Completed Fanfiction Recommendations

[robkelk]

This one's a decade old, but it's still a fun read.

"The Great Taboo Turkey Shoot", by bissek (the author of "The White Devil of the Moon"). Complete in one chapter.

tl;dr: In seventh year, Harry Potter actually reads the prophecy... and, with some mundane weapons, does what he needs to do.


(And I see that AO3 has a canonical tag "Albus Dumbledore Bashing" with over 7,900 examples, of which this story is one. YMMV.)

[AvrosRaven]

Ao3 tags are wild sometimes.

[Bob Schroeck]

So I've been going through my Kindle for the last few months, reading everything in my fanfic folder (which held in excess of 650 works), deleting things that had never been completed or were just worse than I remembered (or both), and keeping just the best of the best of something like 15 years' accumulation. And I've come across things I don't even recognize, or forgot I had. Anyway, I figured I would start posting a few things here and/or maybe in the "Old School" thread. This story certainly qualifies for both, as it's finished and it's 20 years old:

Exact Change by Ozzallos. When Nabiki gets her hands on a time machine, she finds herself working desperately with Ranma to avert a disaster which will end up with the dojo destroyed, the Tendos impoverished, and herself crippled or worse -- and that's just the start.

[Matrix Dragon]

Fighters of the Hellmouth [BtvS/Cobra Kai], by Cliffc999

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/...-116984426

[classicdrogn]

Battletech: The Bull and the Genie (SB link) is another entry in the "What if Battletech, but less stupids?" fix-fic collection, running from a bit before the Steiner-Davion merge to post-Clan invasion. It's got some genuine funny moments, but mostly sticks to being serious military sci-fi and does also get pretty grim at times, especially the last arc. It is a particularly bad AU to be a Draconis conscript, and if you know anything at all about the setting that's saying a lot.

219k words in 156 threadmarks, not counting a handful of side story chapters and omake.

[classicdrogn]

It's a bit hard to define a "canon Amy Dallon" given that the depiction in Ward is so radically different, and that despite numerous edits to retcon Worm as Wildbow tried to fix his mistake of making a character who was sympathetic without protagonist-centered morality, but even with that caveat most of the versions you'll find in fanfic have had their sharp edges more or less eased, if not having been entirely alted in the opposite direction in service of patching the world enough to at least lose the "derp" off the "grim."

Well, the Amy in Blood and Bandages is little Jumping Cactus of needles and barbs, at least statistically significantly close to the through line of canon data points, and it's probably a telling point that inserting a post-canon-death Toga Miimiko (B0ku no Hero Aacademia's shapechanging yandere vampire murder-loli villainess) [is still making the world a better place[/i] by her presence. Himiko and Amy are both pretty far off from normal thought patterns, but the differences in their viewpoints and in the internalized "common sense of the world" that they have as baselines showing off just how different the two mostly-street-level superhero settings really are, as well as the deuteragonists themselves, and the points where they clash and mesh just make the whole thing fascinating.

Also features Merchants members who are bad guys but more than idiot strawman druggies.

Spoilers for BnHA late continuity, if you care about that, in the official summary as well as the fic itself.

Saummary

Toga Himiko gave her life to save Ochako and waited for death to fully embrace her. Yet, she finds herself brought back to life by a completely different brunette heroine: Panacea! Somehow, someway, Himiko ended up a couple centuries in the past and also in America. With her entire past now instead a distant future, Himiko now only has one path forward: get a girlfriend! Maybe that cute heroine who saved her life?

80k words in 18 chapters, with updates tending to come somewhere between two a week and two weeks apart.
SB threadmarks link


I haven't read it yet, but one of the commenters noted that there was a similarly well-written Amy in Amy Dallon, Herald of Andraste which inserts her into the world of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

243k words in 22 threadmarks, updates vary from weekly to monthly.
SB threadmarks link

[Matrix Dragon]

Several months before the events of Winter Solder, a SHIELD mission goes sideways and throws Steve Rogers into another universe. Having lost everything... again... He ends up taking a job offer at a superhero dispatch company in LA. With no one having any idea of just how qualified he really is, he has to start out as just another newbie, and gets stuck in the Z-Team, a team made up of former supervillains that cut a deal with the government for clemency, and quickly bonds with one in particular...

My Star Spangled Invisi-Gal by Cliffc999 is a Cap Isakei into Dispatch, and a shipfic between, as the name suggests, Captain America and Invisigal. Managing over a chapter a day for the past three weeks, it's the fastest fic he's managed, which given if was originally just a few snippets he wasn't planning to make a fic in the first place is kind of hilarious. Highly recommended.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/...e.1274687/

[Shepherd]

Erazerhead: The Unknown Hero, a My Hero Academia fic by Clouds.

