Small Fandoms

[jane_elliot]

As a belated birthday present to myself, I'm seeking small fandom recs.  The full list of small fandoms I currently read is below, but I'm pretty open to reading any small fandom, even ones that I've never read before.  I read slash, het, and (occasionally) gen.  All I ask is that the stories be completed and that they have a happy ending.

A few

Comments

[msmcknittington]

Hmm, I don't know. Thornton had a lot going for him that Higgens doesn't. Like, Thornton comes from a family that had traditionally been upper middle class, so he has that "well-born" cache that never goes away, even with poverty. (Did he work in a sweatshop? I thought he was just a draper's apprentice. Hmm.) The family's fall from grace had been recent and short-lived.

Higgens, on the other hand, is about as cultured as a rock, as noble as he is. To make an analogy, Nicholas Higgens entering into "proper" society would be like fitting an elephant through a mousehole. He also has radical social ideas, and I can't see him doing the things necessary to run a mill at a profit. I can see him maybe opening a charity or being a lecturer, but not a mill owner. I think he has too much of a chip on his shoulder and too much of a conscience to make it work.

John could have gone from working in a sweatshop to running his own factory without speculation or seed money

Didn't he have speculation/seed money? Didn't what's his face -- Margaret's father's friend (Mr. Bell?) -- invest money in it? He mentions in the miniseries having interests/investments in a mill, which I always took to mean that he had money in it over and beyond just the rent. And doesn't he have loans and such?

Um, in summation, I can see Nicholas and Margaret engaging in some sort of sexual encounter or romance of the minds, but I can't see them married. Maybe in America, but not as business owners. Maybe social reformers.

(Though that's stretching it, since I'm all about John/Margaret. I do have ideas of Mr. Hale paying a call on Mrs. Thornton and having the town gossips totally misinterpret it after Mrs. Hale's death. AWKWARD!)

[jane_elliot]

Oh, I never thought they'd run a mill together -- the bailout would totally be for John (and Mary! Can't forget about Mary:), after which Margaret and Nicholas would to go America. And I totally agree on the social reform front, especially in one of the fledgling West Coast cities, like San Francisco. Man, I'm going to have to write that some day.

I do completely agree that John/Margaret is perfect in canon. The problem is, it's so perfect that I can't really see a better way for them to hook up and thus fanfiction with this pairing seems like it must be guaranteed to disappoint (the same being true for most literary classics -- I keep trying to read Pride and Prejudice fanfic, but the original is just so darn untoppable!) Thus my desire to cling close to canon for John/Margaret (and I really do think North and South is one of the best miniseries the BBC has ever produce, even better than its source material) and explore unconventional pairings in fanon.

Though, admittedly, I'll probably have to write this particular fic myself...

Re: John's past. Perhaps he was a drapers assistant? I think they implied something more dire in the miniseries (which I've seen several times, while I've only read the book once, so I'm not the best source for details); either way, I have some idea of what wages were like in that time period, and there's no way a draper's assistant could have ever saved enough money to have started up his own mill, especially by John's age. You'd have to be right about Mr. Bell for it even to be possible and even so, Mr. Bell would have had to provide 100% of the financing. A big risk to take for a draper's assistant.

You know, this is just making me want to watch the miniseries again (like I needed much prompting:)