fancake is a thematic recommendation community where all members are welcome to post recs, and fanworks of all shapes and sizes are accepted. Check out the community guidelines for the full set of rules.

This theme runs for the entire month. If you have any questions, just ask!

⌈ Secret Post #6906 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 17 secrets from Secret Submission Post #986.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Fandom: Stranger Things
Pairings/Characters: Steve Harrington & Robin Buckley, Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson
Rating: Explicit
Length: 11,087 words
Creator Link: thefourthvine
Theme: Amnesty, Just Plain Fun, Platonic Life Partners, Everybody Lives/Nobody Dies AUs, Canon LGBTQ Characters, First Time

Summary: As soon as Eddie gets to the counter, Steve turns to him and says, "Back me up here. Kissing is no big deal, right?"

Steve Harrington is talking about kissing. Eddie's brain shorts out. "Uh," he says.

Reccer's Notes: Steve accompanies Robin to a gay bar where he discovers his skills with the ladies are transferable to guys. Robin and Eddie both have a crisis over it, though for different reasons. Very fun and very hot, with Steve at his himbo best.

Fanwork Link: We Better Make a Start

Fancake's Themes in 2025

January: (Not Really) Unrequited Love
February: Ambiguous Relationships
March: Non-Sexual Intimacy
April: Outsider POV
May: Angst (With a Happy Ending)
June: Female Relationships
July: Working Together
August: Marriage of Convenience
September: Food & Cooking
October: Uncommon Settings
November: Mystery & Suspense
December: Amnesty

In the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like.

Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.

The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.

Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.

It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.

The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than scans_daily. But please, no doomscrolling, for your own sake.

I hope that those who celebrated Thanksgiving did so in as harmonious a manner as possible.

In the UK, our own Right Wing extremist wannabe cult leader, Nigel Farage countered claims of Anti-Semitism and racist behaviour in his school days by saying that he had "never directly racially abused anybody"... which managed to make the word "directly" do more heavy lifting than an Olympic shot-put team.

However bad your workday was, the odds are that it was better than whoever at the Office for Budget Responsibility pushed the button which accidentally released a detailed response to, the UK Government's Budget report, several hours before the UK Government actually announced it's Budget report.

The Terry Pratchett Estate has announced that in Discworld terms, following 2025 being "The Year of the Luminous Lemur", 2026 will be "The Year of the Curious Squid".

Stranger Things, Season 5 Pt1 dropped. Having forgotten to actually watch most of Season 4, I made do with the recap and don't think I missed too much. I suspect a lot of shippers will be unhappy with some choices being made but, whilst sympathising with them of course, never having been that invested in it myself, I think I actually liked the realisation at the end of the last episode of this part. I've also seen these episodes described as being "A lot of build up, but not much actually happens", which is probably fair but that's what happens when you split a season in two for marketing purposes)

Hey look, they've made a sequel to the weird by excellent (IMHO) 2022 Norwegian monster movie "Troll" and it's on Netflix!

⌈ Secret Post #6905 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #986.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

As always, our theme for December is amnesty. This month you can post recs for any past round—from any year—as long as the work hasn't already been recommended for that theme. Refresh your memory with a spreadsheet of previous rounds or search the comm for past recs.

Be sure to tag your recs with theme: amnesty in addition to the relevant theme(s).

If you're just joining us, be sure to check out our policy on content notes. Content notes aren't required, but they're nice to include in your recs, especially if a fanwork has untagged content that readers may wish to know about in advance.

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The cover’s a spoiler of sorts: by the end of the issue, this will be the official membership of the Justice League International--America and Europe.

But the most important character in this issue isn’t on the cover. All three of its stories are a showcase for the JLI-est of JLI characters...( G’Nort? )

Fandom: due South
Characters/Pairings: Benton Fraser, Ray Vecchio, Diefenbaker, Harding Welsh
Rating: Teen
Length: 4590
Content Notes: The author chose not to warn. AU from the end of Victoria's Secret as Fraser wasn't shot and he left with Victoria on the train.

If you'd much rather know about major AO3 warnings and be spoiled for the reveal at the end, click the arrow at left. SPOILERS

Ray doesn't realise until near the fic's end that it's Fraser's ghost meeting with him, as Victoria killed him then ran for the US border. But with Fraser's and Welsh's help, they catch her.

Creator Links: MSSalieri on AO3, Salieri's old website
Themes: Mystery and suspense, Friendship, Cops and Crime, AU: Fork in the road

Summary: He’s in a booth around the corner, hands folded on the Formica table. It’s his jacket, the one he had on when he jumped onto the train, so Ray believes it’s him. But it’s not the guy Ray knew. His hair hangs to his collar. His eyes are dark with exhaustion, his face gaunt. He’s been gone nineteen months. It might as well be nineteen years.

Dief’s whine is thin, a little panicky. He’s shivering against Ray’s knee.

“Hello, Ray,” Fraser says.

Reccer's Notes: This is a tough story, but I keep going back to it from time to time because it's just so good. Set more than a year after Ray Vecchio stumbled and missed the shot so that Fraser left with Victoria on the train, Ray meets up once more with a very changed Fraser in a motel at the ass end of Canada, in a blizzard. It's sad, spooky, and wonderfully written. Powerful and haunting, and very much worth a read.

Fanwork Links: Dysmas on AO3, Dysmas on Wayback

Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi
Pairings/Characters: Gen, background M/M (Everything implied no specifics); Meng Yao | Jin Guangyao & Nie Mingjue; Song Lan | Song Zichen/Xiao Xingchen, Meng Yao | Jin Guangyao, Nie Mingjue, Song Lan | Song Zichen, Xiao Xingchen, A-Qing, Original Character
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Length: 6,330
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, OC POV, Outsider POV, Neurodivergent Character POV, disability as a communication obstacle, heavy verse-specific content
Creator Tags: Communication is hard when you're dead, We ain't afraid of no ghosts, We've been dead for years, Bad jokes because writer is in a mood, NaNoWriMo Breaktime, ghost hunt - Freeform, mystery haunting, Undead Investigation Team

Creator Links: (AO3) JustAWanderingBabbit; (Tumblr) justawanderingbabbit

Theme: Mystery & Suspense, Casefic, Just Plain Fun, Outsider POV, Post-Canon

Summary: The Vermillion Peony Tree has stood for two hundred years... It might stand for two hundred more.... Given no one's stupid enough to annoy its guardian.

In which a possibly familiar Original Character meets a group of very familiar Night Hunters, attempting to clear a haunting from an inn built maybe a bit too close to the Burial Mounds.

(Part of the Mending the Pieces Universe.)

Author’s Notes:

* Not every monster or ghost you go after is a real monster. Sometimes the ones you have to worry about are the living people.
* Which, of course, was the message of the early Scooby Doo Adventures. Wish they hadn't lost that later on.

Reccer's Notes: A post-canon Halloween Scooby-Doo homage in which sapient fierce corpses Nie Mingjue and Song Zichen and demi-undead Meng Yao, incognito and under aliases, have become a wandering occult investigation trio. (Or, to the inn stableboy who can see ghosts Xiao Xingchen and A-Qing, a quintet.)

(JustAWanderingBabbit is the sort of author who maintains a repertory company of sorts; POV character Ah Bai is an OC who recurs in several of her MDZS works.)

Fanwork Links: House on Haunted Hill (AO3-locked).