As a certified Hater (tm) one of the things I find irksome are exchanges like this:
Person A: I tried The Thing but it didn't really work for me, does it get better as it goes?
Person B: Actually it's really good from the very beginning, some of the best Thing ever.
This? Not helpful. I get the impulse to defend a thing you love immediately, but invalidating the opinion of Person A isn't going to convince them they're wrong and they should just trust you and continue. Be honest!! "Yeah, the acting gets better as the characters get into their roles." "Yeah, it's confusing at the jump but it all comes together in a satisfying way." "No the sound quality doesn't actually improve over time, sorry, but once the plot picks up you'll notice it less."
Or even, "the rest of the Thing is pretty much exactly like this, so if it really didn't work for you, maybe it's not a good fit. Maybe try Thang instead."
If you're trying to get someone to give your favorite thing a chance, "actually your opinion is wrong" right out of the gate isn't helping. Put that little "your feelings are valid" treat in your open palm and approach earnestly. It works so much better.
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Hello and welcome! I'm going to try to make some rec lists this year for my absolute favourite fics. Monthly seems like a good schedule, yeah? I'm tracking and reading them as part of @fanfic-reading-challenge - you don't have to join to read them, but I'm having fun with it.
This is January's. I took a break from the FRC for the first week of February, so you're getting them now! They're organised by fandom. You'll need to go to AO3 to check tags and content warnings.
Twenty-two offerings this month. :) Here we go!
Ace Attorney
Title: Crawling Back Again
Author: VickyVicarious
Ship: Phoenix Wright/Miles Edgeworth
Rating: T
Wordcount: 6,204
Sparky's Notes: "(Phoenix is) already two sheets to the wind and looking for the third when Miles Edgeworth walks in." A melancholy exploration of Nick's anniversary of winning his first case after losing his badge.
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Title: Juan Corrida Murder Trial Megathread: Day 2
Author: MoonGoddex
Ship: Gen
Rating: T
Wordcount: 7,635
Sparky's Notes: "Everyone is logged onto r/objection during Matt Engarde's trial." Delightful Reddit-style live reaction of r/objection to the insanity of Case 2-4.
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Title: we're a lot alike in favor (like a motorbike)
Author: lungthief
Ship: Klavier Gavin/Ema Skye
Rating: E
Wordcount: 36,074
Sparky's Notes: Klavier and Ema are fuckbuddies and it blooms into more than that.
HNGGFFFF SO GOOOOOD. Exquisite character voices, especially Ema as a depressed, self-hating, unreliable narrator. Tragically unfinished, but what a lovely ride, and there is some amount of closure towards the end as Ema gets out of her own head a little.
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ActRaiser
Title: A God in Fillmore
Author: B_the_Blue
Ship: Gen
Rating: T
Wordcount: 6,294
Sparky's Notes: "For centuries the world has suffered under the dark rule of Tanzra, Lord of the Demons, but deep within the forests of Fillmore everything is about to change. God has returned."
Excellent adaptation of the introduction to ActRaiser. Fandom-blind friendly.
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Animal Crossing
Title: Sable's Day Off
Author: Candyoranges
Ship: Sable Able & Mabel Abel
Rating: G
Wordcount: 4,788
Sparky's Notes: Sable finally takes a day off! Super duper cute and hit that lovely point that artists of all kinds need to take breaks to get inspiration.
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Title: Dear Resident…
Author: 1001paperboxes
Ship: Gen
Rating: Animal Crossing
Wordcount: 1,754
Sparky's Notes: The villagers wish the Resident a Happy New Year. Awww... Flick's got me all misty-eyed. :')
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The Books of the Named
Title: Overthrow
Author: SoongTypeDisaster
Ship: Gen
Rating: T
Wordcount: 1,114
Sparky's Notes: A group of un-Named changes leadership. Really gets into their different ways of thinking from the Named. These are clearly sapient beings, and they hate the Named every much as the Named hate them.
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The Elric Saga
Title: just lay back and laugh at the sun
Author: swirlingvoid
Ship: Arioch/Elric
Rating: E
Wordcount: 2,578
Sparky's Notes:
"So it was a trade, then. She could look at that with the cold eye of a Melnibonéan, who as a people were quite used to bargaining children."
Transfemme Elric has a dream about being ritually publicly dubconned and it turns out to be real in a sense. Hfff. Very good, holy fuck. Feels like exactly the kind of fucked up thing that might've happend in canon.
