~~ tell the truth, but tell it slant.

First of all, this `very important announcement': I am updating links on my recs page and omg. Trin's fanfic reminds me of all the joy I've been forgetting a bit. Every single one. Wah. No serious plotty epics for me, no sir. Gimme the weird, the quirky, the insane, the gorgeous and the deeply unbalanced (but in a brilliant way). Guh. Fiction like a candy-drug-- melting in your mouth, not in your hand. I'm trying to think of "epics I have loved" in general, and am drawing a blank. I like small stories-- tight-knit focus, intense emotion, feverish madness, deep as nightmare and sharp as a knife. The long stories, you can wander in, get lost in-- but for me, that isn't fanfiction, that is a whole new world reinvented. Maybe that's it. In fanfiction, epics get repetitive, plot-devices overused, emotion diluted and momentum lost. If it takes me 25-fucking-chapters to get to a goddamn H/D kiss-- no thank you, goodnight. Hell, I don't even want 15 chapters, though that depends how much UST there is. No, seriously, I have no patience for so-called fanfic-world-building and painstaking characterization efforts. If a ficlet can make me feel the insides of a person in one page, one can -definitely- do it in 10 or whatever the length of a chapter is. Character development is great if you give me some -other- reason to read. I'm a picky biatch with a fickle attention span, what can I say. Being jaded isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In that spirit, a general review-disclaimer:

( What I say just may upset you, but I don't mean to beset you.... Some dissembling re: happy-buttons and yuck-buttons ahead. )

~~

A list of my positive biases in HP fanfic (to the best of my knowledge) would be as follows:

( Also known as Disclaimer #2 -.- )

~~

That said.

On to the fic I wanted to mention (finally!!)

    cupiscent's `Surface' isn't working for me. I mean, the writing (my number one kink, so to speak) is brilliant, but no. It's almost like a textbook case of a fic tailor-made not to do it for me, even though it was all unsentimental and well-told and yet.

It pushed not one but two-- a double-whammy of my multiplying yuck-buttons. For one, the Draco is extremely emotionally distant, of the icy breed. Harry is the one who's supposed to want him, which -totally- doesn't work for me, especially when combined with #2: the too-aware voice. Draco doesn't know -everything-, yes, but he knows all sorts of things he shouldn't-- and he acts on them. He's so manipulative that he puts fanon!Lucius to shame, contrasted with a Harry who basically has no chance against him, almost completely within Draco's power. (Will-less!Harry-- another pet peeve.) This could never work for me, ever. I don't care if you're a genius writer, I won't buy it, not in Hogwarts sixth or seventh year.

    One of the things I really dig in a fic above all else is a voice that stays true to being limited to its intended range of awareness. This is what JKR does so well in the books, almost too well, one might say-- Harry perceives, but with a slant. He is not wise or extremely reliable in his perceptiveness. He is bound up by his emotions. He is often -wrong-, most importantly. And it's not a matter of miscalculation, like with this Draco. It's a matter of complete inability to see outside his blinders unless forced to. And I -like- that about him, thankyouverymuch.

( Blahblah let's-worship-the-unreliable-narrator blah. Also, the joy of being -wrong-. )