sholio | Entries tagged with recs

I haven't read a whole lot in this fandom so far, but here are a few fics I've found and enjoyed. Most take place in season two, and all are gen.

First of all, I recommend

icarus_chained. I've also enjoyed a lot of their LoT and MCU fic, and they write great Flash fic as well -- introspective character stuff, usually with h/c. I'm still working my way through their Flash stories, but here are my favorites so far:

Circling the Wagons - 2x22 tag, with tired collapsing and protective dads and platonic bed-sharing. Apparently this is a fandom in which I just want basically all the cuddling and family-bonding warmth.

Once More Unto - Cisco's thoughts on Harry. Sweet character study. Set at some indeterminate point in late season two when they're all about to die for the umpteenth time.

Other fics:

Mirror, Mirror - early season two Iris POV, including Iris bonding with Linda Park, and her outside POV on Harry.

Retreat - late-season-two era team does a team-bonding retreat out in the countryside. Very cute and fluffy.

Turnover - Harry teaches Barry to run faster by trying to improve his basic running form instead of using gimmicks as the show does. Adorable team bonding ensues. (Nitpicker's note: some recurring grammatical errors.)

The Blanket Fort - Jesse is feeling lonely on Earth-1, so Cisco helps her make a blanket fort. Just as adorable as it sounds, especially when Harry and Caitlin get involved.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/742644.html

The SSR Confidential archive is open, and it's a fanwork MOTHERLODE. Everything I've sampled has been wonderful. I have only read/viewed about half of it so far, but here are some recs! Other SSR Confidential recs posts I've come across are here and here.

I need to caveat that, of the following, I beta'd one and did a SPAG beta on another. Obviously I cannot admit which ones they are until after reveals. But they are thoroughly deserving of reccing anyway!

First, my gift:

Rose in the Spring (Rose, gen, 4500 wds)
Rose Roberts, between seasons 1 and 2.

I know that I gave my writer a hard assignment, because we only matched on one character (Rose), but they came through BRILLIANTLY, with this glorious Rose POV, rich with period detail, that gives her life color and depth.

And now, 7 more recs, in no particular order:

Bad Romance (Peggy/Dottie, vid)
INSPIRED song choice, and wonderful editing; this vid is glorious and worth ALL the rewatches.

Great Stores, Great Choices (Jack & Daniel, gen, 16K words)
Jack visits Daniel on the West Coast to check out the set-up of the new SSR office. But it's about to be a resoundingly bad day for both of them.

Excellent casefic that is also a glorious Jack character study. The author absolutely nails his particular blend of deviousness, self-loathing, and basic decency. Plus, excellent Jack & Daniel h/c!

Duet (Jack & Peggy, gen, 23K words)
After Jack's MI5 friend is shot, he and Peggy visit London to attend the funeral and find themselves swept up in espionage and intrigue.

Fantastic casefic that picks up where season two left off, with Jack and Peggy in London to investigate the missing file. The Peggy and Jack voices are both excellent, as is the continuation of their post-S2 relationship, with some gloriously understated emotional h/c and great character insights into Jack.

One of the Lucky Ones (Daniel + Peggy, with a little Jack & Dooley, gen, 4700 wds)
The anniversaries we want to forget will always sneak up on us. Sousa, for instance, wants nothing more than to move on from the blast that took his leg. Carter is more tight-lipped about the things she's lost. Neither of them is willing to stay back-benched.

And now moving on to some Daniel trauma ... a compelling and insightful look at Daniel pre-S1, and his earliest meetings with Peggy, Jack, and Dooley.

A Voice For America (Peggy/Angie, AU, 1400 wds)
When Angie takes a job as a voice actor on US Army propaganda films, she has no idea who she'll end up working with. Or, the troubling problem of Captain America's English accent.

Fun and sweet fic with a marvelous Angie voice and a delightfully sexy and unique plot.

Take Good Care of Yourself (mostly gen with a little Peggy/Daniel, 1700 wds)
Post Season 2 finale, three people who visited Jack Thompson in the hospital and one who never made it.

Lovely, sweet hospital-fic, plus A+ use of Dottie.

Sometimes When We Touch (Peggy/Daniel/Jack, post-S2, 13K words)
Strange as it was to admit it, he liked being around Sousa. Carter, too. He couldn’t really pinpoint when it was that their bickering got less pointed and more good-natured or why, but it was nice, even if they were the only people in the SSR who would dare to talk back to him with enough insubordination that any boot camp drill instructor would have kicked their asses to Japan and back if they had been in the Marines.

