Hidden Treasure Subgenres

[melannen]

I'm going back through old favorite fics and bookmarking, and I have discovered two subgenres of comfort fic that I really, really love, and will read in any fandom or pairing, even ones I actively avoid otherwise:

1. What I am calling "art kink", where the fic is mostly about the characters' relationships to their own art, and most of the major sensual moments are about art (to the point sex scenes feel less intense), and sometimes even the main 'ship is kind of subordinate to the story about the artist(s) and their art.

Random old!fic examples:
Steinway!verse by toomuchplor, Inception
The only John Wayne Left In this Town by gyzym, MCU
Any given Dirty Dancing fusion, probably

2. What I am calling Vacation!Fic, where our characters are on a break from everyday life and instead go somewhere beautiful to rest (and recover). This can be beach!fic or roadtrip!fic or snowed in at the ski lodge!fic (a very specific subset of Canadian Shack) or it can be, like, about a character dropping out of life to surf full-time, but it has a deep sense of place and a feeling of being slowed down and voluntarily separate from worries and stress.

Random old(ish) fic examples:
Ordinary Life by Astolat and Speranza, SGA (SGA was a very good fandom for these)
Lee Shore by JumpingJackFlash, Homestuck
The Lucky Ones by Screamlet, Check Please!

But I have also realized as I go through and tag that, while both of these subgenres are really well-defined in my mind, and have their own subtropes and everything - and based on my AO3 reading history, they've been that way for awhile - neither of them is something that really gets talked about or tagged for in a way that would make them easy to find or talk about or even request.

So I have two questions:

What are your bulletproof subgenres of fic that don't have a standard name or a tag or a category but are definitely a thing anyway?

What would you rec in those subgenres (my subgenres, or yours, or someone else in the comments's)?

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I'd say one of my favorites is a "slow discovery" fic. So often in ship stories one or both of the characters are instantly attracted (even in enemies to lovers stories) and then there's just a lot of denial or secret pining. I'd say it's a little different from a slow burn in that the pair isn't just unaware of an attraction, there just isn't one at first, and what's more their eventual relationship is not the center point of the fic either. Instead it's a story where that becomes a piece of it.

[melannen]

Oooh, yeah! You're right, I like that, and I'd have no idea how to look for it on AO3. Sometimes it's friends-to-lovers, but not always.

[sophia_sol]

Oh wow yes, SGA really was very good at your #2, I'd forgotten how much of that I used to see and how much I liked it!

I think one of the odder things I tag for in my bookmarks that isn't frequently discussed as a theme/genre is water related stuff. I don't know why I like it or why I feel the need to collect it together in a tag but I do and it makes me happy.

[melannen]

Oooh, water related stuff! That definitely has some overlap with my #2. I guess I'll have to read that whole tag now! Actually I tried to but together a "beach-related fic" recs set a couple of times and got distracted by whether "all pirate fic" automatically counted.

[sophia_sol]

haha, I see your problem! I would argue that pirate fic only counts if the pirates in question spend at least a little time not on a ship in the course of the fic.

[sholio]

Fic that's about a person dealing with their significant other's friends/family, with the focus on that more than on the ship. I particularly like the variant where their SO is part of an especially close-knit group of friends, found-family or the like, so the poor love interest has to deal with suddenly being dropped among these weirdly codependent and protective-of-each-other people, and then manages to win their way to the inside -- e.g. someone paired with a member of a Stargate team or superhero team or a person who has a canonical best friend who's up in their space all the time.

I can't really come up with recs off the top of my head; I'd have to think about it. Most of the times I can think of that really hit my buttons were back in Stargate fandom, though it's a thing in MCU and some others as well.

[melannen]

That's sort of "meet the family" only not, isn't it? Because a lot of "meet the parents", the parents are off somewhere in the picturesque hometown, not part of daily life, whereas what you're talking about, the family the SO has to get used to is their everyday. Yeah, I can think of some stories I liked that did that, but I can't think of how I'd find something like that out of nowhere.

It's also tough because usually the codependent people *are* the main cast, so bringing a new person in usually means an OC/crossover character/AU, and those are always tricky.

