Ladystuck!!!

[edenfalling]

Ladystuck 2014 (and Ladystuck Treats 2014) went live today! All works will be anonymous for a week, so I can't tell you what I wrote. But in the meantime, let me interest you in my two wonderful gifts:

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I Hate You (Don't Leave Me): Getting people in her quadrants has never been difficult for Porrim. But keeping them there? That's another story. Porrim<3<Damara. (1,800 words) [ETA: by inklesspen]

This is a lovely story about Porrim and Damara negotiating a rough spot in their black romance, with a focus on the need for respect and reciprocity. Also contains a pale one-night stand, interspecies flush-flirting, and bonus awesome AU worldbuilding about trolls living on Earth and integrating Alternian and human cultures. What are you waiting for? Go read this immediately!

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Picture This: There are no photographs of your childhood. (2,700 words) [ETA: by lovesthesoundof]

AKA, Roxy growing up among the carapacians. This story has a wonderful frame-structure -- it's told via the photographs of typical childhood scenes that Roxy doesn't have -- and is wonderfully kind and careful about the bonds between Roxy and her adopted family. It also contains some really neat world-building about the carapacians and the things they did and didn't know about Rose, about humans in general, and about the secrets of their habitat. Again, go read this immediately. You will be glad you did. :-)

Comments

[transposable_element]

I don't know this fandom at all, but these look really fun!

[edenfalling]

If you don't know Homestuck I... really, in good conscience, cannot recommend getting into it. It is too big, too weird, and at the moment too frustrating by virtue of being unfinished. We get the last update of Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4 tomorrow, after which who knows when the next part will be done.

(Yes, you read that act title correctly.)

But! If you are interested in an incredibly meta-textual story that starts by lovingly imitating/mocking the format of old text-parsing computer games, and which grows from goofy kids teasing each other over the internet to a massive and epic saga of love, death, human-alien culture clashes, incredibly convoluted time travel, and the creation and destruction of entire universes (while never losing that initial layer of kids being ridiculous on the internet), then Homestuck may be for you. You can find it here on the MS Paint Adventures website. It's technically a webcomic, though by this point it also includes more text than War and Peace, lots of little videos set to fan-created music, playable mini-games, and other medium-breaking elements.

Also, aside from one gang of bit-part super-minor villains, there is almost exact parity in numbers between male and female characters, and the girls get their own plot and character arcs that are just as important as those of the boys. (This is why Ladystuck can exist -- there are enough female characters for it to work!) I enjoy that very much in a story. :-)

[transposable_element]

That sounds like something that would suck me in, to disastrous effect. So...yeah, I think I will refrain from dipping my toe in. Sounds fascinating, though.

[edenfalling]

I completely understand wanting to avoid having your time and brain devoured. :-) I personally think Homestuck is worth it, but I freely admit there may be a certain degree of sunk cost fallacy in my assessment -- I've been reading the blasted thing since January 2012, after all. *wry*