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Great Ace Attorney
Title: Death Becomes Him
Author: EatYourSparkOut
Ship: Gen
Rating: T
Wordcount: 2,150
Sparky's Notes: Barok mourns his brother. Very affecting with exquisitely-researched Victorian funeral rites.
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Hollow Knight
Title: what was/is/shall be
Author: TheQuietWings
Ship: Grimmchild & The Knight
Rating: G
Wordcount: 991
Sparky's Notes: Grimmchild loves the Knight, but knows that they are very different kinds of being. Grimmchild Is. The Knight Is Not. Very lovely.
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Title: No Cost Too Great (Oh, Really?)
Author: eden_elysium
Ship: Gen
Rating: T
Wordcount: 836
Sparky's Notes: How much pain do you have to go through before giving up is okay? Heartbreaking.
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La-Mulana
Title: Bones
Author: moon_hotel
Ship: Gen
Rating:T
Wordcount: 2,786
Sparky's Notes: A re-read this year. It's possible I'm biased because it was inspired by one of my fics, Breath Control, but I think it's a great meditation on losing your estranged adult child and realising how much of a horrible person you were.
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The Lottery (With The New Yorker Magazine RPF)
Title: Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death
Author: Charlotte_Stant
Ship: Gen
Rating: NR (Hard T or soft M I'd say)
Wordcount: 1,082
Sparky's Notes: The New Yorker interviews the guy who runs The Lottery. Holy shit this is incredibly biting gallows humour satire on the state of smalltown America in 2025, the same way the original story was in 1948.
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Pokemon
Title: Concordia's Scrapbook
Author: Ardil the Traveller
Ship: Concordia/Ghetsis Harmonia
Rating: T
Wordcount: 4,054
Sparky's Notes: Concordia looks back at her scrapbook, at how what seemed to be a wonderful marriage to an incredibly kind man descended into ruin. Note that this uses a headcanon that Concordia and Anthea are in Ghetsis' generation. A re-read for me and one of my favourite fics of 2025. I wrote a prequel!
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Primal Rage
Title: Talon's Accession
Author: LittleKipepeo
Ship: Gen
Rating:G
Wordcount: 1,623
Sparky's Notes: Mother Thorn, Goddess of Survival, passes the torch to Talon as she dies. Very lovely. <3
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Radiant Historia
Title: The Role of Dramatic Irony in Political Theater
Author:LadyNighteyes
Ship: Gen
Rating: G
Wordcount: 6,896
Sparky's Notes: Some time after the game, Stocke is dragged to a political party and has to time travel, as usual. It's from Roche's POV and he makes a hilarious outside observer to Stocke's antics.
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Rise of the Guardians
Title: Protegere
Author: VickyVicarious
Ship: Jack Frost & OC
Rating: T
Wordcount: 5,265
Sparky's Notes: The spirit of the Hero adopts Jack, though they only meet when the Hero vanquishes Winter. Their friendship is really sweet.
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Robot Unicorn Attack
Title: Purpose
Author: DracaenaCamael
Ship: Gen
Rating: NR (I'd say it's a G)
Wordcount: 1,460
Sparky's Notes: The origins of the Robot Unicorn. Very cute and funny.
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Sherlock Holmes
Title: Out of the Ordinary
Author: EdosianOrchids901
Subfandom: Sherlock Holmes Granada TV 1984
Ship: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Rating: E
Wordcount: 3,584
Sparky's Notes: Sex pollen for Sherlock. Really nailed that Victorian cadence in the dialogue and narration, which really tickled me.
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Title: On Death and Dying
Author: VickyVicarious
Subfandom: Sherlock (TV)
Ship: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Greg Lestrade & Sherlock Holmes
Rating: T
Wordcount: 3,902
Sparky's Notes: The five stages of grief with Sherlock's... peculiar take on it, after losing John to a murderer. I really liked this despite being semi-fandom-blind.
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Touhou
Title: 緋色月下、狂咲ノ絶 1st Anniversary Remix (Under the Scarlet Moon, Severance of Crazed Blossoms)
Author: EastNewSound
Sparky's Notes: A classic "U.N. Owen Was Her?" vocal remix!
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Title: PRESERVED VAMPIRE
Author: SOUND HOLIC
Sparky's Notes: LISTEN TO HOW FAST SHE SINGS!!