Sweet, fun, and tense casefic/getting-together fic, with marvelous h/c, worry, and banter.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/719775.html

Lately I've been trying to work my way through my unread paperback box. These are a grab bag of books acquired from used bookstores, garage sales, and heaven knows where else, most of them by authors I've never heard of. Usually this results in a lot of dreck with some tolerable reads, but sometimes I'll stumble onto a gem.

Like this one: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. It's partly a murder mystery and partly a slice-of-life glimpse of small-town Mississippi, moving back and forth between the early '80s and the present day.

Thirty years ago, a secret friendship develops between Larry, a white redneck farm kid, and Silas, the son of the black squatters who live on their land. Things blow up between them in ways that are probably predictable given that it's rural Mississippi. Three decades later, Silas got out, went to college and became a cop, while Larry got sucked into the downward spiral of small-town poverty and is now the town pariah, blamed for the rape and murder of a young woman who went missing after a date with him.

Now another girl has gone missing under similar circumstances, and Larry is the prime suspect. Silas has to figure out whodunnit while also confronting everything that happened between him and Larry all those years ago.

Content warning: the plot revolves around the rape/murder of two young women, and this is very much Silas and Larry's book, so there are only a handful of female characters anyway and all of them are in the background. I know that's an understandable dealbreaker for some. Also, due to the book's setting and theme, there is a ton of textual racism and racial slurs to be navigated, as well as the sharp edge of rural poverty.

However, this book hit my friendship/family/reconciliation buttons hard, while also managing to avoid (at least I felt so) most of the cliches that I would expect to run into in fiction about race relations in the South in a book written by a white author. The characters are flawed and unpredictable, the general depiction of life in small-town Mississippi (the good and the bad) felt believable for both the black and white characters (the '80s are not the '50s are not the 2000s, and the different flavor of life in different eras was well done, I thought). Nobody learns a ~valuable lesson about racism~, and Larry's unconscious racism and Silas's cutting defense mechanisms are both realistically portrayed. It's a painful book at times, an uncomfortable one at others, but overall there's a sense of warmth and optimism that flows through the book -- a feeling that things could either careen headlong into tragedy or come out okay, and at any point, individual characters' choices could give it the push that's going to turn it one way or the other: is this the time we do the right thing, the humane thing -- the time we manage to be better than our past selves, better than the people we grew up around ... or not?

On the basis of this book, I also checked out The Tilted World from the library, co-written by Franklin and his wife Beth Ann Fennelly, and set during Prohibition in rural Mississippi. Very good so far, with a female bootlegger, a pair of prohibition agents investigating a murder deep in moonshine country, and an Accidental Surprise Baby they acquire after a shooting.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/661294.html

Fic rec: vinegar and cellophane by

oh_simone - Agent Carter, 20K words, gen, post-first-season (so, spoilers). Daniel POV, focused mostly on Daniel, Peggy, and Jack, with appearances by the rest.

This is THE long post-canon plotty genfic of my dreams! It's incredibly rare to find fic that nails "my" Jack Thompson, and his relationships with the other two; it's mostly either Jack-as-unlikable-asshole, or "Jack never did anything wrong, and Peggy and Daniel are jerks for distrusting him". But this fic has a wonderful Jack, and a wonderful Daniel and Peggy, and a plotty slow build towards gradually growing trust/friendship. I loved every word, and I'm going to claim it as my personal headcanon until season two comes along and josses everything.

Meanwhile, I wrote three more fills for the kissing fest (one of which is for my own prompt, but the rules said you can!).

Peggy/Jack/Daniel, drowning
Foggy/Marci, alcohol and bad choices (TW: aftermath of an attempted, offscreen assault)
Foggy/Matt, hospital (which I am also claiming for "surgery" on my h/c bingo card, as soon as I get around to uploading it to AO3)

All three of these are set after their respective series, so spoilers can be assumed. (

alessandriana! Don't read the Foggy/Matt one until you've seen all of the show!)

I am very amused (but obviously happy) that the first one I wrote, which is for a complete weirdo Age of Ultron pairing, is getting a whole bunch of comment-love! I think most people are just clicking on it because it's so strange, and then end up liking it. XD

ETA: Anyone want to leave more Agent Carter or Daredevil prompts at the kissing fest? :D I seem to be mostly looking for ones that I can write in an h/c-ish kind of way, and I've discovered that I really like writing Foggy's voice. And more prompts with some combination of Peggy, Jack, and Daniel would be great. :D

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/648249.html

I fiiiiiinally wrote up some actual recs. These are cherry-picked from my AO3 bookmarks - only a small fraction of the fics I've read and enjoyed in the fandom (so much good fic!) but it's a start. Obviously this is weighted very heavily towards the characters/pairings/tropes that I prefer, and minus the handful I've already rec'd in their own posts. Spoilers for Captain America 2 in pretty much all of these; some include Agents of Shield spoilers.

