#toh fandom doesn't have a lot of really long fics I feel like

[watery-melon-baller]

aand here's some good omens fics. most of these are more plot driven with less of an emphasis on romance, and all of them are pre season 2 (a good chunk of them are before TV gomens!)

incredible incredible fic series 546k words and 9 installments. I don't cry over fics much but this one made me sob. they have a mostly platonic relationship and when it is romantic it's very low-key and ace 

58k canon compliant fic where both aziraphale and Crowley were on the titanic. has some explicit smut if you're into that

126k fic where aziraphale goes missing and Crowley has to find him and also deal with London. absolutely fantastic writing

125k fic that's post canon Crowley and aziraphale. technically part of a series but you can read it on its own. I can't say much without spoiling it but it's absolutely fantastic. 

356k series with 8 fics. truly incredible. does a fantastic job of expanding the world and playing around. there's a lot of ocs but the author doesn't overwhelm you all with them (there's only a few in the first installment and it slowly builds from there) and does a good job of helping you tell them apart and all having their own unique personalities so you get attached. I could gush about uow beautiful this fic series is for days. the way that god is characterized haunts me. 10/10 read

44k fic about an alternate universe where Crowley doesn't meet aziraphale. and then that universe meets the canon one. good times

I have a 7-hour bus ride on Saturday and not a lot of cellular data roaming left, so:

any recommendations for long fics to download from ao3?

(fandoms: Good Omens, Nimona, The Owl House, Avatar the Last Airbender, The Adventure Zone, Lord of the Rings)

Feel free to recommend your own fics, recommend as many fics as possible, please!

[crimeronan]

hey what is wwaitsoatl?

oh! it's what we are is the sum of a thousand lies, my most popular toh fic by FAR and the thing most toh people here started following me for. back before i got sucked down the princess luz hyperfixation rabbit hole. it's a fic that takes more work to write than any of my others because it has an incredibly involved drafting & editing process. bc i am a perfectionist.

the premise is a canon divergent timeline wherein belos suspects that hunter lied to him at the end of hunting palismen. and completely wrecks hunter's shit forever. and infects him with curse goop in the process. and darius (who, Very Importantly, does not yet have a friendly rapport with hunter) trips over the kid's half-dead body.

and freaks.

and kidnaps hunter n takes him to the owl house. bc that's the one surefire place of refuge on the isles.

there are a bunch of emotional threads, hence why it's novel-length and not even finished yet despite being about just four characters chilling in a house together.

mainly it's about:

hunter unraveling his cognitive dissonance and cult brainwashing in an AU where he doesn't have all of hollow mind's answers; his feelings are Incredibly complicated and messy & he gets incredibly mean and snarly about it

darius grappling with the fact that his own grief and resentment blinded him to a kid who Very Much Needed Him, darius dealing with the fact that actually he never DID grieve his mentor or his mentor's dead family

darius and hunter developing a rapport in a timeline where hunter very much has Not broken out of all the cop shit that darius disdains So Much. so darius is so fucking exasperated and tired all the time

eda trying desperately to help hunter learn to live with a curse / chronic pain / chronic illness, while having very little faith in herself to begin with

luz feeling Horrifically guilty about hunter's curse and injuries, bc she thinks she should have clocked the abuse and brought him home with her or otherwise stopped it

hunter developing an almost immediate and pathological emotional attachment to luz because of her kindness, which complicates all of his complicated feelings WAAAAAY MORE

eda, darius, AND luz all desperately trying to get hunter to admit that he's been abused and that what happened wasn't his fault. you would not believe how fucking long it takes.

i'm actually really, really, Really proud of it -- it's rare for one of a writer's best works to be their most popular, but this genuinely is one of mine. if not my best work, period. there's a lot of nuance and messiness and emotional complexity and grief and arguing that i'm SO happy with.

also, despite the subject matter, it's often extremely lighthearted. some of the funniest dialogue i've ever written is strewn throughout all these serious emotional threads.

i'd apologize for how long this response is but this story is a heart project and has 67,000 published words on ao3 so far. (the chapter i'm writing rn will likely be another ~8,000 words, then there are a couple more chapters to come.) so there's a lot to say!!

it's my most popular ao3 fic for any fandom, ever, in the 12 years i've been on the site. the response has been WILD. if you sort by kudos, it's the 31st most favorited owl house fic Of All Time, the 7th most popular fic involving darius, and the 5TH most popular hunter & luz relationship fic. again, of all time. which is. insane.

people have been very kind and patient with me having been too sick to work on it for a while. there was a seven-month break between chapters 8 and 9, and if i finish chapter ten soon then there'll have been a nine-month break between chapters 9 and 10. so i don't know how many people are actually going to come back to read it, a lot of ppl have moved on from the fandom and such. but i'm extremely extremely extremely grateful to everyone who's given it a look!

