Yuletide 2020: Recs - 9 Fandoms, No Waiting

[graycardinal]

Herewith the highlights of a day wandering through Yuletide:

ETA: I've given up trying to figure out why everything goes bold beyond the Gargoyles cut tag in this entry (*except* when you view it on a page by itself, when everything looks normal). Whatever's going on there, it's not an HTML thing, I promise.

The Tigers Have Spoken
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~2100
Relationships: Aladdin & Rajah (Disney), Aladdin/Jasmine (Disney) (background), Jasmine & Rajah (Disney)
Characters: Rajah (Disney: Aladdin), Aladdin (Disney), Jasmine (Disney)
Additional Tags: Language Barrier, Protective Rajah, POV Rajah

"Jasmine, I've been--" The boy stops short when he sees it's not the princess herself come to greet him, but the princess's tiger. "Oh. Um. Hi. I was just..."

Rajah plants himself in the middle of the doorway. He is a solid barrier, but he is also ready to move, should the boy decide to try any of his idiot cleverness. He knows the boy can tell.

Rajah is very good at his job.

It's (relatively) easy to write fic that matches the tone of its source canon - swash for a swashbuckler, slapstick for slapstick, scary for horror. What's distinctive and often difficult is creating fic that flips its source's tone inside out, yet retains the essential flavor of the original. That's what we have here: a moment straight from the throne room of the animated Aladdin that pauses, goes deeply quiet and thoughtful and fierce, and gets very convincingly inside the mind of a tiger who is absolutely no one's pussycat.

This one's a keeper.

Conflagration
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Words: ~1100
Relationships: Sam McGee/Narrator
Characters: Sam McGee, Narrator
Additional Tags: Canonical Character Death, Non-Canonical Character Death, maybe? - Freeform, is it death or is it conversion to cryptid?

In the years after he takes Sam McGee on the Christmas mail run to Whitehorse, the narrator dreams of what might have been -- and what might still be.

An eerily uncanny yarn, this, flipping familiar scenery from the classic Service poem into prose that does a truly startling job of replicating the tone and sensibility of the original - and looks to be grounded in genuine Yukon folklore just as deeply as Service himself was. There's real gold here, though not the spendable kind.

Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Beau
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~3700
Relationships: Cecily Alistair/Enola Holmes, Enola Holmes & Sherlock Holmes, Enola Holmes & Mycroft Holmes, Cecily Alistair & Mycroft Holmes
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Enola Holmes, Cecily Alistair, Mycroft Holmes
Additional Tags: POV Sherlock Holmes, POV Enola Holmes, POV Third Person Limited, POV First Person, Present Tense, Past Tense, Holmes Family Feels, Established Relationship, Secret Relationship, Same-Sex Marriage, But Not Officially Because Victorian England, Heteronormativity, Specifically Sherlock Is Being Heteronormative, Supportive Sherlock Holmes, Supportive Mycroft Holmes, LGBTQ Female Character, Fluff, Happy Ending

As the siblings Holmes and Enola's good friend Cecily Alistair celebrate their first Christmas hosted by Enola and Cecily in their new home, Sherlock is shocked to discover that Enola has a secret lover! So obviously, he snoops. Who is this man? Why did she not tell her family? Is she secretly MARRIED??? And if she's married, where is the husband??? Perhaps it's best not to tell Mycroft just yet.

A wonderfully compact yet deeply conceived exercise in triple-strength Holmesian deduction and subtlety, narrated in prose well-pitched to match not just the style and tone of the books, but also their slightly sideways take on Sherlock and Mycroft. The gift recipient has already done an excellent deconstruction by way of comment; what's worth noting in addition is the deftness of the final twist, highlighting the competitive streak in the relationship between Enola's brothers in its assignment of the last word.

The Hour of Greatest Need
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~1200
Characters: Puck | Owen Burnett, Tom (Gargoyles), The Magus (Gargoyles)
Additional Tags: Gargoyles 2198

Elisa woke King Arthur up early.

A thrilling and perhaps timely snapshot that looks two hundred years ahead by the Gargoyles clock, to what might once have been the opening moments of a planned Gargoyles 2198 series. While it's clearly the doorway to a much larger storyline, this crisp narrative lays exactly the right bits of groundwork to work as a free-standing set piece.

And who knows? Given the advent of Disney+ and the rapid evolution of the media marketplace in the wake of current events, perhaps the third- and fourth-hand murmurs I've been hearing are accurate, and we might yet see a new Gargoyles series from Greg Weisman in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, this serves well enough as a foreshadowing of what might be.

The Chinese Silk Murders
Chapters: 3/3
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~5900
Characters: Dee Jen-djieh, Tao Gan, Ma Joong, Chiao Tai, Hoong Liang, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Case Fic, crime investigation

Judge Dee has to solve the murder of a rich silk merchant, find out if the merchant's niece is just a clueless member of the family or much more than she seems and also solve a riddle in form of strange letters and bills. There are many suspects and just one murderer. Or more?

