Makoyi's Fanfic Recs and Other Stuff

A few more covers posted.

  Cover art for "The Time Travelling Werewolf's Confused Spirit Guide" by miscellea
  Cover art for "Dead Man's Keeper" by Cheryl W
  Cover art for "Folly to be Wise" by Philomytha
  Cover art for "Detritus" by Speranza

Just one new cover because I had to work today.


Cover for "The Vast Profundity Obscure" by mistyzeo

If you put your favorite fanfics on an ereader like I do, it's nice to have cover art for them, so I've done covers for several fics today and posted 4 of them so far.

  Cover for "You Say You Want a Revolution" by Malteaser
  Cover for "Cerberus" by Crunchysunrises
Cover for "Twice in a Lifetime" by Serene_Quill

I also made covers for No Reservations: Narnia, Bent (Sherlock casefic), The Brain Thief, A Little Mental Yoga (Southland fic), and Thomas and the Society of Sentinels today.
... Wow.  I wasn't counting as I did them, but that's a lot of cover art for one day.  That would explain why my eyes are twitchy now.  Anyhow, if you want any of the as-yet-unposted covers (no promises on when I'll get around to posting them), send me a PM with your email address and the ones you're interested in and I'll send you the jpg file(s).

Title: Cerberus
Author: Crunchysunrises
Fandom: Harry Potter, Criminal Minds
Genre: Crossover, Chosen Family, Muggle POV on Magic
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner/Haley Hotchner, Hermione Granger/Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Sean Hotchner/Sirius Black
Length:Medium (22,837 words)

Author's Summary:
When Hermione Granger's parents are murdered custody goes to her mother's sister, one Haley Hotchner.

Review:
I love this fic!  The characterizations are awesome.  I love Hermione-dealing-with-trauma and Harry-coping-post-war, and especially both of them as quietly competent secret war heroes.  I also really like Hotch's point of view on Harry, Hermione, and magic and the insights he has on them from a profiler's perspective.  These two fandoms have very little in common and no compelling reason they should work as a crossover but this fic is perfect.  Sometimes in crossovers with young Harry in them, you get a crossover character who swoops in and knows just what to do to make it all better and it just flops as a story because of it, but that's not what this is.  Hotch and Hermione are really pretty equal as characters, both are really muddling through and the strong character arcs that result really make for a great story.

Cerberus (AO3)

Cover art:

Title: Folly To Be Wise
Author: Philomytha 
Fandom: Rivers of London
Genre: Pre-canon/Memories, Character Study, Case-fic
Length: Short (6,661 Words)
Note: rec'd on TVTropes, rec'd on fanlore, rec'd on fancake

Author's Summary:
Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.

Review:
There are quite a few things I love about this fic. 1) It plays with my favorite aspect of magic in the Rivers of London 'verse - the vestigia or magical character that builds up in places through history. 2) It made me realize how important his quiet competence is to Nightingale's character -- when he suddenly doesn't have it anymore, that was actually a really scary moment. and 3) The case fits so perfectly into the canon universe - I can't really say much without spoiling, but I can really see the 'villain' fitting in with what's known of the 'verse history and background characters. This fic definitely gets a great score and as many recs from me as I can make.

If you're not familiar with this canon... you really should be - it's fantastic... but otherwise, how much canon knowledge is required to understand this fic?  I'm not sure.  At the least, knowing that Nightingale is literally the only person who can teach Peter magic, who can protect Peter until he gains mastery, and who has the will and the knowledge to solve magical crimes in London is important.  Also, you have to know what "Ettersberg" means in this canon: the town of Ettersberg [aka Buchenwald] was the site of a battle in WWII that Nightingale and most British wizards fought in and almost all of them were killed there.  Besides that battle, various other means of mass death in WWII and the Soviet Empire whittled away at and ultimately finished off a significant majority of Europe's other magic users and scattered the rest.  To Nightingale and his few remaining contemporaries, all of whom are understandably haunted by that loss and Ettersberg in particular, it almost seems like they're living in a post-apocalyptic world.  If there's anything else that didn't make sense, feel free to ask (or read the books!  They're very good.)

Folly To Be Wise (on AO3)

Cover art:

Title:  No Reservations: Narnia
Author: Edonohana 
Fandom: Narnia, No Reservations, RPF
Genre:  General, Crossover, Meta
Length: Short (Words: 6,228)
note: rec'd on fancake

Author's Summary:
I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table.

Review:
Anthony Bourdain meets Reepicheep!  I can't believe I haven't rec'd this one yet.  It sounds so crack-y but it's not.  It's well done as a story and it actually has something kind of profound to say.  This story is about a real travel show going to a perfect place but it's not quite what you might expect.  Because what they find isn't a predictably Narnia-esque discovery about goodness and faith as beauty (which would never work with a No Reservations crossover).  But nor is it, as in many deconstructions of perfection, that it's a place where surface perfection hides an ugly truth. 

