brightly_lit

CHECK IT OUT--sylvia_locust podficced my soulless!Sam humor duo of fics, "Donut Run" and "Donuts on the Run." Here's the podfic--with art, too!!! SO COOL--I've never been podficced before (although I just for the first time recorded one myself), and podficcing is just the coolest thing. Yay for reading out loud and hearing each other instead of just reading each other!

Anyway, she did a great job--check it out! :-D

I'm saving the responses to my last Snowflake Challenge entry to savor when I'm less stressed out, but :-D! In the meantime, I did this:

Day 9

In your own space, rec at least 3 fanworks you thought you wouldn't like (because they weren't your fandom or they pushed against your boundaries or you thought you just wouldn't be interested) but you ended up loving.


Two of these come from spn_summergen this last summer, where you're exposed to all kinds of fics you might otherwise not read. To wit:

"Headliners," by kalliel. Clocking in at just under 10k words, it's told from the perspective of the OC teenage stepson of an older, wacked-out Jo, who is obsessed with Dean's death, among other things. There's horror, there's biting commentary on the media (Leonardo diCaprio plays Dean in the film adaptation), there's meta references galore (Padalecki plays Sam!). Yes, that's right, it's long, it's mostly about OCs or, alternatively, a minor character who might not have been too popular with some fans (Jo), it's a deathfic of sorts, it's horror (really not my thing, though I can hang with the rest), it blurs the lines between reality and the world of SPN and then folds them over and crosses them back and forth until you don't know what world you're in anymore, and it is ALL DELICIOUS. I started it when it popped up on summergen last summer, thinking, "Eh, I don't have much time right now; I'll read until I'm not into it anymore," and I couldn't drag my eyes away until the very end. Leave it to kalliel to consistently surprise fandom with the wildly creative ideas she comes up with from this canon.

"Three Bullets," by chiiyo86. Seriously, I'm not into the apocalypse or deathfic, but here's another. It's written in the hard-to-do-right second person, from Dean's POV. It begins "The world ends on a Thursday. It is that sudden," and ends with Dean figuring out a way to use the last of the three bullets he's spent over the course of the fic to kill himself and Sam, together, because otherwise, Lucifer will be able to take Sam as his vessel (I DO, however, love a well-earned tragic ending). The fic is brutal, desolate, their lives unredeemed, but damn if it isn't a thing of beauty.

"Turncoat," by toratio. toratio blames me for this fic (which blame I happily accept), because every now and then we trade comments for an hour or three, during which we always seem to end up coming up with ideas for weird, dark, angsty porn fics--ideas which delight us but which, we generally assume, would be repellant to others (although, judging by the comments she got on this one, maybe we're wrong!). This one came of ship-naming Benedict Cumberbatch and Cas's trenchcoat "cumcoat." In the past, these conversations have never gone past the idea stage, but she actually wrote the fic, which turned out to be the first fic of hers I ever read. I knew it would be an angsty Dean-masturbating-with-Cas's-trenchcoat-when-he-thinks-Cas-is-dead fic--which to me is canon (I'm only being slightly tongue-in-cheek), though I've never seen such a fic before ... but to realize such an idea and keep it from being too gross, too weird, too OTT, too OOC, too cringey in general, would be quite a feat indeed, so as excited as I was to read her fic, I also read it with some trepidation, only to find it's GOOD. Really good. Yes, that's right: cumcoat as pornographic literary fiction. Mmm.

Day 3

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you did not create. See if you can rec fanworks that are less likely to be praised: tiny fandoms, rare pairings, fanworks other than stories, lesser-known kinks or tropes. Find fanworks that have few to no comments, or creators new to a particular fandom who maybe aren't well known or appreciated. Appreciate them.


Obviously, I'm way behind on this challenge. Time to catch up!

I've recced every one of these before, but they deserve it, dammit! They're all gen.

Ever wonder what happened when Dean grew up and John had to recognize him as the guy who talked him into buying the Impala? Well, someone wrote that fic. The characters are spot-on. It covers every aspect of the idea, over time (such as the first time John hears the band Van Halen and remembers the name he was given.) And for some reason, this story never got much love, though it was written nearly 5 years ago: Building Dean Van Halen http://archiveofourown.org/works/1015000

This is one of my favorite hurt/comfort stories ever, about Dean finding himself in a (reputable) massage parlor after Sam took Lucifer into the cage and he can't hide his grief, winding up naked both physically and emotionally in that way Dean finds so hard, but he gets a little comfort and healing from the experience, I hope. The World Was Saved http://septembers-coda.livejournal.com/4132.html

tifaching just turned me on to this one. It got a decent amount of love, but it still deserves more! I've seen PWP fics with hundreds of comments, and when there are fics of this caliber out there with only 40, no, just, no. Sam and Dean are separated by social services at ages 5 and 9 when John never returns from a hunt. Dean can't forget Sam, and does his best to tattoo Sam's life story on his body starting at age 14 until, he hopes, they can meet again, when Sam turns 18. You'll weep: Shells of a Long Ago Lifetime http://archiveofourown.org/collections/remix2012/works/386232

Day One


In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Challenge ACCEPTED!

I blame thank kalliel for this!



Inescapable

The tragic, fucked-up sex-with-Sam story I never knew I wanted to write until I did! Inspired by Orphan Black.

Shards

Ah, my SPN/Princess Tutu crossover. Even my best friend didn't like it :-( (although a couple of you did!). As evidenced by my most recent fic, I really love the fairy-tale aspect of SPN, and this is the first story where I played with that. Here's where I get to talk to my heart's content about Princess Tutu, and if I get ONE person to watch (try Hulu--it's free on there if you watch the excellent English dub!), I will consider this indulgence a success. Princess Tutu is a brilliant anime that isn't popular even among anime fans. No giant robots, no fan service, no battles, just ballet and fairy tales and classical music. It's archetypal and beautiful. Staged like a ballet (spotlights, costumes), beautifully drawn, deliciously cracky yet at the same time perfectly sensical, fun and deeply angsty, you've never seen anything like it.

I conceived the fic when my best friend and I started noting all the similarities between it and SPN. It could be argued that the two shows are like Sam and Dean--they couldn't be more different, but deep down they have a lot in common. (Sam would be the Princess Tutu. ;-) )The fic is me tracing out all those similarities--there's even an evil, dark-haired beauty in Tutu who's only evil because she was raised by her father (basically the devil), named Rue, who I thus called "Rueby" in the fic.

It's true that no one who isn't familiar with Princess Tutu would probably get what I'm trying to go for in the fic, and Tutu isn't for everyone, but I'm proud of this one, dammit!

Echoes

Likewise with this one, my little fic no one wants anything to do with, about now-Sam and Dean encountering younger, happy versions of themselves, who have the life they should have had (a time echo created when Cas saved then resank the Titanic). It seems on par with all the rest of my fics, so I'm not sure why it's so unloved, but it got almost no attention when I first posted it, and none since. I still love it, though.

Alien

Every now and then, I go back and read this one. Most of my fics have a theme or a point or something I'm experimenting with as a writer, but this one is just a story, so when I want to get lost in someone else's life--in Sam--I like to return to it. It's just about when he went to Stanford and how he had a hard time fitting in at first then eventually found his way.


I think this is a brilliant idea for a challenge, because how an author feels about their own fics is often very different from how others feel about them. I'd love to see how each of you responds to this challenge, because who better to rec an author's work than the author themselves??

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