Canon Promo Post 2020

[modzilla]

Please use this post to promote the fandoms you're interested in requesting, or ask for recommendations of canons that suit you!

Promoting your canons

Comment here with information about the canons you are thinking of requesting, or otherwise want to get people into!

Information you might include

Title

Media

Approx length

Where to find it (If giving links, please only link to legal sources. You may want to encourage people to contact you directly if they are having trouble finding a canon and you can give them tips.)

What is it, in summary?

What do you love about it?

What sort of things are you likely to request for it?

Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests?

Content warnings (ie, rape, incest, racism, gore/violence) - this is at your discretion and is not expected to be comprehensive

Some examples: Yuletide, Fandom5k

Please keep an eye on comments, as people may have follow-up questions about your canons.

Asking for recs

You're also welcome to leave comments (anon or not) asking people to rec you canons that they are likely to request.

Consider letting people know if you're interested in specific media only, or have other restrictions.

Comments

[noor_us_sabah]

Title: Embassy Row Series - Ally Carter

Media/Length: YA novel trilogy that begins as a tropey political thriller and evolves into a multigenerational conspiracy with a side order of secret society.

Accessibility: The print, digital and audio books are available through library services where I live, but I am not sure about non-North-American availability. The print version has been out long enough that it is pretty sourcable secondhand.

For a more general overview, the series does have a wiki, which contains major spoilers for each book.

What's it about?:

I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

Grace Blakely is absolutely certain of three things:
1. She is not crazy. 2. Her mother was murdered. 3. Someday she is going to find the killer and make him pay.

In the first book, All Fall Down, Grace is sent overseas following a lengthy hospital stay to live with her grandfather, the American ambassador to a fictional Mediterranean kingdom. In short order she accuses Dominic, the Prime Minister's distinctively-scarred bodyguard and her mother's childhood sweetheart, of murdering her mother three years ago. She and her new friends run surveillance on Dominic to prove his guilt, but when her friends discover Grace has an established habit of accusing various scarred men of the same crime, to the point that she spent time in the hospital to be treated for it, they wonder if they can really take her word for what she saw that night.

All Fall Down is pretty genre-standard YA suspense. However, at the end it takes a bit of a turn and the second book, See How They Run, is where all my favourite Ships of Questionable Morality really have their roots. Which is to say, you probably should read the first book to better understand the second, but it's the second book that will help make sense of most of my prompts and general unbridled enthusiasm for mostly non-canonical pairings and more-ings.

Why I love it:
It just has so much beautifully over-the-top everything. The city is a character in its own right, all ancient and gaslit and mortared-together with secrets. Grace is bitterly defensive and untrusting, with an affinity for jumping from high places at the least advisable times and a tendency to get herself drugged, kidnapped and/or menaced with forced marriage (third book is a TRIP). She is utterly irrepressible, despite being beleaguered by the attentions of taciturn, overprotective men of both age-appropriate and rather-less-so varieties. I ship her with both sorts, and also with her brother: the mutual adoration between them gets me right in the chest even before it takes a dive into life-threatening hurt/comfort territory. Her recollections of childhood pining after the chance to follow him and his best friend (her canonical brooding overprotective love interest) lay that foundation pretty well, and the stoic loyalty both boys have for each other rounds it all out into a nice potential OT3.

For equally inappropriate non-canonical shipping needs, I also enjoy Grace/Dominic. She inherits his fixation on her mother, whom canon takes great pains to assure us she resembles. He has an extensive collection of surveillance photos of them both which he stares at for hours at night, and spends a lot of time following her around the city with and without her being aware of it. In one weirdly intense and intimate scene he stitches her up when she gets stabbed, and he assures her, quite calmly, that he could not possibly be responsible for one particular murder because if he had killed a man who hurt her, they would never have found the body.

I'm a fan.

What I plan to ask for:
Action/adventure, slightly casefic type stuff, mostly. For the larger group of all three teenagers plus Dominic I usually ask for bickering road trip dynamics with a side order of external menacing antagonist, historic AU optional (lot of Renaissance potential, here). For Grace and Dominic I am open to something shippy that explores them steadfastly not dealing with how messed up that would be, or anything platonic that digs into how genuinely odd and intense what does develop between them already is. Again, I'd love an external antagonist there, mostly because I love seeing people frantic to protect each other. While I have not previously requested anything explicit for this series I'm certainly not opposed; just not exactly sure how to prompt for it yet.

Also, if you did pick it up and ended up liking it enough to also request it, just wanted to note that I am definitely planning to offer it, too.

*Content note* - Multiple characters, including Grace, are treated by other characters as unreliable due to their mental health history. A couple scenes in the third novel are set in a very isolated mental hospital used as a kind of prison for somebody who doesn't need to be there; that section includes an attempted drugging and kidnapping of Grace and her boyfriend by medical staff.