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One Day In Fic: Vol. 1, No. 2
Time for the second issue of Twenty-Four Hours in Fanfic, in which I leave all my browser tabs open for twenty-fours hours, and come back and post digressive reviews of all the fic I've read, good bad and indifferent, in an attempt to expiate (or at least explicate) the fact that I never leave feedback.
This is 6:30 PM Monday to 6:30 PM Tuesday. There really isn't that much this time; it almost all came from communities on my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
necreavit flist, because-- *gasp* -- I did other stuff in that period too. Like doing classwork and watching Stargate Monday and listening to three eps of This American Life while sorting notes and cleaning room. At least half of them, in fact, came from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sga_flashfic, so I'm doing those grouped together. (Oh, I haven't mentioned here that I've been writing fic for that community, have I? I've posted Unified Field Theory, which other people seemed to like, and Built of Autumn Roses, which I liked.)
So, on with it then.
Darkness Challenge:sga_flashfic : Six stories:Doing the others took me forever and wore out my reviewing muscle, so I'm just going to link to these and leave short comments- maybe do them justice tomorrow.
Predatory:foxfire : Wraith and hunger and lust and Major Sheppard out-wierding the alien, as usual, yay!
Massachusetts:casspeach : Eh, why do people think Major Sheppard has some sort of special bond with Atlantis?
Destroy:silverwind126 : Second-person fic is very hard to do well. See "Predatory" for a good example.
Opposition of the Stars:kageygirl : In Which John and Rodney Get Locked In A Closet, And Don't Have Sex, yay!
Piano Man:wickedwords : They make music on their down time, and they're a *unit*, yay!
Never Again:andromeda : Unless you're deliberately invoking fanon, if you take the characters to far from canon, you have to *justify* it to me along the way.
The Famine/Pollution Epic:air_and_angels : Good Omens, Famine/Pollution, War/Pestilence, NC-17
Mmm. There seems to be a run of Famine/Pollution onlower_tadfield lately of which I firmly approve. It's about time people starting looking a little more closely at the Horsepersons. This has gratuitously icky, dirty scenes, which is of course a kink of mine. But it also manages to keep the Horsepersons in character, as characters who are both people and aren't, and even DEATH, who I've rarely before seen done in GO without falling to far into the Discworld DEATH, was himself right out of the book. It also examines just what it means that one of the Horsepersons could retire and have another take his place, and what happens afterward.
The Fairest of Them All:violet_quill : Harry Potter, Narcissa/Tonks, NC-17
I read only maybe 10% of the stories that come throughpornish_pixies. Mostly because plain m/m porn doesn't usually do anything for me unless there's something deeper there, so I only pick up the ones where something about the pairing or the summary tweaks me. And, well, one thing that tweaks me is Tonks shapeshifting femmeslash. This one, the writing and plotting and characterization were good, and there was an understated but insightful look into a side of the wizarding world we've only had glimpses of in canon, which is one of my favorite things in HP fic. To be honest the premise of the sex was something of a stretch, but really no more of a stretch than in the books, and the porn was good enough that I was willing to suspend disbelief for the duration.
A Spirit of Brotherhood:flambeau : Harry Potter, Sirius&Remus&Snape, gen
I looked this up when I was commenting tostellar_dust about & stories - stories where the intense relationships aren't sexual. This was one of the first I read in that genre, where the focuse is on a relationship, and the guys are so closely bound that they even share a bed, and yet sexual tension is just not a factor. I've heard so many horror stories about this kind of fic that I don't go looking, but when I find a good one it's amazing; I'm sure that under a lesser author, this would have degenerated into either porn or unbearable smarm, but one thing Torch is very good at is finding and keeping the balance of a story.
By A Thread:arysteia : Classics, Achilles/Patroclus, R for violence but not sex
I haven't read the Illiad since I was about ten years old, and I haven't seen any of the adaptations, but, hey! When Achilles/Patroclus comes up onrarelitslash, I read. And this is possibly the best classics slash I have read yet. The way the characters kept drawing me into the story, and a little detail would pop up that reminded me- hey, these guys don't live in our world. The picture it gives of Early Greece is just amazing; worldbuilding is almost never a strength of fic, but it's the strength of this one. Also, props for managing to write an Achilles who is believeably the Achilles of myth, but is also likable.
Untitled Bit of Fluff:paian : SG1, Jack/Daniel, R for language but not sex
stellar_dust commented yesterday that she wanted more Jack & Daniel where they aren't having sex. Well, this is Jack/Daniel where They Aren't Having Sex. It's excellent, too, in the way it captures elements and vocies of Jack and Daniel that I love that almost never come out in fic, and shows how close they are without needing anything more. Especially rare in slashfic. In slash (and het romances, to a lesser extent) there's this assumption that at some point, the UST will reach levels where they *have* to have sex, damn the consequences. Which, while it makes the porn easier, is totally not the way I prefer to see things: I want Mulder and Scully, or Mac and Methos, or Adama and Roslin, to continue with the devotion and heavy flirting indefinitely without ever deciding it's worth the risk to go further. paian expresses that with Jack and Daniel here without overdoing it, while evoking a military backdrop that feels
much more realistic than the family we usually see at the SGC.
