alyndra

SPN Eldritch Bang (Come Play With Us)

alyndra — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 02:45:22 GMT

:el-dritch: adjective - eerie, strange or unnatural, especially in a way that inspires fear.

Give us your horror tropes, Lovecraftian monsters, and Gothic scenes. Whatever scares you most, this is the place to write and art about it! Writers must produce a horror-themed fic of at least 5k words. Artists will then claim stories and produce one piece of art (or more, for the 15k track) for that story.

Full disclosure: I co-mod this challenge and am not at all unbiased, but it is also objectively awesome. (True fact.) Writer and artist sign-ups are open, but writer sign-ups close soon, on June 30th. Artist sign-ups will stay open until July 21st.

This is our second round after a great first year. We run equally on @spneldritchbang.livejournal and @spneldritchbang.tumblr , and also interact on @spneldritchbang.twitter, our new Discord, and here on @spneldritchbang. Nobody's required to be on any one platform to participate. Please review the 2019 schedule and our FAQ and rules, and then:

Sign up on this form

You should receive an email confirming your sign-up within a day or so.

Thanks to @sketchydean.tumblr for her amazing banner art ♥♥♥

This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/26849.html.

It's Summergen time!

alyndra — Sun, 12 May 2019 02:21:23 GMT

I love this challenge. Yes, I'm a latecomer, but even in my first heady weeks and months of consuming all the SPN fanfic I was behind on after stubbornly resisting the fandom for eight years, I kept seeing "This fic was written for Summergen." "Written for Summergen…"

From the second summer hiatus of the show to the last (and beyond!) the Supernatural Gen Fanworks Exchange is a classic. Sign-ups are open till the 19th this year!

This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/25826.html.

AO3 and teenagers

alyndra — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 22:21:12 GMT

I’ve been pondering the AO3 discourse pretty seriously today. Antis and purity culture don’t think offensive material should exist, or at least not where its easy for kids to stumble over. And I have no time for that argument. But I do think as AO3 continues to get bigger and more publicly known, there are a few things that would make a huge difference to 13yos signing up for their first account, or people of any age trying to avoid being grossed out or triggered while searching for fics.

The single biggest problem, the thing that’s going to create antis out of people just stumbling in, is that there isn’t any rating or content guideline for summaries and tags. You can easily see XXX material on an AO3 search without clicking on a single fic. It’s the situation in place and it’s not going to change, even if people agreed it should, because it would be nearly impossible to make any changes retroactive. But it does mean that AO3 is not 13yo-friendly, even though 13yos can sign up for accounts.

What would make a huge difference to users who aren’t looking for porn, or who are looking for porn but maybe not at full-force-of-AO3 levels, would be to have account settings for Please Don’t Ever Show Me Fics Rated Higher Than _ _ _. The option to never see whichever of the four Archive Warnings are particular Do Not Wants would be a close second in terms of usefulness, and maybe even, if this is a wishlist unconstrained by server practicalities, the ability to blacklist other common tags. This would solve the fundamental problem that as wonderful as the new “Exclude” function is, it’s still very much a two-step process: enter a term in the search bar, then filter, or click on a tag, then filter. Casual users are inevitably going to try scrolling down the results before deciding to filter, so an option which would actually keep adult content summaries from those who don’t want to see them seems like it should be right in line with AO3‘s philosophy.

I don’t know if there’s any ongoing discussion about this or not, but it does seem like one worth having. How much work, technically, would it be to implement? How much would it increase server load? I don’t have any idea! Where would I even suggest it to AO3? A support ticket? I don’t know that either! I just know that it’s going to get to a point in the not-too-distant future where it has to decide if it’s a website by and for adults, or if it’s going to genuinely be welcoming to non-pornseekers who currently inhabit FanFiction.Net and Wattpad: not, I suspect, because their interfaces are better, but because they don’t want to deal with or see all the porn on AO3. AO3, Wattpad, and FF.net all say users can sign up if they are 13 or older, but in practice, the differences are enormous.

This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/25475.html.

Sam Winchester Big Bang Fic: America's Most Wanted

alyndra — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 08:00:14 GMT

Title: America's Most Wanted
Author: alyndra
Artist: oh-cassie
Wordcount: 11k
Rating: Teen
Characters/Pairing: Sam/Amelia, Outsider PoV through OCs
Summary: The FBI notice one Sam Winchester seems to have bought a house in Texas with widowed veterinarian Amelia Richardson. They investigate, but after some hinky adventures in surveillance and very confusing cat-and-mouse games, the Winchesters’ case makes less sense than ever.
Warnings: Sam and Amelia get kinky but only offscreen, various people brandish guns and swear a lot

Art Masterpost on Tumblr || Fic on AO3

This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/25106.html.

Recs Ahoy!

alyndra — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 22:03:02 GMT

In honor of some delightful fics being posted in the past few days by some excellent people, which I have actually had time to read for once, I have concatenated a rec list, brought to you by how I only just now noticed the “Share” button on AO3 fics. I haven’t gotten around to doing a sticky ‘about me’ type post, so for now I’ll just say that I enjoy both gen and kinky fics, and anything NSFW (which this post will be) gets access-locked—I’ll start it out public and then flock it after a few days. Feel free to ask if you’d like access!

Gen: Supernatural

Sweetheartdean is awesome! Art + fic, how can you go wrong?

Chief (4643 words) by sweetheartdean
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester
Additional Tags: Season/Series 14, Christmas, Fluff and Angst, Some Humor, Tired Sam Winchester, looming threat of Michael, kinda sorta casefic I guess, carving canon for juicy bits, brothers being brothers, S14 Spoilers
Summary:
Sam’s really dedicated to his new leadership role. Maybe a little too dedicated if you ask Dean.

Realistically dealing with wounds and brotherly snark, not-to-be-missed!

We Enter, Drunk With Fire (7174 words) by interstitial
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Characters: Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester
Additional Tags: Implied/Referenced Alastair/Dean Winchester, Brief Mention of Ruby/Sam Winchester, Episode: s04e11 Family Remains, Survivor Guilt, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Hurt/Comfort, Hurt Dean Winchester, I'm In Yur Canon, Fixing Up Yur Medical Education Errors, Sam and Dean Would Know Way More Field Medicine- Don't @ Me, Fluffy Christmas Center Inside A Delicious Shell of Angst
Summary:
Dean killed a kid a week ago, he's got a fever and a nasty wound infection, and now Sam's in a huge snit too. Merry Christmas. At least it's better than Hell.

Mostly Wincest

Touch My Brother And You Die
Gifter: runedgirl
Giftee: fridayblues
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean
Word Count: 2800
Rating: R
Warning: Show levels of violence
Summary: Michael captures the Winchesters. He knows just how to get Dean to talk – and it’s not by touching Dean.
Author's Note: Outsider POV. For the prompt, “touch my brother and you die" as a gift for spn_j2_xmas. I tried to make the violence not very graphic as you requested, hope I succeeded!

Squirm (2616 words) by WetSammyWinchester
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Relationships: Michael/Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Characters: Sam Winchester, Michael (Supernatural), Dean Winchester
Additional Tags: Possession, Rape/Non-con Elements, Blow Jobs, Humiliation, Episode: s14e09 The Spear
Summary:
Michael decides that keeping Sam close will crush Dean even more.

breathe you in and eat you whole (10711 words) by BlindSwandive
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/OFC (implied)
Characters: Rowena MacLeod, Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester
Additional Tags: showering, Only they forgot to get undressed first, Caveman!Sam, Repressed Dean Winchester, First Time, Magic Made Them Do It, Scent Kink, Stripping, Dirty Talk, (just a little), Possessive Behavior, Jealousy, Biting, Comeplay, Cum Eating, Internalized Gender Issues, Implied Masturbation, Rowena is naughty, But she definitely goes on the 'nice' list this year, Christmas is for happy endings, All I Want for Christmas is Kink
Summary:
Written as part of the 2018 SPN Kink Christmas Exchange for Lady Simoriah. To level the playing field against monsters, Sam agrees to let Rowena try out a spell on him that promises to heighten human senses to something closer to a monster or animal level. The problem is, the spell just happens to have some beastly side effects.

For the following kinks: scent kink, showering/getting wet/caught in the rain, xyz made them do it, stripping, and a hint of dirty talk. And several others 'cause I'm me and apparently can't help it.

I’m still reading this one but Amanda is known to be awesome!

On the Winds of Morning (5842 words) by Dancing_Adrift
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Supernatural RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki
Characters: Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dragons, Hurt/Comfort
Summary:
A dragon has seemingly made a home of the old ruined castle just outside Jared's village. But when it hasn't moved from its perch upon the highest tower in nearly a week, Jared sets out to investigate.

Other Fandoms: Miraculous Ladybug, Road to El Dorado, Ballad of Tam Lin

And this one I got to beta! If you haven’t ever seen Miraculous Ladybug, it’s one of those animated kids shows that’s so all-around well done that you can’t help falling in love.

this is a gift, it comes with a price (4653 words) by AlexSeanchai
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Characters: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Miraculous Ladybug Ensemble
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, spoilers through S2 Mayura, Angst, Dissociation, Identity Issues, minor trans character
Summary:
"All right, kids," snarls Hawkmoth, "watch what a man who's got nothing to lose can do!"
He fights like it, Chat observes, reckless and risky, and Ladybug and Chat are lucky he hasn't come out personally before: they might have Cataclysm in reserve but they're exhausted and he's taken them down—
Carapace's flung shield knocks Hawkmoth off his feet. Queen Bee tangles her top around his ankle. Rena Rouge flashes past him, snatching the brooch from his throat. His transformation falls before he hits the platform.
Queen Bee shrieks, "Agreste?"
Chat blinks.

Eee, I got not one but two gifts for Yuletide this year! Let me excitedly show them off:
One of the first movies on my list of ‘this absolutely screams ‘threesome, amirite?’ movies is Road to El Dorado!

Set Sail by Anonymous for Alyndra
Fandoms: The Road to El Dorado (2000)
Rating: General Audiences
No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationship: Chel/Miguel/Tulio (Road to El Dorado)
Additional tags: Pirates, Shenanigans, Post-Canon
Summary:
“And if we were pirates we’d have our own ship, to sail across the Seven Seas and rob the treasure fleet of the Spanish Crown. But we never robbed the treasure fleet.” Not for lack of trying, but Tulio keeps that to himself. “We are penniless, and ship-less. We're innocent."

And then I threw one (1) very kinky prompt into the aether for my yuletide prompts, and behold, it was delivered!

Hold Me Fast and Fear Me Not by Anonymous for Alyndra
Fandoms: Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad)
Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationship: Janet/Tam Lin
Janet (Tam Lin), Tam Lin, The Queen (Tam Lin), Bestiality, Shapeshifting, Snakes, Bears, Magic, Sex Magic, Pregnancy, Pregnant Sex. Yuleporn
Summary:
When Tam is transformed, Janet must hold him tightly, as a lover does.

This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/25015.html.

Raksura/Supernatural crossover rec and other SPN crossover fun

alyndra — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 19:52:17 GMT

Supernatural is an excellent canon for crossing over with, well, practically any other canon. It's about two guys driving around investigating strange phenomena. You don't have to worry about including a huge cast, or getting them to wander into places and universes they don't belong, or letting them come off as regular crazy guys to a non-magical universe -- they're used to all that.

Crossover fic

One such story I really enjoyed was Cross Cases by yopumpkinhead, which is a Dresden Files/SPN crossover so excellent I had to read the entire excellent book series on account of being addicted to this fic when it was a WIP. (Yes, sometimes I do fandom backwards. Don't judge me.)

I was therefore DELIGHTED when I spotted yopumpkinhead/fallintosanity on the fandom Puerto Rico charity auction, and promptly commissioned a fic with great delight --

Me: Please write a crossover! SPN! Raksura! *vague handwavey flailing*

fallintosanity: ...So, if this story wants to expand far beyond the commissioned wordcount, are you cool waiting extra time for a longer story?

Me: (my secret hopes and dreams are coming true) ~~YEESSSS I mean~~ I'm cool with that, sure!

13 MONTHS LATER: This glorious fic is posted and it is 41k of beautiful wacky funny shenanigans of exactly the type you would expect when alien communal shapeshifting polyamorous dragon-people drop through a universe-rift into Sam and Dean's world. Everybody bonds over ripping Leviathan heads off.

The Distant Sky (40946 words) by fallintosanity
Chapters: 11/11
Fandom: Supernatural, Books of the Raksura - Martha Wells
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, Moon (Books of the Raksura), Malachite (Books of the Raksura), Kethel (Books of the Raksura), Stone (Books of the Raksura), Chime (Books of the Raksura), First (Books of the Raksura), Jade (Books of the Raksura), Merit (Books of the Raksura), Lithe (Books of the Raksura), Consolation (Books of the Raksura), Rise (Books of the Raksura)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Canon-Typical Violence, Angst
Summary:
Moon is supposed to be avoiding Consolation, but a mishap during a visit to Opal Night puts Consolation in danger. Moon and Malachite have to navigate a city stranger than anything either of them have ever seen to rescue her.
Sam and Dean, newly reunited after Dean's miraculous return from Purgatory, investigate reports of mysterious disapperances and cattle theft near Cleveland. But the case turns out to be far more complex than they thought when an enemy they believed dead resurfaces, and they must ally with strange and dangerous creatures to protect all of Cleveland from their common enemy.

