SV fanfic rec

[ratcreature]

Mere Mortals, by deanine.

I found this AU thanks to mecurtin's recent post tracking WIPs. She obviously has a knack for finding the good stuff on ff.net. The story is long, and projected to be a trilogy, The Lost, Genesis and Identity Crisis. As a whole it is still a WIP, but the first book The Lost is finished. The story has a really interesting premise about Krypton's demise and a lot of original ideas about Krytonite. And it is a true ensemble story with lots of plot and good characterization. I started reading today telling myself that I'd just take a look at it to see whether it was worth keeping track of, and was rapidly hooked by the story. My afternoon and evening went a bit differently than planned, but I was well entertained, so who cares about cleaning and doing dishes?

Comments

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

She obviously has a knack for finding the good stuff on ff.net

It's really not hard.

1. Ignore all stories featuring Lana.

2. Ignore all stories featuring Chloe.

3. Ditto Mary Sue (Clark's cousin, Lex's little sister, a new girl at SV High, etc.)

4. Ignore stories where the summaries contain (a) horrific spelling and/or grammar, (b) chatspeak, (c) the phrase "I suck at summaries."

5. Bail if the first paragraph is horrifically bad.

I scan the new stories list once or twice a week and see if there's anything worth reading. To be honest, I follow quite a few WiPs I wouldn't rec to a dog, including the one I personally label "Why *Do* I Read Badfic?!?!"

[ratcreature]

To be honest, my problem with ff.net isn't really the badfic, it's that I dislike the interface on all its levels. The search and sorting capabilities, as well as the display system that only allows display in chapters, when I'm quite sure it wouldn't be impossible to have a script for a "display all chapters" button or something like that, so that you could choose whether to read a specific chapter, or to download the whole thing. So I don't care for looking for stories there, and it needs something very interesting for me to keep reading there. It's the same as with message board fic. Like in Farscape there's a lot of message boards and the Kansas board has really good stuff in its fanfic threads from all I hear, but so far I've only read two stories there that were specifically pointed out to me and not available anywhere else. And I really don't get why people would bother to archive in message board format, with moving posted stories to those older story threads after a while etc. like it's done on Kansas. Some fanfic distribution systems are just not in a format I care to read in.