Satsuma @Satsuma@cat.family

#DecRecs: I mentioned the other day looking forward to the day when fics set on twitter could be recced as charmingly vintage period pieces so! time to test that by finding out if we've all been off LJ for long enough for that to count as charmingly vintage! this fic was written in 2011 for the kinkme-merlin comm. It's an AU where the characters of BBC Merlin are in the Starz Camelot fandom and is both a loving tribute to internet friendships/romance and a by my memory (admittedly not necessarily reliable, satsuma was a tiny fandom baby in 2011) pretty accurate representation of what LJ fandom was like at the time. Absolutely no knowledge of BBC Merlin necessary

Pairing Pendragon/Merlin (~24,500 words) by Anon
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: BBC Merlin (2008-2012)
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Arthur/Merlin
Additional tags: metatextuality, secret identities, fans & fandom
Summary:

Arthur is a BNF and Merlin is his prized beta

Also to make up for missing yesterday if you want a lighter (tho no less earnest) fic, try the Dwarf Queen. political marriages! relationships based on mutual respect! some highly plausible worldbuilding on how dwarvish relationships traditionally work and what they'd consider romantic

The Dwarf Queen (10689 words) by SassySnowperson
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Carrot Ironfoundersson/Cheery Littlebottom
Additional Tags: Marriage Proposal, Marriage of Convenience, Politics, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Dwarf Gender Concepts, Friends to Lovers
Summary:

Carrot is named King. Of the Dwarfs.

He doesn't want to be king. His nomination is really just a nasty case of Ambition and Politics on the part of some upstart dwarfs. Still, he needs to be very careful how he handles this. Accepting the throne means war. Rejecting...probably also means war.

Help comes from an unexpected source when Cheery Littlebottom offers up a unique proposal. If these ambitious dwarfs want a king, then maybe they should be forced to accept a queen, as well.

~

"No, I've beat around the bush enough, I'm just going to come out and say it. You should accept the coronation, and at the same time announce that you are happy to announce a political union with the Coal Hills Mine, and you are marrying the daughter of their respected engineer, Jolly Littlebottom. Which is, um, me."

Carrot ran through that plan a few times, before he was confident he got the relevant details. "Marry…you?"

#DecRecs: one of the fun thinks about the discworld books is that
pterry would make jokes about some fantasy cliche, follow it to its logical conclusion & somehow end up doing four or five genuinely interesting social commentaries along the way. eg he decided dwarves only had one gender, dwarf, and it was just the humans applying human binary gender standards to them that lead to the assumption of all dwarves being male. which then raises the question of, well, what happens to dwarves conceptualizations of gender when they move out out of the mines & into the cities where there's people doing gender everywhere? Thus, the phenomena in the disc of dwarves deciding they're female dwarves actually, and then having to figure out what the hell that actually means. Modern Love decides to just keep going with that, through a series of OC vignettes

Modern Love (2906 words) by Penknife
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Discworld
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Character/Original Character
Additional Tags: Community: lgbtfest, Gender Issues, Queer Themes, Transgender, Podfic Available
Summary:

It's amazing how the world rarely gets less complicated.

#Ao3TagOfTheDay This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender

#DecRecs another Star Trek fic, though a different branch of the franchise! Lunch takes two characters we know very little about in the AOS universe & fleshes them out in a nice exploration of the difficulties of cross-cultural friendships. can pretty easily be read as generic space college scifi, if you're so inclined

Lunch and Other Obscenities (9717 words) by Rheanna
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Galia & Uhura, Spock/Uhura
Additional Tags: Humor, Female Friendship, Female Protagonist, Character of Color, culture clash, Wordcount: 5.000-10.000, Women Being Awesome
Summary:

Nyota liked her roommate just fine until she met her.

also a bonus non-fic rec, if you're curious about tastings (either alcohol, tea, coffee, etc) this video where James Hoffman introduces Tom Scott to coffee is a very solid introduction to the basic approaches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo

#DecRecs: this is tagged alternate universe but its more of a different first meeting style canon divergence — everyone still has the same skillsets and life circumstances you’d expect for something set shortly pre-canon (which is to say, Eliot doesn’t have Stockholm syndrome, he’s just unexpectedly charmed by the full force of Hardison and Parker’s Hardison and Parker-ness)

If you haven’t watched Leverage, its a show about a bunch of thieves deciding to run ridiculous heists to get back at capitalists on behalf of the people screwed over by capitalism. its a little dated at this point (it ran like 2008-2012) but v fun & one takes ones very nearly canon poly triads where one can them

Lucky numbers (10745 words) by Silence89
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Leverage
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker, Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Wrong Number AU, First Meetings, Fluff, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Summary:

“You got a wrong number, so you went to the park in the middle of the night, found a guy in a pool of blood, and brought him to your apartment,” Eliot says, filling in the blanks. Maybe, he considers, he’s still hallucinating. Or just delirious.

In which Hardison can't resist a stray, Eliot has Stockholm syndrome, and Parker is Parker.

this still hasnt solved the issue of what to call the store we buy milk from lmao

#DecRecs: a slightly introspective? look at Chihiro’s life after the end of Spirited Away & how her experiences might shape the way she looks at the world. softly domestic 💛

The Rock and The River (17441 words) by Pi
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Haku | Nigihayami Kohakunushi/Ogino Chihiro
Additional Tags: Future Fic, Post-Canon, College, food service, bartending, Magic places, Parent Death
Summary:

Chihiro takes magic and bends it around herself to make a place in the world.

#DecRecs i've generally been aiming towards the 'low knowledge of canon necessary' side of things with these recs but with this one i can cheerfully assert that it's easy enough to follow without having ever seen Strange New Worlds at all because that's how i read it -- time travel, psychic bonds, and wildly divergent cultural understandings of romance make polyamory negotiations either much simpler or more complicated than they would usually be but everyone manages a charming amount of adult communication in between the usual day to day shenanigans of a starfleet ship

Look me in the eyes (50090 words) by marcicat
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Spock/T'Pring (Star Trek), Christine Chapel/Spock/T'Pring, Christine Chapel/Spock/T'Pring/James T. Kirk
Additional Tags: Crew as Family, Crew Before HQ, vulcan bonding, Family is complicated, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hemmer Lives, conversations in space
Summary:

AU. What if Christine and T’Pring had started talking after the katra-swap episode?