Fic Recs: Longfic #2

I may not be up for intelligent content generation (this situation, you guys, it's doing my head in) but at least I can provide recs.

I'm going to be saving these recs in my recs: longfic tag -- hopefully I can make this kind of a habit.

I don't know what's widely considered 'longfic', but honestly, I tend to think of anything longer than 10K as likely to have the qualities I look for in longfic (i.e. movement of plot, not just character study or vignette.) For these recs I'm setting the floor around 30K unless I hit something really great that deserves an exception.

Anyway, on with the recs:

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The Queen Susan in Tashbaan, Part 2 of The Stone Gryphon (174583 words) by rthstewart
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Series: Part 2 of The Stone Gryphon
Summary: Queen Susan and Lord Peridan of the Gryphon Aerial Corps aid the British war effort in 1942 America – a dodgy tale of espionage, seduction and garden insectivores.

I love this fic so much. rthstewart has done a huge amount of Narnia worldbuilding which shows through in all her stories; The Stone Gryphon tells the stories of the Pevensies in England as they all struggle with the problem of how to navigate the work you feel you're called to do when you're in wartime England and the world still thinks you're a child. (It also, eventually, brilliantly handles The Problem of Susan in a way that finally makes sense.) Of all the parts in the series - and they're all great - The Queen Susan in Tashbaan is my favourite for the plot, the intrigue, and most of all for Susan herself.

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the cammieverse (92310 words) by synecdochic
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Summary: I've always been fascinated by always-a-different-sex AUs, especially the kind that take a cis dude and flip him into being a cis woman and then ask: okay, to get her into the same place he was in canon, how is she going to have to be different from her male counterpart?

Turns out, to get Cammie Mitchell into the same place as Cam Mitchell, she has to be twice as good and twice as agreeable. But she winds up about the same amount of stubborn.

synecdochic's Stargate stories are rightly lauded, and the broken wings-verse usually gets most of the love (especially A Howling in the Factory Yard). I, however, love the cammieverse - the always-a-woman take on Lt. Col. Cameron Mitchell. Cammie is smart, ferocious and incredibly capable - but far from perfect, and all the more interesting for it. This one is a series rec - it's not a longfic without it, but it flows smoothly as a single overall story, so that works for me.

mezzanine (225468 words) by synecdochic and ivorygates
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Summary: this is an AU mashup of two AUs: the one in which Cameron Mitchell was more injured in his 302 crash than he was in canon, and the one where Cam's a woman. It's sort of our take on the "we're not gay, we just love each other" trope. Us being us, it did not come out in the least bit like what you'd expect.

For all that I love the cammieverse, I love the first half-a-dozen stories of mezzanine more. Cammie is still ferocious and smart and capable - and dealing with a shitty hand and some scary realities. Mezzanine has a lot of personal resonance for me, and I found it for the first time right when I needed it.

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have you heard (42166 words) by peradi
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Series: Part 1 of once there was
Summary: "I heard FN-2187 was a Stormtrooper."

 

 Finn sparks a revolution.

(Written post-TFA, not compliant with TLJ or ROS.)
This is a truly tremendous story, about hope and humanity and choices. I cry like a baby every time I read it. (I am rereading it for this rec. My screen is blurry.) It is also occasionally hilarious, in a dry sort of way. Ugh. *flaps hands*