Crossover art

All this talk of crossovers ties in REALLY WELL with my spn_j2_xmas gift from kuwlshadow, who funnily enough ALSO chose my vague flaily CROSSOVERS prompt and made THREE (3) illustrations of different SPN 'What if?' crossovers! Sam and Dean in front of Judge Judy, Sam and Dean on an adventure with Buffy, and Sam and Dean confronted by the Walking Dead cast!

Layouts

So go be sure to check out all of the above, and then maybe also admire some very pretty Dreamwidth layouts and styles made by rosecarmine here at myrtillenne. I tell you, I did not think anything could tempt me into giving up my simple purple swirly theme, but the second one down is making me seriously reconsider.

Three things make a post! (For those new to Dreamwidth, you can use any number in this phrase. However many things you have is the exact right number for you to make a post with. Let's call this creative math skills - math skills for creative types!)

This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/24624.html.

In Which I Leap Long-Windedly To Dreamwidth's Defense

alyndra — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 20:45:12 GMT

Okay, I assume I'm more or less preaching to the choir by crossposting this here, but I wrote it and I'd be upset if it disappeared forever into tumblr's abyss, so here it is for posterity:

nightpool:
[A tumblr post about Pillowfort's technical issues which concludes with] writing for-profit social media and selling it as “by fans for fans” in 2018 is still evil, and making it closed source is just stupid.

deusvulture:
how do you feel about dreamwidth?

nightpool:
open source and nominally for profit, which means, I suppose, that they’re evil and not stupid. in practice my understanding is that they’re reasonably transparent about Money stuff and they’ve earned a lot of trust from the community. (but i’m not very close to the situation, maybe someone else can speak in their defense)
pillowfort … has not particularly earned anyone’s trust money wise, over the past 5 years
And, of course, open source here means (like it did with livejournal) that “leave and go somewhere else” is a much more viable option then it would be otherwise.

me:

*raises hand* Okay, I’ll speak in their defense, since you’re throwing the word “evil” around so casually.

“writing for-profit social media and selling it as ‘by fans for fans’ in 2018 is still evil” I must be missing a lot of background here. But as someone who was around for Strikethrough and the formation of OTW and Dreamwidth that came out of it, wow, NO. Fanworks should be not-for-profit because it’s important to the legal definition of Fair Use. A social media website is not a fanwork. Disney is not going to try to take down all of Dreamwidth, the social media blogging platform, for being a copyright-infringing Thing.

Point two: social media websites cost money to run. Everything with massive amounts of use costs massive amounts of money. We’ve been using Google to search the web for ‘free’ since the 90s, and they make money. They just don’t make money because we pay them to run a search. They make money off of selling ads and collecting our data and figuring out clever money-making things they can do with it. There are lots and lots of companies that run off this model, and what it results in is that at the end of the day, their customers are the companies who want to sell ads and buy data. You, the person, the userbase, are the product. Google wants to keep you reasonably happy so you aren’t too inspired to leap the fence and go use somebody else’s search engine, but when the ad companies say ‘jump,’ say ‘we don’t want our ads next to that icky unpopular stuff,’ they get listened to.

But wait, there’s another source of money so we can use fancy internet sites for free: venture capital. Venture capital is people with lots of money going out and putting money into small start-ups that they think can make it big. Sometimes lots and lots of money. So the site gets built, the services get offered for free, and somewhere down the line the venture capitalists come back and say, okay, you’ve got a big site now, how can you turn it into profit for our shareholders? And the guys who had a cool idea for a site and took the venture capitalists’ money so they could make it big have to listen. So then it’s ads everywhere, it’s costly, cool, but not core services getting chopped off, and when it turns out that the big cool free site isn’t as good at making money as the suits wanted it to be, it can get sold off for whatever they can get for it, to people who may or may not just shut it down, or deliberately drive off most of the userbase so they can still afford the server costs while making everybody who stays pay.

This pattern is everywhere. Photobucket, Del.ic.ious, LiveJournal, you name it. Tech in general has been seriously bubbled for the last couple decades due to all these venture capitalists thinking everything’s going to be the next Amazon or Ebay.

The people who created Dreamwidth were very, very aware of it. They made decisions at every step that they were never going to take money from ads or venture capitalism for their business, and they’ve stuck to it. But at the same time, they recognized that erecting a paywall around fandom would be antithetical to everything fandom stands for. So they’re entirely user-funded, but at the same time, everybody can use their site for free. This is a careful balance, and what it works out to is that when you buy a paid account, you get extra but nonessential features, and you’re not just supporting Dreamwidth-the-company. The amount you pay ($3 a month) works out to your share of the server-costs you’re using, the extra features that are mostly on the extra features list because they require extra processing power, and the server costs for about nine other users with free accounts.

We’re subsidizing each other as a fandom when we pay for Dreamwidth to run, and they worked it out this way very, very deliberately. And that’s just one aspect of the philosophy behind Dreamwidth: when Paypal wanted them to establish stricter content guidelines so that Paypal would continue to take payments for them, Dreamwidth said go screw yourself (publicly) and spent three months without taking any electronic payments until they could find a new processor who wouldn’t try to make them censor content (or charge through the roof on those $3 payments).

So yeah. Your lunch isn’t free. Given the fact that we live in a world where things cost money, I’d rather have people who sat down and thought really damn hard about how things should run. Yeah, the fundraising/crowdfunding/nonprofit model is another one, and that works really well for OTW because they’re providing public resources that are otherwise non-monetizable, specifically fanfic and academic scholarship and legal resources for a wide pool of people without a lot of money. But your cat pictures and discourse don’t have the same need for nonprofit protection as fanworks do, and frankly even if they did, people distributing fanzines in ages of yore still charged printing and mailing costs even if they weren’t making a profit.

And Dreamwidth isn’t just “reasonably transparent about Money stuff,” they’re transparent about as much as they possibly can be across the board. What’s bannable and why and if the site might or might not do a thing in the future and why or why not. It’s night and day from the way other sites roll out changes and then shrug at you because they can’t just come out and say, “Our corporate overlords want us to make more money off you.”

This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/24455.html.

alyndra — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 01:05:25 GMT

A really nice compilation of tips and resources from the comments section of the "Welcome to Dreamwith, Tumblr Folks" post in dw_news, which is now up to twelve pages of comments:

https://honigfrosch.dreamwidth.org/1916.html

Hey, not all my posts have to be gigantic, right?

Fandom's new home is still getting drywall and fixtures, but the foundation's built solid

alyndra — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 21:46:29 GMT

A few thoughts on fandom migrations. I love seeing all the renewed Dreamwidth activity, and I'm back here for the long haul now. I hope both Pillowfort and Dreamwidth continue to grow and innovate and do well. (Twitter can die. They're going to have to crack down on nsfw content too because of SESTA/FOSTA, only they're not even going to give the advance warning tumblr did.)

Discord's not done growing its fandom presence by far, and that's exciting, too -- I love using Discord. I only recently got curious enough to go look up how it's run, though. There's good news and bad. (Forgive me if you know all this already.)

Discord was created for gamers to talk to each other in 2015, and it's funded by venture capitalism. Also, despite calling individually modded communities "servers," all the data is still on the company's various server farms, we're not hosting our own.

The good news is that it's not based on ads or selling people's data. They charge a few bucks for a few extras like the ability to bring your own custom emojis with you server to server. This is essentially the same model used by Dreamwidth, Pillowfort, even early LJ. And since the market is primarily gamers and one of the things they charge for is a little suite of exclusive games, it might work out really well in the long term. But it has to work out not just well enough to pay the bills (which for this level of data handling are not cheap), it also has to be enough to keep making the venture capitalists their money back and more. It might, it might not: if we ever start seeing ads on the service, that'll be a pretty good sign it's time to move again.

I don't expect Discord to be our primary fandom home. I expect it to fill the little gap between now and when we can settle into our own space for real.

Some smart people have been discussing this for a long time, much longer than just the past few days. This is a good starter post with links to talk about fandom and federated systems.

"...so far the best is Hubzilla, which I'm sort of poking around now. It's interoperable with Mastodon, and it works - I'm just figuring out this language myself - on a hub system where you join a hub and the hubs link up, so nobody is dependent on any one hub and different hubs can have different rules and are interoperable, and if you don't like one or have a fight with the mod or get interested in wanting to be on another hub, you just take all your stuff and move; they call this a nomadic identity."

This one will really start making sense of it.

"The new platform must allow photo/text/video sharing as well as conversations; the new platform must allow NSFW content and have robust filtering; the new platform must be resistant to the kind of profit-driven vicissitudinous behavior most tech companies embrace.

I agree with all of this. I also agree with the problem statement, which I've seen repeated again and again, that fandom should be more distributed - that no single (especially not corporate-owned) social network should be the point of failure.

So. Let's talk about server federation."

THIS. This is the future, this is Web 3.0, this is where fandom can and should go. It has everything we need, ticks all the boxes, except some of us need to spend some time figuring out how to connect all the widgets in a nice user-friendly package, and then work out how it all goes and write user guides for everybody who’s not into learning tech wizardry. But that’s all really, really doable! So it’s maybe not quite ready for all of fandom *yet* - we can hang out on other platforms, Discord, Pillowfort, I love Dreamwidth - but in a year or so? Hubzilla, or some new branch of it, is going to be the place to BE.

And in the meantime, if you’re inspired and you want to come play in this cool new sandbox, come check out the discord for it! https://discord.gg/c3E72cT

List of Supernatural communities and feeds on Dreamwidth

alyndra — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:40:31 GMT

I wanted to start a good resource for SPN fandom to find old and new communities, and collect relevant feeds in one place! In no particular order and without further ado:

COMMUNITIES:

(I might have sorted a few wrong, let me know; this is still pretty rough!)

Dreamwidth native/primary:

episodic_supernatural spn_icons supernatural thedestiel destielfic destielart allfordestiel genspn supernatural_meta supernaturalfic gabrielbigbang

DW communities with tumblr equivalents:

allspnships deanwbigbang
spncc spn_crowley
tfwbigbang weekendwritingmarathon spncoldesthits

LJ clones:

spn_betas spn_j2_fic wincest spn_bigpretzel spn_darkside thewincestdiaries spn_spanking evilsam_spn j2_crack spn_on_parade spnlittlebro spn_indulge spn_napowrimo wincest_reverse wincestbigbang

Communities with more active lj comms (subscribe to feed):

spn_reversebang/spnreversebang_feed
spnj2xmas/spn_j2_xmas_feed
spn_gen/spn_gen_feed
spnstoryfinders/spnstoryfinders_feed
spn_summergen/spn_summergen_feed
deancastiel/deancastiel_feed
all_spn/all_spn_feed
spn_springfling, quicky_bang, spneldritchbang, spn_kink_meme

Inactive for years (this does not mean you can't still post there):

spn_batcave spn_bitesized supernatural_women spn_rps threeweeks_supernatural jo_sam gabrielsam spnmysteryyears dean_layla

FEEDS:

Feeds are useful if you want things posted on another blog, a certain AO3 tag, or a comic like xkcd to appear on your reading page. Most existing feeds tend to be LJ journals, but you can make them for tumblrs or whatever you want. If there's anything anyone would like me to make for them, I'm happy to help! Feed FAQ

spn_newsletter_feed, spn_j2_bigbang_feed, omgspnbb_feed, cas_whump_feed, crack_impala_feed, deancasxmas_feed, purgatory_spn_feed, sam_castiel_feed, sn_fic_feed, sn_slash_feed, spn_brotherlove_feed, spn_morseomes_feed, team_free_love_feed, tfwbigbang_lj_feed, wincest_feed, wincestielbb13_feed, hoodie_time_feed, spn_ontheset_feed, spn_sceneit_feed, supernatural_tv_feed, supernaturalvid_feed, spn_masquerade_feed, spn_meanttobe_feed

AO3 tag feeds:

ao3_destiel_feed, wincest_ao3_feed, ezekiel_ao3_feed, ao3_j2_feed, wincestiel_ao3_feed, sam_castiel_ao3_feed

I've filed a Support request for these already:

spn_j2_bigbang_feed, wincest_ao3_feed (duplicates) Fixed, thanks DW!

TWITTER:
misha_collins_feed (now updating!)

I'm SURE this is still incomplete! What am I missing? Comment here with whatever you've got and I'll add it, or if someone wants to take a stab at organizing these better than I've done, here's the raw html so you can play without having to re-code everything. Feel free to share and repost wherever you think it might be useful!

<h2>COMMUNITIES:</h2> (I might have sorted a few wrong, let me know; this is still pretty rough!)

<b>Dreamwidth native/primary:</b>

<b>DW communities with tumblr equivalents:</b>

<b>LJ clones:</b>

<b>Communities with more active lj comms (subscribe to feed):</b>

<b>Inactive for years (this does not mean you can't still post there):</b>

<h2>FEEDS:</h2> Feeds are useful if you want things posted on another blog, a certain AO3 tag, or a comic like xkcd to appear on your reading page. Most existing feeds tend to be LJ journals, but you can make them for tumblrs or whatever you want. <a href="https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=27">Feed FAQ</a>

<b>AO3 tag feeds:</b>

<b>I've filed a Support request for these already:</b>

<user name=spn_j2_bigbang_feed>, <user name=spnj2bb_feed> (duplicates)
<user name=wincest_ao3_feed>, <user name=ao3_wincest_feed> (duplicates)
<user name=misha_collins_feed> (not updating)

Crossposting in supernatural

This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/2018/12/09/spn-coms-and-feeds.html.

Testing 1-2-3

alyndra — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 16:43:31 GMT

This is exciting because I am just kinda casually emailing a post in for the first time ever. Yes, posting on Dreamwidth is now as easy as sending an email! (Assuming you are seeing this, which means I did it right.)

