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readingreylo · 2 years ago

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The best Reylo Fanfics I read in 2022

(Not necessarily written in 2022)

My 2021 wrap up was such a hit I thought I would do another one! While I didn't read nearly as many fanfics this year, I did discover a few new authors whose bodies of work are just *chef kiss*.

(Don't forget to check out my All Time Favourite Fic list and my pinned post with all my rec lists!)

And in no particular order...

Similar Creatures by quamquam20 | @quamquam20 | Explicit | 36k | Complete | Historical AU | 1700s | Venice | Pretty Woman retelling | Sex worker!Rey | Mafioso/enforcer!Ben | "no kissing on the mouth" | Angst | HEA | Multi POV | "As the Hammer of the Medici, Benjamin Solatti has a lot of practice crushing dreams and wringing every coin from nearly empty pockets. Sent to Venice to collect on a debt, he doesn’t have time for pleasure. Nobody knows the winding alleys and canals of Venice quite like someone who works them. So when street-smart Rey notices a lost Florentine noble, she’s more than happy to offer her services. Worlds apart, they lead very different lives. Brought together by chance and an irresistible proposition, those same differences might be what tear them apart when their time runs out."

Happenchance by PurpleSugarQuills | @purplesugarquills | Explicit | 5k | Oneshot | Modern AU | Office Party | Mistaken Indentity | Mention of sex work | Rey POV | "When Rose hires an escort to be Rey’s date for their company’s fundraising event, Rey’s livid. Until… Well, until she spots him in the hotel’s lobby. Tall and gorgeous, with dark hair nearly brushing the collar of the suit he fills out sinfully well. Maybe Rey doesn’t hate Rose. Maybe she should write Rose a thank you note. Or, Rey thinks Ben is an escort. Ben is not an escort."

Here's to more amazing fics in 2023!🥂

#reylo #reylo fanfiction #reylo au #reylo fic rec #jess made something

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okapi-jones · 4 months ago

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😈 what is dark within me, illumine 😈

🔥RELAUNCHED FIC ALERT🔥

what is dark within me, illumine

A #Reylo divine rom-comedy.

OR: funny until it’s emotionally devastating (feels on brand)

🜘 Demon-Summoning Modern AU 🜛 Also an Office / Historical AU (yes, really. you’ll see.) 🜁 Multi-chapter / Long Fic WIP 🜂 Demon Ben with a mysterious past 🜃 Disillusioned human tech-worker Rey 🜄 Forced Proximity 🜘 Failed Soul Contracts 🜁 Bibliomancy 🜂 Humor and Romance and Angst and Fluff 🜃 Fish Out of Water / Man Out of Time 🜄 Existential Crises 🜁 Weird forays into surrealist imagery 🜂 Literary references. SO MANY LITERARY REFERENCES 🜾 Eventual Smut 🜡 Eventual HEA (Always. Promise. 🤍)

Art by the incredible @cndcrd!

———🜘———

I finally did it! After 9 months of hiatus, WE’RE BACK with demon!Ben and grumpy!Rey.

All six existing chapters on AO3 have been completely revised - and I’ve just posted the seventh, my first update since October.

I expect I’ll be working on this one for the rest of the year, if not longer. She’s CHONKY. She’s THICC. She’s going places I don’t think most people will expect. And I’m so excited to be working on her again.

I sincerely hope you’ll join me and keep me company along the way.

Revised summary below!

———🜘———

Five years after Rey graduated from college, she’s living the millennial dream: stressed, depressed, in debt, and working for a soulless social media tech giant. When she finally decides to throw away her dreams for good, a treasure from her past accidentally summons something she never expected: a monstrous demon straight from Hell.

A demon who might just be her salvation.

———🜘———

A Reylo divine rom-comedy, a.k.a: the modern/demon/office/literary/historical AU slow burn epic mishmash fic of my dreams - with a twist.

Come for the genre-bending and humor, stay for the philosophizing, non-standard demon lore, and eventual [ready-or-knot] monsterfucking. I don’t know, I don’t make the rules of demon anatomy.

(Except when I do.)

Read it here on AO3!

