Yuletide recs!
This ended up being VERY long because there were a lot of really fun stories this year! And because it's so long (and this is so late) I'll group by canon.
(I wrote femslash (Susan/Nancy) for the movie Spy: Sniped.)
RPF
There are two Lin-Manuel Miranda/Jonathan Groff stories, both wonderful and very different. They'll Say We're In Love is quiet and full of heartwarming feelings and cross-country yearning; Thank You Mario But Our Cinnamon Roll Is In Another Castle is hilarious and full of references like referring to That Ex of Groff's only as "sex demon." Read both of them.
Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift's friendship is so often told from her POV, so it's refreshing that in Born Stars we're in his head instead.
I'd said on twitter that Lingua Franca would have been worth it just because of the tag "Lord Byron/Everyone (implied)" but it's also a charming endorsement of overpacking.
I haven't read much Georgette Heyer, so if Gruesome That Someone So Handsome Should Care hadn't been cross-listed in RPF I might have missed it-and I probably have missed many of the Heyer references. Read for the melancholy portrait of Beau Brummell's decline from the perspective of a friend.
This year Tennis RPF has a LOT of femslash but the one that stood out to me was a Chris Evert/Martina Navratilova space pirate AU, Bright Pirate Blues, in which Jimmy Connors is a handy villain/agent of chaos.
TV
I love Raylan, but he and Boyd get their due in the show Justified. So I was drawn to stories about the other characters, like All Our Plans and Crimes, a perfect portrait of future-marijuana-baron Loretta; Scenes from a Cat, where that cat belongs to Tim; and A Thousand Small Regrets, Ended, in which Rachel works a case with a personal angle.
The Hour is actually all about Lix, isn't it? Nowhere Else to Be is Randall and Lix's first meeting, while Pandora's Box has Lix trying to comfort Bel as she waits for news of Freddie's condition from the hospital.
There were so many delightful Parks and Recreation fics: The POTUS Plan, We Goin' Til They Kick Us Out, The 50 Greatest Seduction Songs of All Time, Playing Chess With Fate, And The Days Go By. But my favorite was If You're Lost You Can Look and You Will Find Me, where Ben tells Leslie he needs to take a little break. (Of course it has a happy ending! This is Parks!)
The thing about You're the Worst is you either love it or you don't, and you'll only write fic for it if you love it, so these four fics are pretty great: This Is Not a Noxema Commercial, A Fool For Your Face, Practice Makes Perfect, and This Is Going Swell.
I realized a little way into my Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries reading that I was uninterested in Phryne/Jack stories, though I'm very sure that other reccers have gone through all of them! Instead, how about Dot and Butler (The Perfect Ingredients), Dot and Hugh (Like Butter on Toast), Mac and Phryne now (et faisons la grasse matinee) and long ago (Strife at Methodist's Ladies'), and of course Dot and Mac (Wistfulness and Romance and Boozy, Cognac-sodden Breath).
I feel the same generally about Jake and Amy on Brooklyn Nine-Nine (though I adore them in the show). The standout is Blow a Kiss, Fire a Gun (We All Need Someone to Lean On), wherein Rosa goes undercover as a Columbian drug lord (lady?) and uses this opportunity to court Amy as only she can; I cannot say enough good things about this funny, sexy, perfect story. But also have two more Rosa/Amy stories (Lesbian Bar, Margin of Error), three Holt/Kevin stories (Couple's Retreat, The Buttering Up, An Ever-Fixed Mark), two young Rosa stories (Though She Be A Tiny Dancer (She's Fierce), Have Each Other's Back), some back-in-the-day Rosa/Jake (Buddy System), an Amy-centric Harry Potter AU (To Amy Santiago, Thanks For Everything, Love, Hermione Granger), and some post-wedding Linetti-Boyle family togetherness (Gathering). (Note: there was also a Rosa/Gina story, intriguing new ship but … also watersports? Did anyone else notice a bunch of random watersports stories this year? What was that about? Do I need to start specifying that I don't want that in my Yuletide letter?)
