Fic recs: mostly long-form

[raspberryhunter]

*SGU: So I recently discovered the whole SGU show/fandom (uh, obviously), and the huge freakily amazing thing going on in that fandom is CleanWhiteRoom's fics, especially Force Over Distance. This is a master of the long-form, here. (395k!) I must append here that I'm a bit of a comma stickler, and I'm of the camp that does not accept that "alright" is a word (though I am informed that The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style says it is fine ;) ), and even though CWR and I have agreed to disagree on "alright" I am still super-recommending this fic (and this gives you an idea of how amazing it must be, because usually that kind of thing makes me stop reading the fic, and what actually happened is that I dropped everything to read 395k). In fact, even if you don't know the SGU show, I'm informed that it's still possible to read this and enjoy it. It's got it all -- a tight plot, humor, worldbuilding, awesome characters. IT EVEN HAS A TIME LOOP CHAPTER. I am also so psyched by CWR's clear love of and knowledge of the hard sciences (D-branes! YANG-MILLS THEORY. "The universe doesn't have an edge that one can travel to. It's spatially infinite." YES). There are also two other AUs in the works (EDIT 7-31-12: THIS MEANS THEY ARE WIPs. Sorry!): Ad Noctum (which I love) and Mathematique (which is a huge crossover with SG-1 and SG-A, and which I like very much but will probably like more once I watch those).

*In Once Upon a Time, there are two major things going on in that fandom on AO3:

-Fyre is writing the heck out of it. My favorite is her Home Before Midnight, which has two sequels. This was the one that started it all, I believe. It focuses on and has a deep compassion for all the characters, like OUAT itself. She's currently writing a season 1 AU WIP that is rather interesting.

-THE Rumpel/Belle-AU fic, and I say this as someone who maxed out on Rumpel/Belle quite a long time ago, is a WIP, A Bed of Thorns. It is quite possibly the only explicit fic I will ever rec, because it is that rare beast: a fic where the sex is actually there as character development. (Okay, honestly, it's a bit more indulgent than that, and I've started skipping some of the sex parts, but it's way better about it than most of the explicit stuff I read.) It is also an extremely rare beast in that it doesn't gloss over Rumpel's evil side. As an AU, this is very possible to read even if you know nothing about canon.

*I recommended this a while back on my media-rant journal before I got this one, but since I'm talking about the long form, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, alas, another WIP, but worth every chapter even if he never does finish it, is flipping fantastic. From my rec there:

What would happen if a) Harry were brought up in a loving super-rational super-academic household, and b) everyone and everything in the HP universe was, well... more-or-less reasonable? (Not necessarily sane, mind you -- just not holding the Idiot Ball.)... Harry starts out by explaining things like observer bias to various people at Hogwart, and decides to run experiments to figure out how magic works! He explains Punnett squares to Draco in the context of blood purity! The first several chapters are a little one-note like that, but I don't care because I love that note! I would have loved it had it all been riffs on that, but as it progresses it also acquires a really interesting plot, layers on layers of hints to be explained, I think maybe every character in the entire fic is now involved in at least one secret plot, and I find the relationship between Harry and Draco extremely moving (and no, not in that way; it's gen/het).

Comments

[ecaterin]

[prepare for comma abuse, run-on torments and other degradations of the English language, as my gushing exceeds my grammar...]

I did want to wait until my FEELINGS on the first read-through had settled down just a bit, to see if it was as good as I remembered. IT IS

It really is :D It's standing up gracefully to the kind of saturation re-reads I'm inflicting on it as well.
<--- is a brute!


Going back to your previous comment -- it just completely boggles my mind how CWR takes tropes that could so easily be done completely wrong and does them right. Like H/C, as you say. Like the Rush/AI/Young threesome -- even just writing that down that sounds horrible, right? Like something out of a bad PWP?

LOLOL!!! Yes! I *do* have a h/c + service kink for sure....and I almost never get to indulge it, because h/c stories are so universally formulaic and tiresome. Repeated torment of our favorite characters ends up feeling like the story itself is a time-loop :P It's almost impossible to get variety in situations, in character reactions and interactions....and almost by definition no one can GROW and relationships can't change. If they do, the h/c is resolved, and there goes your format! But CWR really pulls it off, doesn't she. The damage is both cumulative and on an upward spiral of ever higher stakes and drastic devastation to body, mind and relationship. The inherent structure of the canon story (DISCOVER THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE) means that you can ratchet the tension as high as you want - it'll never feel disproportionate :D So it makes sense that Rush is further and further damaged, more and more difficult to reach, to help and to heal. It makes sense that Young goes deeper and deeper into this relationship, to the point of becoming Rush in a tangental but fundamental way. Even if he can recover from these events, Young will never recover from this relationship and he knows it.....and it's entirely worth it any way.

