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

[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.