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The Way of the House Husband
Title: Dragons Banking Through Beautiful Skies
Author: Caeria
Ship: Miku/Tatsu
Rating: E
Wordcount: 14,971
Sparky's Notes: A WIP with a slightly more realistic take on how Tatsu and Miku met. Set before their marriage as Miku takes in a Yakuza goon who wants out of the lifestyle. It updated at the end of last year and is well worth following as it progresses!
Do you have any advice, guides, or opinions on how write a good rec list?
WELL! This is Elizabeth, and as the longtime co-curator of "The Rec Center" newsletter (with @hellotailor) I do have *a lot* of thoughts about rec lists. 😊 I'm delighted you asked, because as I'm sure both Flourish & I have mentioned on the podcast, rec-list-making is way less prominent now than it has been in previous fandom eras, and I think that's a shame. Reccing can be a great critical tool, and rec lists make a fanwork space richer—not least because they can move readers beyond the mostly quantitative metrics of the AO3.
I'll put the rest of this under the cut:
So obviously there are different kinds of rec lists, including by category/trope, favorites about a character or a ship or fandom, etc. To me, a true ~authored~ rec list is one in which the writer(s) deliberately put together a batch of fics to make some kind of argument about the works/the ship/the fandom/the source material.
Most of the lists we run in the newsletter are not like this, because we're pulling 5-7 works from our guest submissions bank—and since we don't (realistically, can't!) read the stories that are sent in, I have no idea if those 5-7 compliment each other in any real way. (When I put together one of these lists, I aim for balance: not all M/M, not all white characters, not all Western source material, etc.) (Yes, unsurprisingly, those are overrepresented in our submissions bank.)
But an authored rec list treats the rec list itself like a fanwork: you can tap into connective tissue that runs throughout the fics you choose, and you can put stories side-by-side that illuminate something when read together. You can approach this from two different directions: working from a broader pool of fics you like and pulling out a coherent batch, or starting with a theme, an argument, that connective tissue, and seeing what fits.
When I first got into my current fandom, I kept a google doc with fic titles, links, brief descriptors, and general thematic vibes etc., for future reccing use. (Obviously you can do this with AO3 bookmarks, but I use those differently, so this was a separate endeavor.) These were set up to transfer to "The Rec Center" easily, e.g.:
“Celestial Navigation” by kaydeefalls. 9K words, rated Teen.
Canon-era: C & E go to NYC to try to recruit several mutants. Delicate balance sort of story with a soft revelation. No tropes.
When I actually go to rec something, I reread it—mostly because I want to get the content warnings right, but also because reading it to rec is more like reading for work: you wind up looking at the text with a different eye, always lowkey thinking about how you'll make your argument about it in writing. I haven't actually recced the fic above in the newsletter, but here's another X-Men fic I did rec at one point:
“Come Together” verse by blarfkey. 60K words across 4 stories, rated Teen.
Backstory: When Peter gets arrested for breaking Erik out of the Pentagon, Erik returns the favor and breaks Peter out in turn—and takes him to live with Charles. Beautifully awkward father-son bonding coupled with bitter, stubborn exes pining: *chef’s kiss*. The verse spans five years, with really believable character growth, which is really saying something, based on the emotionally-stunted starting point for all parties involved.
Rec: Peter is the POV character here, so a+++, and the close third-person narration plays with the spaces between what he feels and what he says while capturing his voice beautifully. This means 50% dragging people and 50% feeling like an idiot, which is a total joy. A lot of X-Men stuff, canonically or...fanonically...sorry...is about found family, and I mean, this one is about finding your literal blood relations, but it’s also about building a true family, and I think the author gives that enough space to really sell it.
Content warnings: Canon-typical violence, torture, ableism, the unenlightened thoughts about women’s bodies that preoccupy heterosexual teenage boys
That rec is from a whole list I did with @morgan-leigh a few (five???wtf lol) years ago, which I think is a good example of an authored rec list: Morgan and I had overlapping tastes and similar interpretations of the characters, so all the fics here feel like they're talking to each other in some way, and making an argument about who these characters are (in Morgan's beautiful words, many of these stories "capture the exquisite and venal dickishness of both our heroes" lol).
Obviously rec lists don't have to be super formal—we created this reccing format a long time ago to keep things standardized—and I certainly don't think recs need to sound like literary criticism (not that the examples above sound like literary criticism lol...you know what I mean). Some of my favorite rec lists are pure vibes and (performatively? in a good way) emotional, and that's great. If you're a fic author, you know what a delight those comments are to receive. And like someone's AO3 bookmarks, the all-vibes rec list is an opportunity to see if you, too, feel like the selected fics smack you in the face or whatever violent expression of appreciation people are using. They often don't give you a ton of information, but if you and the reccer have similar taste, you know you can trust their picks.