Also, highly recommended reading is melannen’s post forecasting what spaces fandom might or might not be on a couple years into many the future. I’ve definitely been thinking very similar thoughts to this.

A larger collection of links is here!

I’ve been really loving the paid account network page, to the extent it’s consuming way way too much of my time! I’ve been going around subscribing to names I haven’t seen for years, it’s oddly thrilling to see so many people that I used to follow or read their fic or just hear about how awesome they were from other people I followed. It’s like I thought the whole Fandom Of Old community was gone and they were all still here the whole time.

If you’re new to Dreamwidth or trying to figure out how to find people you want to subscribe to, a good tip is to find one person you like and then look at their profile for who they’re subscribed to and/or click on their Reading page and read through until you see some posts you like, and check out their journals from there. This is something that Tumblr and Pillowfort don’t allow, to my knowledge, and I really miss being able to find new people and communities this way!

ETA: Here’s a post with another neat tip for finding more people once you’ve subscribed to a few: look at the popular subscriptions of your circle!

alyndra — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 18:02:22 GMT

Welcome and hello! It's great to see so many people posting here again. Here's a good collection of Intro-to-Dreamwidth type posts, and I'm finding some really fascinating discussion in the comments of the latest dw_news post here, and on this post about the long-term future of fandom.

ETA: Maciej, of Pinboard vs. the Delicious fiasco, is once again asking what fandom wants in a site, complete with Google Doc!

My fannish homes:
Here on alyndra has in a lot of ways been my fundamental primary fannish home since it started, even when I was barely here and/or spent time on other platforms. [Unknown LJ tag] and [Unknown LJ tag] were always going to be temporary diversions. I don't really delete accounts, so you can still find me on ff.n as alyndra and of course alyndra; I've used them both for posting SPN fanfic recently, since there are still lively SPN communities in both places. alyndra is the one-stop-shop for all my fanfic, though. And by far the most social fannish time I've spent in the past year is on Discord as Alyndra#7957; here's a handy list of places to get started there. I'm also Alyndra on Pillowfort.io, even if I've barely started to use it.

I'm going to celebrate this little Dreamwidth revival by buying paid time for the first time ever, especially since there's a December sale on; I never did on LJ or here before, and I slid into pfio during one of their open registration waves, too, so -- I've been singing the praises of Dreamwidth to everybody for long enough, it's time to put my money where my mouth is. Also looking forward to getting to see the Network feature and everything else that's going to be new to me!

More nattering about my spreadsheet

alyndra — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 20:51:01 GMT

It's been a while since my original post describing in words what I was doing with my giant list of Big Bang-style challenges in the Supernatural fandom. So here's a whole bunch more stuff I have to tell the world about organizing SPN fanworks challenges into a bunch of little data cells. Since my post over a year ago, I added another tab for all the rest of the fic challenges that are still In Supernatural fandom. This did not happen all at once because it's a big-ass project, and while I'm fairly sure that the list of bangs is fairly complete (I might be missing one or two, <I>maybe</I>) there are so many more other challenges in such a wide variety out there, I really may never get them all. So by all means, come tell me what I'm missing: you can comment directly into the spreadsheet itself, reply here, look me up on any other social media site you spot me on, it's all good and I don't bite. If there's a reason it wasn't included, at least I can tell you what it is.

A few reasons I might not have included something:

It's multifandom. Challenges that crossover Supernatural with one or more other fandoms are included; challenges that can be any fandom are not. I have dreams of doing at least a bang list for multifandom challenges at some point too. Someday. In the meantime, check out my list of resources where you can find most of the bangs that would be on such a list, were I to make one. Also see thedevilchicken 's list of multifandom exchanges active in 2018, and check out fandomcalendar for updates here on Dreamwidth!
It never produced fic, or produced fic by only one person. There are so many challenges, I had to draw the line somewhere.
It's a rec community, or for posting fic that was previously posted elsewhere. "Challenge" means it's challenging people to produce new fanworks.
It's one of several similar challenges run by a single community or person. This gets pretty arbitrary in a hurry and I know I have not been entirely consistent drawing the line. Tell me things and help me out!
I've included some fanart challenges as well as fanfic challenges and many that accept both and more, but I've probably missed ones that don't use AO3, and I have no idea where to even look for fanvid challenges, so suggestions are welcome!

The Bangs tab has my best efforts to determine how many fic/art pairs were produced for each round, made easier by the fact that with very few exceptions, bangs tend to run just once a year. Other types of challenges can run annually, semiannually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, or whenever the mods damn well feel like, so for the most part I had to throw my hands up at that section. IF they made masterlists, I tried to include links to them, or at least to a tag or central page of such masterlists. But the whole "Rounds" section is going to stay incomplete indefinitely.

What columns I have and why: On both tabs, I have columns for LJ, tumblr, Other, AO3 tag, and AO3 Collection. Other is mostly Dreamwidth pages and a few other random places people host fanfic challenges. The AO3 columns are an artifact of how I found a lot of the challenges, and the fact that there is a lot of user inconsistency in using tags vs. collections. I've thought about adding columns for, say, Twitter or Discord, since a number of challenges have their own account/server, but the deciding factor has been whether these are platforms where any challenges are primarily hosted, and so far they tend to be auxiliary. Therefore the links to them can generally be found from the main site pages. At least on my computer, the spreadsheet is at a size right now where it just fits on the screen, and I like that enough to resist adding a lot more columns and make it an endless exercise in scrolling.

I've also thought about adding a column for pairing, but that would be boxing up a lot of things that don't quite fit neatly into boxes: Destiel-leaning multiship, Wincest-leaning multiship, plus or minus RPF, character-based, theme-based - the challenges themselves will tell you much more about what they do and don't want than I could in a spreadsheet box. However, you can use filters in part for this - more on filters later.

Sorting: How is this thing organized? The first tab, Bangs, has the oldest, deadest challenges at the top and as you go down, ongoing challenges start being sorted by the month of (writer) signups. But what if you're an artist, or a reader who only wants to know when new fics will be posted? Well, that's why the months all have numbers by them, so they can be sorted by the spreadsheet. If you are on a computer, you can go to Data: Filter Views and either select from a few pre-made views (Alphabetical, Sort for Artists, etc) or create your own. You could choose to exclude all dormant challenges, to only include challenges with "Dean" in the name, or to only show "reverse" type challenges, for example.

The second tab, Other, is sorted differently: the longest-running, still current challenges are at the top, and records of past recurring challenges are below them. There is then a separate section for one-shot or non-recurring challenges, challenges which ran less than a single year. This includes many challenges from this year which will likely return next year as well as many that were never intended to run more than once. The main reason I organized it this way was just because there were so many, and this format was less overwhelming. At the bottom below those are challenges which appear to have had their main page deleted, and challenges which I have not been able to find adequate information on.

I've played around with creating filters for Destiel, Wincest/J2, and Women on this tab (sadly they do not carry over between tabs) but these are not guaranteed: I likely missed/misinterpreted some, and every time I add a new challenge, it's necessary to go take it out of each filter it doesn't belong in, so if they get cruddy I apologize in advance. The other filters show specific types of challenges: for example, if you are looking for "exchanges" or "bingo." These should be more robust to new entries because there's a more limited number of "types."

Updates? My goal going forward is to click on every challenge, even the dormant ones, shortly after the new year to see if they've had activity, a new round, etc. and update the spreadsheet accordingly. Updates during the year are more as-I-catch-things; I'm not guaranteed to see all new challenges, so do let me know about them! I used to add links when sign-ups were open, etc, but I don't expect to do that going forward: I might think it would be common sense not to sign up for a challenge without reading the rules first, but it's a chance I don't want to take, and it's not that hard to click through from the main page. Plus, there's a lot of challenges to keep track of now! As of this writing, there are 90 bangs and 164 other challenges, and I expect a complete list of other challenges would have over 200.

I also want to shoutout to wetsammy for helping me out with this project a lot, telling me about new bangs and helping organize the ones I had. And thanks also to Superwiki who not only runs the best damn wiki, but also encouraged me to put my collected knowledge into a wiki page all about the Big Bang, and for telling all of Twitter to come check it out!

Finally, welcome to Dreamwidth, everyone discovering or rediscovering it due to Tumblr's recent meltdown. Best of luck and I hope you enjoy finding your way around!

Fic: A Tigrefying Tail

alyndra — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 06:53:18 GMT

At long last, I get to post the tiger fic I've been cackling over all fall!

Title: A Tigrefying Tail
Artist: Kuwlshadow
Author: Alyndra
Category: Gen
Rating: G
Summary: For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, Jared Padalecki is transformed into a tiger on the set of Supernatural.
Shenanigans ensue.

Art: Livejournal
Story: AO3

Fic: Small Problems

alyndra — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 15:39:35 GMT

Artist: marietwist (@sketchydean) ♥

Fic Title: Small Problems
Fandom/Genre: SPN, fluffy humor
Characters: Dean and Sam Winchester
Rating: PG (swearing)
Word Count: 11k
Summary: "I hate witches."
~Dean Winchester, 3x09 Malleus Maleficarum

Art Link: tumblr
Fic Links: AO3 || FF.N

Dear Holly Poly Creator:

alyndra — Sun, 28 Oct 2018 23:33:47 GMT

Hi! I got some, but not all, of my details for each fandom in before sign-ups closed, so I'm just going to put all of it here. Italics are repeated information that's already on the AO3 sign-ups, so you won't have to read twice. That said, my brain just is not in prompt-mode this week, so apologies for only having some fandoms with specific ideas. Don't feel bound by the ones I did manage, either. Write/draw/vid what makes you happy and I will be thrilled! (Although I'll be in Thailand when reveals happen, so if I don't squee right away, it's only lack of wifi/time. I will squee at you, I promise.)

Generally: I have a huge thing for One True Threesomes, because I love complex and unconventional relationships. Most of my picks have a fairly obvious central M/M/F pairing. Sometimes a particular canon has a foursome instead, or the pairing is all male, or more than one female. Sometimes it gets more complicated, but at core that’s what gets me happy. I love plottiness, I love humor and outsider point of view. (ETA: You can assume I like pretty much all side characters and am open to them appearing as side characters or Outside-PoV narrators of the main pairing. OCs are welcome too.) I'm down for most kinks. You can check out my Dear Yuletide letter here for more straight from my brain.

Do Not Wants: endgame open relationships (seeking out new partners), endgame severe power imbalances, toilet kinks, humiliation kink, ABO-verse.

Secret Garden: Mary/Dickon/Colin
It's been a long time since I read this book, but I'm pretty sure I shipped the OT3 before I knew what it was. Secrets, figuring out how to be healthy, and how to be friends: how do the three children fare as they grow up? Is it more inappropriate for Mary to be with Colin because he's her cousin, or Dickon because he's lower class? If course Colin/Dickon would be the most inappropriate, so they're probably stuck hiding the whole thing, but I feel these three would be down with hiding their relationship as much as necessary. How would that play out? Do they stay at/eventually inherit the house? Or find someplace new and cozy?

Phantom of the opera: Christine/Raoul/Phantom
Christine and Raoul get their happily ever after, but what about the Phantom? Don't you feel bad for the Phantom? I feel bad for the Phantom. He needs some remedial socialization, okay, but I think Christine and Raoul might just be up to it. Plus, they can make fantastic music together.

Man from U.N.C.L.E.: Illya/Napoleon/Gaby
I love when a movie gets you most of the way there to a scorching, funny OT3 and you only have to do a little tiny bit of work to get them falling into bed together! The Further Adventures of these delightful characters will feed my soul.

Haven: Audrey/Duke/Nathan
This little show had its flaws, but I loved it anyway for providing a truly glorious central OT3. The show is all about Audrey, Nathan, and Duke, and the often-complicated love they have for each other and for their town. Another thing I love about this show is that Troubles generally require emotional solutions rather than violent ones. So give me an alternative ending, or a casefic/missing sexytimes from early in the show, or time-travel shenanigans, or whatever awesome idea you’ve been wanting to write for this sweet little show!

Leverage: Alec Hardison/Eliot/Parker
Bestest show of my heart. Don’t get me wrong, I love SPN a lot, but Leverage is about as flawless as TV gets. I tell everybody it’s a show where you can watch the first episode, understand that every other episode is going to be essentially the same thing, and go, YES PLEASE, sir, may I have some more? It’s that good.
Here’s a starter fanvid playlist for Parker, Hardison and Eliot. I love these three individually and together, but if you wanna play with Nate and Sophie too, please do. Maybe Parker/Hardison half-teasingly offer Eliot blowjobs to cook for them more?

Sense8: (Cluster), cluster/cluster's romantic partners, Wolfgang/Kala/Rajan
I would also be really into Lito/Hernando/Daniella if the author wants. I love this show like, a lot - a lot. I found it based solely on the Netflix summary where eight strangers are psychically linked, because hell yeah. I've never clicked anything so fast in my life. And it did not disappoint. I love every little bit of this show. Maybe show me more of explaining how sensates work to Hernando/Daniella or Rajan (or others)? Working out how their relationships change and stay the same after everything that happens in the last part? More of non-sensates being weirded out and then adapting to seeing the cluster inhabiting/speaking through each other's mouths?

Stranger things: Nancy Wheeler/Steve Harrington/Jonathan Byers
Okay, I didn't think much of any of these three at first in the show, but they really grow on you. And the bond they have based on fighting crazy monsters, I feel, really might enable them to put aside any feelings of jealousy.