Potential:katiem : SG1, Daniel, Gen
This is a story about Daniel in high school, for the stated purpose of making him more like the real Daniel than the way he's usually shown as a kid. And it's a very good story, and a very good point. But what struck me is that it's pretty much a perfect teacher's-eye view of what *I'm* like as a student. And I don't know if I'd even seen myself from quite that perspective before. And it amazed me that more of the commenters sawe themselves in the teacher than in Daniel, too. Maybe when I've had teachers confess that they just had no idea what they're going to do with me, they really meant it...
Taste:zorb : SG1, Sam/Daniel, NC-17
This is set in Season 7-8, which gives it a very dark, but very yummy, Sam/Daniel dynamic. Although the sex scenes didn't really make that much of an impression on me, the characterization did. I like, and I believe in, this Sam, who has gotten so used to juggling all the different people she has to be that it's second nature now. Daniel's bothered me a little; the the thinking he did he did about Ascension at the beginning seemed a little off to me, and I did like the ending, possibly because I *loved* the completely non-romantic way she developed the relationship, especially in contrast to Pete, and didn't want it to degenerate into True Love. And my version of S8 Daniel has an aversion to True Love anyway. But that's really just nitpicking: great story.
Five Ways They Lived Happily Ever After, in Atlantis:radiotelescope : Stargate Atlantis, Various, Gen
This is a "Five Things" story, as you can probably tell from the title. It's a very silly five things story.
Several of them are crossovers. I'm going to talk about the last one. Because it's a matter of constant wonder to me that good My Little Ponies crossovers not only *exist*, they exist in sufficient number that I am capable of making generalizations about them.
The main generalization? They all get *really* *freaking* dark. Even the ones that are basically silly tend to get dark. I haven't actually seen any actual My Little Ponies, mind, but I'm assuming the show itself is not particularly pessimistic. Somehow, though, trying to make fic-sense of that material leads right on to the cosmic horror, in a way beyond that of other fluffy cheery milieus.
I also wrote the first two thousand words of the Jack/Thor story that will not die, and am working through the long Stargate/Asgard saga Æsirhættir, by The Prophet, which I found by googling "Angrboda Nirrti" while researching the Asgard. Also, apparently all this time I've been thinking that the original epic noncon crosspecies mpreg love affair was Thor/Loki, when it was actually Gwydion/Gilfaethwy. Ah well, I'm still trying to get my mind around the idea that the Asgard apparently did all kinds of fornicating with the Goa'uld back in the day...
This is 6:30 PM Monday to 6:30 PM Tuesday. There really isn't that much this time; it almost all came from communities on my
necreavit flist, because-- *gasp* -- I did other stuff in that period too. Like doing classwork and watching Stargate Monday and listening to three eps of This American Life while sorting notes and cleaning room. At least half of them, in fact, came from sga_flashfic, so I'm doing those grouped together. (Oh, I haven't mentioned here that I've been writing fic for that community, have I? I've posted Unified Field Theory, which other people seemed to like, and Built of Autumn Roses, which I liked.)So, on with it then.
Darkness Challenge:
sga_flashfic : Six stories:Doing the others took me forever and wore out my reviewing muscle, so I'm just going to link to these and leave short comments- maybe do them justice tomorrow.Predatory:
foxfire : Wraith and hunger and lust and Major Sheppard out-wierding the alien, as usual, yay!Massachusetts:
casspeach : Eh, why do people think Major Sheppard has some sort of special bond with Atlantis? Destroy:
silverwind126 : Second-person fic is very hard to do well. See "Predatory" for a good example.Opposition of the Stars:
kageygirl : In Which John and Rodney Get Locked In A Closet, And Don't Have Sex, yay!Piano Man:
wickedwords : They make music on their down time, and they're a *unit*, yay!Never Again:
andromeda : Unless you're deliberately invoking fanon, if you take the characters to far from canon, you have to *justify* it to me along the way.The Famine/Pollution Epic:
air_and_angels : Good Omens, Famine/Pollution, War/Pestilence, NC-17Mmm. There seems to be a run of Famine/Pollution on
lower_tadfield lately of which I firmly approve. It's about time people starting looking a little more closely at the Horsepersons. This has gratuitously icky, dirty scenes, which is of course a kink of mine. But it also manages to keep the Horsepersons in character, as characters who are both people and aren't, and even DEATH, who I've rarely before seen done in GO without falling to far into the Discworld DEATH, was himself right out of the book. It also examines just what it means that one of the Horsepersons could retire and have another take his place, and what happens afterward.The Fairest of Them All:
violet_quill : Harry Potter, Narcissa/Tonks, NC-17I read only maybe 10% of the stories that come through
pornish_pixies. Mostly because plain m/m porn doesn't usually do anything for me unless there's something deeper there, so I only pick up the ones where something about the pairing or the summary tweaks me. And, well, one thing that tweaks me is Tonks shapeshifting femmeslash. This one, the writing and plotting and characterization were good, and there was an understated but insightful look into a side of the wizarding world we've only had glimpses of in canon, which is one of my favorite things in HP fic. To be honest the premise of the sex was something of a stretch, but really no more of a stretch than in the books, and the porn was good enough that I was willing to suspend disbelief for the duration.A Spirit of Brotherhood:
flambeau : Harry Potter, Sirius&Remus&Snape, genI looked this up when I was commenting to
stellar_dust about & stories - stories where the intense relationships aren't sexual. This was one of the first I read in that genre, where the focuse is on a relationship, and the guys are so closely bound that they even share a bed, and yet sexual tension is just not a factor. I've heard so many horror stories about this kind of fic that I don't go looking, but when I find a good one it's amazing; I'm sure that under a lesser author, this would have degenerated into either porn or unbearable smarm, but one thing Torch is very good at is finding and keeping the balance of a story.By A Thread:
arysteia : Classics, Achilles/Patroclus, R for violence but not sexI haven't read the Illiad since I was about ten years old, and I haven't seen any of the adaptations, but, hey! When Achilles/Patroclus comes up on
rarelitslash, I read. And this is possibly the best classics slash I have read yet. The way the characters kept drawing me into the story, and a little detail would pop up that reminded me- hey, these guys don't live in our world. The picture it gives of Early Greece is just amazing; worldbuilding is almost never a strength of fic, but it's the strength of this one. Also, props for managing to write an Achilles who is believeably the Achilles of myth, but is also likable.Untitled Bit of Fluff:
paian : SG1, Jack/Daniel, R for language but not sexstellar_dust commented yesterday that she wanted more Jack & Daniel where they aren't having sex. Well, this is Jack/Daniel where They Aren't Having Sex. It's excellent, too, in the way it captures elements and vocies of Jack and Daniel that I love that almost never come out in fic, and shows how close they are without needing anything more. Especially rare in slashfic. In slash (and het romances, to a lesser extent) there's this assumption that at some point, the UST will reach levels where they *have* to have sex, damn the consequences. Which, while it makes the porn easier, is totally not the way I prefer to see things: I want Mulder and Scully, or Mac and Methos, or Adama and Roslin, to continue with the devotion and heavy flirting indefinitely without ever deciding it's worth the risk to go further. paian expresses that with Jack and Daniel here without overdoing it, while evoking a military backdrop that feelsmuch more realistic than the family we usually see at the SGC.
Potential:
katiem : SG1, Daniel, GenThis is a story about Daniel in high school, for the stated purpose of making him more like the real Daniel than the way he's usually shown as a kid. And it's a very good story, and a very good point. But what struck me is that it's pretty much a perfect teacher's-eye view of what *I'm* like as a student. And I don't know if I'd even seen myself from quite that perspective before. And it amazed me that more of the commenters sawe themselves in the teacher than in Daniel, too. Maybe when I've had teachers confess that they just had no idea what they're going to do with me, they really meant it...
Taste:
zorb : SG1, Sam/Daniel, NC-17This is set in Season 7-8, which gives it a very dark, but very yummy, Sam/Daniel dynamic. Although the sex scenes didn't really make that much of an impression on me, the characterization did. I like, and I believe in, this Sam, who has gotten so used to juggling all the different people she has to be that it's second nature now. Daniel's bothered me a little; the the thinking he did he did about Ascension at the beginning seemed a little off to me, and I did like the ending, possibly because I *loved* the completely non-romantic way she developed the relationship, especially in contrast to Pete, and didn't want it to degenerate into True Love. And my version of S8 Daniel has an aversion to True Love anyway. But that's really just nitpicking: great story.
Five Ways They Lived Happily Ever After, in Atlantis:
radiotelescope : Stargate Atlantis, Various, GenThis is a "Five Things" story, as you can probably tell from the title. It's a very silly five things story.
Several of them are crossovers. I'm going to talk about the last one. Because it's a matter of constant wonder to me that good My Little Ponies crossovers not only *exist*, they exist in sufficient number that I am capable of making generalizations about them.
The main generalization? They all get *really* *freaking* dark. Even the ones that are basically silly tend to get dark. I haven't actually seen any actual My Little Ponies, mind, but I'm assuming the show itself is not particularly pessimistic. Somehow, though, trying to make fic-sense of that material leads right on to the cosmic horror, in a way beyond that of other fluffy cheery milieus.
I also wrote the first two thousand words of the Jack/Thor story that will not die, and am working through the long Stargate/Asgard saga Æsirhættir, by The Prophet, which I found by googling "Angrboda Nirrti" while researching the Asgard. Also, apparently all this time I've been thinking that the original epic noncon crosspecies mpreg love affair was Thor/Loki, when it was actually Gwydion/Gilfaethwy. Ah well, I'm still trying to get my mind around the idea that the Asgard apparently did all kinds of fornicating with the Goa'uld back in the day...