15 chapters/21k words.

Izuku finds a piece of Eraserhead's capture weapon and accidentally becomes a vigilante. The only issue is that when villains see a hero using Eraserhead's capture weapon, they make the logical assumption that that hero is, in fact, Eraserhead.

Oops...

https://archiveofourown.org/works/378019...s/94384678

[Shepherd]

Dreaming of Sunshine/Final Fantasy XIV

Echoes of Sunshine

In the moment she died in the desert, when Shikako freed Gelel, she came back slightly different. Now she just has to master her new senses, not suffer too many diegetic flashbacks, and solve her increasingly dire divine problems before the world ends.

10 Chapters, 8,690 words.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/794717.../208546836

Echoes of Shadows

After escaping the interdimensional rift thanks to the timely intervention of the Crystal Exarch, Shikako must learn of the worlds beyond her own and act quickly, for the First Shard is in dire peril. In a land seared by a Flood of Light, everyone must stand together against blinding oblivion and restore the long-lost night.

56 Chapters, 157,740 words.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/794754.../208555986

[ECSNorway]

https://www.battletech.com/forums/index....078.0.html

"The Long Vigil"

Corvin Hale's family has been keeping watch in the Deep Periphery for a very long time.

But what have they been watching for?

[classicdrogn]

The Limits of Power is a Worm/MTG crossover (with bits of vasrious other things that have MtG crossover cards) with Taylor as (until the final chapters) a half-step Oldwalker minus the actual planeswalking and with initially quite limited summon count that slowly grows into a proper full ignition over the course of the fic. I'm hardly an authority on Magic canon but can at least say that the internal story logic is consistent for tat, and it allows for a sense of genuine progression along with the character arc so various antagonists can be faced while they're still at least some degree of challenge, and still get through the list to wrap things up in arounf 300k words.

Also, the PRT and Protectorate characters still have their flaws, but incompetence and stupidity are generally not among them, plausiblly boneheaded teen moments aside. That's always refreshing. Likewise, Taylor herself stumbles and changes and learns, at least, how to make different mistakes next time. It's not packed with laughss like a lot of my recs, but I'm not regretting a day spent reading it.

[Bob Schroeck]

Ah, yes! I was following this as it was written. I second the recommendation.

[classicdrogn]

Dark Star Rising is another Worm alt-power fic, non-crossover this time. Most of what I said about the tone of The Limits of Power applies here as well, with the added note that the challenge factor feels higher most of the time, and that it manages to pull off that rarest of feats, a Snoozefest Nine arc that is not just a comic relief curb-stomp and also not a grimderp slog that makes me drop the story. It also does an actual battle against Scion rather than trick-boss neutralizing him or running out of juice before even getting there, the first such I can remember seeing in the fandom.

285k words in 77 posts. There were more epilogues mentioned as a possibility, but that was 2024 so it's probably safe to assume that the story really is as complete as the title tag says it is.
SB threadmarks link

[classicdrogn]

So, this one is really outside the range of what I'd usually even open a tab for, let alone stick with and then reccomend, but bear with me.

Riley, Alone opens on the S9 getting into a traffic accident on their way to Brocton Bay. Murder ARRGH gets squished before being fully named and a prompt hero response ties up most of the other members while Bonesaw is preoccupied fixing Uncle Jack after finding that he'd broken his fall with a nearby stop sign ... through the skull. It's fine, he's Jack, he's always fine, nothing and no one can really hurt him, of course he'll be fine! There's a little damage to his corona gemma and how it connects to the rest of his brain, but she fixes it right up, so he's fine!

The first arc of the story is Bonesaw slowly realizing that he is not, in fact, fine, and not invincible either, as the group falls apart and Jack gets more erratic, until, well, title drop isn't a spoiler but the how of it would be. The body horror tapers off as MC tries to reconsider what it means to be "good" and "bad" and how people know which is which, with predictably mixed results, but the spiral trends upwards and verges into the general region of sanity by the finale. It is another story that maintains a smaller scope without addressing the other setting antagonists, but it's open ended enough to accommodate a canon-ish resolution, and probably something better.

94k words in 26 threadmarks
Warning for gore and body horror due to Jack-ness / Bonesaw-ness
SB threadmarks
It's the same author as Desperate Times Call For Desperate Pleasures and What If Catgirl Taylor Got Stuck In A Tree? if you remember those.