There is one fic series I was surprised weren't on your list. The Martian (and it's prequel that was written simultaneously Changeling Space Program) are basically the mix of hard science and magic that you've said previously you like.
CV12Hornet Cleans Out His Fanfiction Favorites List (Beware of Shit Taste)
- Thread starter CV12Hornet
- Start date
Ah, that unique sense of agony when you reach the end of a fic far sooner than you though you would, you look for the publish date and last update date to get a feel for when the next chapter might happen, and both dates are within two months of each other. . . a few months shy of four years ago.
What's there is pretty damn solid, though.
A Bunch of Short Fics
CV12Hornet
Riter.
- Location
- Tacoma, Washington
In which Sally Blofis writes a fictionalized romance novel based on her own torrid romance with Poseidon.
It's shockingly sweet for being about a book consciously imitating Fifty Shades of Gray. That moment at the end, where it goes over Sally and Poseidon's final meeting... mmph. That's some good shit.
You're on the list!
The answer is yes, my dear doctors, and the aggression is a plus in his role. Ah, the dawning comprehension that Darth Vader is the one in the abomination against medical ethics...
Overall, though, I'm not sure I like this. The email format is a bit hard to follow thanks to using work-coded addresses, it takes forever to put the pieces together, and in the end it's all shut down. It's good! I'm just thinking it's not to taste.
Yeah, you're not on the list.
Yeah, I'm with Evy: I have no context for what's going on here. I'm sure Stargate fans would get a kick out of this, though.
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Look, this was funny for a couple of chapters, but then the Kahuna chat showed up and I was just like "I don't care about this, scroll". Also, Ash sounds off, and is it too much to ask for a little dignity?
You're not on the list.
In which Jocasta Nu organizes the GAR and saves the galaxy.
Let's talk about the central conceit of this fic, which is that Jocasta treats the clones as... well, books in her library. It's something I think will put off people, especially since it's more than a legal fiction (and yet also a legal fiction at the same time). It's explicitly dehumanizing, and called out as such in-universe. It is explicitly in part a coping mechanism by Jocasta to send men off to their deaths in war. At the same time, it's also her way of declaring "You're mine, I will make you safe", and the clones themselves find Being a Person exhausting in large doses anyway.
So I like it. Others may not. YMMV. You're on the list.
A headcanon piece where the Jedi Order splits from the Republic - a premise I'm increasingly liking as a way to square the circle between "the Jedi didn't deserve this" and "The Republic is a corrupt institution and arguably a failed state" - based on fridge logic of "Hang on, the Senate can't be all their funding".
RIP to Sheev's plans. You're on the list.
This fic crashes and burns the minute Palpatine says something more complicated than "Tea!" His voicing is way off.
You're not on the list.
This fic crashes and burns when it forgets that the main character doesn't know the name Aziraphale and keeps using it in narration.
You're not on the list.
This fic crashes and burns when it shows Ash coldly ordering Greninja to kill Lysandre. That's not what I want out of my Pokemon fic. That the writing quality isn't great even before this doesn't help.
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Not terrible, but also not interesting enough for me to stick it out straight to Ash accidentally revealing his trolling to the server.
You're not on the list.
Pro tip of the day: get a beta! Someone who can proofread for you, because this is a fucking mess of bad word choices! Arrrrrrgh.
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Pro tip of the day: separate all dialogue lines into new paragraphs, for the love of God.
You're not on the list.
This devolves swiftly into a scriptfic. I don't think I need to explain further.
You're not on the list.
This should be a good premise. I loved it when Boldores and Boomsticks referenced the events in Ryme City. But the fic doesn't do anything with the idea. Tim spends most of the time just standing there doing nothing, the Pokemon names are left uncapitalized, which I hate, and Ash doesn't feel like Ash, even accounting for him being twenty years older.
You're not on the list.
Too short to do anything with the idea, besides Alain angst and that's very old hat at this point.
You're not on the list.
This is not the premise I was expecting. I was expecting something like Ash and Pikachu constantly photobombing news feeds. Instead I just get Pikachu frantically trying to get attention to his missing trainer, an idea that the fic doesn't go into enough detail to execute on.
You're not on the list.[/QUOTE]
- Location
- Georgia
That might be a record of non recs for this thread.
I get the impression that you wouldn't be a fan of Traveler?
I get the impression that you wouldn't be a fan of Traveler?
CV12Hornet
Riter.
- Location
- Tacoma, Washington
That's on my to-read list.
