Matching-Muff Matrimony, by eloiselovelace. HP, Ginny/Pansy. Ginny's the Quidditch coach, Pansy's the Arithmancy prof, and they get into a marriage of convenience for base lucre.

Upside: A delightful four-part femmeslash story that, while a bit silly in the beginning, earns the sterling praise of being really, well, slashy. Much of the femmeslash I come across (though, admittedly, I haven't dipped my toes into Xena fandom) is a bit... wishy-washy. Dreamy women, symbolic moons, perhaps a reference to ocean tides. Bah. This fic is sexy and, perhaps more importantly, damned cheery. I want to read novel-lengths of this sort of thing.

After the incident in the office, Ginny just couldn't look at Pansy the same way anymore. She supposed she'd always considered Pansy rather asexual. Yes, Pansy had professed her gayness, but Ginny had considered the knowledge to be as theoretical as Pansy's Arithmancy research.

But now that she knew exactly what Pansy sounded like when she came, and what she looked like, Ginny found herself rather hard pressed not to think of the practical implications.

It was incredibly unfair, not to mention just plain improbable that anyone should look attractive at the moment of climax. The last bloke Ginny had shagged more than once in a well-lit room had made the most ridiculous grimaces, the recollection of which was more prone to inducing fits of laughter than fits of furtive wanking.

Besides, furtive wanking was harder than it appeared, because pretty well every suitable spot was already taken by teenagers who had the same idea, sometimes more than one of them.

Downside: The title. The first part feels like an incredibly rushed infodump (eight years! zoom!). The humorous style throughout can be a bit overly ornate. The illustrations in the fic were originally hotlinked, and are now just blank boxes sitting in the middle of the text -- unnecessary to the story, but I found myself just having to look up the source code and find the original links (perhaps not a problem for everyone, but certainly for me). And there are additional silly things that are unnecessary but were added for Humorous Effect, which goes down just about as well as you would think. But! Watch me recommend this anyway. Ha.

On the subject of Star Trek: Voyager:

Let me start this by saying that I keep a collection of good lines from bad fanfiction. I don't mean that I collect really awful lines and laugh gleefully over them -- I mean that I find really good lines from the middle of absolute garbage, and then I keep them for posterity. I suppose it comes down to the fact that I really believe that every story, no matter how bad, was somebody's baby, and that every story, no matter how horrible, has something to redeem it.

Now, that being said, this evening I was caught up in the memory of a line:

They'll realize that beneath your unfeeling exterior is a heart that's breaking. Silently--and in more pain than any of us can possibly understand, because that's what it is to be Vulcan.

And I remembered that it was from an episode of Voyager, and from that alone managed to remember the title of the ep out of some seven seasons worth of episodes and at least six years' time away from the material. (For those curious, it was from "Muse.")

It's weird. Nobody (but nobody) liked Voyager. Me? I loved it. The writing of DS9 was, I grant you, decidedly brilliant. The original series was groundbreaking. TNG... had Patrick Stewart. (I readily admit that my love for TNG? it is somewhat lacking.) I do not discuss Enterprise where small children with sensitive ears can hear me. But Voyager... man, Voyager. I gave my heart away to that ship of misfits.

Looking back on it, I suspect my love came from the same place my love of fanfiction comes from: the shining moments of glory amidst absolute trash. Garbage like the Doctor playing Beowulf for an entire episode ("Heroes and Demons") is interspersed with the Doctor creating for himself a family and then dealing with consequences when he tries to use holography in the same slapdash fantasy way us "meat" people do ("Real Life").

Voyager was like a giant fanfic of the Star Trek universe. Filled with improbable and ill-timed (but dirtily addictive) romance, vainglorious generalizations concerning the human spirit, weird and twisted ideas that held no pat solutions, and attempts at different styles and methods of story (some of which succeeded, most of which did not) within the very narrow confines of the Star Trek universe.

I realize it was the commercial creation of Paramount and quite a few really annoying producers -- my rather romantic notions concerning amateurs trying their best to chip at the face of Truth are, basically, just romantic notions. But what I loved about Voyager is that it seemed that way -- I could forget that it was some slick production company's seasonal work and actually think, "People like me made this. People with stories to tell, and the desire to tell them, and the heartbreaking inability, most of the time, to accomplish that telling."

I guess for me, feeling like someone's really trying is better than any amount of technical (and soulless) brilliance.

Fanfiction, to me, is often more satisfying than pro fiction because there is an extra dimension of pure flaming need to tell a story, even a bad one, that just does not exist for me with most professionally published works.

