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anghraineI've been happily chewing on TOS for the last, uh, several months over on Tumblr (still laughing at myself that all I needed to finally get fannishly obsessed with ST was watch the first season ever; even the first few episodes aired at all were really enough to ensnare me, though it was actually the distinctly flawed S3 that made me completely obsessed, while J and I are currently at S6 of TNG in our ST marathon of ultimate destiny, and it's been a ... messier experience, let's say #justicefordeannatroi). But I've wanted to post more over here and I was lured by a meme from shadaras (and now, several others on my f-list!).
Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? Use one fic per line. ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'A' and 'T.' Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count!
My rough rules for myself: fics posted (even as WIPs) got precedence over fics that I've titled but have only posted in scraps or not at all, and fics that represent some particular significance for me took precedence over those that might be better or more complete but not as prominent in my own mind (if none fit that, I generally favored complete over WIPs).
A - Anomaly
We won't talk about how long this meme has been in my drafts, lol, so I think most people I'd ordinarily tag have already done it. If you've gotten far enough to see this and haven't done it, though, consider yourself tagged!
shadaras (and now, several others on my f-list!).Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? Use one fic per line. ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'A' and 'T.' Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count!
My rough rules for myself: fics posted (even as WIPs) got precedence over fics that I've titled but have only posted in scraps or not at all, and fics that represent some particular significance for me took precedence over those that might be better or more complete but not as prominent in my own mind (if none fit that, I generally favored complete over WIPs).
A - Anomaly
- Austen: canon-compliant Darcy/Elizabeth fic about Darcy being demi/grey-ace (complete).
- Legend of Korra: AU in which the old theory that Amon/Noatak and Tarrlok were actually working together in S1 is (or rather, will be) true, but their pre-Amon backstory is the same; the fic is a one-shot about how that alliance could have been struck pre-S1 (complete).
- The Borgias: Modern USA AU in which they're not a crime family, just cutthroats in the publishing industry; the broader AU is abandoned, but I did finish the one-shot dealing with the fracturing relationship between wannabe novelist failson Juan Borgia and his overachieving twin sister Lucrezia (complete; there are some hints at the canon Cesare/Lucrezia incest, but it's mostly focused on Juan and Lucrezia).
- Star Wars: fic about relationships among the Skywalker women, though it only got to Shmi Skywalker and Beru Whitesun (WIP).
- Legend of Korra: AU ft. f!Tarrlok, but centered on Noatak/Amon and his relationship with his sister (the specific fic linked, dealing with their dynamic until Noatak's escape, is complete, but the series it belongs to is a WIP).
- Austen: m!Elizabeth/f!Darcy re-telling of P&P (complete).
- Tolkien (book only): Eldarion/OFC one-shot and canon-compliant sequel to LOTR, focused on the young Eldarion and his politically-motivated, but affectionate-turned-loving marriage to Faramir and Éowyn's younger daughter, who dies of old age long before he becomes king (complete; features an assortment of Fourth Age headcanons).
- Austen: brief, canon-compliant one-shot/P&P sequel about the first baby steps in the relationship between Elizabeth and Georgiana as sisters-in-law (complete).
- Star Wars: Rogue One AU in which Jyn and Cassian live and are together, but centered on the relationship between Leia and Cassian and the undercurrents involving their more or less shared language; it was an attempt to take the "Space Spanish" trope that at the time was applied without differentiation to almost any character played by/adjacent to a Latine actor, and make it fraught and messy rather than blandly eroticized and often rather racist (complete, one-shot within a wider WIP universe).
- Star Wars: the third of the main Lucy Skywalker fics (my long f!Luke AU), but the first to explore drastic long-term consequences; I felt it was pretty evident that Darth Vader's daughter would be a considerably harder sell than a son, given ... uh, everything about the OT Empire, so the immediate test from ESB is less urgent for Vader than capturing and turning her to the Dark Side before Palpatine writes her off altogether, and this is the fic about Lucy's captivity as experienced both by Lucy and Anakin, and the effects on both and their relationship (the fic is complete, the series is not).
