimpered into your shoulder as you stared at Peeta, one of the final two, and you hoped he’d fight all the while knowing he wouldn’t win against Cato. You watched as the two blonde boys faced each other, Cato panting angrily and Peeta furrowing his brow.

  “DO SOMETHING PEETA!” Peeta’s older brother, Flint, yelled at the screen

  “He’s terrified” his mother scoffed but you didn’t see it that way. You’d seen Peeta terrified before. During the broadcast, sure, but also whenever he’d accidentally burn something in the bakery or do something to make his mother angry. The look he was giving Cato right now wasn’t one of terror, it was of pain. How could you blame him. Without Katniss, being a victor meant less than nothing. She was the only thing that made the games worth fighting in, she was the only thing he was willing to fight for. And now that she was gone, you knew what he was planning, forcing your eyes to well up with tears; letting them fall only when he stepped off the Cornucopia to face the same fate as Katniss.

xx

  You had wanted to put the games behind you for good, but that’s not the way it worked. Especially not when you lose someone to the games. Today was the start of the Victory Tour, so you dressed in a soft yellow dress in memory of both Katniss and Peeta. Two Peacekeepers guided you and Peeta’s family to the front of the square, while two peacekeepers did the same for Gale’s family and the Everdeen’s. Your eyes wandered around the square, taking in everyone’s anxiety as they slowly filed in after you. When Cato took his place on stage, he looked taller than you anticipated but younger than he did when he was on T.V. The blood that covered his face must have shielded his youth from Panem.

  “I would first like to thank you for coming out today,” he started, his voice steady at first but it slowly began to falter as he caught sight of the crowd, “this is not an easy speech to make. The lives you’ve lost will be, uhm, will be felt by-- will be felt by the Capitol. Your sacrifices are -- will be missed.” When Prim let out a small sob, Cato turned his focus to her, straying from his carefully scripted speech, “Katniss was incredibly smart and, with the way she treated Rue, I could tell she had a big heart. Peeta had remarkable strength,” he turned to face yours and Peeta’s families. His eyes trained themselves on you and, try as you might, you couldn’t look away, “but for all his strength, he was kind, truly.” The words felt true but they quickly vanished from thought when Gale spoke up, calling the boy from District Two a murderer in a booming voice while Prim pleaded for him to stop

  “You don’t care about them. You don’t care about us!” Gale said, pushing aside Prim so he could confront the large boy who stood on the stage.

   “The Captiol thanks you for your sacrifices. Peeta and Katniss will be mourned.” The words were par for the course from a victor, undoubtedly something that was fed to them from the Capitol. You let out a whimpered sigh at the words but before you could even think to shed a tear, Gale was lunging forward. As Cato tried to walk off the stage, Gale ran to him, cocking back his arm and balling his hand into a fist

  “GALE!” You screeched, even though you knew it was useless, “GALE DON’T!” you repeated, just as Gale released his fist, missing by an inch as Cato turned to face him. You could see anger forming across his features and you feared for Gale’s fate as the boy in front of him, who was now the newest victor, pulled back his arm to throw a punch in return, but he hesitated when he looked behind the curtain on stage. Then, as if Gale knew he only had one choice, he balled another fist, only this time it connected with the side of Cato’s face and blood flew from his mouth at the blow. You and Prim screamed as the Peacekeepers separated everyone, frantically trying to get Cato to safety and discipline Gale. As they tore Gale away, you ran after him followed quickly by his family as well as Prim and Clara. When you finally reached him, you saw his arms tied to the whipping post at the side of the square.

  “I thought that was only there to scare us,” Rory asked, his voice trembling as he knew he was wrong, “they’re not going to actually use it...”

  “It looks like it” Vick replied, a harshness in his tone to cover the fear you knew he had

  “Boys, enough!” Clara and Hazelle rebuked while you and Prim started to walk to untie him. Maybe it was just a scare tactic, you thought to yourself and you could tell Prim was hoping the same thing when two large arms stopped both of you in your tracks

  “Stop right there” roared two Peacekeepers as another stepped closer to Gale. It was the Head Peacekeeper’s outfit, but it wasn’t Cray, you could tell from his movements. When he took of his helmet, you realized it was Romulus Thread and your eyes went wide. He was a callous man, a man who loved the Capitol almost as much as he loved to watch the citizens of this district bleed.

  “NO!” you heard Prim scream when you both saw Thread pull out a whip, “NO! STOP!” she yelled again after the first lash cut Gale’s back. Peacekeepers continued to hold you and Prim back, restraining the rest of your friends and family when they tried to approach, while Gale suffered enough lashes to drain him of all breath

  “STOP!” you screamed alongside Prim now, fighting to get out of the Peacekeepers grasp as tears streamed down your face uncontrollably.