[sholio]

It's also tough because usually the codependent people *are* the main cast, so bringing a new person in usually means an OC/crossover character/AU, and those are always tricky.

YMMV, but in the versions I mainly enjoy, it's usually either a new-ish canon love interest or someone else in the cast who just isn't part of the main group. The version where I first encountered it enough to realize that I liked it was in SGA when people would focus on Keller in Keller/Rodney stories, and specifically on Keller making friends with Rodney's team, or with John specifically. There are several other canons where I've run into it since (or realized I'd run into it before), often with villain/hero pairings where a big part of the story focus is on the new villain love interest having to get to know the team and deal with their distrust that s/he is going to break Hero Character's heart.

You saying this about OCs/crossovers makes me realize that I have those categorized completely differently, because for me the appeal of this kind of story is mainly about building up connections within the main group that you never actually got in canon (someone who's a relatively minor part of the cast, or in a different general section of the cast, getting accepted into the main group). It's a slightly different kind of outside POV than the outside POV of an OC or someone else who canonically doesn't know the team at all.

[elf]

My daughter's bulletproof subgenre is "they're forced to live together." College roommates AU, roomies at the academy (whatever the academy is for them), only one hotel room available, etc. This is complicated by her being aromantic and not interested in ship fic of any sort - she wants buddies, or enemies maybe becoming buddies. (OTOH, this is a narrative kink she loves so much that she'll put up with some shippy fic to read it, as long as it's heavy on the dialogue and snark and doesn't just become romantic as soon as they realize they're interested.)

I went looking for those stories for her and was much annoyed to find out that there's no tag, not even a set of tags, that works to find them.

She also adores, "characters from canon visit our 'real' universe."

For myself, I love fics that have a twist that puts all of canon in a new perspective. This includes "he was a vampire all along!" but also "they were secretly married" and "actually, the protagonists were the villains." But that may be too broad a genre. (Too bad; we could call it "Everything You Know About Canon Is Wrong.")

Examples:
Nocturne by Tira Nog (Harry Potter, HP/SS)
Through the Glass by dentalfloss (MCU)
A Way So Familiar by Teland (DCU Comicsverse)

[melannen]

I still love the "Inappropriate Elf" ones, yes! And all sorts of similar ones that I call AU-but-not-AU where you have a premise that would usually mean AU but the writer threads it through canon such that it isn't. Those are the BEST. I tend to find the ones that do hero/villain reversal really tricky because with those it's sometimes about two millimeters between ones that are really good and ones that are, like, Nazi apologia. But in general, yes, good.

You'd think with the prevalence of "and they were roommates!" and "and there was only one bed!" as the slash cliches these days, finding ones for your daughter would be easier! But I can see how it would be tough especially if you're looking for non-ship-focused ones - I gave up at a young age and just learned to filter the good bits out of the ships, but I didn't know about all the other options at here age. There is AU-Roommates and AU-Neighbors but that doesn't really capture the trope when it really is mostly about sharing spaces. I have gone through phases where I really want, like "AU intentional communities" and those are tough to find too, even in fandoms where "they start a commune together" is a pretty obvious trope.

[elf]

If there were an easy way to find "and they were roommates!" we'd deal with filtering for ships. Apparently, this is not a tag that's used in general. (Also: Daughter is in her early 20's; she's not traumatized by ships; she just doesn't like most of them.) And yeah, AU-Neighobors/Roommates doesn't quite catch the "ahhahah they're stuck together!" that's most of what she's looking for. (She really, really wants Red vs Blue training academy fics, AU or not.) But mostly, even a lot of the neighborhood/shared room etc. fics aren't tagged that way.

...The biggest difference between AO3's tagging, and what inspired it (Delicious collapsing), is that Delicious was tagged by readers, not authors. And they were tagged by multiple readers with different focuses - the same fic might be tagged for relationships and kink in one place, and tagged for AU setting somewhere else, and specific sex acts in a third listing. Authors often don't notice all the details someone might be looking for, or they just don't want to spend twenty minutes writing two dozen tags for a 2,000-word fic.