- Legend of Korra: an Amorra (Amon/Korra) side-story in an AU in which Korra is the Avatar in the iceberg, but she's broken out by siblings Tarrlok and Noatak decades "late" (compared to Aang). Azula is Fire Lord at this point in addition to many other changes, but this one is just a small side-story about Korra and Noatak's romance after all three flee Yakone into the blizzard (this one-shot is complete, the larger fic very much is not).
- Austen: a P&P femslash Darcy/Elizabeth AU that is not the direct re-telling of P&P that First Impressions was going for, but considering what I think are likely consequences of the change in their actual social context, with the RL homophobia and gender roles etc etc (it also includes racebending, insofar as it doesn't assume the Fitzwilliams must be 100% white). Catherine Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet have barely met in person, though Elizabeth has already gotten an earful from Wickham, but it follows the initial changes following from Darcy's absence in Hertfordshire as well as their romance (WIP I'll actually continue).
- Star Wars: AU of Revenge of the Sith in which Anakin dies in the Battle of Coruscant, but persists as a Force-ghost still very much prone to attachment (as complete as it will ever be, if fairly ephemeral).
- Austen: technically canon-compliant prequel in which the common fanon that Darcy's father had an illegitimate child near in age to him is true, but the child is not Wickham; it's Mrs Gardiner, here an oblivious young girl visiting Pemberley (as she mentioned in P&P that she had previously) and having a chance encounter she doesn't fully understand with Mr Darcy's glamorous half-sister, who is fully aware of the connection (complete).
- Legend of Korra: the sequel to The Edge of Darkness, the f!Tarrlok & Noatak sibling drama fic above. Like the first, it focuses heavily on Noatak, now shifting into the Amon identity and projecting his sibling baggage onto his non-bending "brothers and sisters" he recruits as followers, only to be confronted with the reality of his actual sister he abandoned to their abusive father's mercies years earlier when she arrives in Republic City as the new, ambitious councilwoman representing the Northern Water Tribe (WIP that I'll definitely return to, halted after Amon captures Taraka and strips her bending).
- Star Wars: a Rogue One Jyn/Cassian AU in which Jyn, Cassian, and Bodhi escape Scarif (+ Jyn seizing Kaytoo's head) in their Imperial shuttle, with Cassian still very severely injured, only for the shuttle to get caught in the Death Star's tractor beam. Jyn exploits the Imperial paraphernalia and an established false identity of Cassian's as an Imperial captain, as well as his very real injuries, to pass herself off as an Imperial aide-de-camp desperately trying to escape the Rebel attack with the only people she managed to save. She's resourceful enough to squeak them past security in that guise, and Bodhi enough to disappear into the influx of stormtroopers brought onboard, while Cassian recovers enough to step into his own role, forcing all three to scrape by undercover on the Death Star and infiltrate actual Imperial social groups as the ANH plot plays out, including the destruction of Alderaan (WIP, though a long one with some major points of tension resolved; they've just reached Yavin 4).
- Star Wars: an old ROTJ sequel that aggressively rejects everything outside the PT and OT, particularly what I've always found the strange, underbaked treatment of Force Ghost!Anakin and Luke as an embodiment of PT Jedi dogmatism, but ended up having some odd similarities to the sequels—it ostensibly centers on Han and Leia's younger daughter, Padmé Organa, a steady young Jedi on good terms with her entire family, but the real ghost haunting the story is her difficult, brilliant, restless older sister Lyra, who has become increasingly more of a merciless, self-righteous zealot as a Jedi while also increasingly fixated on her Skywalker ancestry, alarming not only Padmé, her parents, and Luke, but also Anakin himself (complete in itself, though the larger universe it's part of never got anywhere near as filled out as I'd envisioned: news at eleven).
- Star Wars: also very old, an AU of Return of the Jedi inspired by some discarded earlier concepts like Luke's twin being a new character, a more gradual redemption for Anakin entangled with his evolving relationship with Luke, and Leia gathering and taking up leadership of the remaining Alderaanians, but also weaving in material from the PT even though it's of course drastically AU: Padmé still exists as Leia's mother, for instance, and her death was still pivotal for Anakin, but they were platonic best friends and she was reciprocally in love with Bail Organa (complete in an unresolved sense: I had planned a sequel that I never wrote and had some side fics I never finished, and a lot of the ideas for it actually got funneled into the Lucyverse later, but Revenge itself was meant to work on its own even if it doesn't wrap up the OT plot).
