earisparticipates | Entries tagged with fandom

Reclist 3.1 - Sex Pollen. That's it. That's the Rec.

There’s something pure about sex pollen fic. It’s just compulsory fucking. That’s it. I’ve often joked that sex pollen walked so that A/B/O could run, but sex pollen does not have the societal complications of A/B/O and certainly does not require alternate anatomies. Sex pollen can run the gamut from crack fic (oh no, we’ve wandered into this mysterious greenhouse together what will happen) to heavy plot-driving devices (oh no, we’re mortal enemies who have been forced to have sex maybe we should work together.) Sex pollen can be considered to be a subset of a larger aphrodisiac-related trope. In aphrodisiac fics, there are all sorts of entities causing the need to fuck - including sand, moth dust, aphrodiasiac sap, alien pheremones, etc.. And while it usually rides the line of dub-con/non-con, it doesn’t have to mean that the characters themselves are forcing themselves on each other (at least until one party doses the other(s) without consent).

For my first iteration of this theme, I will be focusing on classic sex pollen in Reylo (but there will be background pairings, which I will note). 6 full fics plus a 7th microfic/drabble. As always, if you think there is a tag I missed, please let me know. And for some of these authors, I could not find them on Twitter or Tumblr, so please let me know if I’m missing someone.

General Warning: For sex pollen, most of these recs are dub-con, verging on non-con. Please read the tags in the fic!

1. This Dust Survives

Author: RedRoseWhite; Twitter

Rey has houseplants in her pod on Ajan Kloss. She starts have sex with her friends. She learns about love, friendship, loyalty, strength, and kindness. When the Force Bond opens, she shares what she has learned with Ben and brings him home. While Rey is definitely horny because of the plants, she does not regret what she has done. I love this fic because it is sweet and languid and sexy in the best way. It does have non-Reylo sex, but the true emotional connection here is Rey and Ben and it is Reylo HEA.

Pairing: Reylo, Rey/Rose, Rey/Kaydel/Poe, Rey/Original Male Character
Status: Complete
Rating: Explicit
Warning: Dub-con due to sex pollen

2. Avaritia

Author: bbl8te; Twitter; Tumblr

Rey is lost and stranded on an unknown planet. In a panic, she reaches out through the Force to Kylo. When he gets there, he realizes that Rey has been exposed to a plant that causes living things to want to have sex. This fic a great example of one of my favorite sex pollen tropes - when one of the characters realizes what is going on and tries valiantly to resist the pull of the sex pollen, despite the fact that they want the other person, even without the botanical encouragement. Kylo Ren is tinged with sadness here and feels resigned to violence, but Rey brings him to a more hopeful place.

Pairing: Reylo
Status: Complete
Rating: Explicit
Warning: Dub-con due to sex pollen

3. L’etrange affair de Venerem Pollini

Author: ELopez; Twitter; Tumblr
Language: French

Translated into English - The Strange Affair of Venerem Pollini

Translated by: ELopez with help from Everren (Twitter; Tumblr) and annonna

Regency Era Sex Pollen AU. Need I say more?

Okay, okay. Miss Rose Tiloy-Connor needs Euryale Palpatine to chaperone her when she and her suitor Lord Armitage Huxley visit a greenhouse to witness the blooming of a rare flower rumored to be the incarnation of a fertility goddess. Unfortunately for Euryale, the utterly unbearable Lord Benvolio Kylopold Soloren is there with Hux. Hopefully the beautiful flower’s blooming will provide some much-needed entertainment.

Pairing: Reylo, Gingerrose, various other background characters
Status: Complete
Rating: Explicit
Warning: Dub-con due to sex pollen, public sex, public orgy, period typically attitudes towards extra marital sex

4. Blue Flowers and Silver Skin

Author: blueyedgurl

FUCK OR DIE. Ugh, what a great fuck or die sort of medieval AU. Rey is looking for a specific flower to make a potion. The flower, she knows, has a pollen that, if encountered, makes people want to fuck, and if they don’t, they will perish. She’s carefully harvesting the flowers when the local woodsman, Ben, comes into the clearing, covered in pollen. Whatever will happen?

Pairing: Reylo
Status: Complete
Rating Explicit
Warning: Dub-con due to sex pollen, rough sex, somnophilia

5. Apart From My Beating Heart

Author: ReyloRobin2011

A post-TROS fix-it fic (sort of). After facing Palpatine, Ben and Rey escape Exegol in the decrepit X-Wing. They crash land on a planet with some very interesting trees and are overwhelmed with desire. This fic is lyrical and lovely, especially for a sex pollen fic. The sex is wonderful, and the ending strangely happy.