I think I want to nudge AO3 into making their bookmark searching more robust. As far as I can tell, you can't even sort them by fandom.

[doranwen]

I did not know this about AO3's tagging! (I never did Delicious - heard about it.) And being able to tag fics as a reader... oh man, I would LOVE that. I wish AO3 could implement that outside of the bookmarking system, as a site-wide thing. Or a site that would be just for fic organization/rec'ing that would allow organizing of fic links from all manner of sites, including fandom-specific archives... Realized that outside of fan-made rec lists, there's no one place anyone can ever go for all the links to all the fics. Like AO3 but just for readers tagging/linking to fanworks only (not a general bookmark service), not hosting the content. Of course, if one did exist, it's very probable that I would waste far too much time on it, lol.

[elf]

Pinboard is the successor to Delicious (and eventually, absorbed Delicious when the new owners decided they couldn't figure out how to monetize it). There are some fans who make rec lists at Pinboard - I use Amalthia's lists all the time - but after Delicious died, there really hasn't been a widely used recs-and-bookmarking place.

AO3's bookmarks are supposed to be for general fannish things, not just fics at AO3, but very few people use them, and the feature set is poor. (I don't blame them for that; they've been focusing on the fic features, and those are important.)

Recently I've been noticing how very much I miss Painless J's rec lists.

[unavee]

...for #1, my first reaction was "Oh, how interesting! YKINMK" and then I realized it was just last week that I stayed up past my bedtime to read an AU where the characters were dance instructors. And yes, I had to think a moment to remember the pairing, because what drew me in were the intimate descriptions of developing the choreography and dancing/teaching the dances. I think the attraction for me with this type of story is getting the personal relationship of the character with their work, which doesn't necessarily have to be art. It kind of crosses over with "competence kink" and the appeal of listening to experts talk lovingly about their fields.

The fic was: Seen a Million Faces (but I've been waiting for you) by Hyeyu, Haikyuu!!

A popular genre I've recently started to like is friends to lovers, and I've always loved AUs, and a subgenre that combines them that I sometimes really like and sometimes am ambivalent about is childhood friends getting put into a meetcute AU. Because then they don't have their touching history! But they have an immediate connection and it feels like they've known each other forever!

A comfortfic staple for me is comedy of errors involving superhero secret identities.

Another is slice-of-life feeling stories about developing relationships that describe the small gestures and surprises as characters learn to make space for each other in one another's lives. Or really any fic that has these moments.

[melannen]

Yes, see? It definitely has a lot of overlap with competence kink! But I will do the art ones even if the person isn't actually very good at it, just loves it a lot (or even where one of the characters doesn't even make art, just really loves experiencing it.) And I think for me a whole lot of it really is about the sensual descriptions of art and experiencing art.

Of course, at some point most stories about someone who really loves their work end up being stories about art one way or another, even it it's the art of cat burglary or whatever. (And I guess there are other competence kink stories that are just about getting to see the person be really good at their job - just the satisfaction of things falling into place and being done right - that don't focus as much on the relationship of the person to the work - and that don't really overlap the same way.) interesting!

[snickfic]

Oooh, I know this one! For me it's fic where a character has some aspect of themselves (sexuality, kinks, wings - it covers a broad range!) that they're ashamed of, finally reveal to someone else, and are affirmed in. I probably see it most often in kinkfic, where someone's ashamed of their kink for watersports or whatever, and their partner helps them embrace it, but I'm also super into it in non-kinky and non-sexual contexts.

It even has a name! stultiloquentia coined the term "shame/comfort" a few years ago, and I've tagged a few fics with it on AO3, but unfortunately it's never really caught on with fandom at large.

Here's a couple of fics of this type that came to mind:
untitled - Hockey fic where a pregnant guy is embarrassed about his loss of bladder control
I wanna fit inside you - Hockey fic where guy has an oviposition kink (and is also into his sister)

[melannen]

That is definitely something that ought to have a name!