They find, as so often happens in No Reservations, that traveling somewhere fantastic is seldom everything you'd imagined, but that doesn't make it any less perfect or less beautiful and that encountering new cultures is a journey of self-discovery but a relativistic one with meaningful uncertainty and bigger questions rather than the obvious answers of a life lived unchallenged.  And when it comes to Narnia specifically, they find that there is a strange power to perfect even if its not what they imagined perfect would be.  And in a weird way, I think that combination really speaks about a kind of faith independent of religion.  It's a faith that CS Lewis probably wouldn't recognize as such, but still.  And it does it without talking about faith at all, but by talking about Narnia.

And I'm not sure that message could have been told quite so well or quite so profoundly (and especially not so efficiently - this is less than 7k words, remember) without using Narnia's allegory and No Reservations' template of (paradoxically) ambiguous discovery as a medium - which I think represents the pinnacle of fanfiction.

Now, I don't actually know if Edonohana set out to write a profound commentary on faith and the clash of imagined ideals and reality.  It's entirely possible they just thought it would make for a funny story - and it is funny and it has beautiful descriptions for people and places and food (that amazingly manage to stand in pretty effectively for the missing visuals of No Reservations) too.  The Anthony Bourdain voice is incredible and just perfectly nails both the snarky irreverence and the relativistic acceptance of canon... which is a little trippy beside the allegorical fantasy world of Narnia.  Maybe I'm reading into this things that aren't actually there.  But that in itself sounds a lot like a line out of No Reservations, so maybe there's something to it after all.

No Reservations: Narnia (on AO3)
podfic available (on AO3) - though frankly the author got Anthony Bourdain's voice so spot on that I really recommend reading it because part of the magic of the crossover is how easy it is to hear him narrate it

Now with cover art:

Title: When Worlds Collide
Author: elfinblue 
Fandom: Supernatural, NCIS
Genre: General, Crossover, law enforcement investigates the Winchesters
Length: Very Long (Words: 113,980)
Admin Note: rec'd on fancake, rec'd on TV Tropes

Summary:
When a kidnapped Tony DiNozzo is rescued by legendary - and supposedly dead - serial killers Dean and Sam Winchester, the NCIS team takes over the Winchester investigation. What they find is a file filled with contradictions and impossibilities. This is an attempt to cross these shows but keep both in canon. No pairings.

Review:
An epic, detailed, well-plotted law enforcement crossover that's so incredibly good, and so much better than any of the ones I've rec'd before, that it may well have ruined the whole subgenre for me because nothing could possibly compare.  It's seriously fantastic.  Both fandoms are well represented, it's well-written, and the plot is very well done.  NCIS manages to clear the Winchesters, even though they do so while quite convinced that Sam and Dean are delusional for most of the story, and in turn, Sam and Dean manage to save the NCIS team's lives more than once and foil Crowley's dastardly plans.  I especially love how Ziva's faith allows her to seriously consider what Sam and Dean are saying even when the team is convinced they're just crazy and this leads her to break the case for real by discovering the hidden community of hunters.  Don't worry though, she doesn't bring the law crashing down on them, in part because she believes and in part because the hunters aren't stupid and have lots of practice at evading interference.  Also, there are some very, very funny lines throughout - might want to avoid drinking anything while reading this one due to the frequent unexpected laughing this fic will cause.

When Worlds Collide (on ff.net)

Cover art:

Title: The Brain Thief
Author: hollimichele 
Fandom: Discworld
Genre: Case!fic/Mystery, Supernatural, Next-gen
Length: Medium (Words: 31,591)
Admin Note: rec'd on fancake

Author's Summary:
Young Sam grows up, meets a girl, cracks a case, and tells a lie. Not necessarily in that order.

Review:
Let's face it: no one can quite match the style of Terry Pratchett.  Fortunately, this fic is close enough you can get your Discworld fix in between new novels.  Young Sam, son of Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh etc, etc. is a new corporal in the Watch, proceeding through the streets of Morpork on his usual beat when he spots a running man and gives chase.  Things are looking up for Sam.  Soon, he meets a lovely girl and catches his first big case.  But Ankh-Morpork is in a difficult time, facing the looming uncertainty of Life After Vetinari (the patrician is old and his health is failing).  As a next-gen fic, most of the cast is original characterizations and I think the case is compelling. I did find the ending a tad predictable, but its so well-written that I whole-heartedly recommend this fic to all Discworld fans anyways.

The Brain Thief (on AO3)
Podfic for The Brain Thief (on AO3)

I made a cover for this fic: