I Love Your Eleutherophobia! What Are Other Fics That Most Influenced That That You Recommend?

I love your eleutherophobia! What are other fics that most influenced that that you recommend?

First and foremost, a huge honking caveat: Most of these are not Animorphs fan fiction.  I am sorry about that, especially if you’re here looking for Animorphs recs.  I tend to be super-picky in what I read in general and that tends to be quadruply true for Animorphs.  There are lots of good stories that I know I am missing, and for that I’m sorry.  This is just my own wildly eclectic and deeply idiosyncratic list of Things That Influenced Eleutherophobia. 

Sword and Shield, Jewel and Song

Author: Elecktrum

Fandom: The Chronicles of Narnia

Genre: Action/Adventure, Family

Length: 1k to 104k (several fics in a loosely interconnected series)

Summary: Details the first two years of the Golden Age of Narnia from Peter’s and Edmund’s points of view, as the Pevensies deal with curses, quests, political tangles, cannibalistic giants, grumpy dwarves, and coming of age.

Why I love it: This writing is complex, disturbing, hilarious, and deep.  It features characters who are so fleshed out you feel like you could meet them on the street, imagery so powerful it haunts your mind’s eye for days after reading, and dialogue that seamlessly melds with the original novels’ writing style.  More importantly, it updates and refines C.S. Lewis’s work for a modern audience through adopting a contemporary perspective on gender, race, and social roles.  It has irreparably re-terriformed Narnia in my mind, and for that I am grateful.

What it gave me: This author understands absolutely how to write siblings, including a set of four siblings with a deeply complex history such as the Pevensies.  I gladly take lessons from this series not only on how to write families but on how to write leadership and consciousness with one’s public role interacting with one’s extreme youth and inexperience.

The Maddest House

Author: Busaikko

Fandom: Harry Potter

Genre: Romance (Remus/Sirius), Kid Fic, Adventure

Length: 43k

Summary: Sirius gets custody of Harry after James and Lily’s deaths.  Over the course of his first decade as a parent, he and Remus must learn to forgive each other for past transgressions and eventually to fall in love again.

Why I love it: This story makes incredibly creative use of some of the devices and concepts from the original Harry Potter series while also adding a lot of its own flairs and twists to the plot.  The writing is so good specifically for all the things the author doesn’t say: for instance, we never find out the exact circumstances of Remus and Sirius’s breakup, but all the tiny hints allow us to infer a very disturbing picture.  It’s also notable that this author resists the temptation to make any of the characters anything extraordinary, instead celebrating the fact that they are a handful of mostly-incompetent mediocre blokes thrown into a situation beyond their control who nevertheless rise to the occasion.

What it gave me: WORLD BUILDING.  There are dozens of running jokes and small elements in this story that really make Sirius and Harry’s life feel real, from the book of domestic spells that worms its way almost accidentally into every aspect of Sirius’s life to the question of what it would really be like on an everyday level to have one-seventh of Voldemort living inside one’s soul.

Redefinition

Author: KilroyWasHere

Fandom: Blue Bloods

Genre: Family, Adventure

Length: 137k

Summary: Schuyler Van Alen learns self-defense, befriends her antagonistic cousin, finally goes on a date with her best friend, discovers her family history, and generally gets her groove back.  Oh, and she prevents Lucifer from rising and ending the world along the way.  Canon divergence as of Masquerade.

Why I love it: This story draws attention back to a lot of the coolest aspects of the Blue Bloods series (the protagonists as Grigori, the plethora of female heroines, the idea of high school drama echoed on a literally cosmic scale), most of which Melissa De La Cruz sort of tosses out and then leaves untouched on the table.  Other commenters have said that this story is a more worthy sequel to Masquerade than the deeply problematic Revelations, and I could not agree more.

What it gave me: I should admit that I’m biased, since I betaed this fic and its author currently betas my stories, but this is the one story that taught me more about the possibilities of fan fiction than any other I’ve read.  It updates and complexifies the canon work, challenging its casual sexism and also celebrating its daring scope.  It actually takes the time to explore the implications of her universe and its rules in full, bringing considerably more depth and nuance to the characters’ relationships than are present in canon.

The Tocsin

Author: Beth Epstein

Fandom: Animorphs

Genre: Canon Divergence

Length: 7k

Summary: After Tom breaks his leg, the yeerk inside him gets replaced—with a member of the Peace Movement.  He teams up with Jake and ends up acting as an older brother of sorts to the entire Animorphs team.

Why I love it: This was the story that got me intrigued about the possibilities of Animorphs if the kids actually had someone they could lean on instead of each other.  It was also, for many years, the only work of fan fiction on the entire internet that offered any speculation at all about what Tom Berenson would be like if he was ever given a voice in the canon series, and I must have reread it 50,000 times as a result.

What it gave me: A fascination with Tom, for one.  I don’t know that I even paid much attention to him as a character before I encountered this fic and then immediately returned to reread #31, wondering for the first time about the person underneath the homicidal alien using his body.  Needless to say, I’ve been wondering ever since.

Another Brother

Author: AvocadoLove

Fandom: Avatar the Last Airbender

Genre: Family, Action/Adventure, Canon Divergence

Length: 224k (INCOMPLETE)

Summary: Hakoda finds a mysterious firebender child with a very distinctive scar on his face but no memory of his past life, and decides to take mercy on the little boy.  Zuko grows up as a middle child between Sokka and Katara, until the arrival of the avatar at the South Pole brings his old life crashing into his new one.

Why I love it: It’s probably painfully obvious by this point in the list that I’m an utter sucker for stories that focus on families and how they influence the observed lives of fictional characters, and few fics do it as well as this one.  This story is complex without being difficult to follow, plotty but undeniably character-driven.  It’s probably the only incomplete story I can unambiguously recommend, and it holds that status for a reason.

What it gave me: The plot of this story leans heavily into the unique strengths of fan fiction as a literary genre through making use of the readers’ knowledge of the canon work to set up and then subvert expectation after expectation.  Right from the very first moment that Hakoda encounters a child with a burn scar over his left eye, this author uses that dramatic irony to raise intriguing questions and ramp up the tension in this story.  The contrast between the Zuko we see in this story (trying to live up to Hakoda’s expectations, wavering over how to be an older brother to a younger but more-competent Katara, acting as a fond but exasperated mentee to Sokka) and the Zuko we see in canon (with Ozai, Azula, and Iroh in those roles, respectively) raises really fascinating questions about the roles of nature and nurture in shaping canon characters.

The Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail

Author: Owlet

Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe

Genre: Angst and Humor

Length: 3k to 144k (several fics in a loosely interconnected series)

Summary: Bucky Barnes has been dehumanized for the better part of the past 70 years, meaning that when he tries to put himself back together he remains in some ways fractured.  However, the ability to make his own choices and to seek out hedonic experiences more than makes up for the confusion of freedom.  Too bad he’s trapped in perpetual indecision about whether or not to contact the former best friend he recently tried to kill.

Why I love it: I first opened this story on a Tuesday afternoon when I had errands I meant to run—and when I looked up, it was evening, nothing had been done, and I’d had an entire new universe implanted inside my brain.  Prepare to be swept away by this writing from the moment you first dip a toe into its waters.

What it gave me: Humor and angst in equal measure, without either one overlapping or diluting the other.  It makes really good use of an experimental writing technique (which I’m normally wary about in fan fiction) to give us an enormously deep emotional connection with its deeply unusual narrator.