I'm not super into shame qua shame (I get embarrassment squick so it's tricky) but I am 100% there for "there was this thing about myself that I thought I'd always have to hide and now I've found people who will celebrate it with me."

[vicki_rae]

That's a really interesting question. I don't think I have any? I'm very strongly drawn to characterizations consistent with the source material, or with the fanon interpretation of the source material. And often I don't have an OPT so always it's not so much who the relationships are, but that they exist or develop believably, and are satisfying to the characters. And to me :)

Oh wait, I do have one, it's very specific though and totally unsearchable. I have no clue how to even describe it except that MCU Bucky recovers a sense of self and builds a new life. Of if that can be generalized to other characters.

Copperbadge's The Silver Age
https://archiveofourown.org/series/353996

Owlet's Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail
https://archiveofourown.org/series/195689

Yes! Unexpected life changes and building a different life, because this one hits it hard too.

SpaceAnJL's The Paladin Protocol
https://archiveofourown.org/works/432888

[melannen]

Oooh, that sounds like something I've on-and-off been trying to get called "recovery!fic" over the years, because it's definitely something I'd like to be able to find: kind of like hurt/comfort, except the 'hurt' is 'my life has been terrible for years and years' rather than some specific thing, and the 'comfort' is 'I've just realized it doesn't have to be like that, and I'm going to work to change it' rather than being more relationship-focused like standard h/c often is.

My ur-example is this long Buffy fic I've never been able to find again where Spike (post-soul) is just like I've had enough apocalypses and leaves Sunnydale to be a poetry teacher at a community college, and Buffy goes looking for him and when he won't come back or talk to her, signs up for his poetry class, then slowly realizes she is allowed to just live in a quiet little town and be content if she wants that, too.

[elf]

Oooh, I like that one!

I recall some Harry Potter fics that seem to fit, but I'm having trouble finding links. I read Harry/Snape, and there's both "Harry was captured and tortured by Death Eaters until Snape rescues him, but it takes a long time for Harry to realize this is a rescue and not just Snape wanting a pet of his own," and "Snape is found guilty after the war, thrown in Azkaban or just tortured by people in general, until he's bonded to Harry 'for his own safety' and" etc. etc.

There's also a whole lot of "Snape believes he's worthless and mostly evil and nobody could ever willingly tolerate his presence, much less fall in love with him," which has similar feels.

I remember Black Story by Jay Tryfanstone being one of these, but I haven't read it since before AO3 existed.

Robins and Other Flightless Birds by Ionaperidot (DCU-Batfamily) involves various Robins recovering from canon (or AU-canon) traumas and slowly reclaiming themselves.

I think there's some amnesia fics that fall into this, too, but looking for them at AO3 gets me twenty opened tabs of things I start to read the first few paragraphs and don't want to stop.

[duskpeterson]

Friendship fiction in which the friendship is as important as romance would be in a romance story. It gets tagged, but usually under labels that don't make clear how important the friendship is. And it's *never* mentioned in professional novel blurbs. Never, never, never, no matter how important the friendship is to the plot.

Here's the only example I've been able to find at AO3; you don't need to know the fandom.

Meeting for Robots, by songofsunset
https://archiveofourown.org/works/12919731

[hannah]

One bulletproof subgenre is peering-around-a-corner fic: typically gen, often under 5000 words, looking into corners, nooks, crannies, and other little spaces to explore moments and places the canon never got to visit. Two examples from Buffy are In Imbolic and Wish You Were Here (Instead of Me), and one from Deep Space Nine is Favorite Customer.

[doranwen]

*ponders* I'm not sure if I do or not. I know within specific fandoms there are types of stories I love - but the one that comes to mind isn't even mainly on AO3 - it's mostly on a fandom-specific archive that is organized only by author and title, so you couldn't search by tag anyway. The example I'm thinking of is Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman - and the two types I love are where Lois finds out Clark's secret *before* they ever start dating, and where she finds out Clark's secret not only before they start dating, but without him even knowing. Something about the "I know your secret but you don't know that I know" really is great - but that's not exactly something that translates to most other canons.