Movies, Books, Plays, Videos
I didn't expect Jeeves to fulfill my love of slash/femslash BFF/double beard ships but then I read The Rummy Affair of the Brinkley Ball. For your non-shipping needs, Happy Christmas, Jeeves! is a good straight-ahead Jeeves fixes everything story (though he's not the only one with a solution).
Northanger Abbey gave us not only an adorable Harry Potter AU in The Mysteries of the Astronomy Tower but also a future fic that has all the charm and emotion of the novel, The Newlyweds, or Catherine Tilney Thinks Again
I didn't expect Magic Mike XXL to be mostly fic about Rome but it WAS and here are three lovely Rome/Paris stories: and these lips, I just can't hold back, Beauty and Love, and Come As You Are.
Two fics from A Single Man made me glad I saw the movie. A Happy Man shows Jim and George finding their dream house, and Everything But Us is a sort-of fix-it fic.
In fact I watched the video "Girls Like Girls", which has been all over my tumblr dashboard, just so I could read the fic and I'm glad I did, because both Chloe Liked Olivia and The Light Is Changing Color were worth it. (The third story for this canon is good, but definitely heed the warnings.)
A lot of the reason I love Hedwig and the Angry Inch is Yitzhak and there were two stories about his post-show life: One for the Road and Being Handed the Sun
Okay, Hamilton. I didn't read all 57 fics only because I opted out of E-rated Hamilton/Burr or Hamilton/Jefferson. But I did indeed read the rest and here are the ones I loved-nearly all AUs; I found that 1-2000 word canon fics just didn't do it for me, possibly because the show itself is so dense. Better to move it to another setting, like the #blacklivesmatter movement-Tell Your Brother That He's Gotta Rise Up is pitch-perfect and in the end surprisingly kind to both Burr and Jefferson. Or The Courage of Which He Has the Reputation which includes pirates and a proposed arranged marriage (Hamilton/Laurens) in a mostly-epistolary story. And The Miner Refuted takes most of the first act of the play and sets it in space. There's the three college AUs in which Angelica sets up Alexander with John Laurens (John Cusack), sets up Alexander with Eliza (You Forget Yourself), and lets Alexander help run her campaign for student government president (Listen to Her Declaration). If you agree that the Schuyler sisters are superheroes then you'll love This Revolution is Night and Day, where they're Sailor Scouts, or Birds of Prey in which they're doing a sort-of Batfamily thing.
One-offs:
crossposted from Dreamwidth |
comments | comment at Dreamwidth
(I wrote femslash (Susan/Nancy) for the movie Spy: Sniped.)
RPF
There are two Lin-Manuel Miranda/Jonathan Groff stories, both wonderful and very different. They'll Say We're In Love is quiet and full of heartwarming feelings and cross-country yearning; Thank You Mario But Our Cinnamon Roll Is In Another Castle is hilarious and full of references like referring to That Ex of Groff's only as "sex demon." Read both of them.
Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift's friendship is so often told from her POV, so it's refreshing that in Born Stars we're in his head instead.
I'd said on twitter that Lingua Franca would have been worth it just because of the tag "Lord Byron/Everyone (implied)" but it's also a charming endorsement of overpacking.
I haven't read much Georgette Heyer, so if Gruesome That Someone So Handsome Should Care hadn't been cross-listed in RPF I might have missed it-and I probably have missed many of the Heyer references. Read for the melancholy portrait of Beau Brummell's decline from the perspective of a friend.
This year Tennis RPF has a LOT of femslash but the one that stood out to me was a Chris Evert/Martina Navratilova space pirate AU, Bright Pirate Blues, in which Jimmy Connors is a handy villain/agent of chaos.