I don't know what that is.
- Location
- Caracas
Traveler is one of the most popular pokemon fanfics out there, taking a tone closer to the manga. Not every pokemon is a happy friendly creature, there are some actually dangerous mons. It's a tad darker than the anime, but not particularly Edgy.
I think, you should give it a read and come up with your own opinion since apparently I am shit at giving summaries.
- Location
- Georgia
Pretty much what @Duncan Idaho said. I'd link it but, I'm on mobile right now and away from my laptop.
Also it's a monster in terms of length, ongoing since 2012. Most recent chapter was last month.
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- Location
- Perth, Western Australia
- Location
- Georgia
Yeah it's one of those stories I really enjoy but I don't think i can recommend, at least without some caveats.
Bioethically speaking, Mr Sheev was right up my alley, though admittedly I derive perhaps a bit too much pleasure from being accidentally cc'd or bcc'd to a conversation (usually via a mailing list that includes more people than expected) and just sitting back with some popcorn to read the emails.
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Some small context: Near the end of its run (so seasons 9-10 and the last couple TV movies) Stargate developed a love for time travel stories featuring alternate takes on the characters and characters taking the long road back to the present. This is a riff on that.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
More specifically, the fic says that it's going off of the Season 8 finale, "Moebius", wherein due to time travel shenanigans on top of other time travel shenanigans, an alternate timeline version of Daniel wound up stranded and living out his life in ancient Egypt, with the mcguffin of the episode buried somewhere that it would be found in the present day so that there would be no reason to time travel in the first place.
A crossover between Stargate SG-1 and The Mummy makes a lot of sense, given how they both involve fantastical happenings in ancient Egypt coming back to menace us in the modern age, but the premise of this one would be particularly impenetrable for people who weren't familiar with the source material.
cB557
voOOP
I actually like it going nowhere, myself. It has a kind of
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6VjPM5CeWs
to it.
Nicholas
No longer teaching battlethings on a battleship
- Location
- Ashore again
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Same here. God knows corporate-style workplaces have far too few opportunities for entertainment, but getting into an email chain and watching some clusterfuck unfold (importantly, a clusterfuck you are neither responsible for causing nor tasked with fixing) is absolutely one of them.
Daniel Jackson is a professional at dying and then coming back to make everything
- Location
- Caracas
Bioethically is seeing a pebble become a snowball. It's amazing.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
Oh, good point. It didn't even occur to me that I needed to explain that the reason why the first thing he says when resurrected is "Not again!" is because it's not the first or even the fifth time that he's died and then woken up in sarcophagus.
- Location
- [REDACTED]
Seeing as you have an affinity for MHA chatfics, I would very much like to recommend Q.A.B., in which Midoriya's amateur quirk analysis blog goes viral after a tweet from (not-officially)Hawks, and the chaos that ensues, including:
But the real reason I'm recommending this is because this fic, in my opinion, sets the gold standard for epistolary fiction on AO3. The formatting has to be seen to believed. I'm genuinely convinced jihnari is some kind of fucking virtual wizard. It's a two-parter, with the second part just ending last month.
- Dabi and Hawks being the best Gay Dads ever
- Vigilantes characters in the spotlight (and on Discord)
- The tragic love story of a cow and her farmer
- The League of Villains being the worst vloggers ever
- 'beep beep, here comes the cab'
But the real reason I'm recommending this is because this fic, in my opinion, sets the gold standard for epistolary fiction on AO3. The formatting has to be seen to believed. I'm genuinely convinced jihnari is some kind of fucking virtual wizard. It's a two-parter, with the second part just ending last month.
Meanings of Master + Making History + Fall of the Citadel
CV12Hornet
Riter.
- Location
- Tacoma, Washington
This is adorable. I'm especially fond of the fourth story, which deals with Anakin first learning to swim, but I also like the dinner and Anakin's innocent awe at the idea of soup. Of having enough water to make a meal out of it. I just love it whenever fic writers use the desert origins of the Skywalker family.
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For an AU it really is too damn similar to the movie. Details change, but the overall plot doesn't, nor any of the character arcs within. If you really want more of Toothless being adorable, go ahead and give this a shot. But for me, it doesn't offer enough.
You're not on the list.
This is a tentative addition. The entire first chapter is a giant battle scene, which certainly does work to put butts in seats, but it comes at a cost: we have no context for why this battle is happening. Also, there's a lot more Halo than Mass Effect DNA in this so far, and the gun porn is a bit much.
