Fandom Snowflake Challenge: Day One (only two days late)
In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.
This is a task that becomes increasingly hard the more I write. When I first started writing fanfiction (I'm talking about my first year in fandom), it was really easy to pick out which stories I wanted to tell other people about. I could easily identify the ones with my favourite themes, the ones that I felt I'd put my best effort into, and the ones that garnered the best reception. But with just over 600 stories (ranging from 100-word drabbles to 100K longfic) under my belt... well, to be frank, it's getting hard to remember what I've written! I went through my story list and stumbled over half a dozen fics that I haven't thought about in ages, but that I immediately remembered loving and feeling really good about. I also wanted to choose fics that, taken together, form something of a complete picture of what I write, but what I write is so decentralized that this in itself was difficult (even Bellamort, by far the pairing I write the most, accounts for only about 12% of my overall output).
After an at-length examination of everything I've written, I've come up with three fics that I think ultimately demonstrate what I like to do best - not what I do most often, or what I think I'm best known for, but what I feel most pleased with myself when I do - which is taking information that we get in canon, and filling in the empty spaces, giving backstory, and taking canon facts and drawing conclusions from them that I find completely logical, but that aren't necessarily common or intuitive.
Les Étrangers (Rodolphus/Rabastan, rated R). A post about what I've written couldn't go by without me talking about Les É. I just... I'm completely in love with the world of this fic. I really enjoy writing a sort of neo-Victorian Pureblood high society. I like writing an ongoing story where sexuality is a main theme. I'm so fond of each individual character in the story that I want to write a separate novel from the point of view of every single one of them (one project at a time, Gamma...). I especially love (hate) Rodolphus and Rabastan's parents, who are absolutely loathsome and yet who were driven to do such horrible things by a genuinely broken social structure that left them few to no other options. And I love that there's so much incest that it makes Flowers in the Attic look positively wholesome in comparison (two incest pairings, VC Andrews? Ha! I laugh at your feeble attempts to be shocking). At last count, there were five incest pairings openly present in Les É, not counting in-law-cest. Yup.
The Nature of Dominance (Bellatrix/Voldemort, rated NC-17). Funny how Bellatrix, despite being pretty much an archetypal dominatrix (to the point where even when I was twelve and didn't really understand what S&M was I could have told you that she was getting off on torturing people) is not usually very dommey in Bellamort. I mean, okay, yes, obviously he's her master, but come on. When did Voldemort ever show signs of being a sexual sadist? I don't recall him gratuitously torturing people the way Bellatrix did. He used the Cruciatus curse as a tool to get what he wanted, but he didn't use it for its own sake when other spells (like, you know, Avada Kedavra) would work just as well. At least, not in the way that Bellatrix did. So between Bellatrix obviously being the more sadistic of the two, and the pop psychology principle (we all know that pop psychology is where I get all my favourite ideas) that powerful men are sexually submissive, I remain surprised that, apparently, only one person besides myself (and yeaka at my prompting) has thought that femdom Bellamort was a good enough idea to write fic about.
They Do Not Know (Tom Riddle Jr, rated PG). Okay, so everyone and their grandmother knows about the obvious parallels between Voldemort's reign in Deathly Hallows and Nazi Germany. It wasn't exactly a discreet allusion, it was pretty in-your-face, which is often something of a criticism levelled at it. But when people criticize the blatantness of the similarities, I think most people sort of forget that it would make sense in-universe for Voldemort to have been inspired by Naziism. He grew up at the right time, after all. In fact, he grew up at the exact right time to have been living in London during the freaking Blitz (give or take three years; he would have technically been at Hogwarts at the time since he didn't go home for Christmases BUT WHATEVER, MY POINT STILL STANDS).