TV
I love Raylan, but he and Boyd get their due in the show Justified. So I was drawn to stories about the other characters, like All Our Plans and Crimes, a perfect portrait of future-marijuana-baron Loretta; Scenes from a Cat, where that cat belongs to Tim; and A Thousand Small Regrets, Ended, in which Rachel works a case with a personal angle.
The Hour is actually all about Lix, isn't it? Nowhere Else to Be is Randall and Lix's first meeting, while Pandora's Box has Lix trying to comfort Bel as she waits for news of Freddie's condition from the hospital.
There were so many delightful Parks and Recreation fics: The POTUS Plan, We Goin' Til They Kick Us Out, The 50 Greatest Seduction Songs of All Time, Playing Chess With Fate, And The Days Go By. But my favorite was If You're Lost You Can Look and You Will Find Me, where Ben tells Leslie he needs to take a little break. (Of course it has a happy ending! This is Parks!)
The thing about You're the Worst is you either love it or you don't, and you'll only write fic for it if you love it, so these four fics are pretty great: This Is Not a Noxema Commercial, A Fool For Your Face, Practice Makes Perfect, and This Is Going Swell.
I realized a little way into my Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries reading that I was uninterested in Phryne/Jack stories, though I'm very sure that other reccers have gone through all of them! Instead, how about Dot and Butler (The Perfect Ingredients), Dot and Hugh (Like Butter on Toast), Mac and Phryne now (et faisons la grasse matinee) and long ago (Strife at Methodist's Ladies'), and of course Dot and Mac (Wistfulness and Romance and Boozy, Cognac-sodden Breath).
I feel the same generally about Jake and Amy on Brooklyn Nine-Nine (though I adore them in the show). The standout is Blow a Kiss, Fire a Gun (We All Need Someone to Lean On), wherein Rosa goes undercover as a Columbian drug lord (lady?) and uses this opportunity to court Amy as only she can; I cannot say enough good things about this funny, sexy, perfect story. But also have two more Rosa/Amy stories (Lesbian Bar, Margin of Error), three Holt/Kevin stories (Couple's Retreat, The Buttering Up, An Ever-Fixed Mark), two young Rosa stories (Though She Be A Tiny Dancer (She's Fierce), Have Each Other's Back), some back-in-the-day Rosa/Jake (Buddy System), an Amy-centric Harry Potter AU (To Amy Santiago, Thanks For Everything, Love, Hermione Granger), and some post-wedding Linetti-Boyle family togetherness (Gathering). (Note: there was also a Rosa/Gina story, intriguing new ship but … also watersports? Did anyone else notice a bunch of random watersports stories this year? What was that about? Do I need to start specifying that I don't want that in my Yuletide letter?)
Movies, Books, Plays, Videos
I didn't expect Jeeves to fulfill my love of slash/femslash BFF/double beard ships but then I read The Rummy Affair of the Brinkley Ball. For your non-shipping needs, Happy Christmas, Jeeves! is a good straight-ahead Jeeves fixes everything story (though he's not the only one with a solution).
Northanger Abbey gave us not only an adorable Harry Potter AU in The Mysteries of the Astronomy Tower but also a future fic that has all the charm and emotion of the novel, The Newlyweds, or Catherine Tilney Thinks Again
I didn't expect Magic Mike XXL to be mostly fic about Rome but it WAS and here are three lovely Rome/Paris stories: and these lips, I just can't hold back, Beauty and Love, and Come As You Are.
Two fics from A Single Man made me glad I saw the movie. A Happy Man shows Jim and George finding their dream house, and Everything But Us is a sort-of fix-it fic.
In fact I watched the video "Girls Like Girls", which has been all over my tumblr dashboard, just so I could read the fic and I'm glad I did, because both Chloe Liked Olivia and The Light Is Changing Color were worth it. (The third story for this canon is good, but definitely heed the warnings.)