( 7 gen recs, 4 Steve/Bucky, 4 other pairings, 1 that can best be categorized as 'ow' )

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/598995.html

Night Over Water by Ken Follett. My expectations weren't that high, but I really loved it.

This book falls squarely in the "group of strangers, each with their own agenda, trapped together by circumstances beyond their control" genre. In this case, circumstance is a fictional flight of a real plane, the amphibious Boeing 314 Clipper. Pan Am's first trans-Atlantic flights were luxury "sleeper" flights (the seats folded into bunks) and the book fictionally extends the extremely brief tenure of the commercial Boeing 314 flights into the early days of WWII. The passengers include a family of fascists fleeing the U.K., a German scientist escaping the Nazis, saboteurs, criminals, a runaway bride, etc etc. It's a lot of fun and seems to be pretty well researched as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the way the characters' storylines wove in and out of each other, and that the female characters were as fleshed out and had as much agency and interesting backstory as the guys did.

The book also did something I really liked with sexual consent, although this is slightly spoilery and slightly NSFW, so I'll put it under a cut.

( Consent issues in the book - some spoilers )

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/592308.html

After a week of being largely in a creative dry spell, my urge to write/draw/etc finally hit today ... right before I leave for a week+ of visiting with family, which means there's no time to finish ANYTHING and also I still have to pack. Thanks a lot, brain.

Still, I wrote a bunch today, both original and fanfic. The fanfic was White Collar, some of you may be surprised/pleased to know. I still find it fascinating how quickly and easily I can write those characters; I sit down at the keyboard and bam, 3000 words falls out of my head. I've only ever been able to do that with SGA. I love writing for the MCU, but progress is slow and hard, even though it really shouldn't be. (They are superheroes! Canon itself is ridiculous! Why am I holding myself to a higher standard than the actual comics writers?) And yet.

Now I have that pleasant mentally-wiped-out feeling from a good writing session and I want to be chatty online, except I shouldn't start conversations when tomorrow morning is probably the last time I'll be online for over a week. So I figured I'd collect a few more MCU-verse recs and post them. Assume spoilers for "Winter Soldier" in EVERYTHING.

( Music videos )

( Tumblr ficlet dump )

( And finally, a fic rec )

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/591815.html

I saved this one to my Kindle to read on the plane, and then, uh, ignored everyone I'm supposed to be visiting with for part of today because I had to finish it.

your blue-eyed boys (Steve/Bucky, around 120K) - I really don't know how better to rec this than to say that this is really THE definitive post-Winter Soldier recovery fic. There is lots of great fic in this fandom, but this one is, IMHO, the best one out there. It is also unbelievably grim in places and triggery for probably just about everything (depression, self-harm, food/eating issues ... basically every common trigger I can think of except for rape is in this one). This is a very wrenching, disturbing story. But it's filled to the brim with love and h/c and cuddling and friendship and team feelings and characters being selfless and AMAZING.

(It is also, no lie, the kind of story that makes you go out into the world wanting to be a better person. This story gave me ideas for dealing with family members who are going through trauma -- I mean, obviously not trauma on the level of what's happening in this story, but it made me quietly determine to be more patient and supportive. There's a bit in the story that if you're willing to take a bullet for someone, you should also be willing to accept some hurt feelings, and obviously things can often be more complicated -- which is also acknowledged in-text -- but that really resonated with me. As well as just, generally, the characters being self-aware and giving and flawed and human and beautiful.)

As you can probably tell I still have many feelings about this.

The best thing I can compare this to, as far as fic I've loved in other fandoms, is The Hard Prayer by Rheanna (SGA, John/Rodney). I loved this story for similar reasons to why I loved that one. If you liked that one, you might like this (and vice versa).

(Also, if Steve/Bucky is not your pairing, it's actually possible to read the first half of the story -- it's posted in two parts, plus a prologue and epilogue -- as gen. Not that I'm necessarily recommending this, since the second half is where most of the emotional payoff kicks in, and I also feel a bit weird about mentioning it since it's clearly against the intended authorial reading of the fic -- but it's possible.)

