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The Best Damn Fics You've Ever Read.

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Sixth'd for Gifts, Stolen and Received, by nagia.

A inexorable slide downward into delicious fae-branded awful.

Unrelatedly, it has the best shipping tag Ao3 has ever conjured up: Harry/Rent Money.
 
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Zaxxon said:
I have a recommendation that I wish to share, now that it is complete, Mauling Snarks by @CmptrWz.
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Another derec from me. Probably superfluous at this point, but there were requests for more reasoning. It has a decent premise and a passable start, but the characters are often wooden and lifeless, the protagonists are practically never permitted to fail, and it's padded to hell and back—the author wastes an absurd amount of word count on things like writing out the protagonist's daily routine that hasn't changed since the last ten times it was described. (No story needs that many bland descriptions of eating breakfast, feeding the pets, and visiting the toilet.)

Perhaps its biggest sin is that despite the length, there's no noticeable increase in quality. I picked it up when it first started because it was a decent popcorn fic to read on the bus, and I was really hoping it would get better as the author got more practice, but it just doesn't; I gave up after the first several hundred thousand words. If you can write over half a million words and not improve, you're either not listening to your critics at all, or you're just not trying. And while that's an acceptable path to writing in general, it's not the way to write a fic that belongs on this list.
 
Zaxxon said:
I have a recommendation that I wish to share, now that it is complete, Mauling Snarks by @CmptrWz.
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I want to join the derecs for this one.

I'm totally okay with slice-of-life, but CmptrWiz's style involves everyone being emotionally flat and rational. It'd be fine if that was just how the story's protagonist was, but it's everyone, and it kills my interest in the characters and their interactions.

Like, one of the earlier things that happens in the fic that I feel exemplifies this is that Taylor works out that her uncle Jacob is Jack Slash, murderhobo serial killer extraordinaire. She blurts this out in front of her father and Jacob.
"Your snark did tell me enough to identify you before it went silent," Taylor said, looking at her uncle. "I am quite curious. How did Jack Slash end up working with the PRT?"

The answer was delayed a bit by Danny having to recover from choking on his coffee, including cleaning the table up and getting him a new shirt. Eventually, though, Jacob was able to answer.
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Said answer is a huge speech about the whole cape-therapy-through-murder thing that's a major part of the story's AU worldbuilding (and which @TheUnicorn rightly thinks it's kinda weird the government would go along with). But, like, Danny just realized his brother in law is one of the modern world's greatest monsters... and his reaction is a spit-take and changing his shirt while letting him explain his position? It's okay that he comes around to understanding it and agreeing, but a bit more anger/terror seems initially justified...

Going on, a lot of the humor is of the form that Taylor is an asshole who uses unreasonably literal interpretations of exact-words to prank people by doing what they literally said and not what they very-obviously meant. That's fine, but it's wildly immersion-breaking for me that for some reason everyone in story finds this reasonably amusing and not incredibly annoying.

So, yeah. It's competent at doing what it does, but it's weirdly awkward about how-humans-act, and it's certainly not best-damn-fic material.

EDIT: oh, and there's a recurring use of uncritically-enjoyed torture-revenge gruesome murders which kinda weirds me out.
EDIT2: I accidentally a word.
 
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Kemayo said:
Going on, a lot of the humor is of the form that Taylor is an asshole who uses unreasonably literal interpretations of exact-words to prank people by doing what they literally said and not what they very-obviously meant. That's fine, but it's wildly immersion-breaking for me that for some reason everyone in story finds this reasonably amusing and not incredibly annoying.
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She's less-charming Amelia Bedelia?
 
A rec for A Stolen Heart by Aladar.

A lone detective takes it upon himself to solve the murder of a young woman, willingly diving into the dangerous web of conspiracies weaved by the feuding mafia families. But after the truth is uncovered, will that city of sin be the same ever again? AU
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It's a noir story, using the characters from Fate/Stay Night. Sakura Matou's had her heart ripped out, and Private Detective Set Lancer takes it upon himself to solve her murder. His investigation takes him into contact with almost every Fate character introduced in Stay/NIght and Zero, and a couple more besides, all of whom have been reimagined to fit the noir theme: Waver is the up-and-coming new police commissioner, Archer is Lancer's old partner who's still on the force, Gil King is the richest man in town with his fingers in all the pies, etc.