  “ENOUGH!” a voice boomed from the back of the square, silencing everyone there, even Thread stopped his movements. You and Prim looked at each other briefly before the Peacekeepers released their hold on the two of you. You ran to Gale’s side not knowing if the guards would snap out of their trance-like state but needing to help the boy who had become as much of a friend to you as Peeta was. Prim followed quickly behind, frantically untying the knots at Gale’s wrist as you tried to wake him up, hearing him groan lowly, before you helped Prim. When his body finally dropped, he landed on top of you and you felt all of his weight begin to crush you. Prim took one of his arms around her shoulders and you did the same, as you began to walk him to safety

  “Mr. Berenger, sir, I--” you heard Thread whimper

  “Why would you whip this boy?” Cato questioned in a voice all of District 12 had associated him with, “because he mourns his friends? Because he is in pain?” The words he used forced you to stop. Even though his voice was callous and angry, there was sympathy to his words

  “BECAUSE HE ATTACKED YOU, SIR!” Thread yelled as he straightened his posture, only to be met by Cato’s larger frame

  “I don’t need your protection, sir!” Cato countered, sneering down at him as he towered over the new Head Peacekeeper. You watched as the District 2 victor released Gale of his charges and forbid Thread of these acts again. Something about him now, as he fought for a stranger who had just attacked him, reminded you of Peeta.

  “Delly, come on,” Prim whined, making you realize that you’d completely ignored Gale, “what are you doing?”

  “Oh my gosh!” you gasped, doing your best to get your friend to the Apothecary, “I’m so sorry.” When the two of you set Gale down on the table, Prim made fast work of his wounds; soaking them in alcohol to sterilize them, cutting up old cloths to try to cover them as Gale screamed

  “Delly, hold him down,” Clara said as he writhed in pain, “we can’t help him if he won’t stay still.” You stood up, Gale’s right hand clutching your yellow dress as you pushed his shoulders into the table. His screams became quieter and you didn’t have to hold him down anymore

  “He should be okay for a while” Clara said as you pulled a chair close to sit next to him, watching his breath rise and fall in his body before another stream of tears fell from your eyes and you clutched his hand

  “You shouldn’t have done that Gale” you whispered and he seemed to groan in response. Suddenly, you felt a small breeze run through the door, causing you to look up and a gasp to escape your lips. Why was Cato here? you thought to yourself, hadn’t he gone back to the train? You stood up to put a sort of barricade between Gale and Cato before you whimpered “please, he didn’t mean it. He wouldn’t have gone further than a punch, he was just upset..” You pleaded as Cato stood by the door, wiping the water from your face and putting a hand on Gale’s shoulder

  “It’s okay,” he said, holding his hands up, palms forward, in reassurance, “I’m not going to hurt him or take him away. I just wanted to see how you– how he was doing…” More kindness, you thought, this was not the boy that the games had shown you. You furrowed your brow but decided to seat back down

  “The lashes have exhausted him and he’s lost a lot of blood” you said as you rubbed your thumb gently across the back of Gale’s hand, watching as he slept soundly.

  “I’m sorry” Cato whispered, much to your surprise and your head sprung up at the apology, your eyes growing wide as he stared at you. The mark at the side of his face from Gale’s punch was slowly forming into a purple bruise but it didn’t take away from his features. His bright blue eyes seemed to pierce through the tension, making you increasingly comfortable in his presence, and you found yourself examining him. You had always thought Gale was broad but, looking at Cato, he seemed small in comparison, “you must think I’m a monster...” he finally said, snapping you out of your head causing you to clear your throat before you spoke

  “Because of this?” you said, “this was the Peacekeepers, not you.”

  “Because of the games” he corrected, “I’ve watched those deaths more times than I care to admit. I saw how they portrayed me. How everyone else must have seen me.” You thought about it for a moment. Thinking about how cruel he was to Katniss, how he tormented the younger children in the arena and how he used Peeta throughout the games. It would be easy for you to say that he was a monster and no one in 12 would disagree with you, but you couldn’t help but consider everything he’d done for Gale in the square

  “I don’t envy you at all,” you finally said, turning your body in your chair, ever so slightly, to face him more direct, “having to train your whole life to be taught to kill other children. Many your own age or younger. I’ve never understood why death, and the deaths of so many children, was the price the Capitol wanted to collect. You had to do awful things to bring pride to your district and I am very very very… sorry.”