But dammitall, I'll put up with quite a bit for a premise like this executed at all decently. You're on the list!
Nicholas
No longer teaching battlethings on a battleship
- Location
- Ashore again
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The author of that story got their start into Kancolle making Halo crossovers for it, and unfortunately, he had a tendency to full-on plagiarize other stories of the same genre, giving them minimal (if any) tweaks before claiming them as his own. For example, any reader familiar with For Earth and Her Colonies will find a number of very familiar passages and plot points in this chapter, at first lifted word-for-word, then minimally tweaked two years later after a reviewer called the author out on his copying.
To be perfectly frank, given how his stories since have shown minimal improvement, there's a part of me that can't help but wonder if the decent execution of these two chapters is due to finding new source material to plagiarize.
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NHO
Dumb is a state of existence
- Location
- ᓚᘏᗢ
It's strongly AU. Himiko Toga is at her best.
Second part kinda ends... inconclusively.
I was up until 5 AM reading it.
EDIT: Can you post this recommendation to The Best Damn Fics You've Ever Read. Discussion ?
- Location
- [REDACTED]
Aye, jihnari had originally planned for the story to be longer, but after four years of work, he decided that keeping it going would take more time and energy than he has, so he chose to end it where it is now.
And yes, it was definitely written before Horikoshi revealed that Touya's hate-boner for Endeavour was exponentially larger than the fandom had anticipated. I'll be sure to post my recommendation in the other discussion.
Usagi Quest + Where No One Goes
CV12Hornet
Riter.
- Location
- Tacoma, Washington
Arrrrrrrrrgh.
People, you have no idea how much I want to like this quest. While a retelling of Sailor Moon, it's also a magical girl megacrossover that brings in Symphogear, Lyrical Nanoha, seven different Precure series, and Ranma 1/2, among others. There's organization. There's pre-existing magic groups. I so wanted this to finally, finally be me finding a magical girl megacrossover that's not dead or terrible.
So it is with a heavy heart that I must report that I reached exactly none of it before bailing.
Fundamentally, the technical errors just became too much to deal with. We have some of the usual suspects, like a lack of tense consistency, but we also have a brand new one I've never seen: at several points the narrative jumps between second-person and third-person - in the same goddamn update. Like, wow, if Lunaryon was going somewhere with that it failed miserably.
Relatedly, the voicing is subpar. Usagi doesn't feel like Usagi, and that's mostly down to her dialogue. Sometimes it's too formal, to which blame can be laid at a lack of contractions. Other times, she feels too coarse. The other characters come off better, but Usagi... no. And she's the main character, so that's one heck of a dealbreaker.
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Mm, that's some good shit.
This is basically just the first How to Train Your Dragon movie, but with Azula. This is not a bad thing. We spend the first few chapters following Azula and her dragon, Brainless, as they get to know each other, and that shows a clear difference: Azula is not Hiccup. Her reasons for keeping the dragon around are more selfish, her mechanical aptitude is not as high, and above all she's a lot less honest with herself about caring for Brainless on her own merits.
Alas, eventually Ozai pushes her to kill Brainless and Azula takes the opportunity to flee. From there, the story focuses on her trying to find Zuko, before putting her with the Gaang at the very end.
What makes this fic work is its dedication to taking down Azula several pegs. First, Brainless is willing and able to physically manhandle her - the pond in the crater Brainless winds up stuck in is a frequent recipient of Azula. Though she doesn't know it, this forces Azula to think of Brainless as an equal and not a resource, which was her friendship problem in canon. During the first third of the story she realizes that her mind and ability to lie, so praised and so well-used in canon, owe a lot to her stacking the deck in her favor as much as possible. Faced with problems with no easy way out, and forced to actually lie about something she cares about, puts her off her game. And that's before she gets out into the Earth Kingdom, is confronted by normal people, and finds herself not only caring about Zuko but surprisingly adrift. Seems Zuko's inability to think things through is somewhat genetic.
So at the very end in the Air Temple, while Azula isn't quite ready to return to the side of angels, its clear some part of her recognizes how lonely she's felt and longs for some companionship other than Brainless. That maybe, doing things the normal way isn't such a bad thing.
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Look at this shit:
Awful. Simply awful. Two scenes and I was already rewriting things in my head.
You're not on the list.
- Location
- Reading, Berks, UK
There is an advantage to sticking mostly to minor characters and OCs away from the plot.