A lot of the reason I love Hedwig and the Angry Inch is Yitzhak and there were two stories about his post-show life: One for the Road and Being Handed the Sun
Okay, Hamilton. I didn't read all 57 fics only because I opted out of E-rated Hamilton/Burr or Hamilton/Jefferson. But I did indeed read the rest and here are the ones I loved-nearly all AUs; I found that 1-2000 word canon fics just didn't do it for me, possibly because the show itself is so dense. Better to move it to another setting, like the #blacklivesmatter movement-Tell Your Brother That He's Gotta Rise Up is pitch-perfect and in the end surprisingly kind to both Burr and Jefferson. Or The Courage of Which He Has the Reputation which includes pirates and a proposed arranged marriage (Hamilton/Laurens) in a mostly-epistolary story. And The Miner Refuted takes most of the first act of the play and sets it in space. There's the three college AUs in which Angelica sets up Alexander with John Laurens (John Cusack), sets up Alexander with Eliza (You Forget Yourself), and lets Alexander help run her campaign for student government president (Listen to Her Declaration). If you agree that the Schuyler sisters are superheroes then you'll love This Revolution is Night and Day, where they're Sailor Scouts, or Birds of Prey in which they're doing a sort-of Batfamily thing.
One-offs:
- Femslash
- How to Get Away with Murder, Laurel/Michaela: Good Things Come to Those Who Fake (that's right, FAKE GIRLFRIENDS)
- Broad City, Ilana/Abby: Good (adorable morning-after)
- Laverne & Shirley: What Friends Are For,: (with Lenny/Squiggy preslash in the background, and you KNOW how I feel about femslash/boyslash double beard BFFs)
- Rosemary and Thyme, Rosemary/Laura: Rosemary's for Rememberance (realizations after Laura is shot, very sweet) Slash
- Nero Wolfe, Archie/Nero preslash: Lies and Jest (in which Archie learns that his sexuality might be more fluid than he'd previously thought)
- Man from UNCLE, Illya/Napoleon: Two Men, Crossing the Street (in which Illya, Napoleon and Gaby observe a spy exchange in Berlin)
- Top Hat, Horace/Alberto: Couture and the Theater (in which Madge makes certain suggestions)
- Good Will Hunting, Will/Chuckie: The First Principle (in which Chuckie gives Will a birthday, and a reason to celebrate it) Het
- Guys and Dolls, Sarah/Sky Masterson: Love and Marriage (How Sarah and Sky's marriage works from the POV of another (female) Runyon character, complete with all expected slang)
- Anne of Green Gables, Anne/Gilbert: The Tower Room (Gilbert and Anne are snowed in and spend a night together alone at Windy Poplars)
- Grosse Point Blank, Martin/Debi: Not Throwing Away My Shot (Another how-it-worked-out-after-the-canonical-happy-ending fic, and a pretty fantastic one too, from Debi's POV)
- Eastern Promises, Anne/Kirill (Nikolai): Waiting (Kirill watches over Anne and the baby over the next five years. Beautiful.)
- Selfie, Henry/Eliza: Rocky Mountain High (Basically the getting-together ending we all deserved.) Gen, mostly character-centric
- Hercule Poirot: 5 Habits of the Detective Most Effective (If you love Hercule as much as I do, it's a must-read. He's a dear man.)
- Inner City Wizard School: There is never a portal that cannot be opened with ingenuity and respect! (A wonderful expansion of this Key & Peele sketch, and now I want an entire YA series about inner city wizards.)
- Murder She Wrote: A Toast to Murder (Long because they wrote an episode of the show. You know if you want this.)
- Inspector Alleyn: An Ass's Headgear (Lovely snapshot of Roderick as a young constable, and how he found a way, despite class differences, to fit in with the other officers.)
- Empire: Sing With Cheer (A day-in-the-life of Cookie, back when she was in Philly, pregnant with Hakeem, helping Lucious collect money from dealers, fitting in with the neighborhood ladies, and dealing with a snowstorm.)
- Belle: Let Justice Be Done (Post-movie, how Belle works within and for her community.)
crossposted from Dreamwidth |
comments | comment at Dreamwidth