[aziraphalesbookkeeper]

Hii :))

You are my favorite writer and I want to let you know how much I love your work 💜💜💜

Really, everything you write is just aghhhh I'm speechless

And I'm very curious what authors (both on AO3 and not) or books or fics you like and maybe recommend?

And what is your inspiration?

If you don't want to respond to these questions, feel free to just ignore this ask, but know your works always make my day

Thank you in advance, have a lovely day 💕

UGH ANON you're so sweet!!! you made my day with this. i'm such a silly little guy i'm so happy my keyboard smashing brought you joy i'm blushing so hard rn 💕

this reply is long, so it's under the cut!

i read a LOT, both fic and published books. in general, i have two genres that are my go-to's: romantic comedies and fantasy adventures. (now this doesn't mean high fantasy, cause i'm not a LOTR girlie, but if a story has rich lore with a soft magic system IM ALL ABOUT IT)

i'd recommend reading ANYTHING by Casey McQuinston for romantic comedies - i love their style SO MUCH. the way they go from writing dumbass humor to heartfelt romantic moments is just UGH CLENCHES FIST SO GOOD. for fantasy i can never get enough of Emily Lloyd-Jones. she's not super well known but she freakin' SHOULD BE, every time i read one of her books i'm in the ground for seven business days, she's so talented at creating magic systems.

i'm in quite a few fandoms and read a variety of ratings, so asking for a fic rec is kind of hard without knowing which shelf to grab from lol. HOWEVER, the fics that inspire me the most tend to shatter my world and rebuild it into something more beautiful. i'll list some of them here:

TTS - The Before and After by vaguenotion

Arcane - your teeth in my neck by b_o_i

VAT7K - The Silent Opera by littlemisslol

BNHA - literally anything by roadtripwithlucifer or SpiritusRex

Good Omens - A Certain Celestial Agency series by Atalan

BNHA - Missing Everything by Haptronym

TOH - With Clay and Star Scraps by SiryyGray

A LONG READING LIST I KNOW IM SORRY but these authors and stories are all genuinely SO GOOD

honestly, my inspiration is trying to be as good as anyone i listed above. i want to be like them when i grow up. writing is subjective, but if i can make at least one person feel the way i do when i read something by those authors then i know i've done my job.

[angelcloves]

Just read the latest chapter of S&S! Lol at the "safe house" being the CATs HQ. Of course it is, I have no idea why I was expecting an actual house. I'm with Hunter on it not being very homey, he now has less privacy and fewer possessions then when he was still under Belos's thumb! No wonder he's so anxious. Raine's getting a bit ahead of themselves, to the point it set off a lover spat with Eda! Raine, I love you, but please brush up on your communication skills. Manipulation isn't a good way

Pt. 2) rekindle a previous relationship! The confirmation that Belos doesn't know that Camilla is back on the Isles is very nice and supremely interesting though! I can't wait to see where that plot thread leads, XD. I like (Actually, love) Camilla and Darius's back and forth with each other. She's very open with him... I definitely sense some big unresolved emotions between them though, from both sides. I look forward to light being shone on them going forward and not just because I want to see

Pt.3) if any of my theories regarding Camilla's palisman are right, XD. Oh sure Camilla, keep telling yourself that Eda is going to be the one adopting Hunter at the end of the story, not you. You're definitely not super attached and separating from him wouldn't be as traumatizing for you as it would be for him. /s Hunter spying on Camilla and Darius's conversation? Well, perhaps not deliberately, I got the sense he sort of just walked in on them and got caught up in what they were discussing.

Pt. 4) :( Poor buddy, he's afraid to show himself being vulnerable with Darius around. I really don't like how he still refers to Hunter's previous loyalty to Belos as being a "lapdog". Hunter was born into what was effectively a cult, raised by the Leader of said cult to be his perfect little boy soldier and was severely punished every time he so much as stepped an inch out of line. Of course an abused child is going to be "loyal" to their abuser and eager to please them, that's how they

Pt. 5) survive! I get that he was looking out for Hunter and was trying to keep him safe while they were both within the Emperor's Castle, but he the way he went about it was terrible. He actively antagonized Hunter on multiple occasions, obviously he couldn't get all buddy-buddy with the kid because Belos had eyes and ears everywhere, but the least he could've done was be civil to him. It's something that I feel like the TOH fandom deliberately overlooks because it's an uncomfortable subject.

