tabacoychanel

boilerplate disclaimer: these are not fic recs. i enjoyed them, but if i was reccing fic recs i’d have more of a care for what other people need/want. these are just words that became pixels because i had feelings.

[hp] The Changeling by Annerb (183k) I love Slytherin!Ginny with my WHOLE HEART. It’s a Ginny Weasley character study—it’s tagged Harry/Ginny and Harry is a major presence in her life but the ship is not really central. The way the author conceptualizes Hogwarts Houses is very much as Secondary Houses, if we’re going by the Sorting Hat Chats taxonomy; your Secondary describes how you do things, not why you do them. Slytherins are ruthlessly pragmatic about getting results using whatever means are at their disposal; over the course of seven years Ginny learns to weaponize other people’s assumptions about her against them. The other students find her fucking terrifying. And she’s a survivor, which is not a label I would apply to Harry, Ron, or Hermione. Listen, when I tell you I love this story I need you to understand Ginny Weasley doesn’t even crack my top 10 HP Characters. I don’t even like her. It’s been so many years since I’ve read the books that I legitimately couldn’t tell you which of the characters in this fic are OCs and which are tertiary canon characters. But this Ginny has an astonishing number of layers. Her family treats her different for being a Slytherin and her housemates ostracize her for being a Weasley. For the first few years Quidditch is the thing that centers her. When Fred and George showed up to her first match as captain of the Slytherin team and one of them was decked out in red/gold and the other in green/silver to support Ginny I swear I started bawling. But there’s so much more to Ginny than being good at Quidditch. The fic is about her discovering the whole of her self and her strange ambitions. It’s about how people are more than what they seem. It’s about how Snape is actually an excellent Occlumency teacher, Harry was just the world’s worst student. It’s about how sometimes you grow up and apart from your friends through no fault of your own. It’s about how Slytherins are capable of trust and sacrifice—they’re just incapable of not calculating the cost. It was SPECTACULAR.

[hp] a life of smoke and silvered glass by dirgewithoutmusic (27k Snape-centric) I do not believe dirgewithoutmusic is capable of constructing a sentence that is not wrought like a gem. It’s not just that the words are pretty, it’s that the feelings slice right through you like a scalpel to the spine. You would think a fic about undercover DeathEater!Snape remaining friends with Lily and repenting that “Mudblood” slur and secretly being christened Harry’s second godfather would be angsty as all get-out but it’s somehow soft??? Snape’s not cuddly or kind, but his canon edges have been softened. Ok I just finished it and I lied, the final 1/5 is wall-to-wall angst. The fact that the most important people in Snape’s life are Lily, James and Harry and yet this fic revised my opinions of Petunia and Dumbledore is some alchemy.

[xmfc] Limited Release by rageprufrock (20k, Erik/Charles but plenty of outsider pov) Man, if I ever want to write a story about (1) FBI field agents or (2) how journalism works I would probably just reread this fic instead of, idk, a book? It’s way more fun than a factual account would be, and the research is woven into every molecule of the story. I realize the research isn’t why most people come to rageprufrock, it’s the humor, but the hallmark of her humor is the specificity of it. Her jokes are my jokes because they’re fandom in-jokes, idk how else to explain it. As always I am floored by the way she chooses words like a surgeon selects scalpels. What I noticed is how there isn’t a lot of tension driving the plot. There is a plot—the plot exists—it just doesn’t pull me along on a string. It has occurred to me that I’m reading xmfc fic in the Year of Our Lord 2020 primarily for craft-related reasons, to study the writing, not for squee reasons. It’s a big enough fandom that there’s an embarrassment of good content; it’s not such a large fandom that the top-hits-by-kudos are all garbage. I like it enough to consume the content; I don’t like it so much my emotions overwhelm my analysis. Anyway rageprufrock is a national treasure.

[xmfc] Some Such Place (The Big Screen Classics Remix) by pocky slash (17k, Erik/Charles, no beach divorce AU) Y’all know my shipping priors right? I’m way more interested in two people’s dawning realization that ohshit they’re in love than a recounting of the sequence of events by which they fell in love. This fic was therefore tailored to my tastes. It’s an “oh no we’ve been fuckbuddies for a year now we gotta define our relationship???” story where Erik goes to classic film screenings not because he particularly cares for any of the movies, but in order to spend time with Charles. When these two had a fight because “we’re not friends” because the word doesn’t encompass everything they are to each other that’s my fucking kryptonite that’s the GOOD SHIT right there. I’m no film buff myself, and neither is Erik, and somehow we both ended up learning a lot. The way Erik/Charles’s relationship was embedded in the most hot-button social issue of the day (mutant school integration) was …. wow.

[leverage] All the Way Back Where I Come From by romanticgirl (71k, OT3, soulmark AU) Eliot is born with two soulmarks, one that matches Parker’s and one that matches Hardison’s. Parker and Hardison start dating, just as they do in canon (though they do not themselves have matching soulmarks). Everything happens exactly as it does in canon, only with additional soulmark complications. This kind of interstitial storytelling is not usually my jam. Actually soulmarks are not my jam, and the workmanlike prose is not my jam, and yet I really enjoyed the fic. It’s not doing anything groundbreaking—it’s Eliot POV, Eliot is the most popular and written-about character in the fandom, Eliot is usually depicted as the most reluctant to commit to the ot3. It’s just so good at looking at the boundaries we draw and the boxes we put people in, coworkers vs. friends vs. lovers, and how the ot3 is all of these.

