Just finished a terrible fic with so much promise. I forgave the badness at first, thinking maybe it was second-language issues. But! The plot holes! The spell check weirdness! The lack of reality! (they let the dude go when he was caught in the act of beating a kid, a kid who was not his, Because they couldn't prove he was guilty of a different crime. HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?? KIDNAPPING AND ABUSE! RED-HANDED!). And Dean doesn't show up until about 3/4 of the way into the story.

And then, after 20,000 words, there is suddenly romance. Bwuh?

I highly recommend CJ Cherryh if you like old school Asimov but with a bit more emotions. That same school of thinking, but "feminised". As in, humanised, because he was a cold fish theoretician a lot of the time.

And, not old. 80s. You know.

What fic was that, Julie? Sounds like one I missed, but I'm behind on my READ ALL THE D/C I had doing there for a while.

And, lord, was Sin With A Grin a waste of time and title.

Oh god, I'm glad my reading of Sin With a Grin was mostly skimming and skipping.

The fic that ticked me off was Jude.

C.J. Cherryh was my fave author in highschool. Downbelow Station, Faded Sun, Heavy Time, The Dreaming Tree (that last one always makes me ache). The Foreigner universe.

Sin with a Grin had no emotional resonance at all. Manufactured conflict, weird casework (FBI), wooden banter, but one great piece of spy fu that got me kinda hot and bothered. So many words, so few feels...

And what the hell was the title about? I'd rather an obviously obscure-to-me song lyric with brackets in and non-standard punctuation, really. Helps stop me from trying to work out the connection.

My biggest main issue with SwaG was that it sold itself as a cop AU, but spent a fuckton of time on fluff. Because of the skimming, I can't comment on the emotional resonance, but I'm sure you're spot-on.

Jude had lots of procedural, but made absolutely zero sense, plot-wise or emotionally.

The part where they rolled Dean into the case they failed to exercise any competence porn on his part (Sam and Cas were uber-agents, but Dean was...a grade school teacher who had fired a gun offscreen at some point).

I also find that I'm less and less in love with Mary living--I don't think her being alive affects the stories enough. I think the boys should be more different with a mother around, especially now that we know the Campbells are generations of hunters. We don't seem to get that Mary, nor any other Campbell-fu in the stories I'm reading (scaramouche's BB is a good exception).

I honestly think that Mary living would change too much, just as WiaWNSB showed us. John doesn't become obsessed, Dean isn't forced to become Sam's primary caregiver, the boys aren't forced to live in each other's pocket. What makes the boys we know and love is gone.

But that was a Mary that no one knew was a hunter, and managed to stay out of the hunting life.

If you keep her alive, you don't have to make those same assumptions--you know more than Dean did. And she could either fail or reconsider keeping them civilians.

There's a dozen ways it could go. But if we stayed on the trajectory of a hunter!Mary who'd given up the life, Sam and Dean grow up differently, and don't have that codependent bond. Sure, other things could be invented to happen along the way to recreate that relationship: John dying and Mary raising the boys as hunters, John and Mary divorcing, something trying to kill Mary and the fam on the move to avoid more attacks. Etc... But an apple pie Mary and Dean and Sam being the same to each other? I don't see it.

The key its why did Mary live, and did her parents (and all that knowledge entailed) survive, for me. There are quasi isolationist hunter families that can come out of those variables for me.