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

[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.