snowflake challenge, day twelve

Day 12

Rec at least three fanworks that you think would make a good intro into your fandom

.

Harry Potter is, I think, a very hard fandom to pin down. It's been around for years and years and years, and it's incredibly, just incredibly large. I don't think you can narrow it's entire point and purpose into a handful of fics. You can't just say "hey, read these three or fics right here, they'll explain everything, tell you everything you need to know."

Instead, I'm going to take this opportunity to rec some of my favorite gen fics. All of these are older fics -- before DH, even before HBP -- but that doesn't really matter. A really, really good gen fic is timeless, because it takes you back to how you felt and thought before the new canon arrived.


the whole of the moon by minervacat [Harry, Remus, gen]

I'm pretty sure I've recced this before. Whatever, it's phenomenal. I so badly wanted for Harry and Remus to develop a strong friendship in HBP. I was disappointed when that didn't really happen, and I'm pretty sure this fic is the main reason why.

Wordless by penknife [Arthur, PG]

I'm pretty sure I've recced this one before, too. The very first time I read this, the first thing I did afterward was call my dad. I haven't read it since he died, because quite honestly, I can't.

A Cloak, Many Colours, and the Boy Who Didn't Live by snegurochka_lee [James, gen]

Oh, James. If DH hadn't come along and told me otherwise, I would have believe this is the way things happened. Every single word of it.

A Certain Night by mindabbles [Neville, Longbottoms, gen]

This is one of those fics that attacked me from behind. I mean, I never knew I wanted a gen fic about Neville and his family until I read this. After I read this, I didn't understand why I hadn't thought about wanting a gen fic about Neville and his family in the first place.

Aphelion by carmine_ink [Peter, Remus/Sirius, gen]

This is a Remus/Sirius fic in some ways, but it a lot of ways, it's really about Peter. And it's about a Peter you don't see very often in fic, if you see Peter at all. This Peter is clever, capable, patient, and shrewd -- as opposed to the bumbling idiot who is constantly sent to the kitchens so James, Remus, and Sirius can have some privacy to shag.

Fire on Babylon by musesfool [Draco/Various, adult]

I know I said this list was going to be about gen fic, and here I am linking to something with an adult rating. That's the thing with a really, really good fic -- it can't always be neatly pigeonholed into a particularly category. Yeah, this fic has sex in it. In fact, it has both het and slash. But really, this fic is about Draco. It is very perfectly about Draco.

this is my excited face.

There are five fics tagged Broom Cupboard Sex at AO3. As it turns out, all five are mine. Also, I'm apparently the only user who truly believes Grimmauld Place is a character in its own right.

My favorite writing tropes and incredibly ridiculous headcanons; let me show you them.

Archiving all of my fics at AO3 has definitely been an experience. It's forced me to read over all my older stuff -- things I haven't looked at or thought about in six or seven years -- and yeah. I wrote quite a bit in 2005, but let's just say it wasn't always my best work. I've also got two or three fics that don't make a whole lot of sense outside the LiveJournal context they originally came with. Take the Harry/Mrs. Black portrait frottage fic (please) -- I didn't write that just because I got smacked with the crackfic stick that night; it was inspired by a meme that was going around LiveJournal like wildfire at the time.

I'm stuck somewhere between wanting to have everything in one place and "wow, people are actually reading the Stan Shunpike porn I wrote just to freak out happiestwhen."

*

In other news, I got my prompt assignments for dysfuncentine and sirius_black, and I am super excited about it.

Both prompts were my first choice. I've already got the pairing picked out for dysfuncentine, and most of the story is sketched out in a vague sort of way, mainly because it's been sitting in my head for years. The sirius_black fic might be a little trickier -- the prompt is loose enough that I could go two or three different ways with it, and I'm still pretty divided about it.

Oh, sleep.