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spn recs
I am still not caught up from that week I didn't read, but have a bunch more spn bigbang recs:
Play it all Night long (Dean/Cas, Sam/Jess) by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
janie_tangerine is definitely THE Dean/Cas of this bigbang. This is a terrific AU: Dean is a late-night radio deejay, and Cas is a regular listener who calls in one night when his life hits the nadir of despair. The two of them gradually bond. Great muscial selections in this (with links), fantastic Castiel, and a hilarious running gag with Chuck's sideline career as a gay porn writer.
Perdix's Lament (Jared/Jensen) byfrostian. Really excellent sci-fi political drama; great plotting and pacing, with high-stakes dramatic tension. Warning: Major character deaths. (Highlight for spoilers about the deaths) A lot of minor characters get killed off, but although both Jared and Jensen die, Jared dies of old age, and Jensen decides to follow him into death rather than possibly be exploited by people who want to make more living dolls. It's definitely a bittersweet ending--it made me cry-- but not shattering.
Perdix's Lament is a sequel to Three Grams, and you really need to read it to understand this story [Plot summary for Three Grams: in the future, the mineral used to allow space travel also causes infertility and birth defects, so many colonists have "dolls"--intelligent robots--as children substitutes, but the dolls come with a time limit. In the prequel Jensen is a doll raised with Jared, and Jared falls in love with him.]
Apocalypse Z (Gen, with some very very slight Dean/Cas overtones) bybaylorsr. Hilarious and engaging zombie apocalypse, starring the Winchester brothers and their sort-of-angel. My favorite part of this was the reveal of HOW the Zombie apocalypse started. I don't even really like zombie apocalypses but I loved this.
It's Never Just a Simple Salt and Burn (Gen) bymonday7112. Interesting Bobby-centered casefule, featuring the first time he met John Winchester. I wanted more wee Sam and Dean, but it's a great look at Bobby and his early perspective on John.
This Time Around (Gen) bydebbiel66. Fantastic reimagining of the Pilot and early season 1 in which John is the one to come to Stanford and get Sam because Dean has vanished. Really excellent characterizations; I especially loved all the John-Sam interactions, even when they were fighting (which was often).
Cabinet of Curiosities (Gen) bylike_a_raven. I almost didn't read this because the summary turned me off, but it turned out to be a nice gen casefile set in season 1, with a well-drawn OFC.
Bell's Pond bykelleigh (Sam/Dean). An AU spinning off mid-season 5: Dean says yes to Michael, with one caveat: Sam has to be kept safe. Sam doesn't know this, so when he wakes up mysteriously in Bell's Pond, Nebraska, his first impulse is to escape back to Dean. But he soon realizes there's no way out. This was a well-written Sam-centric piece, though later in the story it becomes a Sam/Dean romance.
Leave all your love and longing behind (Dean/Lisa). This is an interesting re-imagining of season 3 which posits that Dean decides to stay and be Ben's dad. I honestly expected to hate it, since it seemed too cruel for him to insert himself into Ben and Lisa's lives when he was going to die in months, but I actually ended up liking it a lot, partly because the romance with Lisa doesn't happen until near the end of the story. I did want a lot more post-Lazarus Rising stuff than the story had, however.
Hail Mary (Jared/Jensen) byrhythmsextion. This is an epically long (about 118,000 words) and immensely satisfying AU in which Jared the Dallas Cowboys' star quarterback and Jensen is the new--openly gay--coach. I don't even *like* football and this story completely sucked me in; it's a tremendously satisfying way to spend a day. The only reason it's at the bottom of my list is that it's a sequel to an equally long (and much less happy-ending) football AU set ten years earlier in which Jensen was still a player rather than the coach, and you really need to read the 100,000 words of Next Man Up to understand Hail Mary, so that's quite a time commitment if you haven't already read it.
Stories I had more mixed feelings about
The Family Business (mainly gen with a little Sam/Dean toward the end). I enjoy AUs in which Mary lives, and this one was different from most of them I've read in that we get to see Sam and Dean grow up. That said, I hated the ending, and I feel like to really see the effect of Mary living on Sam and Dean, we needed to see beyond where the author ended it.
Due Supernatural (Sam/Dean, though they're not related in this story) byqueenklu. I am getting really, really sick of fusions in this bigbang season--there are too many of them, and most of them simply take an episode of another show and J2-ify it without making any interesting changes whatsoever--so I almost didn't read this story, which is a Due South fusion. However, despite some similarities to the Due South pilot I actually thought the author did some interesting things adding the Supernatural mythos to the Due South universe, and Sam Winchester is FAR from a Benton Fraser clone. It also had an interesting use of Bela--and spoilers for that, because it may turn you off on first encounter (highlight to read): She isn't actually a hellhound, she's just cursed to be one, and she gets freed of the curse by the end of the story, as I thought she might, which cut down the possible misogyny of that storyline I thought, though YMMV. I think she was a wonderfully snarky hellhound, but I can see how that is problematic.
