[Meme] Four Favorite Fics
Nov. 19th, 2014 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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thatgirlnevershutsup (aka snacky) tagged me to talk about four of my favorite fics that I've written. I'll borrow her idea and try to keep it to four separate fandoms. I will also keep it to only completed works.
The first three are easy.
1) Naruto: The Way of the Apartment Manager -- My first completed novel! Okay, at 72,000 words, it's a relatively short novel, but still. A novel! Also, to borrow some TV Tropes terminology, this story is designed to hit at least one Crowning Moment of Heartwarming and/or one Crowning Moment of Awesome per chapter, because it is my feel-good AU where Naruto gets a happy childhood, dammit, and also exercises his canonical role as a catalyst to make other people reevaluate their lives and go do awesome things in their own right. In this particular case, the person getting inspired is Ayakawa Yukiko, a retired genin who owns the apartment building Naruto moves into at a far too early age. The superficial plot structure is Yukiko's return to her ninja career via participation in a chuunin exam -- which I had ridiculous amounts of fun writing, because ninja fights are awesome. But that's just scaffolding. At its heart, "The Way of the Apartment Manager" is about reclaiming dreams, finding new friends, and creating families of choice. (Like I said, it's built on Crowning Moments of Heartwarming. *grin*)
2) Harry Potter: Knives -- Years ago, I was reading Nabokov's Lolita and thinking about how the narrative makes readers feel complicit in Humbert Humbert's pedophilia and molestation. You get pulled in to his POV and kind of want to see him get away with stuff even while you know, logically, he's a terrible person and needs to be stopped. I wanted to see if I could do something similar with torture. For unrelated reasons, I also wanted to write a dark!Ginny fic, and a few months before the publication of HBP those strands of thought combined into a hallucinatory slideshow of images and emotions that felt like disembodied pieces of a story. It took a lot of work to shape a coherent narrative out of those influences. It's in second person because I wanted to be invasive, it's pretentious as hell, and it has what I have been told is an incredibly frustrating ending... but you know how when you write, you're chasing a Platonic ideal of the story and never quite manage to transfer it onto the page? "Knives" is the closest I have ever gotten to pinning that ideal story down in words, intact. (Note: when I say this story is designed to make readers feel complicit in torture, I really do mean that. Please take note of the AO3 warnings!)
3) Chronicles of Narnia: Out of Season -- I wrote this forlady_songsmith in the 2011 Narnia Fic Exchange. The rules require a 1,000 word fic. I, um, went a little overboard. Anyway, this story is set entirely in Calormen, among original characters and canon villains, and notionally serves as an explanation for why Rabadash was courting Susan though the match doesn't make a lot of political or cultural sense on his side. But mostly it's about faith and politics and the delicate balance between them. It's also a story about a deeply religious (and moral, by her own culture's definitions) character who explicitly doesn't worship Aslan, and does not change her mind about that... because you know what? She's not wrong. Which is not to say that her perspective is completely right, either, but I wanted to bring serious and honest religious plurality to the Narnian world -- none of this "oh, if you're a good person you weren't really following that god(dess) you devoted your life to; it was all Aslan in disguise. Surprise, sucker!" nonsense Lewis tries to push in TLB. (The things I hate about TLB are many and varied, but that one is high on the list.) Also, this story hits a sweet spot for me, where the world-building and characters are the next best thing to original fiction -- I get to invent and control All The Things! -- and yet it's still clearly fanfiction and would lose layers without that dialogue with canon and fandom.
...
The fourth choice is where I run into problems. If I were including original fiction, this would again be easy -- Finding Marea: Truth and Change in the Circle of Kemar embodies a lot of my thematic obsessions, from world-building to storytelling to religion to the centrality of female characters -- but the meme says 'fics,' which I take to mean fanfiction only, so. *ponders* At the moment, it probably comes down to five options: two Homestuck, two Saiyuki, and one Inception. Ask me tomorrow and you will likely get a different answer, but today I'm going to say...
4) Homestuck: Of Stone and of Sky -- This was a pinch hit for chthonianCrocuta in last year's Ladystuck. She asked for Lalondes, Pyropes, and dragons. I couldn't resist. I love this story partly because it's about female friendship and partnership, but also because I kind of cheated and used the world-building from an original secondary world I'd had kicking around for nearly twenty years without ever finding a good story to attach to it. Basically, there is a world that contains two intelligent species -- humans and dragons -- but their interactions are generally an armed truce at best. In one culture they finally worked out a way to live together... but the side-effect was displacing the 'acceptable target' sign to the entire rest of the world, which they then spent nearly three hundred years conquering with a fair amount of success. That fell apart, of course, as these things tend to do. "Of Stone and of Sky" is set long after the Empire's collapse, when the Anvil is a collection of tiny integrated settlements constantly warring with each other, aside from a sacred truce every twenty years when they work a dangerous ritual to call the rain to their desert homeland. It's a story about how emotional bonds can be both a weakness and a strength -- as demonstrated by Rose's ties to Terezi, Roxy, and Dave -- and it's woven together by a fragile thread of hope. (Also, there's some implicit mythology that I think is pretty cool. *grin*)
I am bad at tagging, so I will simply invite anyone else who wants to do this meme to consider yourself invisibly tagged. :-)
snacky) tagged me to talk about four of my favorite fics that I've written. I'll borrow her idea and try to keep it to four separate fandoms. I will also keep it to only completed works.The first three are easy.
1) Naruto: The Way of the Apartment Manager -- My first completed novel! Okay, at 72,000 words, it's a relatively short novel, but still. A novel! Also, to borrow some TV Tropes terminology, this story is designed to hit at least one Crowning Moment of Heartwarming and/or one Crowning Moment of Awesome per chapter, because it is my feel-good AU where Naruto gets a happy childhood, dammit, and also exercises his canonical role as a catalyst to make other people reevaluate their lives and go do awesome things in their own right. In this particular case, the person getting inspired is Ayakawa Yukiko, a retired genin who owns the apartment building Naruto moves into at a far too early age. The superficial plot structure is Yukiko's return to her ninja career via participation in a chuunin exam -- which I had ridiculous amounts of fun writing, because ninja fights are awesome. But that's just scaffolding. At its heart, "The Way of the Apartment Manager" is about reclaiming dreams, finding new friends, and creating families of choice. (Like I said, it's built on Crowning Moments of Heartwarming. *grin*)
2) Harry Potter: Knives -- Years ago, I was reading Nabokov's Lolita and thinking about how the narrative makes readers feel complicit in Humbert Humbert's pedophilia and molestation. You get pulled in to his POV and kind of want to see him get away with stuff even while you know, logically, he's a terrible person and needs to be stopped. I wanted to see if I could do something similar with torture. For unrelated reasons, I also wanted to write a dark!Ginny fic, and a few months before the publication of HBP those strands of thought combined into a hallucinatory slideshow of images and emotions that felt like disembodied pieces of a story. It took a lot of work to shape a coherent narrative out of those influences. It's in second person because I wanted to be invasive, it's pretentious as hell, and it has what I have been told is an incredibly frustrating ending... but you know how when you write, you're chasing a Platonic ideal of the story and never quite manage to transfer it onto the page? "Knives" is the closest I have ever gotten to pinning that ideal story down in words, intact. (Note: when I say this story is designed to make readers feel complicit in torture, I really do mean that. Please take note of the AO3 warnings!)
3) Chronicles of Narnia: Out of Season -- I wrote this for
lady_songsmith in the 2011 Narnia Fic Exchange. The rules require a 1,000 word fic. I, um, went a little overboard. Anyway, this story is set entirely in Calormen, among original characters and canon villains, and notionally serves as an explanation for why Rabadash was courting Susan though the match doesn't make a lot of political or cultural sense on his side. But mostly it's about faith and politics and the delicate balance between them. It's also a story about a deeply religious (and moral, by her own culture's definitions) character who explicitly doesn't worship Aslan, and does not change her mind about that... because you know what? She's not wrong. Which is not to say that her perspective is completely right, either, but I wanted to bring serious and honest religious plurality to the Narnian world -- none of this "oh, if you're a good person you weren't really following that god(dess) you devoted your life to; it was all Aslan in disguise. Surprise, sucker!" nonsense Lewis tries to push in TLB. (The things I hate about TLB are many and varied, but that one is high on the list.) Also, this story hits a sweet spot for me, where the world-building and characters are the next best thing to original fiction -- I get to invent and control All The Things! -- and yet it's still clearly fanfiction and would lose layers without that dialogue with canon and fandom....
The fourth choice is where I run into problems. If I were including original fiction, this would again be easy -- Finding Marea: Truth and Change in the Circle of Kemar embodies a lot of my thematic obsessions, from world-building to storytelling to religion to the centrality of female characters -- but the meme says 'fics,' which I take to mean fanfiction only, so. *ponders* At the moment, it probably comes down to five options: two Homestuck, two Saiyuki, and one Inception. Ask me tomorrow and you will likely get a different answer, but today I'm going to say...
4) Homestuck: Of Stone and of Sky -- This was a pinch hit for chthonianCrocuta in last year's Ladystuck. She asked for Lalondes, Pyropes, and dragons. I couldn't resist. I love this story partly because it's about female friendship and partnership, but also because I kind of cheated and used the world-building from an original secondary world I'd had kicking around for nearly twenty years without ever finding a good story to attach to it. Basically, there is a world that contains two intelligent species -- humans and dragons -- but their interactions are generally an armed truce at best. In one culture they finally worked out a way to live together... but the side-effect was displacing the 'acceptable target' sign to the entire rest of the world, which they then spent nearly three hundred years conquering with a fair amount of success. That fell apart, of course, as these things tend to do. "Of Stone and of Sky" is set long after the Empire's collapse, when the Anvil is a collection of tiny integrated settlements constantly warring with each other, aside from a sacred truce every twenty years when they work a dangerous ritual to call the rain to their desert homeland. It's a story about how emotional bonds can be both a weakness and a strength -- as demonstrated by Rose's ties to Terezi, Roxy, and Dave -- and it's woven together by a fragile thread of hope. (Also, there's some implicit mythology that I think is pretty cool. *grin*)
I am bad at tagging, so I will simply invite anyone else who wants to do this meme to consider yourself invisibly tagged. :-)
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Knives
Date: 2014-11-22 02:45 am (UTC)Re: Knives
Date: 2014-11-22 06:27 am (UTC)Re: Knives
Date: 2014-11-24 12:18 am (UTC)Re: Knives
Date: 2014-11-24 01:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-20 02:19 pm (UTC)I just reread WotAM thanks to SOMEONE posting to A03 and bringing it to the top of my inbox. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-20 07:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-21 02:38 am (UTC)