cabin at the end of the universe

You are Arthur Pendragon. You know that everything you have – everything you are – exists because of your father. It was your father who dragged the family name and title from the mud, pulled it through years of war and conquering, and built a kingdom. Your father, who is all you have because your mother died giving birth to you.

(And sometimes, he makes you feel as if you should be grateful that he doesn't hate you for killing her. And then later you learn that this only because he killed her, so that you could live.)

Your father shapes who you are, and even when you fight and disagree and when he abuses the power he has over you, you love him. You love him because he's your father, and that's what you're meant to do, and because you want him to be proud of you and when he says he is, it makes everything okay.

But then the world you've always known, the world he made for you, shatters. You have an illegitimate sister and she is magic, the very thing you're meant to hate and shun; and she betrays him, and suddenly you aren't enough. Your father breaks. You're still there, running his kingdom – which is your kingdom now, in all but title – and he doesn't even notice.

Until one day, he does. It is your birthday, which is also the anniversary of your mother's death, the death that only happened because he wanted you to exist. A difficult day. It always has been. Except, suddenly, it's enough to make your father really look at you, and that makes everything better. He laughs, and you laugh, and it's so good until it isn't because there are traitors in the castle again, and they're out for blood. Your father dies to save your life.

There is grief in leaving an abuser behind and trying to define your own personhood without them. This grief doesn't mingle well with loss. You're left with so many unanswered questions about him, and yourself, and whether you could have helped change him or done something to make him proud. About whether you could have been enough.

But your questions don't matter. Your father is dead, and you have a kingdom to run, so you run it as he never would.

(You could acknowledge that his death has set you free, but that's terrifying. That would make you a terrible person. Wouldn't it?)

Then, it's your birthday again. Now the anniversary of your mother and father's deaths, a burden you have to bear. Except, you've been given a path to relief this year. You can go to your father and call him up from the afterlife, and you can finally show him everything you've done. He wanted you to be a leader, a King, a Pendragon.

But then you summon him, and he answers all your questions with vitriol. He warns you with softness and love that he can't stay, because you won't like the things he has to tell you. He tells you these things anyway. You've become the wrong kind of king, the wrong kind of leader, the wrong kind of Pendragon. You try to convince yourself that this creature isn't really your father, but you know. You remember your sister (although you hadn't known her as that yet), shackled in the dungeons for disagreeing with him. You remember your wife, convicted to burn at the stake, supposedly for the crime of sorcery, but he had made it clear that the crime was all yours for daring to love the wrong woman.

And you have to realise that your father's ghost has been hounding you long before you set it free. Because abuse so easily becomes a haunting, and you've been haunted by your father your entire life. It is fitting, then, that you are the one to blow the horn and banish him. You are not yet free – you still grieve for him, still feel his loss – but you have purged the ghost, and now you can heal.

A Prat for Christmas (I Think I Must be an Owl Because I Have a Twit to Woo)

words by Camelittle, art by LFB72

Summary: Jobbing actor Merlin is despairing of ever getting his big break. With the acting world seemingly set against him, he takes a job as far away from London's glitzy theatreland as he can think of – at a down-at-heel castle in the far north of Scotland. There, he encounters a gruff, kilt-wearing shepherd with sturdy knees and the sort of Viking beard that Merlin would just love to bury his face in. But both men are hiding secrets that could blow the whole thing wide open.

In which BBC Merlin's characters get the Hallmark movie treatment. In Scotland. Because Arthur obviously needs to wear a kilt and strut around the highlands looking pretty.

Another masterpiece: lilies with full hands. Another trauma recovery focused fic, where Bucky adopts a service dog, gets lots and lots of therapy, and learns what things like "consent" and "boundaries" are. Well, not what those things are, but that they apply in situations where others are touching him.

As with some of the other fics, this one portrays Bucky as a survivor of sexual violence, inflicted on him as part of his torture by Hydra, and delves deep into the feelings of self-blame and crushing shame he feels about all of the trauma he experienced, but especially the sexual assault. The way these feelings are shown in all their ugliness and complexity is hard-hitting and very powerful. It viscerally examines all the other traumas he went through as well: the whole nonconsensual human experimentation thing, getting his arm sawn off while he was awake, being forced to kill people, and being beaten and tortured in various other ways. As a whump enjoyer, I was Having A Good Time. We don't get, like, lengthy flashbacks, but there are some uhhh haunting details.

