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The Best Damn Fics You've Ever Read.

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So, I have a Persona 5 recommendation to throw in: A Year To Fill An Empty Home - Chapter 1 - Turandot (LostOzian) - Persona 5 [Archive of Our Own]

"A Year to Fill an Empty Home" by Turandot.

Pros: it's nice and brisk at about 31K words over 10 chapters, but dense enough to feel complete. The character development of the P5!Protagonist's parents is believable, complete with their own "social links". The catharsis at the end is worth the whole journey. Essentially, Turandot wrote this whole story as a challenge to make the protagonist's parents sympathetic, since the overwhelming consensus characterization is that Akira/Ren's parents are the devil incarnate.

Cons: Honestly, I wish it had been longer.
 
forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest) Original - Fantasy

The in progress royal road rewrite of this quest can be found here The biting chill of autumn...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Forge of Destiny is the Xianxia story about a street rat named Ling Qi who has joined argent sect where she makes friends, enemies and learns to cultivate.

I like this story/quest mostly because rather than following or subverting Xianxia tropes it deepens and worldbuilds them to make them make sense. And while world building is one of the strongest parts of the story characters also feel alive and cultivation is made fun.

Since the first book of this which covers MC's first year in the sect is done I would like to rec it here. IF you are looking for Xianxia story you won't find any better than this.
 
Tasoli said:
forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest) Original - Fantasy

The in progress royal road rewrite of this quest can be found here The biting chill of autumn...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Forge of Destiny is the Xianxia story about a street rat named Ling Qi who has joined argent sect where she makes friends, enemies and learns to cultivate.

I like this story/quest mostly because rather than following or subverting Xianxia tropes it deepens and worldbuilds them to make them make sense. And while world building is one of the strongest parts of the story characters also feel alive and cultivation is made fun.

Since the first book of this which covers MC's first year in the sect is done I would like to rec it here. IF you are looking for Xianxia story you won't find any better than this.
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Prior rec. Use the thread search tool on the title at a minimum, please.
TheUnicorn said:
With the thread reopened here's a completed quest that I think fits on the list Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest) Original - Fantasy
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Also has a derec:
Erebeal said:
I love the quest, but I'm not sure one could call it one of the best fics ever. While it has great characters and moments, its pacing and ability to hold arcs together well is substantially hindered by the quest structure and mechanics. The old "there are a bunch of things that voters have voted to do in this 'turn' and need to be shown in writing" problem that such quests tend to fall into is absolutely prevalent here, and this kind of simulationism reduces the smoothness of the narrative. We might also note elements such as the way we were allowed to largely fail to engage with the world and just cultivate our way to security are significant narrative flaws, with the Renshu "arc" in particular suffering (it is being rewritten and is much better in the RoyalRoad version, but that isn't complete). The entire back 20% of the quest from ~weeks 40 to 50 has very little happen and the pacing slows to a crawl.

Overall, many have argued it's one of the best Xianxia out there, and is one of the best quests on SV. I would absolutely recommend it to people who are interested in those things. But I wouldn't say it's tight enough and edited enough to be enshrined here.
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As I agree with Erebeal on the points raised, I will be throwing a derec on the pile.
 
I would be hesitant about rec on Forge of Destiny for the exact reasons Erebeal describes, but the edited version in royalroad has long since(near a year ago) finished the first volume and even the quest one with all its issues from that format is far better than BoC which got in.

So count me a rec for it.
 
tbf, there is a challenge here with quests which is that they aren't really the same as fics. There are a lot of structural issues they can suffer from which are problematic for a fic, but also make them better as a quest. Whether or not they should be evaluated in the same way is an open question - though that could also just be an argument for a different thread.
 
Honestly love Canary by Cloud Nine and Three Quarters on AO3...

Its well written and creative and I've reread which I never do...
 
Ultra Sonic 007 said:
So, I have a Persona 5 recommendation to throw in: A Year To Fill An Empty Home - Chapter 1 - Turandot (LostOzian) - Persona 5 [Archive of Our Own]

"A Year to Fill an Empty Home" by Turandot.

Pros: it's nice and brisk at about 31K words over 10 chapters, but dense enough to feel complete. The character development of the P5!Protagonist's parents is believable, complete with their own "social links". The catharsis at the end is worth the whole journey. Essentially, Turandot wrote this whole story as a challenge to make the protagonist's parents sympathetic, since the overwhelming consensus characterization is that Akira/Ren's parents are the devil incarnate.

Cons: Honestly, I wish it had been longer.
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I'll add a rec for this fic; I really enjoyed seeing the parents develop over the course of the fic, and the little ways in which the Phantom Thieves' actions rippled out and affected even people distant from the action.
 
AncientPhoenix said:
love Canary by Cloud Nine and Three Quarters on AO3...
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Midoriya Izuku is Quirkless. Well, he thought was. That was until he opened his mouth to sing.
There is more power in Midoriya's singing than he could have ever dreamed of - a power truly worthy of a hero. But will he ever have the confidence to spread his wings and soar?

Follow Canary on his journey to find his voice and become the hero he was always meant to be.

