Recs: Original, AVG, HL, BBT, Enterprise, ~TW
Let's do a round of recs, shall we?
The One About Where Mermaids Come From by
Waldorph
Length: 1.736 words
Fandom: Original
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Gen
Summary: screaming-till-im-numb: I want someone to write a book where Mermaids are the women thrown off ships when the sailors got afraid because having a woman on the boat is bad luck. And as they sink to the bottom legs tied together they change slowly until they can breath, until they can use their tied up legs to swim. And they drown sailors in revenge, luring them in by singing in their husky voices still stinging from the salt water they breathed.
Reccer's Notes: Short and amazing, and I'm not the only one to think so: it's a flashfic that's been up on Tumblr for a little over 24 hours and already has well over 113,000 notes. It's absolutely worth checking out.
Mermaid by Sergey Kolesov (Peleng Art)
Mermaid artwork that isn't intentionally related, but feels thematic.
Still Life by
domarzione
Length: 3.300 words
Fandom: Avengers
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Gen
Summary: For Steve, drawing in the park was initially a means of escape. Escape from the apartment he'd been given that felt nothing like a home. Escape from a world that confused and horrified him. Escape from all of the dark thoughts in his head. Almost every day, he sat on a bench surrounded by hundreds of people and ignored them all, ignored his surroundings entirely beyond the professional soldier's situational awareness that was as automatic as breathing (which was why he knew that he had three SHIELD agents watching him at all times), and drew from memory instead of the vibrant life than surrounded him but could not penetrate beneath his skin. They had defrosted his body, but somehow he was still frozen where it counted.
Reccer's Notes: Brilliant little Steve character piece focusing on his sketching, post-thaw.
Live to Rise by
ishafel
Length: 1.524 words
Fandom: Highlander/Avengers
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Gen
Summary: Methos has learned that nothing good ever comes of being in his office during office hours.
Reccer's Notes: Written for this year's Highlander Shortcuts, this is a short fic but very, very compelling.
Swing My Heart Across the Line by
Muir_Wolf
Length: 9.196 words
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Sheldon/Penny
Summary: AU that runs concurrent to the show's canon; bodyswap fic
Reccer's Notes: I don't know how in character this is (actually don't as in I'm not really versed well enough in the character to know - it's close enough for me, regardless) but I really enjoyed it and loved their respective POVs.
Excerpt:
They have this argument a hundred different times, in a hundred different ways.
Penny insists that the first time it happened, she was eight. She’s sure of it. She’s more than sure. It’s not easy to forget suddenly standing in the boy’s locker room, surrounded by gross boys. She’d clapped her hands (his hands) over her eyes (his eyes) and turned away, and that, she says, that, she knows, is the very first time.
Sheldon remembers it differently. He remembers waking up from a dream of jumbled numbers and ideas too large to cut down into words, and he remembers a hand softly pulling the tangled mess of his hair (her hair) away from his face (her face). “Shhh, Penny,” a voice had crooned, and a hand had clutched his (hers) and he’d slowly been lulled back to sleep by an accent unfamiliar and a voice unknown.
The Prisoner by Djinn
Length: 1.879 words
Fandom: Star Trek Enterprise
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Gen
Summary: T'Pol and Porthos have some bonding. Trip notices and is amused. There is fluff.
Reccer's Notes: Yeah, I'm in this for Porthos. :P As a beagle owner, I find this a 100% plausible scenario. (I can't speak to starships or Vulcans from personal experience, but fictional data would support plausibility in those cases as well.)
.: Then There's Teen Wolf :.
Oh, god, there's Teen Wolf. Absolutely the reason I haven't been reccing lately. I have a whole different yard stick for TW fic than I do for most anything else and I generally don't know how to write a rec for a given fic without ending up stepping back, re-reading it, going "oh my god", and promptly deleting it. There are a lot of qualifiers, for one thing, as in "well, it has some significant plot holes, but still a major improvement over canon!" or "timeline/continuity issues; I choose to see this as an homage to the show at this point". If I didn't like the fic (and didn't think someone else would and should give it a chance) then I wouldn't want to rec it in the first place, but an unqualified rec feels like lying. Personally, I'd rather go in knowing the shortcomings a fic might have so I can enjoy the good stuff. It's Teen Wolf for the sake of all that's holy - if I expected perfection, I wouldn't be invested in the show! BUT I don't really want a passing author to take it as a backhanded compliment and be upset over it, either. I feel like I'm being a delicate flower over this whole thing, but it's a quandry.
Then there's my ongoing crisis over fanon versus canon characterization wherein I've always been significantly partial to the latter in my fannish reading, but Teen Wolf may break me yet, partially because the show can't seem to decide and partially because when it does any consistency at all it seems to come down on the side of Mean Girls, problematic in some way (i.e. basically everything Isaac), or just something my embarrassment squick can't handle.