Why I'm reccing it: the intricate plotting in this fic is, frankly, awe-inspiring. It almost seems like the author had to have come up with this perfectly coherent murder mystery, then slotted the Fate characters into it - except that can't be the case, because elements of the mystery hang on traits and quirks of the Fate characters themselves. Everything ties together in a way that's damn hard to achieve even when you're not trying to put in references to existing characters.

The writing style is also distinctive and different, reminiscent of those old noir film commentaries. Nothing much to say, it just really works with the atmosphere the story's going for.

For your consideration, I suppose.
 
TheDarkMist said:
Adversary a Worm SI
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SI Wormfics are an uphill battle in general. This one handles it better than many other attempts, but it also starts with typos, awkward sentence structure, and occasionally just really bad grammar right from the opening chapter. Adjectives are not verbs (yeah, yeah, I know there's some past-tense exception or something). Misuse and misplacement of commas. Confusion in dialogue and dialogue tags.

It's just messy.

I'm Derecommending it. It might be good in places, but it doesn't meet my low(?) demands of quality.

Proper edit: This is more of a put-down than I intended. It is well worth the read. Even if it isn't the best, it's still a very good fic.
 
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TheDarkMist said:
I'll like to recommend Adversary a Worm SI it was completed not too long ago and I find it an enjoyable ride.
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Derec.
While I agree it's quite well written and enjoyable (at least what I've read so far) and I really liked the opening scene from the POV of the random Waitress...I have in the first five chapters been jarred out of the story three times by grammar or spelling mistakes that had me pause to figure out what the author meant in that sentence (and that's keeping in mind I often don't even notice this sort of thing).

So while I'll be happy to recommend the story as a well written Worm OC story to anyone who isn't very sensitive to grammar or spelling issues, it definitely isn't a "best ever" story, and that's assuming the rest of the story is perfect.

P.S - Thanks for the link, I'm enjoying the story very much, despite the issue noted.
 
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It's finally time for the list's bimonthly sweep! I'll be going through the new pages, and hopefully I should be done cataloguing everything tomorrow!
 
Alright, one more from me.

I recomment a The Last Of Us fanfic Comforting Sounds.
Basic plot is that Ellie found herself a boyfriend (She's bi in this fanfiction) named Bailey, a very sweet boy of Irish descent. Let's just say, things don't go very well. Despite my description, it isn't a cheesy romance, its actually very good. Check it out for yourselves.

With all the divisiveness of the sequel, I just wanted to throw in a good TLOU fanfic.
 
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6-21-2020 Update
  • Informational
    • List updated up to page 191, post #4,766!

    Changelog

    -Removed Deja vu no Jutsu by Vixen Tai
    -Removed Burn Up by JinglyJangles
    -Added Petals of Titanium by Gazetteer
    -Added Mother of Learning by nobody103
    -Added Digger by Ursula Vernon
    -Added A Miracle of Science by Jon Kilgannon and Mark Sachs
    -Added stained in tea-colors by sangi
    -Added Not-So-Lost Videos by TheSeasonOfWinter
    -Added Ernesto de la Cruz vs. The Court of Public Opinion by skater_of_the_surface
    -Added Gifts, Stolen and Received by nagia

    Addendum:

    -Restored Time v.3.0 by Teyke
     
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  • Informational
    • Mother Nyx said:
    May I ask why Deja and Burn up were removed?
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    Deja vu no Jutsu really didn't age well. Personally, I liked it a lot more than most self-insert stories but the MC has all the characteristic of a fixer-sue. That, and I find it wasn't a story I could read more than once every year or so. And while it wasn't lacking, there weren't many peak of the story to get excited about which were mainly about the MC fixing stuff before stuff in canon became bad.

    As for Burn Up, some people don't like JinglyJangles's writing style I suppose. They have a more abstract writing style which is a hit or miss. It was interesting to read for me but not a masterpiece story that everyone can get behind.

    @Phearo. Quick question. Can you tell me why the Doctor Who story 'Time 3.0' was removed? I noticed that in one of the previous list updates that it was suddenly gone and I don't think it got derec from a quick search through the thread.

    Also, What We Fought For by metisket is stuck in the Naruto list rather than one for Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
     
    lin4t said:
    As for Burn Up, some people don't like JinglyJangles's writing style I suppose. They have a more abstract writing style which is a hit or miss. It was interesting to read for me but not a masterpiece story that everyone can get behind.
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    Jingle Jangle Fingol Fangal has a very purple tasting brain.
     
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