*special note to xparrot: I know this isn't your normal fandom/pairing, but I think you might like this anyway because of your fondness for characters whose world, on both a gen and a pairing level, revolves around each other -- where the pairing is sort of a side note to a particularly obsessive level of "weird for each other". This story seemed to me that it might really hit that kink for you. As well as buckets of h/c, of course. ^^;;

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/586836.html

I have absolutely no idea what to pick as an overall tag for my shiny new Captain America fixation. Avengers? Captain America? MCU? Marvel? The trouble is that the franchise is so huge and amorphous, and there's comics stuff and movie stuff and Avengers-related stuff and stuff that isn't really Avengers-related at all. Right now I seem to be using "captain america" in some instances and "avengers" in others, with "comics" thrown in occasionally for variety. I'm sure this will make it impossible to find anything in the future. AUGH.

Anyway, I have been meaning to rec some of the pretty/fun/shiny things that I've found. I figured I'd start with music videos because there are relatively fewer of them. I'm also reccing Captain America-related fanart over at

fanart_recs this month (I just got started, so there is only one rec so far) but that's probably where I will be putting the fanart rather than making a separate post for it.

Only a few of these contain spoilers for the new movie, but I figured I'd put it all under a cut regardless.

( On to the vids! )

I am really into vids right now, so if you have any others you'd like to rec, toss a link in the comments - the more the merrier!

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/582063.html

I recently got hooked on the webcomic Bad Machinery. There is a LOT of it (it updates 5 days a week and the archives go back to 2009, plus there's a previous strip, Scary Go Round, going back to 2002). If you aren't dead-set on reading in linear order, I recommend going back to the start of the current storyline and reading that first -- I kinda did this by accident, but it's not terribly spoilery for past events and I found it more fast-paced and engaging than starting from the actual beginning, which is a lot more slow-moving and throws a ton of characters at you.

Bad Machinery is about the adventures of a group of teens/preteens in fictional Tackleford, England, solving mysteries which frequently end up involving ghosts, time travel, aliens, and other weirdness. It's sort of like Nancy Drew on crack. I think one of the things I love most about it is that the kids are such kids, complete with extremely poor decision-making skills and an utter inability to understand how the adult world actually operates (although they think they do). At the same time they're smart and resourceful, just in a very 12-year-old kind of way. It's weird, hilarious, and adorable in a "wow, CHILDHOOD" sort of way.

Brief content warning: there are occasional flinchy bits, particularly an unpleasant storyline in which an overweight and unpopular D&D-playing girl nerd becomes viciously jealous of a thin, blonde protagonist to the point of trying to kill her. The kids are also uniformly cis and heterosexual, which is kind of noticeable since there's eventually quite a large group of named kids and adults (several dozen of them) and, seriously, all of them? (On the other hand, one of the girls is openly uninterested in boys or dating -- this strip made me even more a fan of her weirdo little self than I was already.)

... all of that said, it's a cute comic with tons of female characters and a focus on friendship and solving (absolutely ridiculous) mysteries together. And the characters are very easy to love in all their flawed glory.

(On a completely other note, I made my fake-NaNo word-count goals! *\o/* It's on about a dozen different projects and I haven't really FINISHED much of anything, but yay word counts.)

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/558153.html

This made me laugh until I cried. (Note: Not worksafe due to language and simulated gore.)

Normally I don't like to link to videos without providing context, except I'm not sure what the context in this case actually IS. It's two guys playing a surgeon simulator game, both using the same controller? aaaand that's pretty much all the context I've got.

(Direct link)

And the (much longer) sequel using the full version of the game:

(Direct link to sequel)

A few more random recs from all over the place, so that I can close some tabs! Not all Yuletide this time, just fics that I happen to have open in tabs at the moment.

Though I Sang in My Chains Like the Sea (Rivers of London) - This is the long Rivers of London fic that I mentioned in the last recs post, and it is just as good as I had hoped, and more! It's a wonderfully plotty casefic, full of interesting little details of the characters' lives and funny-snarky-sweet interaction between Nightingale, Peter and Lesley. OH EVERYONE! ♥ If you like the books, this is a must-read.

Of Christmas Past by BlueKiwi (Dresden Files) - Like the last Dresden Files fic I recced awhile back, this is another "Thomas and his siblings" fic (I seem to really like those!). This time it's set after "Turn Coat" and deals with Thomas at his darkest and lowest, separated from the people he loves most (Justine and Harry), believing himself a monster, and now, haunted by the (literal) ghosts of his dead brothers and sisters. Despite the premise, it's not horribly depressing; it's more a reminder that Thomas is a much better person than he often thinks he is.

Where the Lovelight Gleams by

rabidchild67 (White Collar) - A sweet and hilarious (and long!) holiday story about Neal and Diana, after being loaned out to the Chicago office, trying to get home to New York for Christmas. So much fun!