Pt. 6) So I'm bemused that Hunter thinks that Camilla has managed to "declaw" Darius, I have to wonder if how he's acting around her and the other CATs is closer to his actual personality than how he acted in the Castle. And yes, the pressure is mounting as the Day of Unity draws every closer... Still curious about King's status as a Titan and what impact it will have on the story. You did draw some attention to it and it's roughly the right time in the Canon timeline for it to be revealed...

Pt. 7) Plus I eagerly await to see how Camilla's presence during the Day of Unity affects it! I have a feeling her plans to head home after it are going to get derailed, courtesy of The Collector... Or maybe not! Maybe you don't intend to bring The Collector in, after all, why write an Alternate Universe fic if you aren't going to turn Canon on it head? Lol.

oh man i missed getting mile long comments on s&s!!!!! lets address some of this. raine is really enthusiastic about camilla arent they! reunions with eda aside they were absolutely brimming with excitement to have camilla on their side. theyve got plans that are being set in motion and now they finally have their trump card. looks like were going to be holding our breaths on this plot thread.

camilla and darius are still sorting through a lot right now. darius has a rebellion to lead and camilla has a grimwalker to get into an adopted home. but theres something there between the two of them. an uncomfortable past? a bitter fallout? who knows.

as for darius and his interactions with hunter. i took some care to tone him down all the way back in chapter 6 when he was willing to concede and let hunter go spend some time with his new friends but he was never the greatest to him prior to that moment. he just doesnt know how to handle himself around a traumatized child for the most part. everything about working under the emperor is cutthroat and nasty and theres just no room for even the tiniest sliver of kindness. hes making an attempt here but he just hasnt had to use a light touch in so long. theres a learning curve here. i wanted to emphasize the fact that hes not going to be perfect with hunter but that he really does care even if he isnt currently equipped to do so. darius is part of hunters support system right now. hes got lots of hands to help him up but theres multiple outlets there because nobody can give him everything he needs and thats okay.

but its funny you bring up the collector

[randomperson339]

Aw thanks <3. My answers to the top 3 are that I have 5 published works so far, 109,669 words as of today, and I write for a variety of fandoms, although the ADHD goblin is liking @wolven91's Conservaverse universe right now. Beyond that I tend to add in a lot of my own stuff to any fandom I write for (My biggest fic is about 60% my own stuff, much more if you get into my other works)

4: My kudos by ratings are:

Insects Gods and Mortals: dude is thrown into Hollownest with knowledge of the game with a xenomorph chestburster inside his chest. Proceeds to realize how little of Hollownest's culture was preserved after the fall.

Status: Snakebitten: XCOM's grump old lady and the alien's young viper prince catch feeling for one another. Proceeds through a comedy of cultural misunderstanding

SLUTS: Breeding Drake: A very informative document about all the dangers of the Lugio Placenata, aka the breeding drake, and why you never, ever, under any circumstances fuck any of them because all the following absolutely disgusting things would happen to you.

A Guarded Heart: What if we could make love to the Tyrant guard?

The Attack Against the Hive: a teenager does super powerful tricks against the super powerful xemomorphs!

5: I absolutely respond to comments- when appropriate

6: attack against the hive has the angstiest ending I suppose. Though not many of my fics have endings yet

7: A Guarded Heart kinda wins the happiest ending by default I suppose. One of them is a story in the 40K universe, so the ending afterwards is probably horrible, but the rest of my fics either aren't completed, don't really have an "ending" because they're more of a point in time than a flow through it, or are the answer to the other question.

8: no hate, but someone did say that A Guarded Heart wasn't what they liked

9: Yes. 40% of my fics are smut RN, and that's only going to go up from there!

10: I don't write crossovers, yet. I might write a TOH and Amphibia kinda crossover with some characters from Insects Gods and Mortals, then put them into Steven Universe and/or Gravity Falls, but those are just plans and I haven't written anythign beyond those vague outlines. TBH I just make my stuff cross over with whatever media I'm currently consuming TBH

WTF There'ss no question 11

12: no fic translation

13: not really co-written, though a friend did edit some earlier chapters of Snakebitten/Insects Gods and Mortals. After that I just kinda started to bounce ideas off of her.