Very nice to see another Yuletide story in this very small fandom - especially when it's a cleverly plotted casefic very much in the spirit of Robert van Gulik's own work, complete with reference notes. (Now if someone will just translate the Lenormand novels so that we can have English editions....)

Hell Bats are Not Just for the Night of the Conjunction of Capricorn With Saturn
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~1000
Relationships: Gerald Harcourt/Marianne Harcourt
Characters: Gerald Harcourt, Professor Zimmer (Kiss of the Vampire), Van Helsing (Hammer), Klove (Scars of Dracula)
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Timeline What Timeline, Hell bats, Post-Canon, Epistolary, Crack, Hammer Horror Universe

Professor Zimmer begins to fear that the acquisition of an army of Bats out of Hell is for life, not just the long-awaited night of the full moon.

So what do you do with that leftover colony of bats after living through a classic Hammer horror flick? You advertise, of course, and the resulting exchange of correspondence will probably look just like this. A clever bit of epistolary tale-telling very much in the spirit of both Hammer and Stoker (with perhaps just a touch of Fred Saberhagen in the mix).

Just Your Typical College Experience
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~2400
Characters: Mary-Lynette Carter, Rashel Jordan, John Quinn (Night World), Ash Redfern

"And you're my roommate through sheer coincidence?"

Mary-Lynette's adventure has always been one of my favorites in this series; it's a genuine pleasure to see her starting college, and I can just see Circle Daybreak pulling exactly this stunt while it's in its organizing phase, as this has to be set some time before the gathering at Thierry's several books further along. The MIT atmosphere feels right, and as quickly settled as it is, Rashel's and Mary-Lynette's proper introduction feels equally on the mark. This series, whether in canon or fanfic, is always at its best when it's playing against genre conventions, and this story has that quality in spades.

Diplomacy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~5300
Relationships: Tail-Kinker & Spock (Uhura's Song - Janet Kagan)
Characters: Spock (Star Trek), Tail-Kinker to-Ennien, Sarek (Star Trek), Another StarFreedom to-Eeaiou, Brightspot to-Ennien

Sivao is on its way to joining the Federation, if they can just get through the talks with Eeaiou and the Federation. Stiff Tail is their main representative and the Federation has asked Spock, Uhura, Chekhov, Academy Cadet Brightspot to-Ennien, and Another StarFreedom to Eeaiou to help the Federation delegation. Spock requests the noted diplomat Tail-Kinker to-Ennien as a member of their party.

This story is no mere coda or snapshot; it's a straight-up sequel to Uhura's Song that tackles the ensuing problems in diplomacy head-on -- and brings in both Sarek of Vulcan and Tail-Kinker to-Ennien to help shepherd the process along. That's an ambitious project, and there's not room here either to cover the proceedings in depth or reach a definitive conclusion, but the story does ample justice to nearly all its large ensemble cast and more or less ties off one of the more tantalizing loose ends Janet Kagan left in the original novel. With a sequel from Kagan herself now permanently off the table, this is more than worthwhile as a continuation. And I'm sure many readers, myself included, would welcome further installments in this arc if the author is so inclined.

A Retreat To Keep
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~2800
Characters: Kethry (Valdemar), Tarma shena Tale'sedrin
Additional Tags: Original Character(s)

Post-Oathbreakers.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, except when Tarma and Kethry are involved!

As various commenters have noted, this is a classic Tarma & Kethry tale, filling in a key moment between books in the extended canon. The structure is familiar - which is as it should be for straight-ahead sword and sorcery - and the execution is smooth and assured. Fans will definitely appreciate the nods to series continuity, but this story should also be readable and accessible without detailed background knowledge of the source canon.

Comments

[graycardinal]

I have been trying to figure that one out since late last night, because insofar as I can tell, there is absolutely no difference in the coding whatsoever. I've taken the HTML through Notepad to clean out any possible format crud from any foreign text editors, and just now I tried pulling the code from the "Enola" rec (which is clearly not borked), replacing the Enola text matter with the Gargoyles text matter, and copying that code back into the DW posting form. No joy.

My best guess is that there is something in the underlying DW/LJ source code for executing cuts that does this, because I have had difficulties with cut tags in general for years; either they balk at larger amounts of text put under a cut, or the engine balks at including multiple cut tags in a single entry. I actually went looking this morning to see if there was any info about such a bug in the support areas, but (a) there is not, and (b) the relevant sections of the support areas have evidently not been updated in quite a long time.

The closest I get to anything that looks relevant are two things: the Known Issue that basically says "some users are having trouble getting some HTML to work, but we're not sure why", and the much more recent posts explaining the overall coding problem of the DW/LJ core code being extremely antique and quirky by modern standards, and they're trying their best to replicate the functionality with modern code without breaking the site entirely.

Which leads me to believe that even if I turn the issue in to Support, a genuine fix is unlikely for not-unreasonable resource allocation reasons. (I may do so anyway, on the theory that this particular glitch might supply a fresh clue for the coders as to the underlying problem, but that's as far as I think we're going to get.)

[alexseanchai]

oh, one of those. fun fun. 🙁

[graycardinal]

Heh. It did give me an excuse to update my journal theme, which was way overdue for a makeover. :-)