straightforwardly

This week’s rec_cember post is going to be slightly unusual. A few years ago, I came across the following meme:

In a new post, list ten fic that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” works, or even all the same pairing or fandom, just the fics that have touched you or that stuck with you somehow.

At the time, I immediately scrawled down a list of the first ten fics that came to mind. That list has been sitting in the document where I pre-write my dreamwidth posts ever since—as in, literally every time I’ve written a post or made notes for a potential future post, I’ve had that list staring at me. But since I failed to make a proper post about it in a timely manner, at some point it started to feel like I’d waited too long and it was “too late” to do it now, as silly as that sounds. This has been haunting me for years. But while brainstorming for rec_cember, it occurred to me… seeing as the vast majority of fics on that list are recs, now might finally be the time to actually share that list.

Fics are listed in the order I initially jotted them down in.

Fandoms included: Pokémon (Main Games), Inuyasha, Downton Abbey, Naruto, Scum Villain, Crossover - Avatar: the Last Airbender/Stargate SG-1, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Labyrinth
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A collection of Final Fantasy VII fic recs from the past couple of months of reading, listed in chronological order of when I read them. Mostly because that was easiest for me, though I suppose it has the added side-effect that you could chart my descent into madness progression through different character relationships and concepts.

Once again, I originally intended to include “why I’m reccing this” commentary for all of these fics, and once again, I am accepting that I will never finish this recs list if I actually try to do so, so here we are. If you’re curious about any one fic in particular, ask and I’ll pull together some words! Otherwise, I am once again practicing “perfect is the enemy of the good” and sharing this as it is.

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A collection of fic recs based on my January/February fic reading, this time (unfortunately) without commentary, if only because I’ve been sitting on this version of this post for over a week now and I have the sneaking suspicion that if I wait until I have the energy to write up the commentary that I wanted to include, it’s never actually going to be posted.

Fandoms included: EPIC the Musical, Fallen London, Greek Mythology, Late Bronze Age Collapse RPF (if you know, you know), Miraculous Ladybug (99% lovesquare), Much Ado About Nothing, Naruto, Northanger Abbey, Othello, Stardew Valley, TAZ Ethersea

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I have read… so much fic this month. It’s high time for another recs post! A large portion is for Ace Attorney, as I finished the original trilogy for the first time earlier this month and promptly binged a truly ridiculous amount of fic.

Organized alphabetically, first by fandom, then by title. Fandoms included are: Ace Attorney, Crossover - Death Note/Ace Attorney, Death Note, Hamlet, Pokémon (Main Games), Scum Villain
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Reading: just finished the final volume of Thousand Autumns, and have now started a nonfiction read about Artisans in early imperial China.
Listening: High Rollers Aerois, ofc
Playing: getting very close to beating Pokémon Scarlet!
Watching: keeping up with my usual YouTube subscriptions, but beyond that, nothing at the moment
Writing: nothing actively, but fingers crossed that I change that later tonight!

► As stated above, I’ve finally finished the official translation of Thousand Autumns! Also marking the first time I’ve read the story in its entirety. I freely admit to having neglected so many things in my life in the past week or so due to this novel—including, memorably, my deciding to read “just the opening chapter” of the final volume before going to bed last night, and instead staying up way too late reading all of the main story + the epilogues. I’m currently very tired, but also very happy. ( more beneath the cut )

►It took me a hot minute, but I finally got around to reading slashmarks’s new Bellatrix-related WIP (this time Bellatrix/Hermione, featuring time travel!!), and, unsurprisingly, I fell madly in love with it, so now I’ve come here to make a rec for it! It’s currently at 17 out of a planned 19 chapters, and the most recently posted chapter ended at a point that left me screaming. It’s great <3 Though do please do note the content warnings mentioned in the author’s note.

swallow some of their history (Harry Potter, Bellatrix/Hermione, currently 94K)
A clash in the Time Room in the Department of Mysteries sends Hermione back in time thirty-three years, from 1996 to 1963. There, she's forced to contend with a drastically different pre-war Wizarding World where blood-based prejudice and rigid class structures rule the day, and maybe worse, Bellatrix Black as a classmate. But getting involved with Bellatrix Black in any capacity means dealing with her family's problems, too.

Have a jumble of miscellaneous fic recs from my last two months of fic reading! A decent number are from the semi-recent Jump Scare and Seasons of Drabbles collections; others are just things that showed up in my inbox or that I came across through other means. Organized in alphabetical order by fandom.

In total: 11 recs across 9 fandoms.

Fandoms included are: Greek Mythology, MDZS/CQL, Naruto, Pokémon Legends Arceus, Scum Villain, A Song of Ice & Fire, Stardew Valley, Survive Mola Mola!, Till the End of the Moon.

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Dropping by with a lot of recs for Battleship 2024! I had so much fun this year—I was on Team Crystal, and it was probably the most fun I’ve ever had with Battleship, which is saying something, considering that it’s been my favorite fandom event since I first joined in back in 2022!

(…I also sacrificed far more sleep to the game than I ever have before;;; The number of nights with <5 hours of sleep were… not nonzero. But each and every one of them was absolutely worth it <3)

We’re still in the anon period currently—it’s a two week anon period rather than the usual one, which I was grateful for, because with a collection of over 2000 works*, including four million words of fic, over 300 pieces of art, and nearly 200 podfics, I definitely needed that time to make my way through it!

(*More than Yuletide! Created in a barely-longer-than-two-weeks period! We truly all lost our collective minds/chill this year, and it was great <3)

I “only” read about 200K of those words, according to my reading & media tracking spreadsheet, but it still took some days to get through it all, haha. And who knows how much art I looked at…

But there truly were so many amazing gems in the collection. For the sake of making this long list somewhat comprehensible, I’m going to be splitting this up into several sections: my gifts, then my personal top three works (both fic and art) that made me absolutely lose my mind in the best way, then the rest of my fic recs, and finally the rest of my art recs, all organized alphabetically by fandom.

