Snowflake Meme, Day #1

[nonisland]

The Fandom Snowflake Challenge (for celebrating ourselves as members of fandom)
Day One: post a rec for at least three fanworks you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.

I've mostly tried not to repeat myself from the year-end meme I did yesterday, but it was hard because most of the fics I've written were, um, written this year. But. If you require or desire detailed warnings for fics, leave a comment and I would be happy to provide.

1. One and One, By and By || Merlin | Gwen/Lancelot/Morgana | soft R, ~2500 words
   I wrote this fic (as well as a couple of other Gwen/notArthur fics) in a state of utter rage at s4e09; this is the one I'm most pleased with. It's a post-s1 AU, where the what-if premise of the AU is "what if Uther became unable to rule a few seasons earlier than he actually did?" and part of the answer is "Arthur invited Lancelot back right away, that's what." I love this fic because Gwen eventually gets everything she wanted, instead of just what people think she ought to want. (And I might play more in the 'verse at some point, because I'd be--interested, I guess--in figuring out how some of the later plot events might have changed. Okay, mostly I just want them to find Elyan.)


2. the Gazebo 'Verse || Arthurian legend | mostly Elaine of Astolat & Isolde of Brittany friendship | PG, ~1600 words
   This series is incomplete, but all the bits sort of stand as are. I'm reccing it because it's the first fanfic I ever wrote, although I wasn't thinking of it as fanfic at the time. (Before you all run away screaming from the words "first fanfic I ever wrote", I was nineteen years old at the time and I'd been writing original fiction for years.)


3. Defy the Devil || Supernatural | Uriel, originalish character | PG-13, ~400 words, deathfic
   I'm reccing this because it is (understandably) one of my least-frequently-read fics. It's minor-character gen deathfic, written for a spn_bitesized prompt asking about the angel whose vessel's body we saw at the beginning of 4.16, and I tried my best to fill it in a way I thought the prompter would like. SPN-canon angels are hard to write, because they're not really in touch with their emotions (imagine Vulcans, but probably with even more issues), so trying to write about betrayal from the perspective of someone who might or might not even comprehend it was...an interesting challenge.


4. It's All Right With Me || Merlin | Arthur/OMC (Arthur/Merlin) | R, ~900 words
   This is a fic where Arthur has sex with a prostitute to try to get over his feelings for Merlin and it, uh, doesn't work. There is pining. I like pining a lot. I wrote a sequel to resolve the UST, and the sequel is sort of...meh. I mean, it's...technically competent, and all that, but it's really forgettable, in my opinion. Anyway, for some reason the sequel has gotten more hits, and I--I guess I'd rather people be reading the part of the series I actually really liked? Hence this rec.

I wanted to rec the Pan-Fandom Tinyship Commentfest I hosted, but it sort of...fizzled a bit, and then because I'd decided to host it on LJ the broken comments pages make me really reluctant to try to, well, promote something comment-y.

Anyway, here's one more rec, for those of you who want something a little less introspective:

5.  Pursue It With the Soul of Love || Merlin | Arthur/Merlin | NC-17, ~1900 words, dubcon (sex pollen)
Okay. I...actually kind of love this fic for a lot of reasons--I love the way I managed to get an Arthur-voice that makes me pretty happy, for one thing, because that is something I struggle with a lot; and also I am in general pretty fond of sex pollen fic--but the biggest reason I love it is kind of a massive spoiler for the fic so please please if you want to read it go read it before you come back here. (skip this discussion)

This is a sex pollen fic which does not contain sex pollen. While I am absolutely certain I'm not the first person on the internet to come up with that idea, I've never run across any such fics myself. It's the placebo effect, basically, though I was actually thinking of studies that have shown that people who think they're drinking alcohol will not only start acting drunk, they'll start acting drunk before the alcohol could have actually had any effect on them.

It's something I'd been meaning to write for a while, without being terribly picky about the pairing or even the fandom; I eventually settled on Arthur/Merlin because it is a pairing which is hugely popular within its fandom, thus probably getting me a larger audience, and also because the biggest obstacle to their relationship in the fuzzy AUish version of canon I have in my head is that they both think it would be inappropriate and possibly a bad plan--most of my popular pairings in other canons have much more serious obstacles (legal issues (cf Stargates); characters who wouldn't expect to be affected by the same chemical substance as the other half of the pairing (cf Supernatural, Star Treks)).

Basically I just think playing with fandom's popular dubcon tropes--sex pollen; aliens made them do it--is a really interesting thing to do! I've read several fics playing with the [X] made them do it (fics where the X in question isn't who might be expected, fics where X made them not do it, etc.), but the closest I'd come to seeing a similar thing for sex pollen is fics where the affected character sought/received medical treatment before having sex with the other character. So.