Pairing: Reylo
Status: Complete
Rating: Explicit
Warning: Dub-con due to sex pollen, mild somnophilia

6. Unto Dust

Author: LyricalRiot; Twitter; Tumblr

Post TLJ, Rey is searching the galaxy for works that can help her learn about the Force. She lands on a planet with the promise of deep knowledge about the Force, but her journey brings her into a cave populated by plants with a very specific purpose - increase fertility by causing a driving desire to have sex. Unfortunately, the desire for sexual pleasure is so intense that people exposed to the plant will waste away from dehydration while they are trying to satisfy their appetites. Hey, what do you know - it’s FUCK OR DIE again! When Rey is affected, the Force bond opens and Kylo recognizes where Rey is and what is happening. In addition to some very hot sex, this fic has great character work, as the two of them try to find a common ground.

Pairing: Reylo
Status: Complete
Rating: Explicit
Warning: Dub-con due to sex pollen

AND A BONUS MIICROFIC (DRABBLE)

7. Allergic (part 4 of Cap’s Explicit Reylo Microfics)

Author: CaptainMarvel42; Twitter; Tumblr

Basically, Rey’s been exposed to flower pollen and is sooooo horny. Kylo won’t touch her.

Pairing: Reylo
Status: Complete
Rating: Explicit
Warning: Dub-con due to sex pollen, voyeurism

RECLIST 2.1 - JAIL FOR 1000 YEARS

One of the justifications for the alleged necessity of the death of Ben Solo was that there was no other option for his character after his crimes, primarily the murder of his father. This is an absurd argument. It speaks to a total lack of imagination about what possible solutions could exist, and in fact, what would be thematically satisfactory ending for the character. While I am NOT in support of carceral justice, I do enjoy fic where Ben or Rey are or have been sentenced to prison or exile. For serious in-canon fic, the question of how to sentence and imprison Kylo Ren is fascinating, and leads to some of my favorite fics ever. These fics wrestle with themes of forgiveness, self-hatred, redemption, and rehabilitation. Additionally, from a plot perspective, isolating characters and trapping them in one place usually forces them into the introspection that I adore.

This reclist is focused on canon-verse fic where Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is in prison or exile for his crimes, either serving out a sentence or awaiting execution. There are plenty of alternate universe prison fic, which I will rec in later versions of this theme, but I wanted to focus on the canon-verse fic first.

I’ve put quotes from each fic here as well. I think these quotes do a great job of illustrating what I like about each fic.

As a general warning, all these fic discuss prison and imprisonment. Some also discuss execution and the death penalty. In several, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is in solitary confinement, which is effectively torture, and suffers the well-documented psychological effects.

1. Morning in the Burned House

Author: disasterisms; Twitter

I consider this a Reylo fic, but it’s primarily a beautiful Leia character study. Leia Organa has lived through so much, lost so much, sacrificed so much, and now has to deal with her son’s murder of his father. At the beginning of the fic, both Kylo and Rey are broken, angry, and in pain, albeit showing them in different ways. Kylo is sentenced to exile with Luke Skywalker, and is only permitted communication with Leia, and by extension, Rey. In this fic, we never forget that Leia was the daughter of a man who tortured her and took almost everything away from her, and the mother of a man who killed her husband and destroyed almost everything she built. So, how do these characters move forward? And what can they look to to help?

She stares down at her hands. These hands have signed treaties, have been wooed by the prince of the Hapes Consortium, have killed Jabba the Hutt with his own chains, are now slicing apples in a house of exile. These hands were helpless to prevent the evil that wormed its way into her child's soul.

Status: Complete
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Grief, Angst, references to torture and murder

2. The Way To Tomorrow

Author: the-reylo-void; Tumblr; Twitter

This fic is not a light read. Which may be why this is possibly one of my favorite fics. Again, in this fic, Ben Solo/Kylo Ren is sentenced to exile on an uninhabited planet and is forbidden communication with anyone else. He is given a weapon, a blaster with a single shot. Of course, Rey neglected to inform the sentencing body about the bond, and she and he are able to communicate. Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is a very broken character here, resigned to self-hatred and self-destruction. But Rey refuses to give up on him.

There are days when the darkness hovers close, predatory, and Rey stands before him with shoulders back and a fierceness in her gaze, sends him subtle reminders of light through the bond. Sometimes he’s unreachable, deep in meditation, and more than once she finds him in tears.
Other days are hopeless ones, where the bond is awash in pain and regret, and Rey quietly backs away, allows him the space to grieve.
And sometimes, at the brief space where their day cycles overlap, they meet in the rolling darkness of their shared dreamscape, sitting back-to-back, hands barely touching, steady-eyed, holding off the darkness together.
The bond hums.