Proof by

frith_in_thorns (White Collar) - Sweet h/c schmoop with a drunken Neal. Frith-in-thorns does such a wonderful job with these people and their affection for each other.

And I just recently beta'd a White Collar/Carnivale crossover by

aragarna: Let's Shake Some Snow. It's a sweet White Collar Christmas fic with a little background Carnivale woven into it.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/495971.html

I am done with season 6! (Well, for certain values of "done".) Which means you don't have to deal with Psycho Spoiler Lady anymore, and I'm sure we're all glad of that. *g*

( Spoilers for all of Highlander season 6 )

Okay - I am READY for fanstuff recs! I'm most interested in vids right now, actually - know any good ones? As far as fic goes, I will read any pairing, but I'm mostly interested in ensemble gen or mostly-gen stories: action, plotty stuff, character pieces, episode tags? Where are the archives, the rec lists, and so on and so forth? Guide me, please!

I'm not *that* interested in the Duncan/Methos pairing right now, not because I hate the idea but rather because I suspect that's the vast majority of what's out there, and I'd like to start my time in the fandom with a wider sampling. I'm also not that interested in AUs quite yet. But, seriously, if you have some brilliant fanworks in either one of these categories, don't let this stop you from reccing them (especially if it's an ensemble story with a little Duncan/Methos in the background; I'd be all over that -- or Duncan/Methos/Amanda, OMG, *want*). I mean, even if you rec me something I'm not quite ready for, I can always come back later, right?

This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/337280.html with

comments.

Crossposts: http://friendshipper.livejournal.com/349464.html

Prompt claiming is up at

smallfandomfest. There are tons of small fandoms represented - go check it out! I still haven't decided if I'm going to claim a Dresden Files prompt or two ... I'd like to get farther along on my holiday stories first.

If you're an A:TLA fan,

white_lotus is running an A:TLA fanworks exchange for Lunar New Year. Signups close on Monday the 29th at midnight GMT (I finally turned in my signup!). If you can't sign up this year (or even if you do!), you can leave your info on the Treats post and someone may write/draw/make a treat for you. :>

Fics:

This totally cracked me up: All Creatures by

wintercreek - Good Omens/SGA crossover. It's really more of a Good Omens story (no SGA characters actually appear) but some knowledge of SGA canon (or at least the basic premise) is required. And, er, I think this might explain a lot, actually. :D

Vids:

American Music by

giandujakiss - (Quantum Leap) Oh man, this vid is such a nostalgia rush for me; it brings back all the joy of watching the show when I was a teenager. (Download)

Smile by adapo77 - (NCIS) A sweet, cute, happy team vid, with clips from all seasons and incarnations of the team. (Streaming on Youtube)

I Gotta Feeling by

kahesha - (White Collar) I don't even watch White Collar and I still loved this! So bouncy and fun, with great clip editing. (Download/stream)

This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/300912.html with

comments.

Prompt claiming is up at

kahesha - (White Collar) I don't even watch White Collar and I still loved this! So bouncy and fun, with great clip editing. (Download/stream)

Crossposts: http://friendshipper.livejournal.com/314483.html

By now I've read most of the stories in the Avatar Big Bang that looked interesting to me, so here are some recs! Well, actually a lot of recs. (Note: All links go to the googledocs pages where the stories were hosted during the Big Bang; if there are alternate links that I know about, I've included those.)

( Summaries contain series spoilers )

This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/283256.html with

comments.

Crossposts: http://friendshipper.livejournal.com/297574.html

... was pretty much my reaction upon discovering this file while cleaning off my eternally cluttered desktop. I went through a period this spring when I was reading through all the FMA fic featuring Roy and/or Riza on AO3, and saving mini-recs to post to my journal when I had enough of them. Except I never went ahead and did it. So I may as well do it now (right?) even though I never finished writing up recs for everything I liked. I think some of these I may have discovered via

astridv, as well.

( About a dozen links under cut )

This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/282549.html with

comments.

astridv, as well.

( About a dozen links under cut )

Crossposts: http://friendshipper.livejournal.com/296625.html

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Life in a Northern Town

Entries tagged with recs

A few Flash fic recs

SSR Confidential recs

Book rec

More fills for the kissing fest, and a fic rec

Captain America fic recs

Book rec

Some more recs

Winter Soldier fic rec

Recs, part one

Just in case you don't need the next 2 days of your life

Video rec

More recs

Highlander! I'm done!

Highlander! I'm done!

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Assorted fannish things

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