Yuletide Recs
Dec. 27th, 2014 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mari4212Mostly from the first half of the alphabet through to P, with a few Madness recs because all of my treats were things of beauty:
Black Ships:
Recompense for a Debt Owed
Jo Graham is one of my favorite authors, and I love how she left Black Ships with the hints of this next step. Lavinia’s and Gull’s discussion is sparse and nuanced, with more left implied than outright stated, just like the language of the book. This is the discussion of two adult, confident women who are letting wisdom and compassion outweigh pride. These women build new hope out of ruins, rather than despair.
Cyclical
Part of the ethos of Black Ships and the other Numinous World books is that we carry the torch and pass it on. This is the start of the passage between Gull and Kianna, and it very deliberately echoes Gull's experiences with Pythia. Like the other Black Ships story, it really echoes Jo Graham's language throughout the book.
The Muppets
there’s not a word yet (for old friends who’ve just met)
A Beaker’s eye view of The Muppet Show. There’s plenty of random silliness, along with Beaker’s fear for his life, his hair, and his sanity at the beginning, but there’s so much more. This story is a love letter to Muppets and to the found family therein. Fozzie in particular gets some real insight, and the deepening friendship and understanding between Bunsen and Beaker is flat out beautiful to behold.
Mulan
The Guardians
It’s next gen fic, but next gen that doesn’t feel the need to rehash the original movie or create carbon clones to explore the same issue that the parent’s faced. Chunhua is her own self, with aspects of her mother and father, and the plot explores an interesting plothole from the first movie. It is a quiet and reflective fic, but deeply satisfying. Mulan and Shang are present and fully themselves, but they definitely are not the stars of the story and it’s okay.
The Pretender:
Simple Gifts
This is longfic for Yuletide. Moreover, it is casefic that stays totally in character. Jarod is out to solve a problem and confront a bad guy, Miss Parker is out to catch him. But as always with Pretender, there’s layers and layers of interaction and neither one of their goals is as simple as it seems.
Also, there’s a bucketload of OCs, as one would expect in a casefic, and all of them are well done and used correctly.
Protector of the Small
the ghosts before I met you
This is a poem of a fic, interlacing and exploring aspects of Keladry’s identity as it relates to Yamani culture. Pay attention to the scene changes, this is not the most linearly arranged story and it’s the better for it.
Prince of Egypt
The Last Challenge
This was written for me and gave me exactly what I wanted: Great Rameses characterization and a real exploration of what it meant for him to be brothers with Moses. I love the bit about him wanting to shove Moses back into a basket, that’s classic little kid logic.
Brother my heart is an open wound
There was a second Rameses pov fic, and it’s also absolutely fantastic. This is slightly more stylized, and it works beautifully. This really gets at the level of abandonment and pain that Rameses felt with Moses’s flight and return as a stranger.
Yuletide Madness
I haven't explored Madness aside from my own gifts, but then again I'm only partway through the main Yuletide as is. Nevertheless, I got three fantastic gifts that I wanted to highlight:
The Path Not Taken
I mentioned in my letter that I would love fix-it for Prince of Egypt, even knowing how the Biblical story had to go. Author-anon shared my feelings of absolute brokenness about the end of the movie and made an amazing short story of how Moses and Rameses would start to repair their world.
Another Dragon Boy
Pre-canon for Dragon Jousters, it explores what made Ari want a new dragon boy so much, why he was primed to see the potential in Vetch. Moreover, author-anon is good at expressing Ari's isolation and differences with everyone he is supposed to consider peers, how that ran through him as well and shaped his decisions with Vetch.
Return
This is a shining example of what the drabble form can do. It captures the exact moment and the feelings therein without distractions. In this case: Prince of Egypt the moment Rameses sees Moses again.
Black Ships:
Recompense for a Debt Owed
Jo Graham is one of my favorite authors, and I love how she left Black Ships with the hints of this next step. Lavinia’s and Gull’s discussion is sparse and nuanced, with more left implied than outright stated, just like the language of the book. This is the discussion of two adult, confident women who are letting wisdom and compassion outweigh pride. These women build new hope out of ruins, rather than despair.
Cyclical
Part of the ethos of Black Ships and the other Numinous World books is that we carry the torch and pass it on. This is the start of the passage between Gull and Kianna, and it very deliberately echoes Gull's experiences with Pythia. Like the other Black Ships story, it really echoes Jo Graham's language throughout the book.
The Muppets
there’s not a word yet (for old friends who’ve just met)
A Beaker’s eye view of The Muppet Show. There’s plenty of random silliness, along with Beaker’s fear for his life, his hair, and his sanity at the beginning, but there’s so much more. This story is a love letter to Muppets and to the found family therein. Fozzie in particular gets some real insight, and the deepening friendship and understanding between Bunsen and Beaker is flat out beautiful to behold.
Mulan
The Guardians
It’s next gen fic, but next gen that doesn’t feel the need to rehash the original movie or create carbon clones to explore the same issue that the parent’s faced. Chunhua is her own self, with aspects of her mother and father, and the plot explores an interesting plothole from the first movie. It is a quiet and reflective fic, but deeply satisfying. Mulan and Shang are present and fully themselves, but they definitely are not the stars of the story and it’s okay.
The Pretender:
Simple Gifts
This is longfic for Yuletide. Moreover, it is casefic that stays totally in character. Jarod is out to solve a problem and confront a bad guy, Miss Parker is out to catch him. But as always with Pretender, there’s layers and layers of interaction and neither one of their goals is as simple as it seems.
Also, there’s a bucketload of OCs, as one would expect in a casefic, and all of them are well done and used correctly.
Protector of the Small
the ghosts before I met you
This is a poem of a fic, interlacing and exploring aspects of Keladry’s identity as it relates to Yamani culture. Pay attention to the scene changes, this is not the most linearly arranged story and it’s the better for it.
Prince of Egypt
The Last Challenge
This was written for me and gave me exactly what I wanted: Great Rameses characterization and a real exploration of what it meant for him to be brothers with Moses. I love the bit about him wanting to shove Moses back into a basket, that’s classic little kid logic.
Brother my heart is an open wound
There was a second Rameses pov fic, and it’s also absolutely fantastic. This is slightly more stylized, and it works beautifully. This really gets at the level of abandonment and pain that Rameses felt with Moses’s flight and return as a stranger.
Yuletide Madness
I haven't explored Madness aside from my own gifts, but then again I'm only partway through the main Yuletide as is. Nevertheless, I got three fantastic gifts that I wanted to highlight:
The Path Not Taken
I mentioned in my letter that I would love fix-it for Prince of Egypt, even knowing how the Biblical story had to go. Author-anon shared my feelings of absolute brokenness about the end of the movie and made an amazing short story of how Moses and Rameses would start to repair their world.
Another Dragon Boy
Pre-canon for Dragon Jousters, it explores what made Ari want a new dragon boy so much, why he was primed to see the potential in Vetch. Moreover, author-anon is good at expressing Ari's isolation and differences with everyone he is supposed to consider peers, how that ran through him as well and shaped his decisions with Vetch.
Return
This is a shining example of what the drabble form can do. It captures the exact moment and the feelings therein without distractions. In this case: Prince of Egypt the moment Rameses sees Moses again.