Status: Complete
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Suicide Attempt. Heavy Angst and Grief.

3. A Brief Equinox

Author: dustoftheancients; Tumblr

Kylo Ren is imprisoned while he provides information to the Resistance. He is also injured, injured protecting Rey. Rey does not remember this. Rey visits him in prison, at first reluctantly, angrily, and then more willing as she tries to figure out what happened and begins to understand him, at least a little. But he won’t talk to her. And the wound won’t heal.

With as much dignity as she can muster, she turns to leave. The hallway leading to his cell seems so much darker now that her eyes have adjusted to the light, even the weak one from the lantern. Her footsteps make a shuffling sound against the stone in the same way they had when she had come.

She had expected to feel better, somehow. Or, at least, to have a better grasp of the last forty-eight hours. All she feels is angry, and she's no less confused.

Rey doesn't make it far before she hears his sigh- it's long and shaky as a piece of flimsy in the wind.

His breath chases her down the hallway.

Status: Complete
Rating: Teen and Up
Warning: Discussion of the death penalty, heavy angst

4. Astrometric Binaries

Author: pontmercy44

At first, Kylo is sentenced to death. But at the last moment, through Rey’s intercession, he is reprieved and sentenced to exile on a harsh, unforgiving planet with little light and little change in the available light from day to night. Kylo struggles. Rey is the only one who interacts with him (except for a droid), and at first, he cannot be anything but cruel to her. However, once again, she keeps him alive.

Every day, at what he estimated to be high noon – the brightest time of the day of Cygnus II – Kylo climbed the rusty ladder and emerged from the abandoned mine. He stood on the landing pad, in its very center. He didn’t go near the cliff edge. If he did, he might break an unspoken promise he’d made to Rey. He had to be alive when she came back in two cycles.

The center of the landing pad was the center of his universe. Gravity would inevitably draw her back to that spot. He told himself that the laws of physics demanded she come back every time he lost count of the days and wondered whether she was gone forever.

Status: Complete
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Dub-con in places (mostly bad communication), contemplation of suicide, self-hatred, discussion of starvation, death penalty, solitary confinement, mental health issues

Academia and fandom - an uneasy relationship at the best of times. Fandom studies, including studies of fans, fan activities, fan spaces, fan communities, and all sorts of fan behavior, are usually categorized as a type of media studies, but overlap with plenty of other fields, including literary criticism and cultural anthropology.

On the surface, there shouldn’t be discord between academia and fandom. Many academics are also fans and engaged in fannish behavior. Many fans experience or analyze their preferred texts or media through academic lenses or practices. And indeed, there are a lot of academic studies that are written by fans, for fans. But there are differing motives in academia and fandom which can drive a wedge between the denizens who walk in both words. Some academics look at fans or audiences as mindless, naive entities who passively consume mass-produced pop culture, or as infantile social rejects who can’t let go of their ids. There are academics who enter fan communities and study them without respect. Fans, for their part, generally do not want to be seen primarily as objects of study or figures of scorn. There are also academics who are very wary of engaging in fannish behavior because it diminishes the appropriate distance between the scholar and topic. And though fans do process media and fandom thoughtfully and analytically, fandom space contains multitudes - enthusiasms, hatreds, reactions, personal gripes, flame wars, shipping, and tons of activities that could violate copyright laws. While academia certainly has a lot of that (especially personal gripes), there are academics who prefer not to engage with those activities, and view them as distractions that take away from substantive work.

Nevertheless, I am someone who is fannish and someone who has been an academic. It can take a while to negotiate the relationship, but with some care and self-reflection, academia and fandom need not struggle against each other, but can even work together. After all, both include critical analysis, investigations of texts, and a constant interplay between thought, creation, text, and analysis. In the end, we’re just nerds nattering on about our hyperfixations. For me, reading academic works on fandom is a fun, fannish endeavor, and it has helped me understand what I am doing as a fan, where I come from, and where I am going.

In that vein, I now present a reading list/bibliography - books, edited volumes, articles, and other sources that have shaped or informed my own activities and understandings of acafandom and fan studies. This list is not comprehensive, and not necessarily an endorsement. Rather, the listed work has something interesting to say or has been an important piece in the evolution of fan studies. I’ll add to the list as I continue to read and discover.

