Quote:
Originally Posted by guyanonymous
I've never read much fanfic - any sites you'd recommend as a starting place? Western and Romance has little appeal...besides that, I'll read it all (well, almost).
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The
Archive of Our Own tends toward high-quality writing, because it's fairly new, and was created by a pool of experienced fanfic authors who got fed up with other archives' changing policies and erratic customer support. It skews heavily towards slash, but has clear (to me, anyway) markings to make things fairly easy to find.
It's in beta testing, and the code's constantly being updated, so it's got some bugs. (And if you find any, they'd like to know about it. Even if they've got it on the list; they like knowing what new people find vs what their experienced site-crawlers notice.)
Hm. For someone who's never particularly tried fanfic, I'd suggest starting with the
Yuletide 2009 collection. Yuletide is an annual fanfic gift exchange focused on "small fandoms"--those that don't have a large following online. It gets stories on a lot of favorite childhood books, individual songs, and obscure tv shows. Yuletide has a minimum of 1000 words for its stories, and tends to high quality because it's done by volunteers who are willing to be handed writing assignments at random. (They pick what 4 fandoms they're willing to write; they get a prompt list with 3 or 4 fandoms, at least one of which is certain to match one of theirs.)
The
original Yuletide archive is also good, but less search-able and harder to navigate. (Eventually, it'll all be migrated to AO3.)
5 Yuletide recs:
Wait Wait Don't Eat Me: National Public Radio RPF (Real people fic), 1007 words.
Summary:
"We're going to be cutting our show a little short today, because, as you may have heard, there's an apocalypse happening! But we didn't let the election of Barack Obama stop us, and we're not going to let the zombie hordes stop us either."
All your heart-melodies: Lilo & Stitch, 1039 words
Summary:
At seven, Lilo wants to grow up to be an intergalactic space hero.
Bearing Witness: Babylon 5, 9726 words.
Summary:
The best observers are often the quiet ones. The long road of Londo and G'Kar, as seen through Vir's eyes. Spoilers for all of the five seasons.
Breaking Dawn: Atlas Shrugged, 5396 words
Summary:
Hank Rearden settles into Atlantis.
Most Likely To: Breakfast Club, 8142 words, explicit slash, Brian/Bender
Summary:
If there had been gossip after the reunion, Brian's life might have looked something like this.
(Couldn't decide if I should rec my own or not, because there were others in the fandom that I thought were better, maybe, sort-of, so I chickened out & skipped the whole fandom.)