I've been reading that "Tatters" serial by soulcake that Karie recommended. While there's some good writing in general (and including themes from The King in Yellow is always a good thing in my book), I'm having trouble getting into it because it pings one of my biggest eyeroll-inducing fanfic peeves, but hard. It seems to be set in Liberace!World, where most of the main characters and about every supporting character we meet is revealed to be not just gay, but in or beginning a schmoopy committed partnership. And of the three shows being crossed over, Angel is the one in whose storyline the slash is least prevalent so far.

Well, when you're dealing with a slasher writing a crossover in which you have the main slash pairings in each fandom... I dunno, it didn't ping my "oh for fuck's sake is no one in this entire universe straight?" radar, but I can see how it might yours. (Of course, I've been reading it as it was posted, so if there were pairings other than Jack/Daniel and Jim/Blair I quite frankly don't even remember them at this point.)

Lovely, the story to which this is a sequel, is gen if I remember correctly, but it doesn't have the Angel content.

There's also a bit where Angel comments on what Wesley has always really wanted during an hallucinatory attack (OK, that doesn't actually deviate much from show canon, although they don't speak about such things quite that openly most of the time), and it's revealed that Denver the Hipster Bookshop Owner's store has now been taken over by his surviving longtime companion Bill.

Tangentally, women are highly marginalized in the story with the sole exception of Cordelia. Major Carter might as well be a cardboard cutout, for all the impact or agency she's had, and the other women who've apeared in the story haven't even had direct lines of dialogue so far.

I don't mean to imply that the story is awful or anything, I think a lot of it is really well-written and evocative (particularly the chapters set on P3X-636). But I think crossover stories need to maintain an even higher level of plausibility than normal fanfic, and switching the canonical orientation of 5 out of 10 main characters all in one swoop does not help with that.

I really hate slash where prominent female characters -- essential to canon -- are marginalized or caricatured. It really toasts my oats, especially in Due South, which has some comical but really quite chewy women.

Yeah, that's my gripe about a lot of Angel slashfic as well. People, regardless of whether or not you think Angel and Spike/Wesley/Lindsey/Xander/random client off the street are the great tragic romance of all time, Cordelia Chase would not be standing around meekly for the proceedings with no comment!

"Hello? Have we met?" would be her opinion about that. But writing for early Cordy was one of my pleasures in my one attempt at Angel fanfic.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong in choosing to focus on a particular set of characters, though, so long as you do it right. Obviously not every story is going to have room for every credits character, and I don't think it's necessarily a weakness to choose to write a story about Angel and Lindsey that just doesn't get into the rest of the MoG, or a story about Cordelia and Fred that does the same.

No argument there, although I think it's somewhat silly to have characters present but uncharacteristically silent or inactive. Particularly if the cast is fairly small and cohesive to begin with. Writers who don't like writing for Gunn should find some reason for him to not be around rather than having him present to utter one "Let's gear up" line in a 50 page story.

I've been looking for a long time for a site that recced and reviewed just Spuffy fanfiction - that being my sole fannish interest and, with limited time online, not wanting to wade through tons of other stuff. I can't seem to find what I want so I've decided to give it a try myself. I've started a live journal where I'll be developing what I hope will be a fairly definitive list of good Spuffy fanfic (and some not so good). If anyone is interested, please wander over to:

[link]

Just got a lovely fb email from someone I've never heard of before, saying she really wanted to encourage me to continue with Career Change and Career Advancement. It was formatted in paragraphs and used proper English and all that stuff that proves your readers have brains.

I'm all a-twitter.