[leverage] What a Beast is Mankind by ladyragnell (1k, OT3, daemon AU) This is no word of a lie the softest thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. Softer than ice cream, softer than the scarf my grandma knit for me. When Eliot said “Maybe I'd like to touch you first, Parker, you ever think of that?” I could hear his gravelly voice and exasperated delivery. Hardison’s daemon is a big fat cat and I love it bc Eliot and Parker both have funky stuff going on with their daemons since Parker’s neurodivergent and Eliot’s got more PTSD than some nation-states do, but Hardison is just. A cat!!!

[mcu] lord send me a mechanic if i’m not beyond repair by suzukiblu (4k, Sam Wilson/Bucky Barnes, daemon AU) I was chortling from the first word to the last. The main insights I gleaned from this fic were not even about the central pairing, they were about Steve and Natasha. “Sam’s not usually prone to much romanticized violence in his metaphors, but Natasha seems to bring it out in people” and “anything Natasha says neutrally has something else to it” are both lines that would only work in a fic. This is such a fic-lover’s fic. I love that the premise is Sam doesn’t know Bucky’s daemon’s real name—Bucky just calls him “Sweetheart”—and by the end we don’t find out his name, or how they got severed or anything, he just rests his muzzle on Sam’s lap and it’s PERFECTION. Honestly I think people who write daemon AUs spend way too much time writing about severing and its consequences, so me not being subjected to more of that unpleasantness was a relief.

[mcu] The Scottish Boy by BetteNoire (130k, Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes, medieval AU) Worth the price of admission just for the glorious footnotes. I feel like I just read a goddamn dissertation on the Hundred Years’ War. At first I was iffy about this fic because Steve is an English knight and Bucky is his feral Scottish prisoner/squire and is it even Stucky if they’re enemies-to-lovers? However I happened to rewatch Captain America: The Winter Soldier about halfway into this fic and it reminded me they’re enemies by circumstance, and also how punchable Brock Rumlow’s face is. And there are tournaments. SO MANY tournaments. Instead of being a brainwashed super-assassin Bucky turns into a vengeance-driven super-assassin, a cross between the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Count of Monte Cristo. Tony Stark was perfectly cast as the Earl of Arundel. What I love about Steve and Bucky’s story is the epic sweep of it, and the all-encompassing nature of it, and this AU setting perfectly captured both. Sadly this fic was taken down but I saved a copy.

[asoiaf] The Lady of Casterly Rock by justadram (7k, Jaime Lannister/Sansa Stark arranged marriage AU) A jewel of a story omg it’s so restrained and literally nothing happens except Jaime catches feelings for his wife!! That’s it!! He doesn’t even kiss her. One thousand chef’s kisses would not be enough for this fic.

[asoiaf] In This Light by SigilBroken (90k) The ultimate Jaime x Brienne story. It’s a Battle for the Dawn futurefic and it had me glued to my screen for 2 hours. This story fucking slew me. The author is clearly a Brienne fan first and foremost, and I think that makes for a more nuanced shipfic (I’m speaking as Jaime’s #1 fan over here). I can get over the cardboard-cutout-villain Dany and the one-dimensional Arya because she just has such a stellar grasp of Brienne and Jaime’s characters (Cersei is two-dimensional, I’d say—that’s the minimum you need for a good Braime fic). The Tyrion-Jaime dynamic slapped. There are very few canons I know like the back of my hand the way I know ASOIAF, so I tend to be unwarrantedly harsh on fanworks, but every single detail of this was 100% on point (including Gendry being monosyllabic with everyone except Arya). I have been meaning to read this story for like five years and it ripped my heart out but when the humor hits it hits. And there are some lines that pierced my soul to the extent I had to copy them down and repeat them like prayer beads.

[asoiaf] Something that ought to have lain there unnoticed by SecondStarOnTheLeft (23k, Sansa-centric daemon AU) You know when you click on a fic and don’t read the tags and then you’re too lazy to scroll up? I legit didn’t know if this was Joffrey/Sansa, Petry/Sansa, Jon/Sansa, or Tyrion/Sansa, all of which I thought it was at various points. Well it’s Willas/Sansa, and good for her—Highgarden seems like a place where she can heal. Boy howdy does having a daemon magnify her trauma x500. I’m not sure if Petyr raped her or if he just touched her daemon without permission? Maybe it amounts to the same thing. I was admittedly miffed when Jon called Sansa “little sister” I was like HOLD UP JUST ONE SECOND nobody in this fic spares a single thought for where Arya is or what she’s doing. I enjoyed it though, I don't want to misrepresent it as 100% trauma, I was going awww for a good 50% of it.

[mdzs] The Grand Master of Daemonic Cultivation by FayJay (4k, daemon AU) I don’t even go here. I don’t even know who half these characters are. I do not understand how it had the power to hurt me. It’s WWX-pov and he is the Gryffindorest Gryffindor to ever Gryffindor. Lmao can you tell I was writing a daemon AU last week and reading a bunch for research.