  “Sorry?” he questioned and you nodded

  “Yes,” you said, “to have your life mapped out for you, without your say, couldn’t have been easy. I’m so very sorry that this is the life you were led to believe was all you could have”

  “You’re so kind...” he almost whispered and you smiled to yourself, thinking about how you’d connected that word to him earlier, watching as his eyebrows scrunched together, “no one has shown me this much kindness in my life.” The idea made you sad, that he had never known kindness, but he was from District 2, they weren’t known for kindness there.

  “I don’t think you’re a monster, Mr. Berenger,” he looked at you intently as you spoke softly, “I think you’re lost. Trying to fit an image that the Capitol and your own District has created for you.” He appeared as though he wanted to say something more when someone came through the door, nearly tearing it off it’s hinges.

  “CATO!” a man you recognized barked, it was Cato’s mentor, Wade, “you can’t be here. We have to go. Now!” He brought a frantic energy into an otherwise peaceful space, causing your breathing to increase

  “Take this,” Cato said, handing you a small silver box that he’d had in his jacket pocket, “it’s not much but it should help with his healing.” As you took the box from him, your finger grazed the palm of his hand and you swore you could feel a spark.

  “Thank you” you replied with a smile before he was pulled out of the Apothecary and out of the district. You were left alone with what had happened for only a moment when Prim entered the room

  “What are you doing?” she said, leading you to turn around sharply to face her

  “Here. This is for Gale, from--”

  “The victor?” Prim interjected, taking the box from your outstretched hand, and you nodded, “what are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Delly, don’t play dumb.”

  “Prim.. I really don’t know what you mean...” She stood silently in front of you for a minute before eventually moving toward Gale

  “Do you think I’m blind? or stupid?” she scoffed, shaking her head

  “Of course not--”

  “Then why are you being so friendly to the person who killed my sister?!” she practically yelled

  “We were talking, he dropped the charges on Gale. Thread won’t do this again, he promised!”

  “Oh sweet, naïve, little Delly,” she sighed, “the promise leaves with the victor”

  “Prim...”

  “HE KILLED YOUR BEST FRIEND!”

  “NO HE DIDN’T!” you shouted in return, shocked at your outburst, “Peeta jumped.”

  “He still killed my sister” she said softly and you walked closer to where she stood

  “I know,” you replied, “he just seemed so... broken. I’ve seen that before, from Peeta, and I just didn’t want him to think that our district is full of cruel, angry people”

  “But we are angry! Why aren’t you?”

  “What good does it do me, Prim? To be angry? That boy has never known kindness, maybe if someone had shown him some, he would’ve done the same to those tributes!”

  “He’s not a boy, he’s a monster!” she yelled and you furrowed your brow, trying to get her to understand

  “You didn’t see what I saw”

  “You’d rather defend a murderer than say something unkind about someone else?!” she argued

  “Enough! Both of you! Stop!” Clara yelled as she walked in the room, “Gale has to rest and your bickering will only agitate him. Delly, I think you should go home, your parents are probably worried sick about you.” You dropped your head, nodding in agreement, before laying a small kiss to Gale’s forehead

  “Delly..” he moaned and you looked up at Prim and Clara

  “Gale?” you said

  “Prim.. Prim’s right” he groaned

  “Don’t move, Gale” Prim said, placing her arms on his back

  “He killed our friends. And so many others..” he tried

  “Gale..”

  “Prim’s right, the promise goes with the victor. Thread will do this again”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Clara said, “enough talking. Delly--” she tried to send you home again but Gale sat up

  “Believing someone is kind is dangerous, especially when they’ve proven they’re not.” You could tell he was angry as he mustered up the strength to stand in front of you, however hunched he may have been

  “I can’t be angry with him for Peeta jumping off that Cornucopia” you admitted

  “Then be angry that he showed Katniss no mercy. Be sad that your friends and family had to watch someone they loved die”

  “I don’t want to be sad anymore, Gale,” you added, “I miss Peeta everyday but I can’t be sad forever”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s gone. They’re gone. But we’re here. And we should be happy to be alive”

  “LOOK AROUND, CARTWRIGHT!” he yelled, “Is any of this actually living?!”

  “Gale...” you whimpered

  “Listen to me, Delly, he is not kind. He is not lost or weak or any of the things that you told him you thought he was.”

  “You heard that?” Gale scoffed, holding onto the table to keep himself steady

  “He is manipulative, that’s how he won the games. He’s a monster. Delly,” he whispered angrily, as tears began streaming down your cheeks, “he’s not Peeta...” You looked up at him, seeing his grey eyes full of nothing but rage, and shook your head at his callousness before running out of the Apothecary. You couldn’t explain to him, any of them, why you were being kind to Cato, you could barely explain it to yourself, but there was something that made you want to comfort him. If for no other reason than the knowledge that you’d never see him again.