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pulpwriterx · 2 years ago

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A REYLO CHRISTMAS CAROL

For #24DaysOfReylo on Twitter

You know this story. Benjamin Scrooge, a well-made and still handsome man in his 40's is the meanest, nastiest most cynical miser and hard-hearted businessman in all of 1850's London.

His devoted clerk, mistress and former fiancee Aubrey Cratchit still holds out hope for his reclamation for her sake and that of her sickly brother B.B.

But when Scrooge is visited by the Force Ghosts of Christmas, and the spirit of his dead business partner, Armitage Hux?

We all know his redemption is at hand.

#reylo fandom #reylo fanfiction #reylo christmas #reylo historical au #24daysofreylo

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namarabia · 4 months ago

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#historical costuming #jacques le gris #reylo medieval au

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mermaidsirennikita · 10 months ago

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No please talk about how people are weird about Manacled because I see this too and yet nobody seems aware of this?

--I see multiple big name book bloggers refer to this as one of their favorite "books" when it is literally, in no way, legally or in the simple conventional definition of a book, a book. Like, I am literally this close to unfollowing someone whose recs I sometimes like because they also proudly own a professional bind-up of this book.

--Speaking of bind-ups (and when I say "professional"... book binders should not be binding fics; they are potentially opening themselves up for legal trouble, and I know that when someone offers to pay you hundreds of dollars for a bind-up of a fic it's gotta be tempting, but for the love of God do NOT do it and also don't request one, because you are also opening yourself up for some quagmires, and you do not want to get into it with JKR or her publishers or for that matter Margaret Atwood/Hulu/whoever currently has control of The Handmaid's Tale because this is in fact a fic of two different things) I personally find it incredibly wasteful to bind a fic, but that's just my personal snobbery. I cannot IMAGINE paying that much money for a bind of something I can read for free on my phone.

Like... I have respect for book-binding, it's a beautiful art form. I've seen beautiful binds of that fic. But beyond all of the risks I mentioned above, it's just honestly such a goober thing to do in my mind lol. You can spend your money how you want. I totally get why people re-bind their old copies (or new copies) of paperbacks they own and love... for themselves. And do not sell them. (Honestly, don't really know how that would work for the fic--binding it yourself and not selling it could be okay?) If I could do it, I would.

But for the love of God. I am begging people to get real with themselves about what fic is and what fic isn't.

--I really don't get how this is going to work as a reworked fic, tbh. One of the reasons why I do respect the process of converting a fic to a book in many cases, and consider that a valid form of getting a book... is that for all intents and purposes? The vast majority of these fics were essentially people writing original works and slapping vague physical features and names onto their characters. The Love Hypothesis has absolutely nothing to do with Reylo in terms of world or character development. As much as I loathed Wallbanger as a book--that is not Edward and Bella. To me, it sometimes feels like these AU fic writers wake up and go "oh, I wrote a book?"

And there is still work that goes into reworking. I read the fic that was the original form of You, Again by Kate Goldbeck. Honestly? You can see the rewrite in a big way. She did the work.

Manacled basically took a huge chunk of its world DIRECTLY from The Handmaid's Tale. And that's fine! For a fic. The fic is not an "all normal humans" AU. It's not a historical AU. It's not even a high fantasy AU. These people are witches and wizards and Voldemort won and there is a Handmaid's Tale angle. I do not know how she's going to take that into a completely different place without essentially just writing a new book lmao.

Which is the one issue I do have with fic to books, and there's no way of getting around it, and it's not immoral, it's just irritating that we dance around it in these conversations, and it is especially irritating when you get the "dur dur fic is better than original books". A hit fic does not require the same amount of effort that a hit original book does. When you read the fic you think is better than book... 9 times out of 10, you are reading it because you are a part of that fandom. You are receptive, preemptively, to that world. In fact, I would argue that you are probably more inclined to like it, subconsciously, because you are sliding into something that is familiar, or is coded to be familiar even when it's an AU.

