wyntir_knight | Snowflake Challenge

Day 9

In your own space, rec at least 3 fanworks you thought you wouldn't like (because they weren't your fandom or they pushed against your boundaries or you thought you just wouldn't be interested) but you ended up loving. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Okay, so three fanworks in no particular order:

The works of scifigrl47 - I didn't think that I would think much of her work. I'm not really into the Avengers (movieverse) fandom and the few pieces that I had read were kind of lackluster. Also there was the fact that she averages almost 100 reviews and several hundred kudos per fic was a bit of a red flag for me. That kind of response over on FFNet mean sock puppets and a lot of bad fic. Generally speaking anyways. Still, I gave her stuff a shot and it is really well written, well plotted and well characterized. Her work is natural and you can really "hear" the Avrngers actors in the roles as the stories go on. She does play fast and loose with movie-verse canon, bringing in a lot of fanon from the comics, but as a Transformers fanfic writer I really can't dock her points for that.

The Methods of Rationality by Less Wrong. I recced this the last time I took part in the Snowflake Challenge and I'm going to recc it again now. It's just that epic. I tended to avoid the Harry Potter fandom like the plague because, frankly, their shipping wars scare the bejesus out of me. I honestly thought that "Trukk Not Munkey" was bad and being told that Jazz/Prowl was canon was worse, and then I saw the shipping wars over in the HP fandom. I would have stayed away from this story too, but then I read the page about it on TVTropes and was intrigued. Now I am completely enthralled with the idea of it. Basically Petunia doesn't marry Dursley and instead marries a scientist. Harry is then brought up in a loving and very logical home and when he gets to Hogwarts he is determined to rationalize magic. Even if it means he becomes the Dark Lord.

I have been hemming and hawing about this third rec for a while now and have settled on something I haven't read in a long time: The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster by Cheeseburger Brown. This is another one like the aversion to HP fandom; only in this case it wasn't the shipping that scared me, it was the Expanded Universe. You seemed to have to know every little piece of the movie, tv series, specials, comics, books, and radio plays in order to play in this particular sandbox and it was just way too involved for me. And then I came across The Darth Side and it changed my view. A little. I wasn't about to jump into the fandom with both feet, but maybe it wasn't as bad as I had feared. The plot of this is simple. It's the personal diary of Darth Vader taking you through the first three movies (meaning 4, 5, and 6) as Vader contemplates his life, his decisions, his son, and the prophecy that seemed to be tied into every one of Anakin's actions. It's funny, serious, well written, and beautifully insightful.

And there they are. My three reccs that I never thought I'd like.