Yet it's still my primary fandom for reading in and I keep waiting for that to obsession to dial back but, so far, no luck. I shouldn't be terribly surprised - werewolves were my bulletproof kink even before TW showed up, so. Maybe I'm just doomed. In the meantime, if you wish to be doomed with me, you can check out the currently 453 Teen Wolf fics to be recced over at my Pinboard.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth where there are
comments. Comment here or there. ♥ Blue :)
The One About Where Mermaids Come From by
Waldorph
Length: 1.736 words
Fandom: Original
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Gen
Summary: screaming-till-im-numb: I want someone to write a book where Mermaids are the women thrown off ships when the sailors got afraid because having a woman on the boat is bad luck. And as they sink to the bottom legs tied together they change slowly until they can breath, until they can use their tied up legs to swim. And they drown sailors in revenge, luring them in by singing in their husky voices still stinging from the salt water they breathed.
Reccer's Notes: Short and amazing, and I'm not the only one to think so: it's a flashfic that's been up on Tumblr for a little over 24 hours and already has well over 113,000 notes. It's absolutely worth checking out.
Mermaid by Sergey Kolesov (Peleng Art)
Mermaid artwork that isn't intentionally related, but feels thematic.
Still Life by
domarzione
Length: 3.300 words
Fandom: Avengers
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Gen
Summary: For Steve, drawing in the park was initially a means of escape. Escape from the apartment he'd been given that felt nothing like a home. Escape from a world that confused and horrified him. Escape from all of the dark thoughts in his head. Almost every day, he sat on a bench surrounded by hundreds of people and ignored them all, ignored his surroundings entirely beyond the professional soldier's situational awareness that was as automatic as breathing (which was why he knew that he had three SHIELD agents watching him at all times), and drew from memory instead of the vibrant life than surrounded him but could not penetrate beneath his skin. They had defrosted his body, but somehow he was still frozen where it counted.
Reccer's Notes: Brilliant little Steve character piece focusing on his sketching, post-thaw.
Live to Rise by
ishafel
Length: 1.524 words
Fandom: Highlander/Avengers
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Gen
Summary: Methos has learned that nothing good ever comes of being in his office during office hours.
Reccer's Notes: Written for this year's Highlander Shortcuts, this is a short fic but very, very compelling.
Swing My Heart Across the Line by
Muir_Wolf
Length: 9.196 words
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Sheldon/Penny
Summary: AU that runs concurrent to the show's canon; bodyswap fic
Reccer's Notes: I don't know how in character this is (actually don't as in I'm not really versed well enough in the character to know - it's close enough for me, regardless) but I really enjoyed it and loved their respective POVs.
Excerpt:
They have this argument a hundred different times, in a hundred different ways.
Penny insists that the first time it happened, she was eight. She’s sure of it. She’s more than sure. It’s not easy to forget suddenly standing in the boy’s locker room, surrounded by gross boys. She’d clapped her hands (his hands) over her eyes (his eyes) and turned away, and that, she says, that, she knows, is the very first time.
Sheldon remembers it differently. He remembers waking up from a dream of jumbled numbers and ideas too large to cut down into words, and he remembers a hand softly pulling the tangled mess of his hair (her hair) away from his face (her face). “Shhh, Penny,” a voice had crooned, and a hand had clutched his (hers) and he’d slowly been lulled back to sleep by an accent unfamiliar and a voice unknown.
The Prisoner by Djinn
Length: 1.879 words
Fandom: Star Trek Enterprise
Rating: PG
Relationship(s): Gen
Summary: T'Pol and Porthos have some bonding. Trip notices and is amused. There is fluff.
Reccer's Notes: Yeah, I'm in this for Porthos. :P As a beagle owner, I find this a 100% plausible scenario. (I can't speak to starships or Vulcans from personal experience, but fictional data would support plausibility in those cases as well.)
.: Then There's Teen Wolf :.
Oh, god, there's Teen Wolf. Absolutely the reason I haven't been reccing lately. I have a whole different yard stick for TW fic than I do for most anything else and I generally don't know how to write a rec for a given fic without ending up stepping back, re-reading it, going "oh my god", and promptly deleting it. There are a lot of qualifiers, for one thing, as in "well, it has some significant plot holes, but still a major improvement over canon!" or "timeline/continuity issues; I choose to see this as an homage to the show at this point". If I didn't like the fic (and didn't think someone else would and should give it a chance) then I wouldn't want to rec it in the first place, but an unqualified rec feels like lying. Personally, I'd rather go in knowing the shortcomings a fic might have so I can enjoy the good stuff. It's Teen Wolf for the sake of all that's holy - if I expected perfection, I wouldn't be invested in the show! BUT I don't really want a passing author to take it as a backhanded compliment and be upset over it, either. I feel like I'm being a delicate flower over this whole thing, but it's a quandry.
Then there's my ongoing crisis over fanon versus canon characterization wherein I've always been significantly partial to the latter in my fannish reading, but Teen Wolf may break me yet, partially because the show can't seem to decide and partially because when it does any consistency at all it seems to come down on the side of Mean Girls, problematic in some way (i.e. basically everything Isaac), or just something my embarrassment squick can't handle.
Yet it's still my primary fandom for reading in and I keep waiting for that to obsession to dial back but, so far, no luck. I shouldn't be terribly surprised - werewolves were my bulletproof kink even before TW showed up, so. Maybe I'm just doomed. In the meantime, if you wish to be doomed with me, you can check out the currently 453 Teen Wolf fics to be recced over at my Pinboard.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth where there are
comments. Comment here or there. ♥ Blue :)