This isn't to say that there isn't art to writing a great fic. It's not to say that there isn't a true accomplishment to writing a fic that really sticks with your audience. But the reality is that you did have a pre-set audience, "bought" by the original work that created your fandom, and that is something a truly original book does not have. When a truly original book (or, I'll give, a book based off a more obscure fic that doesn't tout itself as fic to book--and a lot of people did not do that as much back in the day, because of stigma surrounding it) hits big... That's because it did the original seduction of the audience. The author did the promo. The premise got people to open it. The book was good enough, or at least had enough "it factor", for word of mouth to kick in. I will ALWAYS give that credit to popular original books, because it is not easy to make an original work hit, and while it may not be easy for fics to hit, it is easier. And that built-in audience does travel to known fic to books.

So, because Manacled is so dependent on that HP/Handmaid's Tale world, the author is going to have to really go in on tearing it apart, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's pretty unrecognizable. It should be. And the only reason why the Manacled label will remain is that built-in audience. Which is technically fine, and I guess I should hate the game versus the player here. But it gives me the ick, I guess.

There are gray areas, I guess. I liked The Hurricane Wars, and that does owe more to SW than The Love Hypothesis or You, Again. However, I do appreciate a lot that Thea did make clear changes, and did curb the world around culture influence Southeast Asian influences. That last part especially is a big distinguisher even though a lot of the fans don't seem to acknowledge it at all but whatever.

I just don't get it, tbh.

#romance novel blogging #sort of #i guess weird fic stuff blogging lol

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reachexceedinggrasp · 1 year ago

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Yeah I enjoyed boarding school-genre (St. Mallory's etc.) books when I was little--- my grandma used to get them for me. I wasn't big on HP because it was boarding school genre minus a female protagonist, and not nearly as fun or as silly. Overall my issue with HP's reception is that it's very intentionally a riff on that genre, not fantasy (and you can see this with the historic aversion to categorising it as fantasy at all, like rejecting the Hugo award). Even right down to what you describe with Snape in that linked post is that his archetype is very common in the boarding school genre (mean teacher who is secretly nice) that I knew immediately he was going to be a Good Guy the Whole Time, though the way it's done is with more emotional gravitas and probably more moral condemnation than those teachers ever warrant, since the nature of HP evolved. Imo the silliness/whimsy never sat right with its serious war narrative and that's not for the better, because the former is what the setting is really all about. But regarding Snape, I think the reason his reception wasn't anticipated is because he's probably one of the archetypes most directly translated; when figuring him into the more serious narrative, much more resonance slipped through.

Anyway! I really wanted to know whether it was DHr or SHr that you were into because I find which of those people ship to be interesting lol. It makes much more sense that SHr fits into your BatB paradigm, though I have definitely read plenty of renderings of DHr which play into that idea--- those tend to lean into inventing more complexity for Draco than there are in the books, though, and yeah I would say on average DHr leans much more rivalshipping. I know what you mean about being picky with fic and slipping into something more casual since that's basically the majority of my fandom experience. If I'm genuinely serious about something (e.g. most of my OTP's) I have to write the fic myself lmao. Reylo is probably the one exception to that where I never ended up writing very much just because canon was So Good screams and there were a rare few handful of fics which leant more into that characterisation we both seem to prefer--- I generally just enjoyed daydreaming with Reylo and theorising than anything else lol.

Anyway, good tidings on your fandom adventures and thank you for indulging my nosiness ✨

Yeah, pretty much. People seem to want to group HP with high fantasy and it has no business there, but you can see where the impulse comes from. It's structurally unsound because of the war plot and heavier themes clearly not fitting into the whacky boarding school setting. The genre conventions do not get along with what she's trying to do with the war and it leads to bigger and bigger problems as the plot progresses.

I think them being classmates who have known each other as peers since childhood fundamentally changes the stakes and makes your job pretty difficult as far as trying to set up a B&tB dynamic. They're much more suited to doing a play on Romeo and Juliet. Where with SSHG, half the work is already done for you, the set up is built in, all you need is a reason to force them to spend time together.

I did end up needing to write my own reylo fic for exactly this reason lol. That, and the fandom refusing to provide Ben resolution with Luke. But the reylo AU machine is fantastic, a nigh-endless font of stories to read.

#fandom #tropes

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