--

Since Voyager is fanfic, I used to find the fanfic of it to be peculiarly excellent. It was my first major fandom, and I still have favorites -- though, to be fair, I had a hell of a time finding anything good that I hadn't already read when I was trawling the internets for this post. If you want a good source for (very thorough) reviews/summaries of the episodes, I'd suggest Jim Wright's site, Delta Blues. For some excellent fanfiction, I'd suggest:


Ghost in the Machine, by Killishandra. A Voyager/TOS crossover, of a sort. Also, weirdly, Kirk/Spock, Kirk/Tom Paris, Tom Paris/Harry Kim, and, um, Tom Paris/His Own Creativity.

Upside: Not just slashtastic -- it can also be thought of as a fairly nuanced discussion of the ethics of holography, a subject near and dear to my heart.

Downside: Can get goopily over-emotional in its wording/feeling. Does not bear up to immediate rereading (see: goopy emotions).


The Secret Logs of Mistress Janeway, by NovaD. Ahahahaha. A classic of our time: the fabulous D/s adventures of Janeway and the gang.

Upside: Sheer sexy fun. Has that level of ridiculousness that just fills me with delighted giggles.

Downside: Well, there's the ridiculousness, and also that my favorite log entry, Objective/Subjective, is actually written by a guest author, Jared. (That being said, fabulous entry. Voyager frame story of a TOS-era "lesson" for Starfleet operatives to help demonstrate the necessity of remaining objective, regardless of, ah, provocation).


First Contact, by Ruth Devero. Tom Paris/Chakotay, stuck on a slave-planet, and, naturally, one of them ends up having to be the slave.

Upside: Great realization of the culture, funny, and hot.

Downside: Strangely, thins over multiple readings. (Granted, it took me ten years or something of rereads for that "thinning.")


Absumption, by The Emu. An alternate version of the episode Timeless (wherein an attempt to go home goes wrong, and while Harry Kim and Chakotay, travelling ahead, make it to Earth, Voyager smashes into an ice planet and all hands die) -- the summary here is: 'Timeless' could have been worse. Someone might have survived.

Upside: It's a fantastic survival!fic. How rare is that? So rare.

Downside: You need to have either seen the episode or read the summary. (Totally worth it either way, by the by.) And there's a Tom/Janeway thing that crops up, which, while adding nicely to the story, is not precisely my thing.


B'Elanna and the Doctor, a series of four stories by E. Cristy Ruteshouser (Radical Therapy, Contraindication, Intensive Care, and Second Opinion). B'Elanna/EMH, obviously, though long taken down from the internet -- those are Wayback Machine links.

Upside: Honestly, I love these. Fun, funny, romantic, and makes me a believer in this very rare (read: nonexistent) pairing. Incredibly well-written Doctor. Brings up a lot of the ethics of holography, but from a slightly different tack than Ghost in the Machine. I could just reread these over and over again.

Downside: I'll admit it: The B'Elanna in here is not, ah, precisely in character (author-replacement much?). Also, the prose suffers terribly from the tragic inability to use the word "said." I didn't notice it the first time I read the series (Lo These Many Years Ago), but... I sort of have to turn that bit of my brain off now if I want to reread the story as I did when I was younger. Whoops.

Over a year since I posted, you say? Bah. And humbug.

The Loving Dead, by Witling. BtVS. Xander, two years after the show ended. A ghost story. Of a sort.

Upside: This is a mood piece. It's the feeling of winter, and loneliness, and getting by. It's about love, and cold. It is the single most effective mood piece I can remember reading in fanfic, and maybe it's a ghost story, or maybe it's just a story about... God, about the way living a life affects us. It breaks me every time I read it. I know I sound like a dope about this, but I can't stress how much this story just runs along my nerves and makes me shake every time.

"Ghosts aren't demons, Xander. There's no database."

"Yeah, okay. But they exist?"

She's quiet, and he glances over at her. She's staring out the window at the snowy streets, one fingertip resting on the glass. "Sometimes I think," she says, "it's just a matter of how far things can follow you."

He turns back to the road, watches the snow fly off the chains on the car ahead.

"And how much they want to find you," she says.

Downside: The title. I love it, but not for this story. I can see it as a variant of "Is my love afraid of the quiet dead?", and in that respect, awesome, totally fits, but the sound of it just isn't right for this. And maybe I would've liked to know what was really going on (but maybe I wouldn't -- "what's going on" isn't the point of this fic, and I'm not sure I'd like the story so much if it was).

I mock this "monthly" plan of mine.


Sacrificial Lambs, by hackthis. Brokeback Mountain RPS (*shame*). On set, trying to get the kiss right.

Upside: It's not really about slash, actually. Jake and Heath -- it's not about that. It's about acting, and belief, and the need in fantastic acting for believing, for just a moment, that a lie is truth.

Downside: Is this Ang Lee? I'm not so sure. The story's not really about him, but I worry that Ang Lee's the author coming in for a secret cameo. On the other hand, the story's short enough that this doesn't distress me terribly much.