Play it all Night long (Dean/Cas, Sam/Jess) by
janie_tangerine is definitely THE Dean/Cas of this bigbang. This is a terrific AU: Dean is a late-night radio deejay, and Cas is a regular listener who calls in one night when his life hits the nadir of despair. The two of them gradually bond. Great muscial selections in this (with links), fantastic Castiel, and a hilarious running gag with Chuck's sideline career as a gay porn writer.Perdix's Lament (Jared/Jensen) by
frostian. Really excellent sci-fi political drama; great plotting and pacing, with high-stakes dramatic tension. Warning: Major character deaths. (Highlight for spoilers about the deaths) A lot of minor characters get killed off, but although both Jared and Jensen die, Jared dies of old age, and Jensen decides to follow him into death rather than possibly be exploited by people who want to make more living dolls. It's definitely a bittersweet ending--it made me cry-- but not shattering. Perdix's Lament is a sequel to Three Grams, and you really need to read it to understand this story [Plot summary for Three Grams: in the future, the mineral used to allow space travel also causes infertility and birth defects, so many colonists have "dolls"--intelligent robots--as children substitutes, but the dolls come with a time limit. In the prequel Jensen is a doll raised with Jared, and Jared falls in love with him.]
Apocalypse Z (Gen, with some very very slight Dean/Cas overtones) by
baylorsr. Hilarious and engaging zombie apocalypse, starring the Winchester brothers and their sort-of-angel. My favorite part of this was the reveal of HOW the Zombie apocalypse started. I don't even really like zombie apocalypses but I loved this.It's Never Just a Simple Salt and Burn (Gen) by
monday7112. Interesting Bobby-centered casefule, featuring the first time he met John Winchester. I wanted more wee Sam and Dean, but it's a great look at Bobby and his early perspective on John.This Time Around (Gen) by
debbiel66. Fantastic reimagining of the Pilot and early season 1 in which John is the one to come to Stanford and get Sam because Dean has vanished. Really excellent characterizations; I especially loved all the John-Sam interactions, even when they were fighting (which was often).Cabinet of Curiosities (Gen) by
like_a_raven. I almost didn't read this because the summary turned me off, but it turned out to be a nice gen casefile set in season 1, with a well-drawn OFC. Bell's Pond by
kelleigh (Sam/Dean). An AU spinning off mid-season 5: Dean says yes to Michael, with one caveat: Sam has to be kept safe. Sam doesn't know this, so when he wakes up mysteriously in Bell's Pond, Nebraska, his first impulse is to escape back to Dean. But he soon realizes there's no way out. This was a well-written Sam-centric piece, though later in the story it becomes a Sam/Dean romance.Leave all your love and longing behind (Dean/Lisa). This is an interesting re-imagining of season 3 which posits that Dean decides to stay and be Ben's dad. I honestly expected to hate it, since it seemed too cruel for him to insert himself into Ben and Lisa's lives when he was going to die in months, but I actually ended up liking it a lot, partly because the romance with Lisa doesn't happen until near the end of the story. I did want a lot more post-Lazarus Rising stuff than the story had, however.
Hail Mary (Jared/Jensen) by
rhythmsextion. This is an epically long (about 118,000 words) and immensely satisfying AU in which Jared the Dallas Cowboys' star quarterback and Jensen is the new--openly gay--coach. I don't even *like* football and this story completely sucked me in; it's a tremendously satisfying way to spend a day. The only reason it's at the bottom of my list is that it's a sequel to an equally long (and much less happy-ending) football AU set ten years earlier in which Jensen was still a player rather than the coach, and you really need to read the 100,000 words of Next Man Up to understand Hail Mary, so that's quite a time commitment if you haven't already read it.Stories I had more mixed feelings about
The Family Business (mainly gen with a little Sam/Dean toward the end). I enjoy AUs in which Mary lives, and this one was different from most of them I've read in that we get to see Sam and Dean grow up. That said, I hated the ending, and I feel like to really see the effect of Mary living on Sam and Dean, we needed to see beyond where the author ended it.
Due Supernatural (Sam/Dean, though they're not related in this story) by
queenklu. I am getting really, really sick of fusions in this bigbang season--there are too many of them, and most of them simply take an episode of another show and J2-ify it without making any interesting changes whatsoever--so I almost didn't read this story, which is a Due South fusion. However, despite some similarities to the Due South pilot I actually thought the author did some interesting things adding the Supernatural mythos to the Due South universe, and Sam Winchester is FAR from a Benton Fraser clone. It also had an interesting use of Bela--and spoilers for that, because it may turn you off on first encounter (highlight to read): She isn't actually a hellhound, she's just cursed to be one, and she gets freed of the curse by the end of the story, as I thought she might, which cut down the possible misogyny of that storyline I thought, though YMMV. I think she was a wonderfully snarky hellhound, but I can see how that is problematic.