Jul. 27th, 2021

Despite being basically the extended embodiment of the "Oh. Oh no," scene, Much Ado About Nothing was never one of my favorite Shakespeare comedies - baby ace!me was strongly in favor of stories where the people who have spent their whole lives saying they are happy to be single and never wish for anything more get to be right about their own lives - but the Tennant/Tate version did a lot to sell me on it. The fandom headcanon that Beatrice and Benedick are both gay-leaning disaster bisexuals who are extremely mad about the discovery that their one true love is not same gender!!! sold me on it a lot harder - if you read their protestations as "I am perfectly happy fucking around with girls/boys and see no need to change so I will sublimate my attraction into bickering!" it hurts my ace heart less. And stories about bi people dealing with their sexuality are nearly as rare as ace ones.

Also the Tate/Tennant version did a lot for that interpretation. A lot. It is a gift. I have seen Much Ado in several community theater productions as well as the filmed version from the West End, and like a lot of Shakespeare comedies, how well it works depends entirely on how (not-)straight the leads play the lines they're given, and Tennant/Tate do nothing straight in that play. And, look, the bickering is very good. (Though I am still dreaming of a version that takes it all the way and puts in plenty of stage business to make it clear that Beatrice and Benedick know exactly what their friends are trying to pull and they fake ham it up on purpose.) (I would also be there for a version where Beatrice and Benedick are both coughing flowers the entire first half of the play but it never comes up in dialogue because they glare daggers at anyone who even looks like they are thinking about commenting.)

I sometimes wonder why the Much Ado trope isn't used more in fandom though. There are so many fandoms where "our friends got tired of waiting for us to get our shit together, so they lied to both of us separately that the other had confessed to pining, and then I decided that if you were going to pine I could damn well pine harder than you" would work really well. Like! Nie Huaisang, sweetheart, all it would take was wandering into a Sunshot camp and letting Lan Zhan guilt you into admitting that Wei Ying had said the reason he was so ill-looking is that he was pining for Lan Zhan, and letting Wei Ying badger you into admitting that the reason Lan Zhan has been so cranky is that he was pining for Wei Ying, and Bob's your uncle. And basically anyone at Hogwarts could have done that to Harry and Draco at basically any point after about Book 4 and I'm pretty sure it would have worked...(Does anyone have recs for these? I feel like I have read at least a few. The key bit being the friends are lying about having been confessed to. I can think of plenty where the friends are telling the truth.)

OK actual recs: This is one of those tiny fandoms where general fic quality is very high, but Shakespeare fic is always very tricky because you have to decide between keeping the character voices just like canon, keeping the language they are speaking Early Modern but going for a more novelistic cadence, or going full out modern; and then you have to decide if you're going to match the description to the dialogue or not; and if you're working from a version that updated the staging but not the dialogue you've got another layer on top of that. And any of those options are actually really hard to pull off? So the caveat here for the canon setting ones in particular is that if you're really sensitive to that kind of thing you may have trouble in this fandom.

No more than reason (7420 words) by jamjar
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick, Claudio/Hero
Additional Tags: newlyweds, Married Life, Wordplay is foreplay
Summary:
Newly-wedded bliss, Beatrice and Benedick style.

This is Benedick and Beatrice bickering their way into their unexepected happy-ever-after - along with their first real solid disagreement, and some good news to share. It is very good and the language choices are pitch-perfect, the banter gives me life and the things it says about canon are settled deep down in me as true ever since I read it.

One Foot on Sea, One on Shore, OR; Where the Bachelors Sit (3752 words) by Cottia
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (2011)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing)
Additional Tags: heteronormativity is a prison, Cousin Incest, Genderfuck, Dick Jokes, Run-On Sentences, Bad Sex, Shakespeare-concordant wilful ignorance of Italian geography, Cunnilingus, Femdom, Queer Themes, Bisexual Character, what is gender??? we just don't know, if you're wondering if something's a dirty pun the answer is yes, greco-roman mythology in lieu of using one's words because you're a dramatic gay bitch, Anal Play, Anal Fingering, Comeplay, Come Swallowing, Come Shot, as in Shakespeare-style kissing cousins but tagging just in case, Blank Verse, Oxfordians don't interacy

This one leans real hard into the Tate/Tennant dynamic and I love it a lot: Beatrice and Benedick have some trouble with the wedding night, until Beatrice suggests she top and gets and very enthusiastic response. It's mostly just filthy porn but it's filthy porn all in Shakespearean language and elegance and I can see the characters from the play still perfectly in voice.

Ad Astra Per Nihil (18005 words) by Talls
Fandom: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare, Star Trek
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing), Claudio/Hero (Much Ado About Nothing)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, try it it's good, Doesn’t require knowledge of either fandom to be understood

Star Trek AU? Star Trek AU! Does the really good fusion AU thing where it uses some of the silliness of the Star Trek canon to make some of the silliness in the original storyline better.