Dear God, I'm early. As I (mostly) said last year: "The following is both an abbreviated and extended rec: a portion of the While We Tell of Yuletide Treasure Secret Santa "obscure fandom" fanfic project. I skipped all previous years, and any fandom I didn't recognize -- and I haven't read anyone else's rec list yet either. We'll see what I end up reccing after some further investigatons."

And now, onwards:

( The 2005 List )

To Carthage Then I Came, by annakovsky. A shortish X-Files fic set long after the show ends. Mulder, looking for the missing clones before they get killed, and suffering for it.

Upside: Fabulous and creepy. The plot circles around nicely, bringing to the fore the only answers that could have been given. On the other hand, it's also fairly straightforward, and leaves plenty of room for the reader to ask questions of the text and the canon. Craig Benson pushes his daughters on the swings and helps with homework, waters the lawn, wears pink polo shirts. Fox Mulder, on the other hand, drives to Savannah to get pictures of his son playing with John Doggett, and comes home to a house full of Samanthas.

Downside: Ha. Not a one. Not Great Literature or anything, but certainly a bit of a brain tease to get you going before you go to sleep.

Via recs:

Like Describing The Alphabet, by Mosca. Firefly fic, Jayne/Mal. "In which Mal unbuilds some walls; Jayne learns to kiss on the mouth; and nobody gets left behind." The long and slow romance of two middle-aged space cowboys.

Upside: So there are some Firefly fics that can manage to make the characters sound right. And there are some fics that can manage to make the universe feel right. But there are damned few that can do both. The joy of this fic comes from the feeling that this is how Joss wishes everyone could hear Firefly -- this author's got a dab hand at making space cowboys sound normal. On top of that, we have good character sketches of both Mal and Jayne, and their (constantly developing) relationship just reads right. Did I mention the voice of the fic?

"What'd you think it was?" Mal said.

"Dunno," Jayne said.

"Let me tell you," Mal said. "It was one very manly hand job on one very strange night, and that's all it will ever be."

Downside: I've got a powerful fondness for long, dragged-out stories. If I'm loving the voice, I'm loving the voice, and I never want it to end. If you didn't like yahtzee's Buffy-fic Phoenix Burning, you probably won't like this. This isn't plotty. This is character-y, with a lot of sex. So there's that. Wash, occasionally, is so painfully wrong-voiced as to throw the entire works out of alignment and make me screech in pain. Inara can come off as way bitchy. The first scene starts off confusing and hard to light -- some detective work suggests that it may be the remains of a previous, much shorter story. And sadly, I just don't think the scene for which the story is named really gels or, for that matter, makes much sense. But if you ignore all that... I've re-read this thing a couple of times now, and I'm keeping it close to hand for the future.

Via Making Light:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Poet, by ladysisyphus and rahaeli. Long poem, set in the HP universe, modelled on... T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. No shit.

Upside: Aside from being fairly funny at times, this poem stands out as 1) an excellent pastiche of Eliot, and 2) a pretty decent piece of poetry in and of itself. I mean, check it:

( Wherein I steal code and quote like a madwoman )

Downside: Based on the number of comments this baby has gathered, you've already seen this. Blast.

Via The Cortex:

Tetchy, by debchan. A Firefly Simon/Jayne fic, featuring an escalating prank war and vertical sex. What better way to end the day? "You shouldn't have drugged him," Kaylee told him through her welder's mask two hours later.

Upside: I've always had a fondness for debchan's style. This has good lines, a cute resolution, and is a fast read. A nice bit of candy if you're in a hurry.

Downside: I'm never entirely happy with Firefly fic. I haven't found one with any good meat on it yet. This one at least makes me smile.

Via recs:

Jacking Gehenna, by Mirabella. Voldemort's not entirely gone. Harry needs help. A Harry Potter/Constantine crossover.

Upside: In all honesty, this is one of those fics that make me go "This is why we have crossovers." I mean, damn. The lines are good, and the concept is fucked up. How can you do better than that? Sometimes John wonders what Hell was like before the Industrial Revolution.

Downside: Well, to start, I'm certain a great heaping number of you have read this already. Not really a downside so much as a "Shucks." As for actual commentary: I'm not sure how I feel about the section headers -- I mean, a good idea, but not pulled off as well as, for instance, the headers in Four Moments of Mourning. Also, like much Constantine fic, it doesn't go quite as far as I'd like. As far as what? Well... let's say that voice is great, but if you don't have a real handle on the universe, a real understanding of why the universe exists, then all you're doing is writing pretty lines. Insert here my rant on nearly all Good Omens fiction, interspersed with my mutterings about Monstrous Regiment fic.