#enjoy yourselves this winter you nifty little fanfic wizards

[autumnsoulcakes]

A Holiday Fic Review - Flour, water, salt, yeast, love

One of the little things I wanted to do this year was read more fanfic (especially since I finally made my own AO3 account), and since I hadn’t read anything in a while, I decided to start with my first ever fandom - The Legend of Zelda. School being school and me being an elastic ball of stress I figured I’d look for something on the light, happy side, with a few deeper elements and maybe a bit of holiday flavoring. Oh boy did I get lucky because I found @zeldaelmo‘s botw fic “Flour, water, salt, yeast, love” off the bat.

It’s a Zelink advent calendar fic (if you aren’t familiar with the concept, it updates once a day each day of the advent season) set in a bakery AU. As of posting this it hasn’t wrapped up yet, so if you want to jump in and binge it before the last few chapters come out, here’s the AO3 summary:

“As a regular in Link's bakery, Zelda asks him for a favor for Hylia's day. A mistake leads to them fake-dating until at end of the holidays neither of them knows what is fake and what is real anymore.”

It’s cute, fluffy, cozy and warm, and if straight fluff isn’t your cup of tea (or coffee with whipped cream), there are some highly engaging mystery elements that I wouldn’t dare spoil, but that revolve around Link and Zelda’s backstories (I’m beyond excited to see how it’s all resolved). The prose is also excellent, and if you’re picky about fic grammar you’ll never need to worry. So that’s the gist; if I’ve piqued your interest already, click here to read it on AO3. But if you need a little more detail, read on. 

(Spoilers herein)

The fic takes place in a modernized Hyrule with a religious holiday called “Hylia’s Day” that involves a traditional pastry called a loftwing’s nest. Zelda’s family expects her to be the oh-so-perfect daughter (or perhaps she expects that of herself... hmm... ) and ask her to make the buns for the year’s festivities after mistakenly believing (as she convinced them) that the ones she brought last year were her own creations. 

She can’t source any from the bakery in time, and instead asks Link for some help with the recipe. Eventually he offers to write one for her, then to show her how to do it, and eventually to come with her to her parents’ and help her make them there. It all very quickly turns to fake-not-fake dating.

To begin gushing: oh my god the detail in this fic. It’s most evident in the baking. I’m almost certain you could reliably recreate your own loftwings’ nests just from the fic itself, but as it happens you don’t need to because...

“Artemyss wrote me a comment that she had trouble imaging the Loftwing's nests. I plan to post a recipe for them at the end of the story, but since I already took photos of the baking process and results, I'll attach a pic to the end of this chapter for you all!”

And yes, they look as lovely as you might imagine.

I really, truly don’t want to spoil anything more because I think the story’s progression and especially its most recent chapters are worth going into blind. Link and Zelda both feel like very hurt, flawed people who are at once incredibly endearing. One of my favorite parts of today’s chapter was that Zelda ends up agreeing to a certain extent (with a character who absolutely despises her) that she’s been fake. But that isn’t treated as a moral failure on Zelda’s part, though a significant number of characters think it is one. It’s treated as it is -- kind of shitty, not at all healthy, and ultimately, not her. 

I can’t wait to see how it all ends, and I hope I’ve convinced at least one person to check it out. Many thanks to @zeldaelmo for a wonderful advent. I hope you continue writing, and writing, and writing for many years to come. To the fandom, I hope you all have a merry Yule, a comfortable Christmas, and quiet New Years.