Crossovers:
Bucky/Sirius/Remus: Hey, let's get the three most tragic, fucked-up characters we can think of together and see what happens!

Remus/Derek/Oz/Hayley: I don't even know anything about Hayley or the Originals, but I don't care, this pairing is so irresistible. Outcast werewolves unite! Feel free to introduce me to her, I'm open. Or pick any three of these four that you want to write about: I'd rather have a solid, intricate threesome than a foursome that strains to include everybody. But if you *want* to do the foursome, that would be amazing, too!

Original: Symbiotic Alien/new human host/Human’s lover
Like, yes, this might be redundant after seeing Venom and adding the last entry. I DON'T CARE. Write me anything along these lines and I will be a happy fangirl.

Venom (2018): Eddie/Venom/Anne/Dan, Eddie/Venom/Anne
I just watched this today, the day sign-ups close, and had to add it. BOOM. Eddie and Venom made such a delightful gay alien superhero romcom, my friend and I agreed. Anne is already into it, and dealer's choice if you want to include Dan or not!

All the challenges I am currently doing

alyndra — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 16:36:46 GMT

ZOMG. You know me, the one who can't hit a deadline to save her life and procrastinates like it's a religious calling?

NOT ANYMORE.

I have turned over a new leaf. After doing three challenges (SPN Cinema, SPN Reversebang, and SPN-J2-XMas) last fall and running up to/over the deadline on all three, then signing up for Summergen (which I still need to crosspost, oops) because I've been admiring that challenge since forever and stressing out over, yet completely disrespecting, the deadline on THAT, enough was enough.

I knew I would want to do SPN-Reversebang and Xmas again. But I didn't want all the stress of not having written enough yet. No fun. And then the J2 Reversebang claims happened, and I was checking them out from curiosity despite not having signed up, and I just got tickled pink by one where Jared turns into a tiger. Haha, I'd write that, I said to myself.

And then the cool new bang in town, SPN Eldritch Bang, looked so fun I signed up for that, too, with an old fic idea about Sam and Dean becoming immortal demigods. (I also jumped on board the mod team later, full disclosure: still awesome seen from inside!)

But I set conditions. I wanted both stories substantially done by SPN RB claims, so I broke down the minimum wordcounts and number of days and decided I would have to write 250 words per day come hell or high water. To make sure of this, I barred myself from some of my favorite activites until words were done: reading fanfic, reading novels, watching TV or movies, in short: consuming any kind of fiction. And also eating. Because I've been starting to play around with intermittent fasting, where you go at least 16 hours between meals every day. So I allowed my desires for food and reading, basically, to motivate me to write, and it worked really well. Both stories are done (except beta work) and I'm 5k into my SPN RB fic featuring Dean about nine inches tall standing on Sam's desk at Stanford.

The only thing is, I keep signing up for more challenges now. I went a little crazy writing Masquerade fills, even though it was right before my self-imposed SPN RB claims-day deadline. And then I took on a SECOND RB prompt, with Sam and Gadreel. And I decided I had something perfect for the Sam Winchester Big Bang, and another thing that's going to make it into the SPN-J2 Big Bang as soon as sign-ups open in January. Mind you, I'm signed up for SPN-J2-Xmas by now, too.

And then Yuletide crossed my radar. I used to see my whole flist doing Yuletide years ago, and now it's this massive ongoing ecosystem that produces thousands of fics every year. But I never used to even consider signing up because I was so bad at deadlines.

Haha, I signed up this year. Got a great assignment and a letter written, and everything. There's all this talk of writing extra fics, too, treats and such, but... wandering Fanlore, I found a POLY FIC EXCHANGE. This is so right up my alley! I haven't signed up YET, but... I probably will. Holly Poly's not due till Jan 13th, after everything else is done. Mind you, I'm flying to Thailand on the 7th, so I really should get it in early. But still, the last due date before that is Dec 24th for SPN-J2-Xmas, so I should have time, right?

Sign-ups close when drafts are due for SPN RB, so I'm writing away and if I'm in reasonable shape then, it'll be a go. Wish me luck!

ETA: I did it, I signed up for Holly Polly, and now I'm eyeing the Gencest Bang and Holiday Mixtape — someone stop me this is getting out of hand! LOL, but here's my list of upcoming dates.

Dear Yuletide Author

alyndra — Sun, 21 Oct 2018 08:47:33 GMT

Dear Yuletide Writer,

I signed up! I’ve never done this challenge before! It was just under the wire of the deadline! So, additional details ahoy, but I’m still very much in the process of writing individually about each fandom, so please consider this a placeholder post/letter for now. Check back in a few days and I should have more for you.

In general, I like all sorts of things, so I will probably love whatever you write! I love a good OT3, gen makes me very happy, slash is awesome, het is good too. I rarely read femslash but if the bunny bites, go for it! I love close-knit team dynamics and am usually not too into villains.

Do Not Wants are (endgame) very unequal relationships, humiliation kink or toilet kinks. Even though my prompts trend light, feel free to go as dark and/or kinky as you like, I’m pretty unshockable.

Please write what gives you joy to write! Got that one burning idea? Do it! Not sure if something’s exactly in line with my blathering here? Haha, I will not care, I promise! Characters not in the nominations? Pfft, whatever, I’m down for it.

That said, if you DO want prompts, etc. from me, read on:

NIGHT SUN TAROT DECK
I don’t know all that much about Tarot as a whole, but some friends and I got into this and you can officially consider me very intrigued. There are stories within stories in all of it, it seems.

Mix and match as the muse calls. I’m not at all stuck on the nominated characters, so for my part please feel free to play.

Prompts:

What if the creator of the deck was a real live prophet (a la Chuck from season 5 of Supernatural) having strange dreams of the people represented by each card?

Or like in Kevin (Probably) Saves The World, there are 36 righteous souls that must find each other to accomplish a great task.

The Star has lost their way, and needs others’ help to find direction.

Strength is looking for a Sword.

The Moon circles their way around the World, drawn to her life.

Knights draw close to the Tower, what adventure lies in store?

The Eight of Cups is popping up everywhere, what does she want to say?

WHEEL OF TIME - ROBERT JORDAN
I only finished reading the entire Wheel of Time series this past year. I was always wishing Rand and Perrin and Matt would interact more (I like Perrin, I know some don’t) and Rand’s weird poly marriage to three women would also be fun to explore. Also Tam was awesome.

How does the Two Rivers deal with getting back to normal, if normal is even possible after they were home to the Dragon and most of them have magic and they are their own land now and everything is different, but crops still need to be planted.

Elaine, Avhienda and Min coordinate going after Rand (or maybe they let him chill for a while first)

After everybody fatefully congregated at the Stone of Tear (the first time), what if they all actually hung out and talked to each other and shared relevant information? (Yeah, okay, it might be a stretch, but I like to dream!)

Or more about sharing dreams/that psychic link thing the ta’veren had/Warder bonds/feeling each other have sex, because this is a very rich field of subject matter that I feel was glossed over without sufficient detail, especially considering the final wordcount of this opus.

ROAD TO EL DORADO (2000)
Okay really from the very first time I saw this movie, I was like THREESOME!! My OT3-detector had only just gone active in my young fangirl innocence and all the bells and whistles went off for this movie. Two handsome bantering best-of-friends, and the girl who wades right in and matches them and says, no, don’t break up, just include me too! Where do they go next? Back to Spain? Central America? The Orient? What adventures lie in wait? I DON’T KNOW. Do they wind up on a pirate ship? Will there be smooching shared? Do they get to help set the tone for pirate culture to be more open-minded about unconventional relationships for the next few hundred years?

Note- I prefer closed relationship OT3s to, say, open smooching with everybody on the pirate ship. Maybe Miguel likes open smooching but it’s really about how the other two need to chase him down and make him know he’s theirs. ;)

TAM LIN - TRADITIONAL BALLAD
There are a lot of different versions, I put a few in a playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTC-cXHN4fWeIN1zryWrmBxLYXa0QuqKL
Basically there’s a lot of room for interpretation, and like most old folk tales, it might be surprisingly dark. You can go wild! Why did Janet run down to Carterhaugh? Why (and when) did she and Tam Lin decide they loved each other?

(If you’d like to go the bestiality route for the faerie trials, I support that legitimate reading of those lines... if I just squicked you and you can’t unsee it, sorry!)

BOOKS OF THE RAKSURA - MARTHA WELLS

I love these books so much! Moon being an odd duck-out-of-water, unconventional gender roles, the sheer vast size and scope of history in the Three Worlds.

I am a sucker for anytime Moon’s experience and skills from fending for himself come in handy, like that thing he does where he’s so paranoid he can feel people coming up behind him or he turns his back just to see if they’re going to attack him, but he’s really good at reacting faster than they expect if they do. Or swimming/fishing, blending in with groundling communities, baiting giant kethels into death-defying acrobatics along rocky cliff faces with his mother watching like at the end of the third book… that may have been one of my favorite scenes, because he was not even looking for rescue like any other consort would have, he’s just like this is what I do, this is who I am, when it comes down to it I’m going to fly like crazy and skate the edge for as much time as I can buy everyone.

Also basically all the times Raksura try to interact with groundlings who try not to be terrified of them/think they’re really weird. Yes please. AND/OR inter-court politics, and the ripples/waves Moon and Indigo Cloud have made therein.

TEMERAIRE - NAOMI NOVIK
Who does not love this dragon? I don’t even know what to prompt.

Temeraire and Lawrence’s partnership is probably going down in story and song for future generations to regard with awe; if you want to play with that direction that would be really really cool.

Lawrence getting to actually rebuild a relationship with his mother after everything they’ve gone through would be really sweet, too. Or spending more time in China, or decades-later, actually having built an effective dragon-human society in Australia or England. Or if you don’t want to focus on Lawrence and Temeraire, maybe a bit more of an inside view from the aerial corps at any point in the series, or the crew of a dragon transport (poor Riley!) would be really interesting.

Again, feel totally free to make something up and go with it!

Rec: Big Damn Heroes

alyndra — Sat, 24 Mar 2018 15:54:47 GMT

This should have gone up MONTHS AGO but attention everybody: RUN DO NOT WALK to check out the glorious SPN/Firefly crossover that tifaching wrote me for spn_j2_xmas!

Title: Big Damn Heroes
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Genre: Crossover with the series Firefly
Rating: PG 13
Word count: 7283
Summary: There's some difference of opinion on whether Sam and Dean are heroes. The crew of the Firefly comes to think they are.

This is an entirely delightful meeting of awesome characters across space and time, everybody gets to shine, and the voices are everything Firefly. It made me so happy to read, and then I was out of the country for a month and got back and life swamped me, or I'd've recced it long since, but do yourself a favor and check it out!

Fic: Not Dead Yet

alyndra — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 08:35:49 GMT

Title: Not Dead Yet
Gifter: Alyndra
Pairing/Characters: Jess/Sam
Word count/Medium: 3.8k
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Jess gets kicked from the apocalyse-world to this one. Who is Sam Winchester?
Spoilers: through the end of Season 12; no Season 13 material is used.
Notes: Written for SPN-J2-Xmas on Livejournal, for madebyme_x who said she liked Sam/Jess, AUs, apocalypse, happy endings, domestic feels, outsider POV, the Impala, the Bunker, and Stanford Era, among other things! And then I never even got to the actual prompts, but I hope you like it anyway, and can forgive me its lateness and that there's a much longer fic shining through the seams here than is written!

ETA: And I hadn't even noticed that SHE'D ALREADY WRITTEN SAM MEETING APOCALYPSE!JESS! Check it out! It's delightful and makes a neat opposite to this one!

Thanks to dugindeep for uber-last-minute heroism in betaing for me, you're a life-saver!

AO3 link
OR

The universe has certain rules.

There are parallel realities, but they require balancing to continue to run parallel.

For a soul to reside in a reality other than its own, there must be an equal and opposite reaction.

When one door closes, another door opens.

In the moment after the rift caused by Jack's birth closed with Lucifer and Mary on the side not their own, another rift opened.

In a cookie-cutter suburban house in southern California, it destroyed half the living room and the coat closet, and two figures stumbled out of it. The rift closed immediately with a whoosh like big-city commuter trains, like a huffy housewife dumping the neighbor's kids back at their own door after unsorting them from her own.

One of the newcomers was blonde, female, tall. She wore rough canvas clothing like armor and carried a rifle, which she swung around suspiciously as she searched for threats.

Finding none, she turned to her companion. He was tall enough to make her look average by comparison, hair black and face stony. He carried only a slender silver blade, but stood with a confidence that said he didn't need it.

"Archangel Michael, sir?" she asked. "Where are we?"

"I will assess the situation," he pronounced. "Remain here and wait." With a flutter of air, he disappeared.

The woman waited five seconds, then tore the front door open. With one sweeping glance around, she darted out into the street. There were only occasional cars; houses stretched as far as she could see, all neat and trim instead of war-torn, decaying husks. "Like I'm waiting for him," she muttered to herself. "Self-righteous asshole can fuck off forever."

Clearly, no apocalypse had touched this neighborhood. Which meant—she hoped it meant—no apocalypse had happened to the rest of the world, either. Everything was different now.

Her parents. Her parents could still be alive here. Her sister, her friends—she had to find a phone.

There probably had been a phone in the house she'd just left, but she wanted to put it as far behind her as possible; firstly in case Michael came back, and secondly in case regular people—homeowners or neighbors, she didn't know if anyone had been nearby and she didn't care—started noticing the damage from the rift and thought she'd been breaking and entering, emphasis on the breaking.

