schneefink

I got two(!!) absolutely fantastic Yuletide fics this year! They both require some level of canon knowledge, so to increase the chances of more people reading them and the authors getting the appreciation they deserve, I'll add a brief overview of the necessary canon knowledge here. (Feedback on if it's enough or not would be helpful.)

Three Times Morgan Acted on His Feelings (And One Time He Didn't) by misura
Fandom: Bloodrights - N. Lee Wood
2.3k, gen, post-canon
Summary: Antonya, Kerrick and Morgan face the big and small challenges of the new future.
Why I love it, short version: The character voices and relationships are perfect and this is exactly what I wanted from post-canon fic for this book.
Necessary basic canon knowledge: ( Bloodrights )

Innocent by thearrogantemu
Fandom: The Inheritance Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin
7.3k, gen, canon-divergent AU
Summary: Deka fell silent, and I saw him trace the sigil on his forehead with a finger in an almost unconscious gesture.
“That made her angry,” he said after a long moment, “and so… She wanted to hurt me like I’d hurt her. She asked our mother to have my mark filled in before I was sent away. So she would have nothing to fear from me, she said.”
I let out a long sigh. Was this the girl who’d refused to choose between her innocence and her brother’s life? Oh well.
“It was nice while it lasted,” I said aloud.
Why I love it, short version: It's such a cool AU and so well done, and the character voices and relationships and especially complicated family and revenge and loyalty etc. feelings are fantastic.
Necessary basic canon knowledge: ( The Inheritance Trilogy )

Hi! Thank you very much for writing a story for me! :D

Things I like:
* I love friendship/team/found family fic. Characters who grow to like each other, trust each other, and eventually would do many things for each other, yes please. Especially when they started out enemies/opponents/are in slightly different positions/places/there are obstacles etc.
* I'm a big fan of loyalty, betrayal, sacrifice, and related tropes.
* Canon-divergent AUs and time travel stories are great.
* Hurt/comfort in its many variations is wonderful. The focus can be on either but I like it best if there's a little bit of both.
* Some other things I love: competent characters, plot, happy (or at least optimistic) endings, hugs…

Things I don't like for Yuletide:
* Stories with a very dark or hopeless ending
* Explicit rape or abuse
* Character bashing
* Stories focusing on harlequin romance tropes, or PWP without character development
* Different world AUs, like coffeeshop AUs or Harry Potter fusions. I love the canon worlds of all these fandoms so I'd prefer to read fic taking place there.

Have fun! The prompts below are guidelines, I hope they help you think of ideas.


( Inheritance Trilogy – N. K. Jemisin )


( Bloodrights – N. Lee Wood )


( Echoes of the Fall – Adrian Tchaikovsky )

Soo it's past midnight and I haven't eaten anything except chocolate muffins today or done anything else productive, which is bad, but I did write almost 2k of an Inheritance Trilogy Harry Potter AU, which... happened? First chapter of probably several. Idk. I thought about a dozen times that Deka Arameri is such a Slytherin, and somehow Hermione was watching him, and then this happened.

Kingdom of Magic (Inheritance Trilogy/Harry Potter)
Hogwarts AU, WIP
Summary: The Arameri have always been in Slytherin. Nobody knows what precisely their ambitions are.

ETA: After a 1am dinner I feel very silly about this whole day. Ah well. I just need to write ~6 job applications in the next four days, it'll be fine somehow.

I read the first two books of the Inheritance Trilogy, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, several years ago, but I didn't like book 2 that much and then somehow never got around to getting book 3. Now I finally have, and I really need to get a copy for my bookshelf. (I have a paperback version of the American version for book 3, but I want the UK version to go together with books 1&2.)

So many tropes I love! God&mortal relationships, complicated parent&child and sibling relationships both among gods (and therefore spanning millennia) and humans, betrayals and their aftermath… and many queer characters, and a society/political system on the verge of collapse. (That last bit could really have used some more fleshing out to be really effective, and so could a few of the characters, but what was there was good enough and I really enjoyed what my imagination filled the blanks with.) The ending was fittingly epic.

It's a book written from a god's PoV, but a god who is becoming/has become mortal, which seems to be a surprisingly popular approach – right now I can only recall the Apollo books by Rick Riordan, but I'm sure I've heard of several other stories with that premise. Writing gods is always a challenge: how do you convey that they are not human? Depending on how different from humans and with how many abilities/different perspectives these gods are in a world, that presents different problems.
Sieh is millennia old, to start with; he has known and experienced and done so much but he's still a child, because that's his nature. And godlings have to act according to their nature (childhood in his case, supplemented by games and trickery and mischief), but staying a child through all of that is difficult; a lot of this book is him struggling with that, not always consciously, and he's influenced by his mortal body as well. Though mostly his emotions seem to be quite human – quite cruel at times, even; he's been through a couple of thousand years of trauma but probably even before then, somewhat.
( Spoilers )

Now a reread of books 1 and 2, and then the novella and short stories.