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First off, my gifts! ( more beneath the cut )


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Next up, my top favorites. This is not to say that I didn’t love and adore the other things I’m reccing below as well, but these three things truly made me lose my mind. So much (internal) screaming and (external) flailing and oh my god, I can’t believe these were created in this short period of time??? ( also beneath the cut )


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Now, for the other fic recs! In alphabetical order by fandom. I originally wanted to make a short comment about each piece like I did with the art recs below, but I’ve run out of steam, so please just have a simple list instead.( beneath the cut )

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Finally, the remaining art recs, including some I was very tempted to include in the top recs section, before I decided that I would restrict that section to only three works.

This is unfortunately incomplete (and heavily weighted towards OW), in that I foolishly didn’t think to save links to the artworks I looked at when I first started making my way through the collection, and now feel rather ;;;;; at the thought of digging through my history to find them. But even with those restrictions, I found a lot to recommend!
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My desire to live surrounded by a bamboo forest of my very own versus the knowledge that bamboo is an invasive species…. /a moot point since I live in an apartment anyway

Somewhat related, but over the past week, I’ve fallen back down into the Scum Villain rabbit hole, and it feels, quite frankly, amazing. I’ve never loved a canon, fandom, or ship as much as I loved Scum Villain / Bingqiu back in 2019-2020, and it’s so so good to experience those feelings again <3

Of course, this meant that I needed to go revisit the canon, and so I’ve been rereading it—though quite slowly, as I’m reading the official translation (for the first time!), which I only own in physical form. Since most of my reading is done via my phone or ereader during commutes and lunch breaks, this means that rereading requires me carving out extra reading time while at home, which has been slowing me down quite a bit. As is the fact that I’m reading it at like, half my usual reading speed—I keep needing to take a moment to breathe or flail before continuing due to the overwhelming feelings this book inspires in me.

So I’m only about halfway through the second volume now, but I’m really deeply enjoying it. And I’m loving the translation! I was a bit worried—while I remembered appreciating faelicy’s retranslation (and also found their meta quite thought-provoking), there was a stiffness to it at times that I didn't enjoy. But—and maybe this is because there were two translators on this project—I didn’t notice that quality at all in this version. It’s smooth all the way down, and I am loving every second of reading it. Scum Villain, my beloved <3

This does mean that I had a problem with my commute/lunch break reading schedule last week—couldn’t read Scum Villain, but did not have the headspace to read anything not Scum Villain—which I resolved by using that time to reread Feynite’s classic I Wish You Were My Husband, which imo still holds up. Plus some other old faves, though IWYWMH took up most of my reading time.

Ridiculously, Scum Villain was filling up my “listening to something while doing chores” time last week as well… last Sunday, I was rereading some of my own fic for the fandom, and noticed that at some point, I’d approved an inspiration link for a podfic of We Never Dreamed These Walls. On a whim, I wandered over to read the comments left on that podfic, and a lot of them were praising the podficcer’s SQQ’s voice, particularly during the moments when he starts flailing in his internal narrative, and despite the fact that I usually never listen to podfics (or audiobooks—I’ve disliked the experience of people reading to me every since I was a child old enough to read on my own), I got curious.

And. Oh my god. This podficcer did such a good job?? The person in question is So2Voice, and here’s the link to the podfic. Just, oh my god. I am obsessed. I would call this narcissistic of me, lol, except for the fact that listening to my own fic read aloud made me very aware of all the flaws in the writing, flaws which I usually don’t notice when reading it—the obsession comes almost purely from how much I enjoyed this person’s reading of it.

Their voice for SQQ’s internal dialogue truly is so deeply truly perfect?? Admittedly, their voices for LBH & SQQ during the actual dialogue don’t match up at all for how I hear them in my head, but that was a minor thing compared to how much I loved everything else, and I did get used to it by the end. And the (usually cat-related) bloopers were also just so so delightful. And how they did the System’s voice!! I was literally standing there thinking, “god I wish I’d included more interjections from the System in this fic” solely because I enjoyed hearing how they did that aspect.

I loved this so much that I went to their works page in the hopes that they’d also done podfics for any of my favorite fics from this fandom, but unfortunately, all of their other podfics were either for fics I’d disliked, my NOTP, or fics I’m unfamiliar with. But still, absolutely subscribed to them now (who knows what the future will bring, after all!), and absolutely obsessed. (Which remains wild to me, considering the aforementioned nearly life-long dislike for listening to people read aloud, but here we are, apparently??)

In any case, I’m having a great time revisiting this canon, rereading old favorite fics, slowly discovering new fics, and casting thoughtful looks at the mountain of WIPs I’d left unfinished. Who knows how long this revival of feelings is going to last, but I’m going to enjoy every second of it as long as I can <3 <3 <3

A trio of fic recs: ( beneath the cut )

Reading: so, so, so much MDZS/CQL fic
Listening: slowly making my way through the TAZ: Spirit Breakers oneshot whenever I do the dishes—I think I have about 15 minutes left?
Playing: nearing the end of chapter 3 in Bravely Default
Watching: nothing
Writing: One of my FIAB assignments, finally.

As the above implies, I am still deep in this strange and unexpected MDZS rabbithole. Since my last update, I’ve picked up a new ship, and have also begun exploring the world of Nie Huaisang-centric fics, aka the character who probably would have been my fave had Jiang Cheng not taken that position in my heart so fully and decisively early on.

A few more fic recs—most of them centering Nie Huaisang, but not all: ( beneath the cut )