Rec Me

[viciouswishes]

I was reading penknife's Con_Text review and thinking about fandom's reluctance to write characters who cheat on their lovers. Which, of course, made me want to read cheating fics.

So rec me some fics, in my fandoms, featuring infidelity. (And ones who avoid character bashing in order to do it.) Because cheating can be so hot, dirty, nasty, wrong with the porn.

Comments

[velvetwhip.livejournal.com]

You're not much of a Willow/Angel fan, so I won't bother tracking down the two I can think of.


Gabrielle

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

It's not that I don't read them. It's that since they're not a couple I automatically ship, and many fics are aimed at shippers. My suspension of disbelief doesn't work with established relationship fics or other tropes used in shipper fic.

[stoney321.livejournal.com]

(ack - sorry to be all over this post)
But you have JUST OUTLINED why it's so hard to read outside of gen fic. (for me) I need to be shown WHY they would be together. Which is why there are few shipper writers I read - because they ar ethe ones that give proof.

THANKS!! I've tried to put my finger on the right words...

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

Glad to provide some insight. There are definitely fannish tropes that go into a lot of writing about OTPs. I've ran across many fics that just a give a warning that says, "x and y were never together like they were in canon, so here's my x and z fic." If I don't really buy a ship that much, I need the extra hand holding and believability factor.

[velvetwhip.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you'd consider these geared to shippers or not. They both start out with Angel still being involved with Buffy.


Gabrielle

[stoney321.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Does fandom matter? (I have one that actually got a flame for how wrong it was that I mentioned the wife! Um... It's RPS, and one is married. Hello!)

[entrenous88.livejournal.com]

You crazy person, taking that "real" in rps even a teensy bit seriously!

Next you'll be telling me that you didn't write them riding on unicorns into the rainbow.

:P

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

RPS is always kind of a draw with me. I do like reading about actors that I'm familiar with, but I can sometimes read other ones. Concerning other fandoms, I pretty much only read in my fandoms.

[stoney321.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty much my stance as well.

This is RPS, Ewan/Hayden, Ewan is married and mentions it in a backhanded way. The conflict in this whole thing (it stretched on to 6 chapters, don't even sweat it if you aren't interested.) was Hayden wanting a relationship, and they CAN'T because Ewan is married with kids.

Yeah, the convenient forgetting of wives, etc. bugs me. To me, it makes it more real and interesting to have that hurdle of: BUT THEY ARE MARRIED. The moral implications can be fun, too.

[stoney321.livejournal.com]

(and we'll just forget my second fanfic ever that was Spuffy and had Angel as the bastard husband and...

Yeah. I've grown a lot since then. :) )

And I'll say that infedelity fic is quite common in het pairings, like Spike/Buffy, Buffy/Angel.

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Buffy/Angel/Spike has the whole OTP and canon thing going on.

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

I'll definitely give it a shot.

Now that I think about it, Snow always mentions DB's wife in her non-AU RPS. Moral implications can definitely be fun, but mentioning the wife/husband/SO is just a matter of staying in "canon."

[entrenous88.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I kind of love cheating fics. *facepalm*

I've requested a few in ficathons, but shockingly, they almost never get written *is sad*.

I wrote an RPG with margarks which has Xander obviously cheating on Anya with Spike for about the first third of it. But it's very nearly a PWP, and of course S/X, so I'm not sure how interested you'd be in that.

But yeah, the requests -- I wanted Riley/Buffy, Riley/Xander for a Riley ficathon and never got it, and though I did get part one of a "Xander is married, relatively happily, and cheats with Spike" request from Ruby which was oh-so-tantilizing, there wasn't ever a follow-up part. Which is not a grievance about that fic, it's just -- I still want that scenario. :D

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

You can love them. That's a-okay with me.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of S/X. That and I'd have to imagine that Anya hooks up with Giles. Because Giles... *drools* ;)

That would be really interesting especially considering Riley having sex with Faith, even if he said that he thought it was Buffy.

[usedtobeljs]

Okay, my confession -- I don't like infidelity stories at all. BUT I wrote a fic(let) for Lovesbitca a couple years ago: Wes/Faith (when she's with Xander), in the I&A 'verse. "Me and Mrs. Jones.

Unfortunately I can't rec you further, since I in general will hit the back-button when I realize it's an infidelity story. :-((

[sends hugs and chocolate]

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

I don't think I read/saw that one. Or maybe I hadn't read I&A at that point.