I also like fics that realistically deal with trauma that canon *doesn't* - and you can't just search for "trauma recovery" or anything like that (assuming the author even tagged for it) because you'd get everything and a half. I'm talking about canons (Rizzoli & Isles, anyone?) which have their characters kidnapped or held at gunpoint and the next episode they're back to normal - I absolutely love stories which deal with the aftereffects, but it's more specific than just "episode related" or anything like that. So maybe that counts?

Anyway, I should also mention that other than a handful of larger fandoms, most of my favorites are small enough that I've read (or deliberately chose not to read based on tags) every fic in the fandom, so it doesn't really make a whole lot of difference - and I almost never read fics in fandoms I don't know. I have to know the fandom first.

[copracat]

It's never tagged for but I like Any Two Guys, stories in a slash fandom where the author is way more interested in their own storytelling than the canon or fanon of the fandom and, if they're a half decent writer, you get a nice queer romance to enjoy. I don't mind reading pro queer fiction but it's such a minefield because pro fiction doesn't have tags so you can read it for reading but you can never trust a new pro book for comfort. (The world is so terrible that I try to avoid terrible in entertainment thses days.)

I love a well written moment of epiphany, doesn't matter what although it's wonderful if it's the emotional heart of the story. I tried to find a Community story where Annie and Abed are in the Dreamatorium and Annie is not getting it and then from one moment to the next she does. It was so beautifully written. I can't believe I don't have it bookmarked.

[pensnest]

In my beloved but over fandom (popslash) I always loved the crack. I don't mean "i drank wayyytoomuch Red Bull and I wrote this fic and me and my friends can't stop laughing" crap, I mean the impossible premise dropped into canon. Guys wake up in each other's bodies, someone wakes up as a girl, or a dog, or a llama (ah, yes, the Llama), or lightning turns them telepathic, or somebody keeps shrinking, or is covered in hair, or pregnant, or, or, or, all these things that are not real but are followed through properly and usually turn out to have something to say. Popslash had *so* much of it, and SGA did pretty well on that score too, but… you know, I haven't really spotted this kind of stuff in MCU stories, though I haven't been hunting for it. I guess having such a fantastical canon means there isn't room for a lot of crack, whereas when the canon is actually Real Life, anything goes. Maybe it doesn't fit the requirements, as 'crack' ought to be recognisable, but I fear that nowadays crack is that Red Bull thing, and that is something I really, really don't want.

I also like stories in which my boys are quietly pining but *getting on with their lives*, not sitting around moping like sulky teenagers. And they are hiding the pining well, but—and this is important—they aren't mind-bogglingly stupid about recognising that the feelings are requited, when signs appear. I don't like mind-bogglingly stupid.

[cadenzamuse]

I really, really love, um, all the ways you can abuse a trope. Like subverting/inverting, taking it to its logical conclusion either to reductio ad absurdum it or just because, worldbuilding the fuck out of this absurd idea, like okay if humans have soulmates, uh, all of human civilization would have developed differently and I'm gonna guess what that looks like, etc.

I am lucky in that trope subversion at least is occasionally, if inconsistently tagged, but it's really the meta-discussion of tropes through fic that is the interesting thing? Like "why do we find this interesting/sexy/etc, and how does that reflect on humanity as it actually exists?" And boy howdy, "trope subversion" does not really cover that...

[fabrisse]

"Outside looking In" is my bulletproof trope. Someone is completely outside canon and ends up seeing a character's arc or a relationship (romantic or friendship) or notices something even the characters don't know (sometimes they find out at the very end). I've written a few that aren't exactly as detached as I like, but give me a reporter preparing for an interview, a barista wondering about zir favorite customer, an administrative assistant trying to figure out the weekly meetings with someone enigmatic, the nosy neighbor who thinks the family/couple/commune that moved in next door looks familiar...

[jjhunter]

art kink is a wonderful name for this subgenre. I've got two recs along those lines where it's a strong subgenre if not the main genre; both also happen to be time travel (one was reminding me of the other):

00janeblonde: The Grand Unified Theory of Shěn Qīngqiū

TheWinsomeWasp: One More Time

Detailed recs here