____

I thought, hey you know what would be really hard to write? A story where the super power is singing - so I did it - a story mainly about learning to have confidence in yourself and those around you
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I haven't actually started reading Canary yet, but is it against the thread rules to derec a fic for excessive tagging? Just out of curiousity, no relation to the first thing I see being a massive wall of unecessary tags.
 
Tentative Halo rec: Consequences of Revelation by Aratech/Red Mage 04
forums.spacebattles.com

Consequences of Revelation, A Halo-4 Story. To threadmark

Hi everyone. Nothing much here, just a little side-story I've written up over the past week or...
forums.spacebattles.com forums.spacebattles.com

Summary: By the request of Captain Lasky, the Master Chief is posted to the UNSC Infinity to train the SPARTAN-IVs. When he uncovers the truth of the Requiem incident and the events leading to Doctor Halsey's capture, he and Blue Team are resolved to bring ONI and his former sister to heel.

EDITED
 
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Erebeal said:
tbf, there is a challenge here with quests which is that they aren't really the same as fics. There are a lot of structural issues they can suffer from which are problematic for a fic, but also make them better as a quest. Whether or not they should be evaluated in the same way is an open question - though that could also just be an argument for a different thread.
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There's also a lot of quests that can be fun to participate in, but harder to read after the fact. Taking FoD as an example, even(/especially?) the edited(?) Royal Road version, often things described in a vote don't get explicitly described again in text. So someone needs to track between the chapters and votes to work out what things are. FoD has at least one mission the MC goes on never properly described until she's in the process of finishing it, but it's referred to like it's something she's been seeing for weeks and very familiar with. Similarly, many of her abilities don't actually get a proper description in the text itself, likely because what they do was spelled out in a vote at some point. It's maybe mentioned she learns something (but not always, and given similar names not always clearly), but that often happens after the fact and the specifics aren't gone into in any detail.

And all of those issues are things I've seen in other quests, sometimes even in the proper quest-thread where it should be less of a problem.
 
Great Greedy Guts said:
There's also a lot of quests that can be fun to participate in, but harder to read after the fact. Taking FoD as an example, even(/especially?) the edited(?) Royal Road version, often things described in a vote don't get explicitly described again in text.
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Thats actually one of the things I really appreciated with the AO3 version of Number None (iirc): they actually included the vote results, so you could see what decisions were being made. I wish more quests did that, even while they're still on the forum.
 
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Mazeka said:
Tentative Halo rec: Consequences of Revelation by Aratech/Red Mage 04
forums.spacebattles.com

Consequences of Revelation, A Halo-4 Story. To threadmark

Hi everyone. Nothing much here, just a little side-story I've written up over the past week or...
forums.spacebattles.com forums.spacebattles.com

Summary: By the request of Captain Lasky, the Master Chief is posted to the UNSC Infinity to train the SPARTAN-IVs. When he uncovers the truth of the Requiem incident and the events leading to Doctor Halsey's capture, he and Blue Team are resolved to bring ONI and his former sister to heel.

EDITED
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I'm going to have to derec this. It's... okay, but not one of the best fics I've ever read. The plot feels disjointed and unconnected, like the author can't decide whether it's about fixing the Spartan 4s(and also giving them a large idiot ball in the process) or invading ONI, and so it spends half of its time on both without satisfactorily doing either. Master Chief also feels quite out of character- almost choking Palmer is very much not within his normal character, imo, and his general voice just does not fit what we see in game and in lore.
 
Tasoli said:
Shoul we create best quests thread. I feel like there would be an interest.
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You're free to make a thread about great/the best quests, but if it's meant for the same purposes as this thread, why would you? (unless you want unfinished ones in your list)
There's already quests in this list, for example Now You Feel Like Number None under Bleach.
 
Firedon said:
You're free to make a thread about great/the best quests, but if it's meant for the same purposes as this thread, why would you? (unless you want unfinished ones in your list)
There's already quests in this list, for example Now You Feel Like Number None under Bleach.
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I'd think a 'best quests' thread would make allowances for the quest format instead of judging them with other fiction generally (which I do think is the correct approach for this thread).
 
I'm going to recommend pride is not the word I'm looking for by Tossawary. It's a The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System fic with some of the best OCs that I have ever seen and heartwarming developments.
A story that stayed cohesively whole and entertaining during its run.

Here's the summary:
"Shang Qinghua goes to take a self-indulgent peek at his baby protagonist son and gets a kick to the shrivelled heart for his troubles. He gave up on changing the story years ago! Yet he finds himself helping his protagonist son's adoptive mother anyway. Just this one change won't matter too much, right?

One little change leads to more. Shang Qinghua never meant to care, but he becomes invested in making sure that his new family survives the looming plot. With the changes to the world cascading around him, with his position as a traitor pulling him between his sect and a certain ice demon, and with the protagonist growing up so quickly, how is one displaced author meant to ensure that everything turns out all right?

A Pre-Canon to Canon Divergence story."
 
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I enjoyed PINTWILF, but derec due to torturous prose. I can't tell if the author is trying to duplicate that "Badly Translated Chinese Web Novel" feel or if they're actually writing originally in another language and then converting it to English for AO3, but it's given me a headache reading it.

Otherwise, it's a decent if not overly exceptional little self-indulgence.
 
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