No problem. It's not a trope for everyone.

Oooh, chocolate. *hugs*

[that_mireille]

Sadly, I really like infidelity fic. Sadly, because for the past few years, that's been one of my trigger issues, and I couldn't read the fic without getting personally upset by it, which seems pointless.

Hm. Maybe I'll start checking out some of these recs and see if that trigger is gone by now....

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

Well, if you can find some, I'd definitely be interested. I understand triggers. I used to not be able to handle death texts. (I still haven't watched the ending of Gia.)

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

This is interesting -- I don't think I have any real bias against cheating fic; I certainly enjoy a good adultery story outside of the realm of fandom -- but I can't think of ANY that I've read, aside from the Wes/Gunn/Cordy that you wrote, set while Wes was dating Virginia (and cheating was mentioned, but not a huge focus). I can't really figure out why I haven't read more, except that I suppose most of the characters I'm interested in don't really spend much time in relationships where cheating is possible. I mean, I've read some season 3 Buffy/Faith where I supppose you could consider that she's cheating on Angel, but it was never really an issue in the story; might as well have been AU.

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

Well, my own fic doesn't help much. ;)

I definitely get that the characters aren't involved since I too have written a lot of AtS fic.

Like your Buffy/Faith, I think a lot of fic set with inconvenient established relationship is rather AU'd.

[sparklebutch.livejournal.com]

Sigh, now I really want to write cheatfic. But I can't decide where to start - too many options.

[sparklebutch.livejournal.com]

I've seen it often done in the House fandom, that people use Chase as a toy when Wilson and House want to annoy each other. As in, they're the OTP, and he's the blond fucktoy that one sleeps with to bother the other. Or both do to flaunt it in each other's face. Personally, I don't like it. But, seems to be all over.

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

This is why I'm very cynical about House fic.

Though there is also a lot of Wilson cheating on wife fic, which I think is easier since it's canon that he's a cheat.

[sparklebutch.livejournal.com]

There's cheating, and then there's being complete and utter sadists and dehumanising a character I kinda like.

Oh well. I'm not much in that fandom anyway :)

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

There are always many, many options for fic writing.

[alizarin-nyc.livejournal.com]

Well there was a good but so sad fic where Rodney cheats on John in SGA and I thought for sure it was by rageprufrock but I'll be damned if I can find it now. It was the ultimate cheatfic, and it made me very depressed. Hm. Where did it go?

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

Someone later down in the comments figured out what it was called and then a Google search came up with the name.

[ladyagnew.livejournal.com]

The Liberation of Katie Holmes (http://buffyx.livejournal.com/287385.html#cutid1) by buffyx is VM RPS, Kristen Bell/Jason Dohring, which is awesome. About Scientology, Tom Cruise's evil alien baby and tru wuv... in that order.

And the rageprufrock SGA cheating story is called "Directional Theory" and isn't on her website, but probably on her journal. It's very sharp and meanly terrible to Rodney. I can't say it's character-bashing, but my emotional response to it was uncomfortablely close to it.

And I just read The Coanda Effect (http://gaia.fictionresource.com/fic.php?story_id=00040&chapter=01) by Gaia a few days ago, which is a monster cheating story. It's a good, solid read, though so long and somewhat not perfectly written, that I skimmed parts of it but kept on reading till the end. Really about infidelity.

[ladyagnew.livejournal.com]

oh, how could I forget Reconcilable Differences (http://www.intimations.org/fanfic/smallville/Reconcilable_Differences.html) by astolat! SV, future-fic, with Kon and the Justice League and Lex and Clark still in love despite years of enmity and Clark engaged to Lois! It's a glorious, fabulous read, and there's an adorable sequel as well.

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the linkage. (I had read or tried to read The Liberation of Katie Holmes and just couldn't get into it.)

The last one perks my interest because Sheppard/Jonas, dude.

[blueswan9.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've read one that didn't somehow bash the cheated party. I'm writing one but it's hard, as I'm using characters I have a big investment in personally. It's really difficult to take a pair I love and break them and then deal with the aftermath. I'm not surprised fandom is reluctant to write cheating stories. I've been working on this one for months.

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

I can definitely see being too invested. Though I still think killing the characters is worse, which I've seen more often. (I definitely remember a fic where an author killed of RayK and I cried and cried.) It was harder to me to kill Gunn than to make my characters cheat on each other.