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

[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.