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ATLA: Heat, Wait, Steep, Repeat by Haicrescendo
Pairings/Characters: Zuko, Iroh, the GAang in the background
Rating: G
Length: 2,889 words, 19min 30s
Creator Links: Haicrescendo
Theme: Food & Cooking, character development, family, families of choice, going home, missing scenes,
Summary:
[Zuko’s greatest failing, not his only but just one that stands out the most in a very long list, is that he’s never known quite what he had until it’s gone. Or, on the opposite hand, he covets the things that don’t matter, that seem to matter so much at the time and turn out, in the end, to be something that Zuko’s made up in his head.
And then Zuko finds, of all things after it all, that he misses Uncle Iroh’s tea.]
Or,
Zuko screws up his life and in the process of fixing it, figures out some tea wisdom along the way.
Reccer's Notes: This story is so beautiful and gentle. I absolutely love seeing how Zuko's growth and character development is mirrored with his finally learning to make a decent cup of tea. Plus the neat detail of how he despite learning from and trying to emulate his uncle, he makes it his own way. Zuko and Iroh's relationship is lovely in this too. Just an all around lovely story. klainelynch does a beautiful job with the podfic as well
Fanwork Links:
Heat, Wait, Steep, Repeat
and the Podfic both on AO3
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Boys 2 Planet
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Rec Something Wednesday - comedies
Comedies
Reminder: you can self-rec and promote your works in this comm too.
If you're leaving a rec for a fanwork, you can include some/all of the following info:
due South: Hungry Like the Wolf, by Wagnetic
Characters/Pairings: Diefenbaker
Rating: Gen
Length: n/a (artwork)
Content Notes: may induce donut cravings!
Creator Links: Wagnetic on AO3
Theme: Food and cooking, Happy endings, Crafts, Textiles
Summary: A bag featuring Dief and the imminent demise of some donuts.
Reccer's Notes:
I will never stop reccing this! An excellently crafted bag with a felt appliqué of Dief about to enjoy a stack of donuts. It's so good, and a perfect likeness of Dief with a "donuts incoming" gleam in his eye!
Fanwork Links: Hungry Like the Wolf
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Round 179 Theme Poll
Pick the next theme of fancake:
Mystery & Suspense
38 (35.5%)
Platonic Relationships
33 (30.8%)
Uncommon Settings
36 (33.6%)
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Reading, or Lack Thereof
Which is probably why I have spent weeks now trying to convince myself that I really am going to go back to Awakened by A.E. Osworth (put down at 40% sometime in mid August). I so wanted to like it - the summary is a coven of trans witches fight an evil AI. Cool, eh? I never got to that bit, I bounced off it for, actually, the same reason I can't get on with the Gideon the Ninth books; the narrator has the same too online, wryly twee, queer elder millennial voice. And I know that the reason I find that voice oh so grating is that I talk like that. During one of the hotter days this summer I was in a pub beer garden with a mate and I described our environs as 'a bit fire hazard-y.'
Moving on, what should I read instead? Read anything good recently?
Comics wise I did read Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon which I loved almost as much as Absolute Superman. The AU is that Diana was raised in Hell by Circe the witch. So like, she's still Wonder Woman, still extending her hand in friendship, but she is riding a skeletal pegasus, and performing dark magic, and constantly covered in blood. She's got a magic prosthetic arm because she sacrificed her real arm as part of, like, a blood spell. It's badass...and Steve Trevor is still kind of a lame love interest.
I only got as far as the first issue of Absolute Batman, but I am generally a harder sell on Bruce in general. I do want to give some of the other absolute runs a shot before they get folded into the wider DC universe or some sort of giant, ridiculous crossover event and I completely lose interest.
And I did read the first issue of G. Willow Wilson's Black Cat, which seems like it's going to be a lot of fun, although I will be bummed if it turns out Felicia wasn't actually flirting with Night Nurse.
