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

[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!