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I feel like this is the year I did Yuletide "right". Wrote a detailed letter to the person assigned to me! Wrote fic for multiple people! Went through the whole archive for fandoms I might be interested in, and at least tried every story from said fandoms! And as such, this time around I have a handful of recommendations for other people.
And by "handful" I mean "somewhere over a dozen," but that's how these things go. (I'll probably do another post in a week or so with a brief note about my own fic, since I know some people who read my fic don't have AO3 accounts or subscriptions.) They're contained below, ranked roughly from what will make the most sense without any canon knowledge whatsoever to what absolutely requires canon knowledge to follow along.
"So You Woke Up In A Slash Fanfic" - Cracked Advice Columns
* This is a delightful parody of a standard (already fairly funny) Cracked style of advice column, in which the column writer has ended up in a coffeeshop AU. You do not need to know anything about the original columns (though it might help to know a small amount about fanfic) to appreciate it.
"Two Monks Invent Mr. Darcy" - Two Monks Inventing Things and Pride and Prejudice
* The explanation of bizarre art through the two monks who keep inventing things, from The Toast, gets crossed over with the concept of Mr. Darcy in various adaptations of the novel. Illustrations are, of course, provided.
"Αἱ ἡμεραι ὑπο κυνα ἐτελευτησαν, or: Exercise 66" - Greek Prose Composition
* Space adventure! It's a fun action fic that's absolutely littered with injokes for people who like classics, but reads fine without any knowledge of them. Keep an eye out for the best sentient rock I've seen in fic yet.
"Portio mea (Thou art my portion)" - Only Lovers Left Alive
* Prequel for the movie, about how Adam and Eve met. Nicely done, and easy to read as a good vampire story all on its own.
"Agave in Illyria" - Euripides' Bacchae
* A creepy, poetic, surreal exploration of some of the really dark, fucked-up shit that happens in Greek myth. It's gorgeous slippery writing, and a lot of the relevant details of the myths are either cited in the author's info before the story starts or revealed in the fic anyway.
"The Kindness of Men" - Black Beauty (with a canon-appropriate stealth crossover you don't need to know)
* Fix-it fic for Ginger, our favorite doomed firebrand of a horse from the novel. Pretty straightforward, but it still made me sniffly, because apparently I have intense feelings about that horse some twenty-five years since the last time I read that book.
"(Science) SCIENCE! Time with (^Nimona and) Ballister" - Nimona
* Ballister is writing a science manual of helpful starting experiments, and Nimona, his shapeshifting bloodthirsty lab assistant, helps. She's very helpy.
"The Whitehall Affair" - O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books
* Doctor Maturin gets a bit of local investigatory work, and Jack is HELPFUL. Slightly non-compliant of the canon timeline, but with an excellent grasp of voice, and nice use of the oft-neglected-in-fic female characters.
"maybe there's a word for it" - Zoolander
* Ten years later sequel, in which everyone is pretty happy and there's a fair amount of sex, and it's absolutely hilarious. I am still amazed at how perfectly the author captured the voices of these characters, and the style of the canon.
"What's Caught Is Gone" - Imperial Radch (aka Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword)
* A quiet story about Mercy of Kalr, set mostly after the events of Ancillary Sword. It does an excellent job of handling the multi-point perspective of a ship AI, and their slightly alien personality, while also doing some neat worldbuilding about the little details. Like the retrieval of ship mines, or how ancillaries were deactivated.
"Kisses Don't Last (Except When They Do)" - Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment
* A long, delicious "How Polly and Maladict got together" story, taking place mostly in Ankh-Morpork. It really fits the tone of its original book--which isn't quite the same as the general Discworld tone--and everything is plausible and Angua is delightful and Maladict is the right kind of bratty and Polly is the right kind of exasperated and it's really quite funny in places. Do read it.
"And All Things Nice" - Peter Pan
* A retelling of the novel of Peter Pan, in which Peter is a girl and Hook is a woman and growing up is still terrifying and dangerous in all the right ways. It's the sort of feminist examination of the text that's not just cheerfully "Woo, women!" but thinks seriously about the ways in which femininity works, especially within the time period when it was written. Unsettling as it should be.
"Like a Dragon in a China Shop" - Naomi Novik's Temeraire with Sherlock Holmes
* With Sherlock stumped by his attempts to investigate a crime committed within a culture he doesn't know as intimately as he knows that of his homeland, Watson asks an old military friend for help. Solid casefic, with absolutely priceless commentary from Temeraire.
"If It's Sewing, She Sews" - West Side Story
* Aftermath story for Maria, taking place over the next ten years following the play. It's a lovely examination of grief and recovery, told mostly between the lines as she follows her career as a seamstress, then more.
"Fuck You and Your Can Opener Privilege" - Fail_Fandomanon RPF
* This will make virtually no sense to anyone who isn't at least slightly familiar with the fail_fandomanon community. It is 100% injokes, and hilariously spot-on with all of them. I came out of it totally shipping Overly Aggressive Anon/Overly Earnest Anon myself.
