Fandom in the time of Coronavirus

[melannen]

So, for some of us, this is looking like a good time to curl up in a blanket and read fic for a couple of weeks!

Who wants to share recs for fanfic or pairings or canons that are good for while anxious and stuck in the house?

I am enjoying rereading all the Garak/Bashir fic right now - if you don't know the pairing, it's from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, about a bright-eyed Starfleet doctor with a dark secret, and a cynical Cardassian exile with a dark past and a heart of gold, and their complicated relationship (which was queercoded on purpose in the show.) A lot of the fanfic is set post-canon, with both of them on Cardassia helping with recovery after devastation from a terrible war, and it's all very soft and hopeful but set in troubled times.

I've also had a very slow project of going through my entire AO3 history (I'm currently in the summer of 2012, the first Avengers movie just came out) and pulling out the fics that I never want to lose track of ever, and bookmarking them as permanent collection. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to get farther in that project in the next couple of weeks! Everything in that collection is works I'm happy to go back to when I need a comfort read.

And if you have any old favorite fics you've been trying to track down but can't, let's use this post to try to track them down! I have two pre-AO3 fics I've been wanting to add to that collection but can't remember enough to find:

--There was a Pirates of the Caribbean fic, probably on LJ, the summer after the first movie came out. It was set in modern day, though I think it was a reincarnation AU; there were capers at a marina, all the old gang got back together, and Jack Sparrow was an IRS agent. Does this ring any bells? There might have been two similar stories that I'm combining in memory.

--There was a very long post-canon Spike/Buffy fic where Spike had disappeared and Buffy found him living quietly in some backwater town, working as a professor at the local college and leading poetry workshops for demons in the evening. Buffy started going to the workshops for lack of a better idea, and at one point wrote a villanelle (I think?) with the refrain "I shape death with my hands".

Comments

[writerkit]

My "help me track this down" isn't something I read so much as it's something I saw somewhere else-- someone had mentioned positively a Draco/Neville fic where it was a main driver of the plot that Neville had, because of being thought to be a Squib as a child, been sent to Muggle primary school and thus knew a lot about Muggles and Muggle things, but they didn't name the fic. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

For recommendations:

Agents of Shield, "Oh Elope with Me in Private and We'll Set Something Ablaze" by zauberer_sirin. It's Skye/Coulson, from the very early days of the show before the Hydra takeover or Inhumans being a thing, and they go on a road trip so Coulson can collect Captain America trading cards. It's *adorable*, and gentle, and incredibly sweet. https://archiveofourown.org/works/1399615/chapters/2934196

burntcopper's National Service series, which is Narnia but ignoring The Last Battle, in which we see the boys enter the military and the girls joining Torchwood. I love it because we get so much outsider POV, of people looking at these four people who are clearly very experienced at wars and supernatural things and going "But how? How could they *possibly*?"
https://archiveofourown.org/series/8533

If you want an epic, well-researched, largely canon-compliant Narnia deconstruction that covers the entirety of canon and basically all the genres (there's a "not a romance", there's a spy thriller, there's some war drama, there's coming-of-age...), rthstewart's Stone Gryphon Cycle. Note that the whole cycle isn't finished; there's many hundreds of thousands of words here but she's not done with the finale: https://archiveofourown.org/series/15017

Over on Harry Potter, "Romancing the War". It's Snape/Hermione but where Snape survives the end of the book, in which Hermione decides to rehabilitate Snape's reputation by writing a romance novel to be serialized in a racy magazine which is going to be a fictionalized version of the actual events, with Snape as Dark Brooding Romantic Spy. Frequently hilarious: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11190177/chapters/24986166

Being stuck in the house also seems like a good time to *write* that epic fic you've been envisioning forever but have never plotted out!

[cesy]

That first one is Lust Over Pendle by AJ Hall.

[writerkit]

Thank you!