She trotted down the sidewalk. Nobody else was jogging this time of day, and if they had been they wouldn't have been wearing clothes designed to be thick and durable and blend into a dusty wasteland.

Or carrying a gun. If this was truly a world without any apocalypse, she should abandon it; she wouldn't need it, and it would make her stand out, make people suspicious and maybe even get the cops called on her. The best way to get a phone was simply to ask a stranger, yet seeing a gun would make strangers wary.

Well, too bad if it would be easier; she'd been sleeping with her gun for the past four years, and she wasn't going to just drop it like trash. Besides, she didn't know anything about this world: it might not be as peaceful as it looked.

She got to a street she recognized. Ironically, she wasn't far from Stanford. And she knew where to find a phone on campus.

"Hello?"

"Mom?"

Silence for a beat. And then… "This is a very bad idea of a joke, and if you don't tell me who you are in the next two seconds, I am hanging up this phone…"

"No, wait, please don't hang up…" It was her mother's voice. She was alive, she could go see her, and Dad… "I swear this isn't a joke, it's just a very long story…"

"Sam Winchester killed you." Her mom sounded so shaken, and no wonder. Wow. So she was dead in this world… she'd never heard of any Winchesters, this Sam person who had killed her alternate self.

Lucky her. Sort of. She readjusted her rifle and scanned outside the phone cubby for threats: just more students, strolling by without care, more people than she'd seen in one place for years. It made her twitchy and it was hard to remember she'd once been one of them, running occasionally when she was late for a class, panicking over midterms.

"Is Dad there? Is Chrissy okay? This is going to sound so fu—so freaking unbelievable, but I want to see you. Please. Do you still live on Ridgeview Drive?"

"I…I can't do this. I don't know who you are. I'm sorry." Click.

Jessica stared as the dial tone filled her ear. Her mom had hung up on her.

It was tempting to try to call right back, but no. She should wait until she could be there in person. Once they could see her face, it would be a lot harder to deny who she was. And she could explain … what? That she'd come through a portal from an alternate universe? It sounded crazy to her, and she'd been living with the reality of angels and demons since they started blowing up the world nine years ago.

No, she needed more information about this universe first. Did people know about the supernatural? Why hadn't there been an apocalypse? Was her family still the same?

She could find the computer lab, try to scrounge a login somehow, but her rifle was drawing looks as it was and she was barely on the edge of campus. She had to beg quarters for another phone call: once she had enough, she stared at the phone box like it was an enemy combatant. Who else could she even try to reach?

Her friend Rebecca Warren had had the same cell phone number from high school right through Stanford, and she knew it from memory. She dialed.

"Who's this?"

"Becky? Becky, don't hang up. I need your help. What do you know about Sam Winchester?"

Silence, again. Jess held her breath and hoped she'd chosen the right question.

"I must be certifiably crazy to be meeting up here," Becky was muttering as she picked her way around little coffee shop tables. She was scanning sharply; as soon as Jess half-rose from the one way in the back, with a good view of both exits, Becky zeroed in on her. "What—" She pressed her lips together until she got closer, glancing around at the other customers. "What are you?" She hissed finally, hovering right outside Jess's reach.

So Becky, at least, knew that humans weren't alone in the world. But the rest of the people in the shop were going about their business, paying no undue attention; they weren't jumpy or nervous.

"I'm just human, but from an alternate universe," Jess said. There weren't many ways to explain away being dead, and she couldn’t think of any story to sell that she wouldn’t just get caught lying in. The truth was better, unbelievable as it was: it had the virtue of simplicity. She needed information too badly to risk getting complicated.

Becky's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Prove it," she said, holding out a tiny silver sewing needle.

Jess held out a finger and Becky pricked it; they both watched a single drop of blood well up, and then Becky heaved a sigh and dropped into the booth across from her. "…Alternate universe?"

"Crazy, I know,” Jess said, almost giddy with relief. She had a friend back, someone who’d been long dead in her own timeline, and Becky believed her. She wasn’t alone.

“What made you ask about Sam?” Becky asked, eyes narrow.

“I never heard of him in my universe,” Jess admitted. “But I called my mom and she said Sam Winchester killed me. This universe’s me.”

Becky snorted out an explosive breath. “Yeah, right. Your mom’s got it wrong,” she said confidently. “You started dating Sam here at Stanford, and for eighteen months you were the most sickeningly perfect couple anybody could imagine. Then his brother swung in and grabbed him for a weekend, and next thing anybody knew, you were dead in a house fire and Sam was gone for good with his brother on a ‘road trip,’” she made finger quotes. “A lot of people figured it was suspicious, but I found out the truth a couple months later.”

“What truth?’ Jessica leaned in, engaged despite herself with the story. What could have been.

“Sam and his brother were hunters,” Becky said, lowering her voice dramatically. “They saved me and my brother from a shifter. Later Sam told me that he’d been trying to get out of the life when he went to Stanford, but something followed him. Something that killed you just like his mom was killed when he was baby, and the whole family, them and their dad, they were trying to track it down.”

“Did they get it?”

Becky shrugged. “I don’t know. Sam kept up with me by email for a little while—longer than any of his other friends—but then a year later, he had to stop because he and Dean were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. It was shapeshifters, really, but try telling the FBI that.” She snorted scornfully, making Jess wonder if she really had tried telling the FBI that.

“So most people still don’t know about the supernatural here?”

“Nooo,” Becky said thoughtfully. “There’s been a bunch of stuff the last few years that’s not exactly subtle, so more people believe than used to. I’ve gotten some more contacts, people who had different experiences, people in the know, even another hunter. But the general public? Clueless, pretty much.” She tilted her head at Jess. “Does that mean it’s different, where you come from? I’ve told you a lot, c’mon, Jess, your turn to share with me. A lot must have happened, for you to be carrying like that,” she said, nodding at Jess’s gun.

“Yeah, it’s different,” Jess said grimly. She knew her expression was dark, too dark for this bubbly, unaffected girl. “The Apocalypse happened. Most people died. The ones left, we try to stay out of the way. The angels won, so we have to suck up to them, but everybody hates them. They wouldn’t lift a finger if you were dying.” She remembered holding her father as he bled out, begging and pleading for help. One touch of an angel’s finger could have healed him, but none of them had stopped to help.

Becky looked shocked. “Oh my God, Jess, I’m so sorry.”

“God’s got nothing to do with it,” Jess said automatically, a well-worn phrase.

Becky nodded acknowledgement, and then, with a true friend’s sensitivity, changed the subject. “What are you doing here then?”

The upshot of it all was that after contacting Becky’s hunter friend, who knew a guy who could get in touch with the Winchesters, she found herself in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, driving a beat-up Jeep of no particular pedigree into a no-tell motel with a signpost the shape of a giant plastic cornstalk. The parking lot was mostly empty, except for a low-slung glossy black muscle classic. Becky had told her to watch for that car, and her hunter friend had spoken of it with a hushed sort of awe, like it went out and killed monsters itself.

The important thing was that it meant they were here. For people she’d never heard of in her own universe, it sure seemed like everybody knew something about them here. They’d been right in the thick of whatever had passed for this world’s Apocalypse, and the fact that they were still alive said that they were very skilled, very lucky, or both.

She should assume they had eyes on her already. She swung out of the Jeep, rifle settling easily over her shoulder as she strode across the parking lot. No point in showing hesitation: she’d come this far.

The Winchesters were easy to identify once she was in the lobby. Thick, sturdy clothing that could conceal any number of weapons, gazes that snapped straight to her when she opened the door. They were seated in the little breakfast cafe that directly adjoined the motel desk area, and one of them started to rise before the other put a hand on his arm.

She walked over. “Sam Winchester?”

The one who’d kept the other seated nodded. “That’s me. This is Dean,” he tipped his head to the other man, who grimaced. “I hear you’re from another universe?”

“Yep. You got a test for that?” she asked.

Sam waved a hand. “We believe you.” The other one—Dean—scowled like he would have liked to object, eyes on the rifle she still had slung over her back. Sam politely ignored it. “You wouldn’t have got this far if you were a shifter or anything else we could test for,” Sam continued calmly. “And...alternate universe makes a certain amount of sense, considering.”

Considering what, she almost asked, but it was too obvious a question. He wanted her to ask. She didn’t want to play that game. And she didn’t like how calm he was: too calm, if she was really his long-dead girlfriend. “Why does my mother believe you killed me?”

It hit home: she saw him flinch. His calm cracked enough to show that it was only a thin veneer covering a well of emotion. But he held it, and said steadily enough, “You were killed because of me. The farther I stay away, the better.”

She snorted. “I thought Becky said you were supposed to be smart.”

“Hey,” Dean said. “We’re here because you said you had important intel for us. So what is it?”

She decided to let the subject change. For now. “It’s the archangel,” she said. “I wasn’t the only one who came through the universe rift, or whatever it was. I figured you guys should know, if you’re the paranormal sheriffs around here.”

“Archangel? Which—” Sam cut himself off. “No, don’t answer that, they hear their own names sometimes. We need to get under angel warding.”

Dean was already looking around at the walls. They were decorative latticework, pretty but impossible to spraypaint a wardsign on. “This place isn’t defensible at all,” he said. “We’re better off in Baby.”

And just like that they were moving, hustling out to the black beast of a car—“Baby,” she realized belatedly—and into it.

“Are you attached to that Jeep?” Sam asked.

She shook her head no, and the engine roared to life around them. Thirty seconds later, they were out on the road.

“We might be in luck,” Sam said. “If he hasn’t shown by now, he’s probably not paying attention.”

“I’ll feel a hell of a lot better once we’re in the Bunker,” Dean said grimly. “And if we’re taking her home with us, you can damn well do the tests while we drive.”

In her world, everybody knew you had to move quick or die. Seeing it here, in these hunters, was kind of comforting. Even more comforting was the fact that no one else in this whole reality had been like this, though. Jess leaned against the window, feeling like she could let her guard down for the first time since the angels had started their war on Earth.

They hadn’t even objected to her keeping her rifle.

‘The Bunker’ turned out to be an underground Cold War relic entirely devoted to cataloguing supernatural threats and methods of dealing with them. Just driving into the garage was amazing, and Jess wondered aloud why there was no equivalent in her world.

“It’s pretty well-hidden,” Sam said. “Everybody from back then got killed by a Knight of Hell, so it’s just us now.”

Sam was another little shock. She hadn’t really noticed his height until they all got out of the car in the underground garage. A lot of guys were shorter than her, and the rest weren’t usually enough taller to really notice. Dean was taller than her, but only by a couple inches.

Sam, when he opened the door for her like a gentleman, was tall enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at him. Oh. And he was built, too, solid muscle and no fat, and he had the grace of someone who could move any way he wanted, not just push weights in a gym.

All the pieces she’d seen so far of him, and suddenly her body was telling her yes, go.

She shook her head and focused on her surroundings. “Nice cars.” The rest of the vehicles in here made the brothers’ Baby look young; cars of the forties and fifties, and a few motorcycles for flavor. “Are we safe to talk here?”

“Let’s get into the library,” Dean said.

“We’re warded here too,” Sam said. “But come see the place, as long as you’re here.” He ducked his head, oddly shy.

Dean rolled his eyes. “Remember she’s still a stranger, Sammy.”

“I know, I wasn’t…” Sam huffed, realized the futility of arguing, and strode toward the door. “Through here.”

The Bunker turned out to be enormous, and even Dean, despite his grumbling, seemed pleased to show it off. Jess cooed appropriately over the weapons collection and the firing range, and finally she asked hesitantly about angel bombardment.

“What if they found out you were here and decided to blast you?”

“This place can’t be located on a map,” Sam said. “Our friend Charlie tried to triangulate based on GPS from our phones, and all she could get was a fifteen-mile fuzzy area.”

“And angels don’t have the juice to get in here unless they’re invited,” Dean added. “You have to be a level above them, or else have inside knowledge, to even make a dent in this place.”

“It’s safe? Really safe?” she breathed, hardly believing it. She’d been on the run, fighting to survive, for so long.

“Safe as it gets in this world,” Sam said, smiling gently. “Now, which archangel are we dealing with this time?”

“Mi—Michael,” she said. And the very fact that there were people here who seemed confident they could deal with him, that he wasn’t the undisputed terror of the world, with puny humans doomed to flee before him, was stealing her breath and the strength from her knees. “I’m sorry,” she managed, sitting down in the nearest chair. “But—who are you?”

Sam and Dean exchanged glances. “Long story,” said Sam, perching on a seat. “But I never told you—my Jess—any of it when I could have. I was just running then. Looking for someplace safe,” his lips quirked in a slight, bitter smile. “Demons killed you, just to fuck with me. They wanted me to follow a dark road, because they wanted me to be Lucifer’s vessel.”

Lucifer’s vessel. It was all Jess could do not to laugh hysterically. An alternate universe version of her had been dating Lucifer’s vessel in college.

Had Sam Winchester still been Lucifer’s vessel in her universe? She didn’t know anything about whoever that poor bastard had been, no name or history, but Michael had shown an image of the final battle, once, to emphasize his victory, and the Devil hadn’t looked anything like Sam. If that was the difference between her apocalyptic wasteland and this living world…

“You said no,” she breathed. “You said no to Lucifer?”

“We both did,” Sam said. “Dean was supposed to be Michael’s vessel, too. But they were all dicks.” He shrugged. “We fought as hard as we could. It was barely enough.” His eyes went dark. There had to be more to the story than that. He probably had good reason to not want to tell it.