14: My fav ship of all time is Thomas and Xernalia. Yes they are both my OCs, yes the girl is very hot and the guy is completely beyond average, but they both have so much going on that kinda doesn't fit into the linear format of English. IDK, maybe someone will be able to understand it if they read everything I write about them in the next decade lol.

15: a lot of smut, some OC stuff, and/or my old WOF WIP that were connected to an acc that has been deleted.

16: I think I'm very good at thinking things though, and examining what both needs to happen for the immediate effect I want and what needs to happen/not happen for the later scenes.

17: My weakness is how much I can actually write in a day TBH. It's hard to concentrate on a scene that is going somewhere but I'm not at the interesting part yet (and I mean like, I'm going to get to that interesting part in a few sentences but I cannot make myself write them yet). This is somehow nullified when I am made to write out long posts that won't ever really go anywhere, but my braing likes to write them.

18: my thoughts on writing dialogue in another langue for a fic is that, ultimately, language is a tool. The correct application of that tool depends on the effect you're going for. I haven't found a reason to use another language that exists, but there are various reasons to use it.

19/20: the first fic you could really call a fic and not me just plagiarizing concepts from The Lightning Thief would be a really edgy fic where Peacemaker from Wings of Fire gets tortured by memories of his alter-ego. I do not remember the title, but I do remember that I did post a few more chapters which petered into nothing.

20 Questions for Fic Writers

1. How many works do you have on Ao3? 49. I have a few options for #50…

2. What’s your total Ao3 word count? 299,440. Ok, I hadn’t realized I was that close. Now, my answer to #1 might be ���a new 560-word drabble.”

3. What fandoms do you write for? I’m nearly exclusively writing for Avatar: Legend of Korra, with a little bit of Last Airbender, where it fits in.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

1. Rainstorm - Su is there for Lin, for once. 2. The Well of Need - My first long-form story, with Lin taking care of Kya. 3. This is My Anchor - A mid-sized Kyalin story where Lin doesn’t make Kya take care of her. 4. I’m Sorry I Need You - An angsty one-shot that fits with a couple others in the “marriage is hard” domain. 5. Walk With Me - A longer-than-intended one-shot variant on a Tumblr joke.

5. Do you respond to comments? I do, as soon as I can. Sometimes, that means getting off work. Sometimes, that means giving a response as meaningful as the comment was to me. 

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? For complete stand-alone stories, that is likely Something Changed, where the last words are usually joyous. I can’t find the link for the worst-worst ending I have, so just pretend that never happened.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? The happiest ending? I like my happy endings, so this is tough. But I think I’ll go for Elemental Changes, because that launched my collaboration with @slowdissolve on Red Jade.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Not hate, exactly. One reader informed me that I had ‘let them down’ on a follow-up story because I didn’t write the story that was in their head. 

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? I’ve done a little, but it hasn’t been a focus for me. And, aside from the polyamory aspect, it’s all as vanilla as it comes.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written? Not unless you count LOK + ATLA a crossover, which I don’t.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Not to date.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? @slowdissolve and I wrote Moonsigns together, and we published two versions. One is told in first-person language and color coded, on Tumblr. We then followed it up with a more traditional third-person version that does not rely on color, on AO3.

14. What’s your all-time favorite ship? Kyalin is where everything opened up for me. 

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? I’m taking quite the long view of all of this. I haven’t added to Their Sacred Year in a while, but have the outline for the next installment, so I don’t consider it abandoned.

16. What are your writing strengths? Folks seem to like my dialogue and plotting.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? I struggle with the final rising action / climax / falling action, to keep the pacing appropriate to the story.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? I don’t plan on it, given I am uneducated in the languages appropriate to this setting. 

19. First fandom you wrote for? Legend of Korra.

20. Favourite fic you’ve written? Saving the hardest for last. Naming the favorite child. Ok, fine. In that case, I’ll have to choose <wrestles with self> Elemental Changes (see #7), mostly because it’s a completely off-the-wall idea that I was able to see through and complete. And to have Slowdissolve illustrate the ending was an absolute capstone.

So I get to thank both @krastbannert and @wishingforatypewriter for their invitations!

Now, it's time to throw the floor open to folks like @yell0wsalt, @dont-blame-it-on-the-kids, @linguini17, @frogblast-the-ventcore, @badlucksav, @cdlunee, and of course,

you.