- Matchmaker: a canon-compliant one-shot about the initial friendship between Francesca Haughston (then Lady Francesca Fitzalan), her brother Dominic, and their much more prestigious and wealthy neighbor, Sinclair Lilles, the future Duke of Rochford (the friendship is a canon detail from Candace Camp's Matchmaker series of Regency romances). I believe this may be the only fic I've written where mine remains the sole fic for the fandom; the quartet has four romances, but the real attraction is the one that develops along its strange, winding route through the whole series and its backstory, the love story of Francesca and Rochford. We meet them as two hypercompetent 30-somethings: childhood friends turned youthful sweethearts turned estranged former betrotheds turned friends still transparently deeply in love as beautiful fashionista widow Francesca Haughston, who conceals her ongoing financial straits via "gifts" she receives from the grateful parents of youths she expertly shepherds and matchmakes for (she's the matchmaker of the title), and Sinclair now the discreet, virtuous, scholarly, and immeasurably reliable Duke of Rochford. Camp, unfortunately, rarely trusts in the strength of her own characters to carry the interest of the story rather than melodrama, which unfortunately infects the quartet finale centered on them, but there's still a deeply compelling quality about their dynamic that got me interested in imagining how it all began (complete).
- Eddings: a 2.7k canon-compliant one-shot sequel to the Belgariad/Malloreon (and my sole Yuletide fic) that's essentially a guided tour through the post-Malloreon world as seen by a later Angarak scholar traveling through Maragor etc, as she looks for proof of the historicity of canon figures like Garion, Polgara, Belgarath and so on, while it becomes increasingly clear that she has a deeper agenda for seeking them out (complete).
- Star Wars: this is another Lucyverse fic, a one-shot set early in The Imperial Menace (after the destruction of the Death Star), but really all about Rogue One and how their sacrifices fit into the psychological space of this AU and into the relationship between Lucy and Leia in particular. I actually waited to see Rogue One before I decided if I was going to try and accommodate it in the Lucyverse, but it was such an ideal OT prequel for me that I promptly decided HELL YEAH and vented my RO feelings here (complete).
- Tolkien: this is a 1.8k one-shot from one of my (multiple >_>) f!Faramir AUs, the one in which the Númenórean throwbacks of LOTR are all genderbent. In this one, Míriel (Faramir) discovers Boromir's death as a follow-up to an earlier one-shot centered on Aranor's (Aragorn's) grief after finding him dying. Míriel is, of course, no warrior and wouldn't be camped at night on the Anduin or any other body of water, but I still wanted to figure out a way for the mystical vision to occur and make sense as something carried via water, so instead had the idea of her vision of Númenor's destruction ft. Tar-Míriel being the appropriately watery conduit for the vision of Boromir's death (complete).
- Star Wars: unusually, this is a Tumblr link, because I have yet to figure out how to shift the older version to the revised version on AO3, but in any case, it goes to the last section of my Jyn/Cassian femslash AU (with links to the previous ones), ft. some Baze/Chirrut and Luke/Bodhi (the premise is that the entirety of the Rogue One main cast is queer in some way, ranging from lesbian Cassia to grey-ace gay Bodhi). Unusually for a multi-chapter loving genderbent fic of mine, it's complete!