“Where is he now? Did Michael still kill him?”

“No. Actually,” he hesitated, glancing at Dean, “another long story, but…”

“We lost him in an alternate universe,” Dean finished. “Possibly yours.”

“Along with our mom,” Sam added.

“You’re kidding—no, you’re not kidding, no one has this terrible a sense of humor,” Jess said, covering her face. “You’re dead serious. You think it’s related to why Michael and I came through the rift—of course you do,” she finished for herself. “Was it three days ago?”

“The time matches exactly, from what you told Becky,” Sam said solemnly. “We need to find Michael, make sure he’s not causing trouble, figure out how to open the rift again, and then figure out how to get Lucifer and our mom back on this side.”

“I say we leave Lucifer there,” Dean said. “No offense,” he added to Jess, “but your world seems pretty shot to hell already, so what difference does it make?”

“Dean!” Sam was glaring, yet not shocked. They’d had this conversation before. “There are still humans alive there, and he’ll wipe them out unless someone stops him. He’s our mess to clean up.”

“What about me?” Jess asked. “Once you put everything right, will I have to go back over there too?”

“You wouldn’t want to?” Dean seemed surprised. “No one you want to get back to?”

She stared at him, stony-faced.

“Yeah, okay, who would want to be there if they didn’t have to be,” Dean said hurriedly.

“I don’t know for sure, so I don’t want to make you any promises,” Sam said. “But we can sure as hell try to keep you here.” He looked at Jess, and for a dangerous, deadly giant, it was remarkable how much heart he could put into his eyes. Jess had met puppies with nothing on that gaze. “So how about it? You willing to stick around and help?”

Jess thought about it. “I want to go see my parents first,” she said. “They deserve to know they can stop hating you.”

Sam flinched, then said, “But…”

“But nothing,” she said firmly. “I died here. So what? Where I come from, everybody I loved died, and we have to fight for our lives while the angels keep blasting away at us and there’s never enough of anything but bullet holes. From what I can tell, the difference is mostly down to you two. So don’t be sorry I died here.”

“I missed you,” Sam said sincerely, while Dean theatrically rolled his eyes and escaped in the direction of the kitchen. “You have no idea…”

Having an ex-boyfriend she didn’t remember was a little weird, but she was starting to think it was something she could handle okay. “Maybe I’d like to get a little of that idea,” she said, daring to flirt. Perfect couple, Becky had said.

Sam picked up on it immediately. He looked kind of poleaxed in a good way. “I don’t know what I did without you.”

“Who knows?” she said, happiness creeping in from some long-dark corner where it had curled and waited to die. “I’m here now!”

The End

SPN_Cinema Fic: The Martian, Starring Dean

alyndra — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 08:45:13 GMT

Movie Prompt: The Martian
Pairing: None
Rating: PG (swearing)
Word Count: 6k
Summary: Dean's bouncing through TV shows at the Trickster's whim, but another planet now? Why is he stuck sciencing the shit out of this?
Notes: Thanks cybel for doing lovely art for The Martian for the SPN_Cinema challenge, and for graciously allowing me to play too when I got inspired to write for it! And thank you Cinema mods, and I'm sorry for pushing right through the last minute here!

Snap

The Trickster's smug, stupid face vanished, and Dean looked around at the new environment — new TV-set reality, he reminded himself —that the damn demigod (or whatever ) had picked for them this time.

For starters, Sam was nowhere in sight.

Coming close on the heels of that thought, as he drew in breath to yell for Sam, was Oh holy shit, what is that godawful smell?

He was in some kind of greenhouse. Some of the smell was green growing things, but most of it smelled like the fertilizer had come straight out of someone's ass, and then he'd hung around without bathing for a while on top of it.

Dean also felt…weird. It wasn't until he turned around to look behind him that he realized what it was, though: either he'd suddenly become super-strong, or he'd lost weight—a lot of weight. He bounced off the ground like it was spring-loaded, stumbled and fell forward, tried to turn it into a roll and wound up flying through the air until he fetched up against one of the flexible plastic walls.

He caught his breath and his balance, shutting down his body's fight response. Sudden movements were the opposite of helpful, okay. But he could move slowly. He pretended he was stalking something that'd kill him if he made a sound, and got to his feet.

The place had three big circular doors. Daylight filtered dimly through the ceiling. There were some small windows behind all the plastic sheeting, but he couldn't see through them with it in the way. This place hadn't been originally designed as a greenhouse, he concluded, even if that was what it was now.

There were also desks with laptops and a bunk area.

He needed to figure out how to get out of here and find Sam. He started for the nearest strange door. It looked pressure sealed. And as he got closer, he noticed the rack on the wall of… holy shit, spacesuits. Spacesuits plus low gravity equaled… not even on the same planet as Kansas anymore. He backed slowly away from the door—no, airlock—and sat down in the computer chair. He had better figure this shit out before he went leaping headfirst onto alien turf.

The computer wasn't locked. It did have the NASA logo, as did a lot of other stuff around here now that he was looking. He fought the odd feeling like he was finding government secrets lying openly around for anyone to pick up. Based on the room he was in, there weren't many other people around. There were bunks like a small group used to live here, but it also looked like only one of them had been used in a long time. Likely Dean was alone here. Maybe something out there had killed the others. He'd have to be wary if he didn't want to die: Trickster or no Trickster, no second-rate cheeseball movie alien was going to put Dean in the ground.

The first thing he found on the computer, front and center like it was meant to be found by a stranger sitting down here, was a series of video journal entries. Did that mean he—his character, whoever he was supposed to be playing here—was planning on dying, or at least prepared for it?

Dean took a deep breath and clicked "Play."

Well, crap. Apparently he was on Mars; he was the only frigging person on the entire planet; and there weren't even any warp drives in this sorry excuse for a space drama. No aliens (unless they were going to show up as a surprise twist and eat his kidneys; Dean had seen movies like this) and no transporter beams and he couldn't even talk to anybody else on Earth because his satellite dish had blown over and stabbed him through the ribs while the rest of his crew evacuated. Assholes; his character in the video diaries kept saying they'd made the right call and he didn't blame them, but Dean didn't know them and he was the one stuck eating nothing but potatoes. Potatoes which had, indeed, been grown in these people's crap.

Anyway, this Mark guy was looking at four years alone here until another ship could come, if he could grow enough food and keep the rest of his bodily functions running and take a rover across the planet when it was time.

And although it wasn't strictly necessary for his survival, re-establishing communications with his team and Earth would not only be good for his sanity, but also improve his chances: having a brain trust on call wasn't an advantage Dean was going to underestimate.

Mark's last log entry talked about setting up for a long rover trip, both to test out multi-day journeys in the thing and to try to find and retrieve an old lander which would be able to communicate with Earth.

Sounded like a great opportunity for aliens to show up and eat him if anything did; Dean had a suspicious soul and the Trickster's little Cave of Wonders wasn't making him any more trusting.

On the other hand, roadtrip across an alien planet after "ancient" '90s technology?

"Awesome," Dean muttered, starting to grin.

The rover was pretty sweet, all things considered. She was no Baby, of course, but Baby didn't have life support, two batteries, and a radioactive heater. Also, six all-terrain wheels.

The life support was only meant for day-trips, and to make the long trip to the other rocket launcher, 'Mark' was going to have to bring the big oxygenator and water reclaimer from the Hab. But for this trip, he should just be able to manage by bottling up enough oxygen and water to take with him. The solar panels would have to come with, of course, because he only had enough battery life for four hours of driving — two hours per battery — and he had at least 500 miles to go, each way. He wasn't going to be setting any land-speed records in this thing, that was for sure.

Although, this was Mars, so maybe he'd be setting Martian records. Huh.

For the long trip, he'd need to use the second rover as a trailer, but for this one he should just be able to get by by strapping his solar arrays to the roof of his rover, and then strapping Pathfinder next to them, assuming he found it. So he wouldn't need the trailer.

He had to pack water, oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, an EVA suit and a spare, food—the first round of potatoes had been harvested, so he was eating some of them along with the rationed meals—a shovel and ropes for when he got to the station, and of course weapons in case aliens attacked.

There were no guns, laser ray or ordinary; NASA didn't think they were necessary. Whatever. Dean was disappointed but he was adaptable. He could use lots of different kinds of weapons.

The first thing that had come to hand when he got here was a small utility knife; he'd kept it near to hand while he got oriented around the place, and it had, though meager, allowed him to focus on other things for a while. But once he started looking around for bigger and better, he realized his options were going to be limited.

On the most basic level, he had clubs. There were enough spare metal parts lying around, struts and oxygen tanks and so on, he wasn't worried about finding something to whack an alien with. Mars might not have much, but it did have rocks lying around in droves.

But assuming he wanted more options than "caveman," he was going to have to get creative. He'd hoped to find a hatchet or chainsaw or something packed away, but no dice. There were a couple drills, but they didn't have much battery life. Other than that the most significant sharp edges around were utility knives. Dean now carried five on his person. He also had one strapped to a stick to make a pole-arm. Nobody was going to be walking down the street looking at him funny here, at least.

It was too bad nothing in the place was flammable. Dean liked explosives. But he could also see the point that they were very likely to kill him along with any hypothetical aliens if he tried to blow anything up. So what were his next best options?

Eight hours with the team chemist's laptop and a thorough search of the Hab's kitchen and medical supplies later, he carefully stowed eight well-wrapped plastic baggies (Small Flexible Sample Containers) in a compartment on Rover 2.

That part was done. Dean threw the rest of his supply list together, lugged it out to Rover 2, and packed it in.

Being out on Mars, in an honest-to-God NASA spacesuit, was totally fucking cool. The spacesuit would have been heavy as fuck on Earth, but on Mars it just brought his weight back up to about what it should have been anyway. It was kind of bulky and hard to move in, but on the other hand, he was on Mars. He spent a while squinting at the horizon to see if it curved more than Earth's, but it was irritatingly inconclusive. There were also two moons, but one was barely brighter than Venus would have been from Earth. The other looked about half the size of Earth's moon and zipped across the sky so fast you could see it move.

It was pretty flat where he was going. A long, featureless stretch of desert. Dean had a map that showed where he was and where Pathfinder was supposed to be, assuming hypothetical Martians hadn't screwed with it over the past twenty years. What he didn't have was GPS or roadsigns or, for large chunks of the trip, recognizable landmarks. He didn't even have a compass, because (according to the laptops in the NASA greenhouse) Mars didn't have any magnetic field to speak of, so they wouldn't work.

All he had were the stars. And the North Star wasn't even straight north anymore. Dean scowled at the sky. Tipping his head back wasn't easy in a spacesuit, either. And the rover didn't have a skylight in the roof: he could see to the front and sides, and that was it.

On the plus side, no such thing as a cloudy day on Mars. Dean shrugged and got in the rover, a cramped process involving an airlock. Once he was de-suited and sitting in the driver's seat, he took a moment just to get comfortable and admire the dash in front of him: he might not be in his baby with Sam, cruising down America's highways, but it was pretty awesome to be taking a roadtrip on Mars, Trickster's stupid games or no.

He put the rover in gear, letting himself relax into the role enough to figure out the controls through whatever rules the Trickster had running this psycho circus of his. It was like looking at those stupid visual illusions; he had to not quite concentrate on looking, and then the information popped into focus in the back of his brain. Weird, but it worked. He hit the gas (not real gas, electric-powered whatever crap) and he was off.

South. He had well over five hundred miles to go, and he'd only have a signal from the Hab to navigate by for about the first forty. At twenty-five miles per hour, terrain allowing, and four hours of driving per day before he had to let the solar cells recharge the batteries, that was at least six days, and he could probably count on the terrain to slow him down more. He had life support for 25 days before he was in trouble.

He was going to have a lot of downtime on this trip.

Honestly, it might be kind of nice, instead of blazing across the country in a hurry to stop the latest rash of supernatural deaths or put a hold on the end of the world.

Dean hated downtime. He'd never felt more cooped up in his life than spending practically all his time in a four-by-four glorified truck cab. He couldn't quite stand up straight, and he couldn't stretch out lying down, either. Plus, one side of him, usually his back, was always warmer than the other from his radioactive little heater. He'd taken to doing EVAs while the batteries charged just to have somewhere to move.

At this point Dean would welcome attacking aliens, just to alleviate the tedium. But there continued stubbornly to be no sign at all that anything except for himself had ever lived in this featureless wasteland.

"So much for tentacled rage-monsters," he grumbled. "Real disappointing show, guys." He kicked a rock with his space boot, just to see it fly up and land in a puff of dust. The dust was somehow dustier here, finer and lighter and it went everywhere without ever really sticking to anything. He kicked another rock, then picked one up and threw it as far as he could, which was pretty damn far.

Then he sighed and went for a run, which consisted of jump-waddling in a circle around his solar arrays wide enough to not get dust all over them until he felt stupid enough to quit and go back in the rover to watch the terrible 70s tv shows that had been on one of the personal laptops.

He was making about 75 miles a day. Never mind he could have driven 75 miles in an hour back on Earth. Featureless desert for three days, then a ridge of hills to his east for two, then another two days of desert. A couple craters, once he got within a day or two of Pathfinder; and then retracing the whole trip with his roof stacked double-high and hopefully finding the Hab again where he left it.

The Trickster was trying to kill him with boredom.

What was going on out in the real world while he and Sammy played stupid pet tricks in here? There was an apocalypse on, and all the angels seemed to care a lot about the timetable, for supposedly immortal beings.