And by "handful" I mean "somewhere over a dozen," but that's how these things go. (I'll probably do another post in a week or so with a brief note about my own fic, since I know some people who read my fic don't have AO3 accounts or subscriptions.) They're contained below, ranked roughly from what will make the most sense without any canon knowledge whatsoever to what absolutely requires canon knowledge to follow along.
"So You Woke Up In A Slash Fanfic" - Cracked Advice Columns
* This is a delightful parody of a standard (already fairly funny) Cracked style of advice column, in which the column writer has ended up in a coffeeshop AU. You do not need to know anything about the original columns (though it might help to know a small amount about fanfic) to appreciate it.
"Two Monks Invent Mr. Darcy" - Two Monks Inventing Things and Pride and Prejudice
* The explanation of bizarre art through the two monks who keep inventing things, from The Toast, gets crossed over with the concept of Mr. Darcy in various adaptations of the novel. Illustrations are, of course, provided.
"Αἱ ἡμεραι ὑπο κυνα ἐτελευτησαν, or: Exercise 66" - Greek Prose Composition
* Space adventure! It's a fun action fic that's absolutely littered with injokes for people who like classics, but reads fine without any knowledge of them. Keep an eye out for the best sentient rock I've seen in fic yet.
"Portio mea (Thou art my portion)" - Only Lovers Left Alive
* Prequel for the movie, about how Adam and Eve met. Nicely done, and easy to read as a good vampire story all on its own.
"Agave in Illyria" - Euripides' Bacchae
* A creepy, poetic, surreal exploration of some of the really dark, fucked-up shit that happens in Greek myth. It's gorgeous slippery writing, and a lot of the relevant details of the myths are either cited in the author's info before the story starts or revealed in the fic anyway.
"The Kindness of Men" - Black Beauty (with a canon-appropriate stealth crossover you don't need to know)
* Fix-it fic for Ginger, our favorite doomed firebrand of a horse from the novel. Pretty straightforward, but it still made me sniffly, because apparently I have intense feelings about that horse some twenty-five years since the last time I read that book.
"(Science) SCIENCE! Time with (^Nimona and) Ballister" - Nimona
* Ballister is writing a science manual of helpful starting experiments, and Nimona, his shapeshifting bloodthirsty lab assistant, helps. She's very helpy.
"The Whitehall Affair" - O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books
* Doctor Maturin gets a bit of local investigatory work, and Jack is HELPFUL. Slightly non-compliant of the canon timeline, but with an excellent grasp of voice, and nice use of the oft-neglected-in-fic female characters.
"maybe there's a word for it" - Zoolander
* Ten years later sequel, in which everyone is pretty happy and there's a fair amount of sex, and it's absolutely hilarious. I am still amazed at how perfectly the author captured the voices of these characters, and the style of the canon.
"What's Caught Is Gone" - Imperial Radch (aka Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword)
* A quiet story about Mercy of Kalr, set mostly after the events of Ancillary Sword. It does an excellent job of handling the multi-point perspective of a ship AI, and their slightly alien personality, while also doing some neat worldbuilding about the little details. Like the retrieval of ship mines, or how ancillaries were deactivated.
"Kisses Don't Last (Except When They Do)" - Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment
* A long, delicious "How Polly and Maladict got together" story, taking place mostly in Ankh-Morpork. It really fits the tone of its original book--which isn't quite the same as the general Discworld tone--and everything is plausible and Angua is delightful and Maladict is the right kind of bratty and Polly is the right kind of exasperated and it's really quite funny in places. Do read it.
"And All Things Nice" - Peter Pan
* A retelling of the novel of Peter Pan, in which Peter is a girl and Hook is a woman and growing up is still terrifying and dangerous in all the right ways. It's the sort of feminist examination of the text that's not just cheerfully "Woo, women!" but thinks seriously about the ways in which femininity works, especially within the time period when it was written. Unsettling as it should be.
"Like a Dragon in a China Shop" - Naomi Novik's Temeraire with Sherlock Holmes
* With Sherlock stumped by his attempts to investigate a crime committed within a culture he doesn't know as intimately as he knows that of his homeland, Watson asks an old military friend for help. Solid casefic, with absolutely priceless commentary from Temeraire.
"If It's Sewing, She Sews" - West Side Story
* Aftermath story for Maria, taking place over the next ten years following the play. It's a lovely examination of grief and recovery, told mostly between the lines as she follows her career as a seamstress, then more.
"Fuck You and Your Can Opener Privilege" - Fail_Fandomanon RPF
* This will make virtually no sense to anyone who isn't at least slightly familiar with the fail_fandomanon community. It is 100% injokes, and hilariously spot-on with all of them. I came out of it totally shipping Overly Aggressive Anon/Overly Earnest Anon myself.
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