Day 2
Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create.
Being totally honest, I have been guilty of not reading as much as I should in fandom circles for a long time. I have been a very vocal proponent for giving feedback to the fanfic one does read, but I haven't been as good to seek out fic as I used to be. I read "real books" even less. Some English teacher I am, though I have always admitted that maybe I was more of a grammar and linguistics fan when it came to academics than a literature buff like most English teachers seem to be. I'm really hopeful and encouraged that I've been reading more fic and even more canon material more often since I've started focusing on spaces like DreamWidth rather than the endless, fruitless, silent scrolling on tumblr.
I do have a few things I can rec, though! Without question. I just hope that I can consume more at a steady and reasonable rate so that this won't be so lopsided in the future.
There is one, singular, amazing fanfic that I revisit over an over even when it isn't my main fandom wheelhouse and that I look at again and again to the point that it distracts me from even seeking out new fanworks...
Blue Sky by waffles
Portal, Chell/Wheatley
Meteors, signals, apologies, and that tricky little thing called humanity- four years after the events of Portal II, Wheatley's been handed a second chance, but it's not going to be plain sailing…
Portal, as a fandom, was a strange experience for me. I played it during a summer when I was having a lot of emotional growing pains and was petty isolated no matter what I seemed to do, even moreso than usual. I was trying to be healthy and also really itching to get out of the house, so between playing Portal and moping around, I took music with me to a state park a lot and did a bunch of walking. While walking, I daydreamed about Portal and the negative space in the subtly told story, even before I got to Portal 2 which has a much more developed, centralized narrative. I posted about it on tumblr one day, and from the tag I met someone who did a very excellent roleplaying rendition of GLaDOS. From there, I became a pretty well-known (for a moment) Chell RPer on tumblr, and while that didn't last long, I still RP Chell on a website called Pandora. She always come back to me.
Early on in my experience with the fandom, I got asked a lot if this fic had inspired the way I wrote Chell. It hadn't. I had never heard of it, and I have never considered shipping Chell and Wheatley at all. I mean, he's a robot ball?
It is not even that I "agree" or espouse every headcanon-y thing in it. If I have one major issue to take with it, it is the way in which this narrative and the fandom that likes Wheatley at large conflates the character of Wheatley and the person of Stephen Merchant together a bit too closely. I appreciate that way in which the office (as in, the UK The Office, I think a lot of the time) dynamics are translated into the Aperture environment - I think it's done brilliantly and in a way that is in line with the background canon we are given. However, I do think that there is some internal contradiction with the background given to Chell with regard to how she got involved in the story, given the canon, to make that part of the story more tropey meet ugly/cute. But it's so well done that I can overlook my few hang-ups with it. It is one of the most tightly and beautifully written stories I've ever read in terms of the fact that no detail is wasted, but it doesn't feel rush. It is rich, alive, and lovely, and one of the best plot or ship fics I've ever read.
A lot of people seem to think of fanvidding as a dated art, from what I can tell, but I absolutely love it. I had just gotten a little bit of prowess during the era of .avis and some kind of weird extension thing on Windows Movie Maker when the technology marched on forever. It is one of my dearest wishes to make fanvids again someday. I recently got a new external harddrive, and it is one of the things I hope to do as a result. I love fanvid as this very stand-alone and yet very communicative, transformative commentary on a canon. Some people manage to use fanvids to create convincing AUs, but it is often more of a comment or perspective on what is already there, and I see it almost as a flipside of the coin to what I love most about fanfic. There is one pair of videos by
I don't really ship Clara and Twelve per se, but I adore their relationship for the complicated mess it is. One of my biggest cool down and walk way moments with a Doctor Who conversation I ever had was someone who hated S8 and considered it out of character, because S8 and S9 of Doctor Who are two of my favorite narrative arcs ever.
These videos go together, one after the other, and contain spoilers for S8/S9 of Doctor Who. The second one is the BEST, but it means so much more with the first.
It's hard to come up with a third specific instance, if only because of the abundant number of fics I have received through fic exchanges. I don't want to be nepotistic by choosing one by a close personal friend, though I could recommend anything by my best friend
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megkips / One fic of theirs that comes to mind is one that they wrote for me for GenEx one year in our same-fandom acquaintance ship:
Diaulodromia by megkips
Sakura and Shirou test the bounds of their friendship as Shirou slowly but surely becomes the Heroic Spirit he was always meant to be. Archer has a different perspective.
It comes to mind among all of them and even in this fandom (of which I've probably read the most, if only in betaing, over the past few years) because it doesn't deal with a ship. I've always been uncomfortable shipping Sakura with anyone on the terms that the canon seems to give us, and I am pretty firmly in the camp of shipping Shirou with Rin and/or Saber. However, I really hate the notion that just because a person isn't romantically involved with someone that they fade in all importance, which tends to take over in "romantic" fiction. This fic is so softly written and handles a sustaining friendship between Shirou and Sakura and looks at Arhcer's retrospective on it - the fact that he can still care all that time later, even if she isn't and never was his lover. I love it so much.