Speaking of comics, I think I got my friend Al in trouble with his wife. So Al has no fewer than one thousand (1000) trade paperbacks stacked up in his garage, and the reason that he has been giving for why he hasn't gotten rid of them yet is that I was going to come round to go through them and take anything I wanted. So the other week I'd been round watching a movie with the wife and she said "Hey, while you're here do you want to have a look at those comics in the garage?" and I said "Huh?" while clearly wearing the facial expression of someone who was just learning this information for the first time.
Oops.
So someday soon I have to clear a morning so I can go round and stand in Al's garage going through a literal ton of comics.
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Stargate Atlantis: A Supermarket in California
Pairings/Characters: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Rating: Mature
Length: 7,571 words
Creator Links: whateverrrrwhatever on AO3
Theme: Food & Cooking
Summary: John decides that California doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
It's an AU where John Sheppard inherits a supermarket right next to Cal and meets Rodney McKay, physics professor. They kiss. That's it, that's the fic.
Reccer's Notes: This is an *almost* complete AU, shot through with wonderful location details, wherein John is a veteran who spent time in Antarctica and Rodney is a professor at Berkeley. In a series of snapshots, John inherits a run-down local market, decides he likes the neighborhood, and sets about making a place for himself. Then one day, an "unnecessarily dramatic" (as described in the tags) Rodney walks through the door.
This was one of the first SGA AUs I read and it stayed with me. I truly enjoyed following John as he problem solved; first the store, then Rodney. (Spoiler: the solution is snacks.)
Fanwork Links: Story on AO3
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New Music Monday - 15 September 2025
Badvillain - Thriller
IDID - 제멋대로 찬란하게 (Chan Ran) (debut)
Jang Wooyoung - Think Too Much (feat. Damini)
Plave - Hide and Seek
Yuqi - M.O.
Soorin - Sure Thing
Doh Kyung Soo - Dumb (feat. Penomeco)
FTISLAND - Monochrome (Japan)
Orbit
Ateez - Ash (Japan)
LUN8 - Lost
tripleS ∞! - Password
Primrose - Love Your Flower
Youngbin - Freak Show
XG - Gala (pre-release)
Taemin - Veil
New MVs are also added to an ongoing youtube playlist.
Last week's MVs: 8 September
Feel free to add new comments in the replies for songs/MVs we missed.
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That Sure Was a Season of Star Trek
Strange New Worlds
I frickin' loved the first season of SNW. The second season included one of my all time favourite episodes of Star Trek (the Lower Decks crossover). I was so hyped for season three...and, like, it was bad? So bad that I was like...did I hallucinate this show ever being good?
Thus follows a brief list of my gripes about S3 of SNW:
1. It's not funny. I agree with the reviewer who said that this season desperately wants to be Lower Decks, except the writers don't have the comedy chops, so you end up with a season that is 50% "comedy" episodes, culminating in the episode Four and a Half Vulcans a thuddingly unfunny episode of television that was nonetheless teased at comic con last year, like they inexplicably thought that was them putting their best foot forward.
2. Speaking of Lower Decks, the nostalgia bait of LD worked because sometimes it was super weird, and sometimes it was a deep cut, but it always felt like it was written by people with a deep knowledge and love of Star Trek, while the callbacks in SNW all feel like they were written by people who vaguely remember having watched The Original Series as kids.
Like, at the end of the episode Terrarium, actually one of the better episodes of the season, the freakin' Metrons turn up to monologue, all like, "We have trapped a human and a Gorn together on a planet, and we will do it again!" And, like, we all remember the episode with Kirk and the Gorn. It's a very famous episode! They made fun of it in Galaxy Quest. And, like, anyone who doesn't know, doesn't know who goshdarn Metrons are either!
3. The overwhelming, bordering of offensive, heterosexuality of SNW is not new - I've said before that making a big ensemble show in the 2020s with not even a token queer character feels like a very deliberate choice has been made - but it did feel like it's stepped up a gear this season. There was a trailer for S3 that went like: "All New Worlds! All New Adventures! All New Relationships!"
And, like, Sorry? What? Pardon? Who is watching Star Trek for the romance?