He knew the Trickster had the power to mess with time, because of the time-loop he'd wrung Sam through the last time. But was this crap similarly taking no time in the real world, or would they pop out to find that Lucifer had had a party and trashed the neighborhood?

And where was Sam right now? Was he somewhere up in space, playing one of the crewmembers who'd taken off without him? Or back on Earth, peering through a telescope at Mars and wondering what was going on? Or had the Trickster thrown them into different simulations entirely this time, and Sam was off fighting space vampires in the Pegasus Galaxy?

Where was Cas? How had the Trickster been able to take him off the board like that? It shouldn't have been possible; angel should trump pagan god, especially on Christian turf, which America pretty much was.

Dean had no way to know, other than to get to the damn antique probe and figure out how to talk to Earth with it. Even after he laid his hands on the thing, he was going to have to bring it back to the Hab to actually get it running; he would be lucky if all it needed was a new battery. Luckily, being handy with mechanics was something he and Mark had in common.

Pathfinder was right where his map said it should be, for a wonder. Mostly buried in dust. A little digging revealed its lapdog-sized mini-rover a couple feet away.

Sojourner, the mini-rover, fit easily through the airlock into his big papa-rover. Pathfinder itself wasn't going to be quite that easy, but after a lot of cursing and heaving and piling rocks together, he got it up onto the roof of the damn van. Grave-digging was more fun than this; at least then he didn't have to worry every jostle was going to knock loose some critical piece of electronics.

And still no aliens had showed up. There wasn't even a mutating mat of malignant slime-mold underneath the landing balloons where microbes could have hitch-hiked from Earth; Dean had checked. Who even ever made a space adventure this boring? And who would actually pay money to watch it?

Grumbling to himself, he laboriously stacked his solar panels back up on the roof, now sharing space with his very own mobile communication station, and lashed everything down as securely as he could. He was top-heavy and precarious, but there was nothing to be done except drive carefully. The good part about all the featureless wasteland between him and Hab was that there wouldn't be much to tip or trip him.

Small blessings. Dean scowled once more on general principle, climbed into his increasingly stinky bubble of Earth atmosphere on wheels, and started maneuvering back the way he'd come.

Other than going stir-crazy enough to try *dragging* the rover overland when it was night and the cells couldn't charge, the trip back was very much the same as the trip out. He got about a foot and a half's progress for a half an hour's puffing effort, and gave up in disgust.

Sam had better have it better than him, wherever he was.

Dean could have wept when the Hab's dinky short-range signal finally registered on the rover's radio. It was just a fancy overgrown greenhouse, a slightly less stinky bubble of Earth air with enough space for him to stand up straight and walk around in a circle, but no fleatrap motel had ever looked better at the end of a long drive.

Hey, the Hab was guaranteed flea-free, at the very least.

Even though the Hab airlocks were bigger than the rover's, he didn’t think Pathfinder was going to be fitting through them. He'd have to take it apart as carefully as he could, haul each piece individually through the airlock, and then put it together inside, hoping that he wasn't breaking anything more than was broken already, and that he could fix whatever had made it stop working in the first place.

He hoped it was just that the battery was dead. There was no way to know until he could get into it.

But taking it apart outside the Hab meant working on it wearing astronaut gloves, which was going to suck balls. The things were stiff and bulky and awkward no matter how many boatloads of cash NASA had sunk into them.

First things first. Dean pulled up outside the Hab, put his spacesuit on to get from the rover into the Hab, and once he was inside, took his spacesuit off, got entirely naked, and ran in circles, yelling just to hear his voice filling the space.

The next day, he was back outside, wrangling Pathfinder down off the roof of the rover and beginning the laborious process of unscrewing its parts.

He'd only detached the base when he stopped, panting, to stand straight for a minute and found himself squinting at the airlock door and back at Pathfinder. There actually wasn't as much of a size problem as he'd thought. If he got the antenna squinched down and could tilt the thing on its side without breaking it...

It was possible. He hoped tilting it on its side wouldn't break anything. The thing had been built to hit the ground surrounded by airbags and bounce, so it should have been made pretty durably. But if he broke the antenna, he was screwed. The Trickster was perfectly capable of leaving him in this stupid simulation until he starved to death, especially if Dean had the opportunity to get himself out and jacked it up through incompetence.

He poked gingerly at the antenna: it flexed easily. Good. It hadn't made the trip through space from Earth extended like this: and what had gone up could come back down. He compressed it experimentally. It was a genius design: it accordioned more-or-less smoothly into a short cylinder and, once he found the catch, stayed.

So far so good. He eyed the distance from his large hunk of delicate metal and the airlock: not far, because he’d driven the rover as close as he could before unloading it. He could crabwalk the thing around okay; the spacesuit was bulky and annoying, but the gravity was much lighter and that helped. The dust got everywhere but that was a given. He was tempted to heave the lander up on its side and roll it across the ground, but it was too likely to jar something loose that he wouldn’t be able to fix.

Hopefully he hadn’t already jarred it too badly, between getting it onto the rover, across hundreds of miles of Martian landscape, and off the rover again plus detaching the base.

Only one way to find out. He spent the next hour carefully crabwalking Pathfinder to the airlock and tilted it precariously up on one edge to get it in the door. There wasn’t room for him to squeeze past it in his suit to get to the inside door controls, so he had to go around to another airlock and get inside that way. At least he could take the damn suit off.

It went a lot easier from there, getting his squat hunk of metal in through the inner door of the airlock and centered in the largest open space he had that wasn’t covered with potato sprouts. Dean wanted out of this place before those were all he had to live on. He hoped Sam was faring better, wherever he was.

The largest open space was by the bunks. He got Pathfinder situated and opened up the side panels. The battery was dead: that much was obvious. NASA had strongly suspected the battery running too low in the cold and being unable to restart itself was what had killed Pathfinder in the first place. Even if something else had gone wrong instead, the battery would still have died as soon as dust blew over the solar panels, so replacing the power supply was his first task.

He didn’t have an appropriate battery, but it was easy enough to run a power cord over from the Hab’s power supply, controlling for voltage. He let loose the catch on the antenna and it gracefully expanded itself. If he was lucky, now, Pathfinder would be sending a signal to Earth and all he needed to do was wait for whoever was manning the desks back there to detect it and respond. It wouldn’t be instantly: it would take eleven minutes just for the radio waves to travel at the speed of light from Mars to Earth, and then they’d have to travel back.

He’d eaten lunch (not nearly enough) and checked over the potatoes to keep himself occupied, but when an hour went by and then another without Pathfinder doing anything other than sitting there, something had to be wrong. Damn.

He spent the rest of the day running diagnostics and reading up on anything the computers could find him on the specs, which wasn’t much. He pried off panels and looked at the electronics; he disassembled components, cleaned dust out of them, and put them back. At the end of the day he still didn’t have any idea what was wrong: everything looked like it should be functioning normally, it just wasn’t getting any reply from NASA. He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. All of the suit radios hung up on the wall could receive the signal Pathfinder was sending out, so either it was just weaker than it should be for some reason, or NASA didn’t know to listen for it or was having to go dig up computer programming manuals from last century to figure out how to reply.

Uneasily he decided to hope it was just taking them time. It had been a long day. With the ease of a lifetime of going to bed in strange places and stranger situations, Dean laid himself out on Watney’s bunk where he had a good view of the mobile camera. Maybe they would have figured out how to respond by morning.

It still hadn’t moved. Dean was getting real tired of this whole stupid game. He stared at his tools and contemplated diving deeper into the innards of the fancy hunk of electronics and instruments that had taken millions of dollars and dozens if not hundreds of engineers to design, and then he cursed and turned around and got back into a now-familiar spacesuit.

There was something peaceful about the wide-open expanse of the sky and the featureless plain outside. The rover was fully charged and Dean got in and drove, picking a direction at random, wanting just to move. A couple days able to stretch out in the Hab had been great, but now it seemed like a prison: the astronaut’s knowledge whispered away in the back of his brain, maddeningly inaudible but conveying the sense that he was missing something obvious, and it was going to mean he would rot here, starve to death on not enough potatoes with the Trickster laughing at him all the way to the end.

Dean stopped the rover when the battery died. He’d driven his two hours. He still had his other full battery, but he should turn back as soon as he swapped it out unless he wanted to be stuck laying out the solar panels still on the roof and twiddling his thumbs for eight hours while they recharged.

Once the batteries were swapped and he was de-suited again back inside, he turned the rover around. His tracks were clear before him: following his trail out would bring him back to the Hab, even if he could’ve gotten lost this close to it. He brought up the radio signal the Hab was broadcasting anyway: sure enough, it was in the direction it was supposed to be.

He frowned. Then he checked through all the frequencies again. The only thing the rover could hear was the short-range beacon designed for exactly this sort of short-range rover trip. If there was a signal broadcasting which was supposed to make it all the way to Earth, he should be able to hear it from two hours away at the rover’s snail-crawl.

Goddammit. That meant the problem was almost certainly on his end. He’d been able to hear Pathfinder just fine from the suits inside the Hab, and the suits had been able to hear each other…

But they hadn’t heard the rover’s unit from inside the Hab. It was designed to broadcast its own little signal constantly, just in case a rover or an astronaut somehow managed to lose themselves in this sea of dust and rock.

He couldn’t hear the suits from inside the Hab, either, though his own suit and the spare in the rover were showing nice and clear. Maybe it was just the distance. But if it wasn’t?

His brain was clicking pieces together now. The roof of the Hab, and for that matter of the rover, were a lot thicker than they needed to be just to keep an airtight bubble. Thermal insulation and durability, he’d assumed, but that wasn’t enough to explain it now that he was thinking about it. They were thick because they were designed to shield the astronauts from all the radiation that Mars’ atmosphere was too thin to block.

And if they were thick enough to block radiation, they were probably blocking radio signals, too. The Hab’s beacon was mounted on the outside, just like its original communication array had been.

Pathfinder could be working fine. If he was right, the only problem was that nobody on Earth would ever know, because he’d dragged it under a roof that radio waves couldn’t get through.

He’d know soon enough. If he got close to the Hab and he still couldn’t hear the suits, that would be confirmation enough. Then all he’d have to do would be to drag the damn thing back outside, fingers crossed, and run a power cord out to it. What he should have done in the first place, if it turned out he was right.

Dammit. He had the nasty feeling he was being laughed at. At least the sussurating input from the Mark character in his hindbrain had stopped pestering him. That, more than anything, meant he was probably onto the problem.

The Hab’s impenetrability did, in fact, turn out to be the problem. He spent the rest of the day getting Pathfinder back out through the airlock and powered properly from outside the Hab, and then he had nothing to do but wait some more while Earth was below the horizon, since his radio signals weren’t going to travel through the entire width of Mars any better than the Hab’s insulation. He went inside and pushed a potato around on his plate without eating it. If it didn’t work this time…

But in the morning the mobile camera was pointed straight at the sign he’d made, “Yes.” Yes, they were receiving him: yes, they could read his homemade signs with whatever question he wanted to ask: yes, they could answer by pointing the camera at different points around Pathfinder. All he had to do was put signs up so that their pointing meant something.

There was one question that was foremost on his mind. He wanted to hold up a sign that just read, “SAM?” But that would be ignoring the rules of the game. He’d been through enough of these now to know that the Trickster would find some way to make his life worse if he was that blatant: probably aliens would show up and destroy all his non-potato meals. He was used to the idea of having the entire planet to himself; he’d stopped expecting trouble, which meant it was the best time for it to find him.

He needed to be able to communicate to get off this damn planet or at least bring the drama to a close. Yes or no questions wouldn't get them far. He needed them to be able to tell him things he hadn’t asked about.

Dean made fifteen signs and staked them to the ground around Pathfinder. He wrote two letters and a number on them until he ran out of numbers, and then added a period, space, and question mark to the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth signs. After thirteen he was through the whole alphabet, so on the fourteenth sign he wrote, “MIDDLE ROW” and on the fifteenth “NUMBERS ETC.” They could point to any sign to mean the top row of letters, they could point to the fourteenth and another sign to hit the rest of the letters, and the final sign for anything else.

With the twenty-two minutes it took just for a signal to make it from Mars to Earth and a response to get from Earth to Mars, plus the time for the camera to move (which he had to be watching or he’d miss what they were saying) and for him to work out what they were saying and then write his own response where they could see it through the camera, it was hardly a lightning round of witty repartee. But they were only a couple rounds in when Dean got the answer he’d been waiting for, after they’d asked : G-L-A-D- -T-O- -S-E-E- -Y-O-U- -B-R-O-T-H-E-R.

Sam was on the other end! Safe on Earth, geeking out in NASA headquarters, not on the ship that had left him here or anywhere else in tv-land, or dead in some game Dean hadn’t even had an option to play. It was a good thing brother had been at the end of a message because he would have missed anything that came after that. He spent about five minutes just lying flat on his back in the Martian dust, and then another minute after that awkwardly rolling to his feet in the damn spacesuit.

He had to write back, but he had a dozen things all clamoring to be said at once…

Snap!

His spacesuit was gone. The barren reddish plain of Mars still extended around him as far as the eye could see, but there was nothing protecting his air from the thin cold lifeless air of Mars…

But somehow he could still breathe. Someone clapped slow and sarcastic behind him and he turned. Trickster. All of this had only ever been his game…

Sam stood near them, wearing a tie and a pocket protector, looking nonplussed as he stared around the Martian landscape. “Was this breathable air the whole time?”

“Now, that would be telling,” the damn demigod smirked. “Wouldn't want to ruin the illusion of being about to die from a little fresh air, now would we?”