(except with the sexual assault stuff, which is more vague. Content warnings are provided nonetheless at the start of each chapter where this is discussed, though.)

I would say this was primarily fluffy, because most of the activities the characters are doing are things like bubble baths and game night and other chill and relaxing fun, but all of it is nonetheless a hell hole for Bucky because he is slamming back and forth from horrible flashbacks to humiliation and guilt to self-harm to being suicidal, and just when he is feeling better about one thing he's getting bodied by something else.

It is really, really hard for Bucky to accept that no part of what he went through was his fault. The most painful part is that after long enough of being brainwashed and tortured, he eventually stopped fighting back and just complied with his abusers' demands. It feels horrible that he ""let"" these things happen to him. But it wasn't his fault, even though he is physically super-strong and powerful and physically could have resisted.

A small spark of insight: no other character from the MCU or honestly from anything exudes such power and confidence in the way they move and inhabit their body as Bucky in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Everything about the character's physical presence on screen screams dominance, prowess and strength.

Therefore, it is compelling to write him as a rape survivor. If Bucky, a character who is pure power-fantasy-fuel, experienced sexual violence, then being a survivor of sexual violence doesn't define anyone or make anyone weak. The story evokes compassion for his feelings of humiliation, powerlessness, and self-blame, allowing the reader to explore these experiences along with him, to accept that he is not weak or at fault for what happened, and to feel that he deserves to get better.

Or at least that's my theory.

read Ain't No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down) last night which was recommended to me by somebody on here and ONCE AGAIN: y'all have EXCELLENT taste

This one just felt so...full. Alive. Vibrant. Every chapter comes with links to songs characters are listening to and/or references explaining the books and movies they're reading and watching. Bucky is Jewish, and it explores that, and Steve is portrayed as Catholic and a child of Irish immigrants, and it goes into like his relationship with saints and with the Gaelic language and it brings in so much depth.

Bucky is a heroin addict and living with a couple of teenage foster kids that had been living on the streets (who are SUCH good characters, my fucking god). Plenty of drug withdrawal type whump, if you're into that. Bucky portrayed as rape survivor, again, there's not anything graphic at all he just talks about it very blithely (and that scene, when it comes, came off as so authentic to me that it really exemplifies what I love about how this author handles these characters). Have I mentioned that the writing is gorgeous?

So I finished reading that one and then I read another fic, which I also finished. I shan't link it since the verdict is mixed. This one was really graphic about the rape backstory. Some other fics I've encountered exploring the "sexual violence" take on the torture/dehumanization Bucky went through were also graphic, but this is the first of those I actually finished. And I really ended up skimming the parts that described his flashbacks/nightmares, because they were super disturbing, but the way that the story "went there" was also really, really compelling.

Like, okay, I remember when I was a lot younger, I thought there was a "right" way to handle rape in a story and that was to Not Be Triggering and ideally not handle it at all? I was really uncomfortable with seeing authors "go there" and it was partly because I thought I should be uncomfortable, that it was right to be uncomfortable. Like, I love the Malazan series by Steven Erikson but there is a lot of rape in those books and I didn't like it!

But then I thought to myself, including that is being honest about war. And there are so many books that are NOT honest about war. And this is WHY Malazan is so fucking good, because it is honest about what war and empire really are and what they really mean, to the point that it's almost like...this existential agony that screams through the books, the excruciating awareness of the indescribable innocent suffering throughout history.

What was I doing, opening up a book that is ABOUT WAR and expecting to have a good time and not be triggered or upset? What did it say about me, and the culture I came from, that this was considered a reasonable expectation to have of a book where the plot overwhelmingly centers around a war?

And, okay so, I read the Iliad in middle school, right? And I hated it. Fucking loathed it. I hated the characters, they were all so arrogant and acted so wildly irrational, especially Achilles, who was a horrible fucking person. And the pages on pages of just...senseless, repetitive gore were so tiresome.

But that was the point. Because that's what war is and that's what war does to you.

And I tried rereading it again a couple years ago, and I quit halfway in, because it was just...so repetitive, and it seemed like neither side really wanted to fight, but they just went back and forth between trying to arrange a ceasefire and not arranging the ceasefire and it went on and on and on without going anywhere.

But that was also the point. Because that's what war is.

