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

[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.