“You and your damn illusions,” Dean growled. “You were perfectly happy making me get in and out of a space suit six times a day for your own sick amusement…”

“Come on, Dean. Do you know how many people would kill for an all-expenses paid vacation on an alien planet?”

Dean had to work to maintain his scowl. Parts of it hadn't sucked completely. “With a bunch of broken shit I had to fix…”

“All part of the package,” the Trickster waved a hand airily. “You got to play mechanic to your heart’s content, while Sam got to geek out with a bunch of other eggheads running a space program…”

“Endless meetings,” Sam groaned. “Sitting at desks the whole time unless we had to go sit in an airplane to go to another meeting…”

“Whine, whine. You two are never happy. You wanted a break, I gave you a break. Now you're complaining it was boring. It's a whole other freaking planet!”

“We never asked you to drop us into whatever crappy space documentary from the future this is!” Dean said. “We wanted your help fighting Lucifer…”

“And I gave you this instead,” the Trickster said. “So what's the lesson?”

“Lesson?” Sam growled, more pissed than ever. “What part of being dragged into somebody else's story to play out their drama is supposed to be fun? Everybody kept calling me Venkat!”

Dean snorted a little. He couldn't help it.

The Trickster pointed to him. “There, see? That's what I'm talking about. Sometimes, you just gotta take your fun where you can find it.”

Sam and Dean both stared at him. “That's it, that's the lesson?” Dean said incredulously. “That's bullshit!”

The Trickster, for one of the first times they'd seen him, looked serious. “You think I've never had anybody trying to write my life for me?” he said. “Trust me, kids, it's not all candy and popcorn at my level. Sometimes you have to go along with what the big boys want…but sometimes playing your own games in somebody else's sandbox keeps you going. So you play as hard as you can whenever you can, whether that's pulling doughnuts in a rover on a barren wasteland or putting gum on the chairs of directors you don't like.” He looked at Sam, but Sam was determinedly scuffing at the ground with the toe of his shoe.

“Sammy? Way to go, little bro!” Dean said reflexively. Then he looked at the pagan demigod more thoughtfully. “Does that mean you’re not a fan of all this archangel bullshit any more than…”

“Sorry, Bucko,” the Trickster gave a wide, insincere smile. “Break time’s over. Next show starts...now!”

Snap!

The End

SPN_Reversebang Fic: Hey, Jude (Refrain)

alyndra — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 22:24:57 GMT

Art: S2032: Wish I Didn't Know Now What I Didn't Know Then
Artist: cassiopeia7

Fic Title: Hey Jude (Refrain)
Author: alyndra
Fandom/Genre: SPN, time-travel adventure, family
Pairing(s): Gencest (also John/Mary)
Rating: PG (swearing, propositioning)
Word Count: 12.5k
Warnings: slight wincest. highlight: (underaged Dean comes on to Sam without knowing who he is, Sam is a responsible adult about it)
Summary: How can Mary ever catch up with everything she's missed in her boys' lives? Sam finds their grandfather's time travel spell in the Men of Letters library.

Of course no one would use such a thing without a very good reason.

Author's notes: Set in early Season 12 and in 1994. Written for the 2017 spn_reversebang, and I amazed myself writing a fic this long in not much over a month!

All the amazing praise in the world to my artist for this collaboration, Cassiopeia7, who went above and beyond: her initial art prompt was inspiring from the first second I saw it, she was a joy to work with, and then she created even more wonderful art for the story! Go love her!

Also thanks to Akintay for excellent last-minute betaing, quite a few things would make significantly less sense without her aid!

Bonus thanks to dancing_adrift for playing sounding board as I flailed around in the early stages of plotting it all out, and consistently cheering me on as the word count went up and up!

Art Link: LJ
Fic Links: DW | AO3
I would've had to break this fic into two posts at least in order to fit in LJ's size limits, so rather than hassle myself and all y'all with that, check it out on Dreamwidth
or An Archive of Our Own!

Comments are welcome here! For ex. you prefer LJ, are currently logged into LJ, or forgot all your passwords but LJ's....

Bibliography: List of Lists

alyndra — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 19:14:20 GMT

I went looking for all the Supernatural Big Bang challenges I could find. Here are the best resources I used to compile my list!

Multifandom:

https://bigbangindex.livejournal.com/profile -Multifandom LJ community; list in profile.

http://bigbangindex.dreamwidth.org/ - Multifandom DW community; list tagged “admin: index post.”

http://strina.dreamwidth.org/410079.html -Updated list by mod of the DW comm, included big, reverse, & a few mini; current, defunct, and deleted; and (readers sit up!) masterlists for each round for each challenge! Almost entirely challenges on LJ/DW.

http://wendy.livejournal.com/1910947.html?page=2 -Wendy is the mod for by far the longest-running and biggest SPN Bang out there! Her list is multifandom, LJ only, big bangs only. It also includes comms which were never active.

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Big%20Bang%20Challenge
-Browse tags for challenges! Once you’re in the Works of a tag, you can look for if it says “Collections: 1″ in between “Chapters:” and “Comments:” under a story. This is honestly easier than trying to search for a collection in the first place. Mods, take note: prominently link to your AO3 collection so people can find it!

https://thebigbangblogproject.tumblr.com/ -Multifandom collaborative effort on Tumblr! Has Google Doc sheets for several fandoms, challenges both lj-based and tumblr-based, go help!

Supernatural Only:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CpU-KDDeTQ6K4XoHyYhgWKJgVVfQWRkmP1sO5-A2TiY/edit#gid=0 -Supernatural Doc from the Big Bang Blog Project (above). Mind you check the tags on the bottom, the first list you see is not all there is!

https://www.reddit.com/r/fandomnatural/comments/4ze79r/i_have_an_updated_and_fairly_thorough_list_of/ -Reddit thread, SPN specific: scroll down for more links.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Ds_yPi47bs_Bz6CJSvV1L72QXVHUXCMSmBOsZpcZXs/edit -List of Dean/Cas friendly challenges (not just bangs) run by the mod of the Dean/Cas Big Bang.

http://deanicanfixthat.tumblr.com/post/153192756651/supernatural-bangschallenges-masterpost -Supernatural bangs and other challenges, current only (active in the past year as of 2016).

http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Fanfic_challenges_%26_exchanges -Good overview of different challenge types with non-exhaustive examples within SPN. A few years out of date; updating it with current information is next on my to-do list!

Hope this is useful. Without all the hard work done by everybody who worked on these lists, I couldn’t have gotten anywhere close to what I was able to do with mine!

Supernatural Big (and Otherwise) Bang Challenges: The Spreadsheet!

alyndra — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 18:44:59 GMT

Ever wonder how many big-bang-style challenges Supernatural fandom really has?

Various people have compiled various lists and posted them in various places. Trust me, I have a list of these lists. Everyone also defines the parameters of their search a little differently. Personally, I chose to look for past and present SPN Bang challenges, and then I made a spreadsheet with info about each bang. There are 70+ entries on it.

I included big bangs, mini bangs, reverse bangs, and the herculean mega bang. I did not include other kinds of fic challenges, such as gift exchanges, flashfic or drabble communities. What makes a bang a bang? Well, it should have writers and artists all paired up and collaborating on their works. Usually there's a claims process, but the important point is you wouldn't just sign up, write your fic, and post. Most challenges will try to get pinch-hitters to fill in if either the author or artist drops out unexpectedly, but even if this doesn't happen it can still be a bang as long as the intent is that everyone gets paired.

That said, often my criterion for inclusion was more like, "does it have bang in the name?" So speak up if there's anything I missed but should have included, or anything included that doesn't meet the definition, or if you just think my definition is whacked.

Size: the original Big Bang community, a Harry/Draco innovation, had a minimum fic length of 40,000 words. This rapidly started dropping as Big Bang challenges proliferated. Each challenge is free to set a minimum wordcount wherever it likes. Although there is a lot of variety in minimum wordcount thresholds, there seems to be a fairly settled line around 10,000 words: a min. 10k wordcount can be considered either a big or a mini bang, depending who's running it, but any wordcount below this is almost always a mini bang, and above it is a big bang.

And then we get into the rarified heights of the mega bang, which, according to the SPN Mega Bang community, is over 100,000 words. (A smaller community has one for over 50k.) Mega bangs are unique to the SPN fandom so far; if anyone sees one in future, holler!

Reversebangs reverse the usual order of affairs: instead of writers starting off and artists choosing stories to work with, in a reversebang artists draw first and then writers choose which art they'd like to write a story for. Minimum size for a reversebang is generally smaller than a regular big bang.

The Friend Bang is unique because you start out paired with a friend and both write and draw for each other. The collaboration bang is an experimental format tried last year by the Sastiel Big Bang where artists and authors are paired up right off the bat and create
simultaneously.

(An interesting idea to try might be a doodle!bang. Artists are perennially in shorter supply than ficwriters, even as wordcount limits keep going down. Setting up a low-pressure experience — maybe suggested 10-minute doodle — probably as a reversebang, could encourage artist participation.)

Couple more notes about what did and didn't qualify for inclusion here:

There are any number of multi-fandom bangs as well as bangs for other fandoms. In the interests of getting one list completed, I skipped including these, even though many (perhaps most) multi-fandom bangs would have SPN fic written for them.

In order to be included, a bang must have completed a round productively or else be less than a year old. Older bangs which never got off the ground are included in this list here. One exception that merits honorable mention in my list is the slackers bang, whose mod posts tell their own tale.

If a challenge's home page has been deleted, then inclusion rests on whether I can find fic/art for it, for example an AO3 tag. If you show me fic, I will include it in my list.

A note about schedule dates I've included: I deliberately tried not to get too precise. Challenges may or may not be regular from year to year, and schedules may be adjusted. Always check the bang page if you're interested in a challenge, rather than planning based off the dates in this! This is just to give a general idea. Some will certainly end up not being what I have down here. Links are to sign-ups open as of when I last checked. The numbers before months are just there to enable sorting by month.

The latest round column is the last year in which a round of fic started being posted, for dormant communities. If they're doing a round in 2017 it should say 2017. Occasionally communities will skip a year or three and then run another round, so dormant may not mean dead! Communities with a history of this are marked ongoing, but may not have schedule information posted.

~~Eventually I would like to replace the "year started" and "latest round" columns with~~ (There are now) columns for each year which contain links to the masterposts for each round. Here's a resource with links to masterposts, ~~in the meantime!~~ for other fandoms. ETA 3: Done! Numbers indicate fic/art pairs for each round, plus scattered unpaired works. Mods who put in the labor to make masterposts, I love you and you get ~~cookies~~ bold font. Mods who tally their entries to spare me counting, you totally rock! Asterisks: because Sheets throws fits about more than one link in a cell, an asterisk means Intrepid Reader should exercise their detective skills to find all the fics; for example, by clicking to the next month on a LJ calendar. Note about calendars vs. tags: often there will be a tag for each round. However, I link to the calendar or archive rather than the tag, if I can't find masterposts, because I can't know if everybody tagged properly without doing a ton of cross-checking, and I don't want to miss anybody. I'll link to tags only if I'm assured they're complete.

Also, if you are a mod (or civic-minded citizen) who has shiny new (or old but well-hidden) masterposts for previous years, please do link me up!

“Main” and “wing” should be self-explanatory -- shorter words than “Primary” and “Secondary!” The numbers in the AO3 columns indicate how many works there are in each tag or collection. Keep in mind that tagging and collecting is up to individual authors, and therefore neither the tag nor the collection is likely to represent all work for a challenge, nor will they necessarily consist of the same works. Check challenge masterposts for complete works. Here’s the tag collection for Big Bangs on AO3. I’m sure there are tags ~~and collections~~ on AO3 that I haven’t yet found the links for, but I’m still on it! ETA 2: I’ve now looked at all 641(!) collections with Supernatural in them. Unless you named yours “LMNOP2″ or “Drabbles Comm: Socks” and didn’t include a description, I should have all Bang collections up in the Doc. Stray tags may still crop up.

My Google Spreadsheet of SPN Big (and otherwise) Bang Challenges!

Anyone can comment directly into the document or contact me with additional information or suggestions! Feel free to link to this from anywhere you like as well. ~~Note that there are a couple new challenges with author sign-ups closing TODAY, August 31!~~

ETA: Fun with filters! The awesome thing about speadsheets is that you can sort all the data any way you like! Here’s a quick rundown of possibly-useful information.

Even if you don’t have editing privileges on a Google Doc, you can still sort columns. It won’t permanently change the doc or impact the way others are seeing it if they’re viewing it at the same time as you. All you do is mouse over the top of a column where it says “A” (I don't think it's possible from a phone) and a little arrow will appear for you to click on. So if you’re an artist, feel free to sort by ‘artist signups,’ or if you just like reading everything as soon as it comes out, sort by ‘posting starts.’ The default way I have the Doc sorted is first I sort by ‘status,’ then by ‘writing signups,’ then by ‘latest round.’ This means that the doc will be sorted primarily by the year of the latest round, then by the month writers should sign up in, then by status.

I renamed challenges which haven’t yet gone a round from “new” to “virgin,” not just for amusement, but so we could have an alphabetical list: Closed, Deleted, Dormant, Hiatus, Polling, Ongoing, Virgin. Is that not sweet? You can sort by that, or alphabetically by name, etc. Play around, have fun, and when you’d like to go back to the standard view, just ‘X’ out of the dark gray filter bar.

LJ 18th anniversary

alyndra — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 13:38:19 GMT

#mylivejournal #lj18 #happybirthday