But! I would make the case for reccing as a chance to talk about fic in a way that you really wouldn't in a comment to the author or in a performatively emotional tag: critically, not in the "this is bad" definition of "criticism," but, like, in the lit-crit way. Why does this work—and how does it work? As with all literary criticism, "work" is totally contextual; a good rec list sets up that context, and gives you just enough information to want to click through and see for yourself.
All that being said, you don't need to overthink it—and I say this partly because I'd really love to see more rec lists floating around! The AO3 often primes people to sort in a top-down way, and though there are tons of great fics with lots of kudos, as the meme goes,
Rec lists let you include things that aren't super popular, that hit niche characterization or plot notes, that really worked for you specifically for whatever reason. They're pure human curation—not just recs, but an arrangement of those recs that creates a whole new work in the process. And that's something I really love about fandom! We don't want algorithmic 'if this, then that' for-you pages; we're interested in doing the actual work of reading, thinking about, and sharing what we like with others, and that's wonderful.
TARDIS Library on Dreamwidth has a new seasonal challenge up - this time it's Alphabet Soup! (Rec at least 5 fanworks for 5 consecutive letters of the alphabet - see the challenge post for details.)
It is 2023, and there is time for South Scrimshaw: Part One.
I played through tonight, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who loves speculative evolution, visual novels, aliens, nature documentaries, and/or whales. It's a visual novel about the calfhood and adolescence of an alien whale.
It's on the very low-interaction side of the visual novel scale. Most interaction is clicking to advance the story, but there are, essentially, footnotes that you can click on to learn more about the wider world and universe this little whale lives in.
The hints at what humanity is like at this is just enough to whet the appetite for more, written to an in-universe audience that doesn't bother to explain things everyone should know. Reminds me pleasantly of The Crucible of Time, in that sense. But even more tantalizing for me is the beautifully detailed speculative biology, centred of course on my favourite animal group, the cetaceans. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it.
It made me cry really hard at The Usual Trigger and I had to take a breather in the middle because of that, but it was well worth it. I've listed some content warnings under the cut. Give it a try! It's free on Steam and won't take more than an hour or two!
Animal death, infant death, parental death are the death ones. The Brillo whales that star in this visual novel also have adaptations that may make folks with trypophobia very uncomfortable.
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My HP fic reading in 2023 was oldschool Snarry fics because I didn't really read outside my comfort zone. Experienced a family loss in May. My HP reading after that was pretty much just comfort fics.
My favorite HP fandom thing in 2023 is the hprecfest. Super fun! Scarlet, love you forever for this idea <3 This is incredible and I love getting to read the recs others made.
I read tons of fic in other fandoms. Les Mis, The Witcher, ASoIaF are the big ones. Got to know some new folks from those fandoms and that's been great. Super confident some of them are going to be seriously amazing writers once they get experience. The talent is already there!! :D So hyped! Read a lot of books outside my comfort zone because of the new fandoms. Also met some fandom folks in real life and it was amazing fun. I got to go to NYC to meet them which was wow.
Crossed 1000 recs! :D
Biggest lesson for me was that I have a people pleasing problem. I mean I knew that before. But reccing also highlights that problem. Sometimes I felt pressured to rec fics directly by the author/indirectly by their friends. Obviously if I am good at setting boundaries that won't be a thing. Idk maybe it was in my head but anyway I feel like I am learning to set boundaries. My 2023 goal was to rec fics I am 100% in love with + don't feel pressured to rec. I feel like I succeeded on some level. My reccing velocity definitely went down but I don't feel stressed out? Like before I felt stressed a lot because I was feeling pressured about commenting/reccing and kind of felt used sometimes? Anyway maybe it was probably just in my head but it's like that sometimes!
Another lesson for me was to trust my taste/don't apologize for it. I feel sometimes I went with what other folks recommended esp if they were writers because I trusted their taste more? Obviously this is a me problem. I was working on that a lot in 2023. My taste is definitely not perfect or anything but taste is super subjective/personal. I am getting better about not apologizing for my taste because otherwise I was always saying stuff like "this fic is not for everybody/this fic is weird" which was more about me feeling insecure about my taste than about the fic itself.
Also I feel my rec style has improved. I was having real problems with reccing more complicated fics. Getting more experience is definitely helping.