[yourbestdream]

hey, do you by any chance have any toh AUs you'd like to talk about? * wink wink *

Thank u bestie time for incoherent adhd ramblings with rk (also idk how long this is gonna be so I'm gonna put it under the cut)

So I have many many many aus for toh and other assorted fandoms but one in particular I've been thinkin about (mostly because I came up w it literally like 3 days ago lmao) is kinda based on this fic I've been reading that's like an amity/hunter roleswap but kinda not which I'll link if anyone wants to read it it's really good

But anyone yeah this is partially based on that and it's basically an au where hunter a: isn't a grimwalker and is part human like everyone thought after ep 6 first came out and b: was an orphan who ended up working for/taken in by eda when he was younger but was then kidnapped by the emperor's coven and had his memories of eda and his life in general erased and/or changed. Which changes the dynamic between eda luz and king bc she's a lot more protective of them due to losing a kid before, and her dynamic with lilith changes as well due to the fact that lilith was the one who actually kidnapped him under order of belos bc he threatened to hurt/kill eda if she didn't do it. So it generally leads to a lot of relationship changes between the members of the owl fam, as well as lilith and hunter's relationship when she was in the coven. their dynamic is basically that she's really friendly and protective towards him because she feels bad about the whole kidnapping him thing but he absolutely HATES her for reasons he doesn't even know because he had repressed memories of her trying to arrest eda and kidnapping him. also lilith is a lot less trusting/loyal to belos but stays in the coven both to protect hunter and because she feels like she has no other option. it also adds more motivation to her trying to get eda to join, because she thinks if eda joins the coven, she can have her curse healed AND lilith can reunite her with hunter. anyway I've exhausted my fingers typing this and also sorry this is just a huge continuous paragraph so I'm gonna stop now lmao. If anyone wants 2 hear more (which is unlikely but I can dream) you can send me an ask and I'll answer. eventually lol

[solarsleepless]

for me it was just never my cup of tea to begin with, so like, agree to disagree, but i never really saw it?? but to each their own, people can ship whatever they want as long as it's not like, glorifying abuse or pedophilia or whatever, so i didn't really care.

i do agree with how fans of lumity and huntlow have butchered the obviously ND characters. i was there in 2020 (although i did come in particularly late) and i saw how people dumbed luz down because of her adhd, and i completely understand how the infantilisation has had the same effect on hunter and it fucking sucks, the veiled ableism of it all.

however, the reason why i say it's like steve is because i love hunter, i really, really do i promise, he's such a tragic character and i love him in so many ways, but as someone who has been in both the st fandom and the owl house fandom, it's been so fucking annoying to see how these two male characters completely dominate the fandom. huntlow spread like wildfire, and like say what you want but they don't nearly have the development they should have to be in a relationship (i understand they didn't actually get into a relationship, however it's hinted at.) i also get that at least a lot of this is the mouse's fault, but knowing that doesn't magically make them develop better (IN MY EYES).

i love hunter so much but as someone who's been in the fandom since s1 and who's favourite character is luz by far, it's infuriating to see luz get pushed aside IN HER OWN DAMN SHOW. in the "hurt luz noceda tags" it feels like there's more fics about how both hunter and luz are hurt than just about luz herself. i love hunter, and he's far more deserving of the attention than steve harrington is, but the way they treat it like The Hunter Show when luz is the protagonist just... pisses me off a lot. not to mention that the fandom has a HISTORY of doing this to luz: even before lumity, apparently ppl joined because they'd heard about eda. and i watched toh because of lumity! NONE of it has been about luz who is one of the best protagonists in media imo. i'm not saying i wish hunter's fandom was smaller, i just wish luz's was bigger.

also, a peeve of mine is the whole bi4pan thing. it's great that dana terrace has confirmed it but it is not representation to me. we never see hunter attracted to guys, and we never see willow attracted to girls. and we've seen how easy it is to pull off (s1 luz blushing at both edric and emira, "i've got a new crush, and her name is education!"). it's great that bi and pan people can see themselves in these characters and that dana terrace has fed the headcanon, but it is not representation because it is never represented.

so all those combined factors really make me just.... not a big fan of huntlow. this isn't to start an argument, it's to explain my side as people who have vastly different views on a fictional ship, and that's fine!

sorry that this got so long, i just wanted to explain my reasoning for it.

okay im assuming this is The Ship