This gripe has sub clauses, y'all
a) I did not especially care for the Spock/Chapel ship in the first two seasons, it felt like it took over the show slightly, and turned what was basically 'two co-workers have a weird vibe because one has a crush on the other and maybe they had an inadvisable snog at the work x-mas party' into an interminable story of star-crossed lovers. Then they dropped it like a hot potato, because it felt like the writers belatedly realised that the ship as written didn't jibe with turning SNW into the Original Series.
b) I didn't actually hate Spock/La'an; it was low key, didn't overwhelm the show the way it felt like Spock/Chapel had, made sense for both characters. It was just that it fit into a pattern this season of the writers having no interest in their female characters beyond deciding which dude's tongues they were going to shove into their mouthes.
c) I like Patton Oswald, and I'm usually happy to see him pop up, and I might have disliked this less if I felt like I had learned anything about Una this season other than she's definitely straight y'all.
d)Beto Ortegas--
Hang on, this sub clause has addendums
i. Erica Ortegas has a brother, doubling her number of known character traits to 1) flies ship, and 2) has brother.
ii. That brother is the pivotal character in an episode called What is Starfleet? which concludes that Starfleet is a bunch of people who almost do a warcrime and then decide not to at the last minute.
iii. Said brother has a stilted, awkward, and unconvincing romance with Uhura. I mean, it wasn't like they were doing anything else with the iconic character of Nyota Uhura, right?
iv. There is an episode where Erica is lost on a hostile planet and Uhura is orders of magnitude more upset than the rest of the crew which would have made a bajillion times more sense if Erica and Uhura had been the ones to have the flirtation/relationship.
I know writers who use compulsory heterosexuality, they are all cowards.
4. Captain Pike has a love interest named Captain Batel. She nearly died at the end of S2, he was very sad about that; at the end of S3 she turns into a statue, and Pike is very sad about that too. I have no idea what Marie Batel thinks about this Nu Who ass ending because the show cares about her character so little that it can't even be bothered to decide what her job is, over the course of her guest appearances she is 1) a starship captain, 2) a courtroom lawyer, 3) a starship captain again, 4) on the supreme court, I guess.
Anyway, she's a statue now.
Leverage: The Food Cart Job, by page_runner
Pairings/Characters: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer, Peggy Milbank, Amy Palavi
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 21452 words
Creator Links:
Theme: food & cooking, casefic, competence, outsider pov
Summary:
She was only here for a long weekend, using this convention as an excuse to see Alice for the first time in over a year, or using Alice as an excuse to get away for a convention, or using both as a reason to finally take a vacation, because it was about damn time.
At least, that was the original plan.
Reccer's Notes:
Peggy Milbank is a side character who appears in 2 episodes: once when Parker's alias "Alice White" gets called in for jury duty, and once when Parker, Sophie and Tara sneak into a ball at an embassy for an event where Peggy does the catering.
This fic has her meeting the team once more, and has her involved in a job in Portland when they investigate a sketchy business man who drives independent food cart owners out of business, not shying away from inflicting violence on them in the process.
While the team does their thing, Peggy offers to take over the food cart, and does so with remarkable competence - learning a whole new cuisine on the fly. Food plays a big role in the whole story, because of their case, but also because now there are several people in one place who care a lot about food. It's also about a community of food cart owners. And just like Eliot found a way out of his violent life by learning how to cook, there's a side plot in this story how he does that for others too.
While the ship Eliot/Parker/Hardison isn't the main focus, it is definitely in the background, and Peggy's perspective is a really nice outsider POV on them, so I tagged it as such as well.