- Star Trek: this requires more explanation (issuefic of ultimate destiny!), but the asterisk is there because it's not actually posted and I've only written the earliest section (though outlined a lot), so it's very much "in the works" and I wasn't sure it quite counted for the spirit of the meme. But: it was basically inspired by how deeply annoying I find the "how could you possibly think TOS Kirk is anything but (binary) transmasc lol top surgery" Tumblr/AO3 thing, when I think binary trans man is easily the least probable trans reading of a character who we're told was, at age 13, one of nine boys/men to survive and witness a genocide; who argues onscreen that gender difference isn't actually real, but who actively leans into pretty explicitly feminine roles and makes them work where he's viscerally repulsed by comparable masculine ones (e.g., his revulsion from the role of strong masculine ideal father-figure in "Charlie X" vs manufacturing motherhood in "The Changeling," Helen's coolly unsentimental sexy dude Lothario fantasy of him in "Dagger of the Mind" as a violation of the real Kirk vs his actively sultry, calculated Lauren Bacall-type femme fatale flirtations to escape trouble in too many episodes to count); and who literally ends up in a woman's body (played by a very good actress—the only actor to really capture Shatner's Kirk), proceeding to argue while in that body and deliberately dressed and made up in femme-androgynous style (for 1969) that everything that defines him as a unique individual can be contained in that body. Despite all this and copious evidence that the 23rd-century Federation hasn't progressed as far with bigotry around gender and sexuality as the show tries to suggest it has with other bigotries, transfem Kirk is vanishingly rare in the fandom and nb!Kirk of any kind is barely more common, even via the obviously available sci-fi tropes/mechanisms. But binary defined-exclusively-by-masculinity Kirk is everywhereeeee (including among the crowd who describe anything Kirk does around gender as "butch" including declaring himself a mom but seem like they'd crumble into dust before suggesting he could be transfem for real). ANYWAY, I decided to be the change I want to see rather than just complaining, and write the "Turnabout Intruder" AU of my dreams in which Kirk and Spock (who is very much the "I am not a man" Spock) do succeed in running away hand-in-hand, Kirk is navigating being stuck in the body of his abusive ex yet also mysteriously more comfortable with it in some ways (helped by promptly dying his hair, wearing contacts, and changing his make-up to cover their trail), the Kirk-Uhura brotp is front and center, and realizing Janice-as-Kirk may well have poisoned the well at Starfleet, Spock instead manages to surreptitiously reach out to the VSA about the bodyswap machine and get Kirk sanctuary on Vulcan in the interim (the AU assumes no convenient time-out on the effect with Kirk and Janice light-years apart; instead they just get some minor though intriguing-to-the-VSA effects on their DNA). The title, of course, is a reference to the deus ex machina trope, but also to the literal bodyswap machine that serves as a deus ex machina for both Kirk's and Janice's gender treks in their different ways despite all the fuckery involved (let's just say that Janice isn't waxing their chest any time soon while Kirk is basically "I'm whatever gender gets me the Enterprise back and couldn't care less what pronouns make it happen").
- Austen: this is an epistolary side-fic to First Impressions, my m!Elizabeth/f!Darcy retelling of P&P listed above, because my earliest phase of structuring First Impressions involved just writing the letters for that universe and I'd had an idea of actually finishing all the letters happening in the background as a separate fic (though entirely consistent with it). I never actually finished them, though I had fun enough with what's there, so it's a forever unfinished hiatus piece at 3k.
- BG3: this is the f/f/f/ fic I nicknamed "the worst OT3": cleric of Mystra!Tav/f!Gale/Mystra, inspired about equally by a wise post from my friend venndaai about how every BG3 companion would be a bit better if genderbent (goth priest m!Shadowheart, dashing Blade of Frontiers f!Wyll, etc) that hit especially hard for Gale (middle-aged ambitious lady wizard nerd with the allure and talent to attract Mystra herself and all the f/f drama there, a compelling mix of real kindness and little moral fiber, and a need to chew down magic boots to keep the world from exploding? <3) + the intrinsic hilarity of cleric of Mystra/Gale + the wildly suggestive way a cleric of Mystra can talk about Mystra herself in emphatic agreement with early Gale. The title is a pun on the cleric spell "zone of truth" because all three people involved (Larissa, Gaila, Mystra) have a strong habit of lies of omission that aren't exaaaactly false, but. This is one I've talked about and posted a few scraps for, but it's still far too primordial for AO3 or anything like that, so I wasn't sure about "counting" it.
We won't talk about how long this meme has been in my drafts, lol, so I think most people I'd ordinarily tag have already done it. If you've gotten far enough to see this and haven't done it, though, consider yourself tagged!