I don't even know what I'm saying anymore, I've gone way off track. War is, like, the most perennially bad thing that humans have created, and the stories we tell consistently fail to communicate how fucking bad it is. And it's the same way with torture. Torture is a real thing and in real life, sexual violence is a REALLY common part of torture. And in fiction, we treat it like...I don't even know, just abstractly causing temporary pain to someone. We put that shit in kids' movies.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Back to the fic.

The mixed verdict is because I feel like the sexual violence was focused on at the expense of the other trauma, and a lot of the things I care about, like the characterization of side characters, and the whump, and the cultural/historical context for Steve and Bucky, were just okay?

Fuck.

So much fanfiction, i cant hardly remember which is which, My brain busting its seams like an overstuffed pillow.

The man on the bridge by boopboop - Liked this one a lot, whole thing is from Tony Stark's POV, which i didnt expect to like but it was great. He's a snarky asshole by nature, a genuine friend by choice. Thor makes an appearance and I fucking love early MCU Thor- his earnestness and out-of-place regal demeanor is so great

Effects of Obliteration by geneticallydead - This one is comparatively short, but a real gem. We get both the asset!bucky dehumanization angst and Avengers slumber party fluff. Stings like hell of mid-2010's nostalgia. OUCH. Bucky orders a bunch of sex toys online, struggles with autocorrect, learns to eat food and ask for touch, tells the press he's gay, and wears band tshirts. Read if you wanna laugh, it's funny as fuck.

Hurts Like Hell by onymousann - finally, an acceptable amount of whump. Another fic where the mask is attached to Bucky's face and he can't remove it (I guess this is what "maskfic" tag refers to) and he thinks Steve is his Handler and refers to himself as "it." Overall goes really hard on the "living weapon conditioned to comply for fear of extreme punishments" thing.

There were two more that I read. I don't think I liked them exactly as much, but, they are all running together in my head now, and I don't know what's what! But as before. I don't want to outright name anything unless it's a wholehearted recommendation, because that seems rude.

It's Prisoner One by ancientreader and I don't know what to do but scream about it. I spent all day reading this fic savoring every single word and I didn't want it to end. It's gorgeously written, it's heartwarming, with some moments of genuine pure horror that made my stomach fall out.

And Every Chapter has these intricate, thoughtful historical and cultural notes with links to poems, historical photography, songs, and paintings that are important to the characters or otherwise important in the story.

By far my favorite characterization of Steve yet. If you want a fic that REALLY delves in deep with Steve's survivors guilt and savior complex this is the one.

I actually started this one about a couple months ago, quit early on, and now decided to start over from the beginning. (switching back and forth between present and past annoys the hell out of me in books, and there was a lot of that in the first couple chapters. But then it goes away.)

This one is heavy. It made my heart ache. LOTS of whump if you're into that (I am). If you like vivisection scenes, you're in luck. And also very thoughtful and nuanced disability rep. In a lot of fics, Bucky is still a badass killing machine, but in this one, Bucky amputates his own metal arm and spends most of the story navigating life as an amputee. He also can't eat solid food so he has a feeding tube implanted. It feels so realistic, whenever he's moving around or lying down he's having to think about his tube getting bent or kinked, and he's learning how to do things with one hand and compensate for the sudden lack of balance, it made the story feel very grounded in what his body would be like. Bucky has a lot of internalized ableism at the beginning which is also interesting to see.

This story wrestles a lot with the conflict of Steve wanting his dead friend back and Bucky feeling suffocated by the expectation that he's supposed to be this dead guy that feels, at best, like a ghost that clings to his body in confusing scraps. It deals a lot with grief. And it is a really good character sketch of Steve that lets him be a complicated and nuanced character that is fucked up with his guilt and self blame, but also not completely a little bitch about it.

There are so many original side characters that are so, so good I want to read more stories about them. Clint shows up in this one, and he's much more like comics!clint and really fun.

This one was light on the "romance," it is more about Steve and Bucky's friendship and Bucky's relationships with many other characters. Also Bucky hasn't any libido or interest in sex because of all the drugs Hydra injected him with, though he does enjoy kissing and snuggling.

definitely worth a read if you liked Ain't No Grave as it is similar

Ready to Comply by exclamation

Book 1, Shallan: Wow! The natural History is so cool! Why does this piece of nature act like that? Oh hey, bread!

Book 5, Shallan: So many horrible things are happening around me and I can't fix any of it because everyone is long dead. Horrible things will happen to the world if these people get their way, and they are only as close as they are because of me. What if all of this is my fault?