Fanwork Links: The Food Cart Job on ao3
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POLL: Fave debut songs
Favourite debuts
A.C.E - Cactus
1 (3.0%)
Ateez - Pirate King/Treasure
6 (18.2%)
The Boyz - Boy
3 (9.1%)
B.A.P - Warrior
5 (15.2%)
Billlie - Ring x Ring
4 (12.1%)
CIX - Movie Star
2 (6.1%)
Dreamcatcher - Chase me
7 (21.2%)
Enhypen - given-taken
7 (21.2%)
Everglow - Bon Bon Chocolat
6 (18.2%)
EXO - MAMA
9 (27.3%)
(G)I-DLE - Latata
2 (6.1%)
ILLIT - Magnetic
4 (12.1%)
Infinite - Come back again
2 (6.1%)
Itzy - Dalla Dalla
5 (15.2%)
IVE - Eleven
3 (9.1%)
Kai - Mmmh
0 (0.0%)
Key - Forever Yours
0 (0.0%)
Le Sserafim - Fearless
4 (12.1%)
Loona - Hi High
2 (6.1%)
Lovelyz - Candy Jelly Love
2 (6.1%)
Meovv - Meow
1 (3.0%)
NCT U - 7th sense
5 (15.2%)
NewJeans - Attention
4 (12.1%)
NU'EST - Face
2 (6.1%)
Oneus - Valkyrie
6 (18.2%)
QWER - Discord
1 (3.0%)
Red Velvet - Happiness
4 (12.1%)
Seventeen - Adore U
9 (27.3%)
SHINee - Replay
9 (27.3%)
Siyeon - Paradise
1 (3.0%)
Stray Kids - District 9
5 (15.2%)
SuperM - Jopping
5 (15.2%)
Taemin - Danger
4 (12.1%)
Ten - Dream in a Dream
2 (6.1%)
Tri.be - Doom Doom Ta
1 (3.0%)
TWS - Plot Twist
2 (6.1%)
TXT - Crown
3 (9.1%)
Wanna One - Energetic
3 (9.1%)
Leverage: What are friends for, by Hagar
Pairings/Characters: Maggie Collins, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker (Leverage), Amy Palavi
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 711 words
Creator Links:
Theme: food & cooking, gen
Summary: Her ex-husband's associates are occasionally useful. For example, when Maggie has a really bad feeling about her latest client.
Reccer's Notes:
Maggie visits the brewpub looking for help regarding a client of hers. It's lovely how the food she is served there acts as kind of character description for the relationship between her, Eliot, Hardison and Parker.
Fanwork Links: What friends are for on ao3
Dark Shadows: Mysterious Circumstances by WickerManStudios
Pairings/Characters: Roger Collins, CC Female, Which Would Give Away Too Much If Named
Rating: G
Length: 2,394 words
Creator Links: AO3 Profile
Theme: Food & Cooking
Summary: Roger meets a friend for dinner who shares his discomfort regarding marriages.
Reccer's Notes: Roger remains one of my favorite Dark Shadows characters, acted superbly by Louis Edmonds, a veteran of stage costume dramas. He always wears period clothing with impeccable insouciance despite figure-hugging trousers, wing collars, and Victorian handlebar moustaches. In this fic, we see how much food presents an opportunity for revealing, soul searching reflections with a sympathetic friend, in fact so much that they don't even eat until the last paragraph or so. The universality of sharing food provides a letting down of the hair, so to speak, voluminous in his friend's case and not-so-much in his. There's an absolutely delightful twist at fic's end. Also, the AO3 profile mentions Author's website, WickerManStudios which contains stories along with more personal content.
Fanwork Links: Mysterious Circumstances
SGA: Battle Potato by fiercelydreamed
Characters/Pairings: Gen. Teyla Emmagan & Rodney McKay & John Sheppard & Ronon Dex
Rating: G
Length: 7229
Content Notes: No AO3 warnings apply.
Creator Links: fiercelydreamed on AO3, anatsuno on AO3, anatsuno on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Food and cooking, Team as family, Friendship, Hurt/comfort
Summary: The thing was, John had never been good at patient, and Teyla looked like okay was a couple galaxies over from wherever she was now.
Reccer's Notes: A touching hurt/comfort story set after the team rescues Teyla from Michael. Although Teyla and her baby are back in Atlantis, she's slow to recover and remains low and depleted. Rodney has a plan to cheer her up, though, involving food, and he ropes John in to help. It was I think written in the hiatus before the last season so a few minor details have been jossed, but that doesn't matter. This is the best sort of found family story, with them all rallying around to support Teyla. Lovely.
Fanwork Links: Battle Potato, and there's an excellent podfic read by anatsuno.