Added to that, she handled the slooooooow build of Young/Rush with a very deft touch. "Our characters are telepathically linked, now they will automatically fall in loff!" is such a worn out trope. She circumvented the usual issues so well - close contact intensifies the hatred and ups the claustrophobic close-quarters conflict.... and that obscures the latent attraction for a good long while :) Even once they start connecting, their explosive relationship never loses its fragile quality. You believe they really are the defining relationship of each other's lives, and at the same time that they never become less who they are. Which is (imo) a critical criteria of any genuine love - love should make you *more* yourself, not less.


But CWR makes it into this amazing thing where now I think part of my headcanon is Rush/AI, at least. And it's even more amazing because we never, in a sense, see the AI as itself -- it's always filtered through their perceptions. (And it killed me when Young finally, finally admitted that Destiny was in love with Rush, almost at the very end. AGH.)

The point at which Rush begins to refer to the AI as 'Sweetheart,' I knew, I knew their relationship had transcended "confused with Gloria" or simply "interconnected" and moved into a true love relationship....even though the AI was still struggling to figure out WTF all the CONCERN loops and WANT loops and OUTCOME DOES NOT EQUAL DESIRED OUTCOME loops - even though it couldn't define what it was feeling, it was feeling it. Ahem, can't relate to that at all *cough* :P


And the handling of the long form is, as you say, spectacular. I simply don't know of anyone else who handles the overall long arc so well -- the HP fic above might, but it's hard to tell since it's a WIP right now, and I suspect it's a little more diffuse than FoD.

HERE HERE. I grab every long-form fic I can get my hands on (I read fast...longer fics make me happeh!), and nothing I've read does it better than FoD. Hell, FoD makes published multi-book serieses look scattered and without focus by comparison :P Part of that is inherent in the structure of the story - it's very linear, driving to a discrete conclusion. But CWR doesn't rest on that nice tidy structure - this is a whole season of television here, with lots of episodes of BAD, all our character vignettes that fit seamlessly into the narrative (I have them all in their respective places within the kindle document, they work great that way)....and STILL the story telling is completely tight.

(speaking of long-form and HP, surely you've read Resonant's Transfigurations, and Copperbadge's Stealing Harry & Cartographer's Craft yes? (on those last 2 links, chapters are in reverse order - scroll down for the beginning)

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[raspberryhunter]

The inherent structure of the canon story (DISCOVER THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE) means that you can ratchet the tension as high as you want - it'll never feel disproportionate :D So it makes sense that Rush is further and further damaged, more and more difficult to reach, to help and to heal. It makes sense that Young goes deeper and deeper into this relationship, to the point of becoming Rush in a tangental but fundamental way.

Oh, this is very interesting, this idea of the mounting stakes. And rings true with me. I always thought I didn't like H/C... turns out I just don't like bad H/C, I guess :) And I think it also makes a difference that Rush is the kind of character that the more you torture him, the more he-- becomes his own self. Partially because of his nature, and partially because of the nature of what his ultimate goal (and Destiny's) is (ascension).

"Our characters are telepathically linked, now they will automatically fall in loff!" is such a worn out trope.

WORD. And, y'know, it turns out to be a very good thing that she had that disclaimer about it being very SLOW building Young/Rush, because my first kneejerk reaction when they became telepathically linked was "Oh, no, I've read this story!" but -- as you say -- in those stories the luff is automatic, and the fact that it was explicitly stated to be slow meant I could trust it to -- not be the worn-out trope.

In my head, I sort of think of Rush's relationship with the AI to be both romantic and parental, in a really weird way. (Heck, the whole thing is weird.) I mean... I don't mean incestual, which gives me the squicks, more non-human in a way that a human mind can't really comprehend exactly. (Uh, I did a lot of thinking about this thing for a ficathon not too long ago, so it's in my brain...) Because the AI is like a big human kid in a lot of ways, and I think Rush gets that, and in other ways it's more than Rush is...

I have read both of those HP fics! I remember especially liking Transfigurations, and now I'll have to go find it again :P :) I did sort of give up on Stealing Harry while the sequel was still a WIP, but should get back to that one...