Start here:

Books

The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, Francesca Coppa

Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins

Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, Anne Jamison

Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Culture, Nicolle Lamerichs

Edited Volumes

Fanfic and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse - table of contents here https://karenhellekson.com/?page_id=14

Articles

Thinking About Slash/Thinking About Women - Edi Bjorklund (Nome #11)
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Thinking_About_Slash/Thinking_About_Women

Why We’re Terrified of Fanfiction - Constance Grady
https://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11531406/why-were-terrified-fanfiction-teen-girls

The Fan Historian - E Charlotte Stevens and Nick Webber https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/2125/2955

African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies - Rebecca Wanzo
https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/699/538

Want to Go Further?

Books

Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Camille Bacon Smith

Novelization: From Film to Novel, Jan Baetens

Characters Before Copyright: The Rise and Regulation of Fan Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Matthew H. Birkhold

Black Women as Cultural Readers, Jaqueline Bobo

The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel DeCerteau

Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Abigail De Kosnik

Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida

Fanfiction and the Author, Judith Fathallah

Fan Cultures, Matt Hills

Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks

Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the movies, bell hooks

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins

Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent, Milena Popova

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture, Janice Radway

Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellctual Property Protection, Aaron Schwabach

Edited Volumes

Fan Studies: Researching Popular Audiences, eds. Alice Chauvel, Nicolle Lamerichs, and Jessica Seymour

Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss

Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Story Telling, ed. SA Guynes

The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa Lewis

A Tumblr Book: Platform and Culture, eds. Aliison McCraken, Alexander Cho, Lousia Stein, Indira Neill Hoch

Science Fiction across Media adaptation/novelization edited by Thomas Van Parys and I.Q. Hunter

Other Resources

The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom

Fanlore - a wiki about fandom by the Organization for Transformative Works - https://fanlore.org/wiki/Acafan

Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures - a peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works - https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/index

Confessions of an AcaFan - http://henryjenkins.org/

REC LIST 1.1 - DEFY THE STARS

'Defy the Stars' is what I call Reylo fics with the word 'Stars' in the title.

I wanted to start with something simple because that allows me to:

a) search my bookmarks quickly,

b) rec some fic I adore, and

b) introduce people to some of the big tropes in Reylo fic.

1. A Path to Broken Stars

Author: stellardarlings; Twitter; Tumblr

Who does mythology better than Reylos? No one. This is one of my favorite fics in the entire Reylo ship because of its skillful use of the myth of Eros and Psyche as a lens for the Reylo relationship. Kylo Ren, a magic user, betrays his mother’s kingdom of Alderaan to Snoke’s armies. In the desert of Jakku, Rey struggles to survive until a chance encounter with Kylo and his Knights of Ren reveal that, unbeknownst to her, she is a magic user as well. Kylo takes her as an apprentice and begins to train her. The fic deals with themes of masks and hidden identities, female desire, and the greatest moral of all time - AMOR OMNIA VINCIT.

Status: Complete
Rating: M
Warnings: mythologically correct dub-con

2. Under Different Stars

Author: Aaveena; Twitter; Tumblr

Perhaps the largest and most fruitful type of Reylo fanfiction is where an author picks a moment in their story and has a character make a different choice. In Under Different Stars, Ben makes a radically different choice - after the destruction of the Jedi Temple, Ben does not go to Snoke, but rather cuts himself off from the Force and disappears. Rey remains on Jakku, continuing to scavenge, until a bounty hunter named Kylo Ren comes to the planet to pick up an old YT 1300 light freighter from the junkyard.

Status: WIP, 24/35 chapters posted
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: oblique reference to sexual assault

3. A Collision of Stars

Author: dustoftheancients

Completed before The Last Jedi aired, A Collision of Stars was one of the first long fics I ever read in this pairing. It has many of the hallmarks of classic, early Reylo - a darker characterization for Kylo, the incorporation of a lot of established Star Wars lore, and a brilliant prediction of the Force bond but in a way that’s really kind of different. This fic is painful in the best way, creative, gorgeous, and shot through with intense emotion and incisive characterization. The author took what we learned in the Force Awakens and careened off into the galaxy, developing their own narrative that is completely plausible and incredibly engrossing.

Status: Completed
Rating: Mature
Warnings: violence, cannibalism, plenty of dark side stuff

4. Stars Across Your Skin

Author: andabatae; Twitter

A modern AU with two of my favorite tropes - 1) at least one of the pairing is an artist, and 2) the two interact over the Internet without realizing who each other are. Rey is an art director and Ben is a photographer working on the same project, a fashion shoot. And they HATE each other - or so it seems. This is a particularly beautiful story because it also deals with intense loneliness. Both Rey and Ben are touch starved, and it laces their interactions with anguish and, later, ecstasy.

Status: Complete
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Discussion of emotional trauma and neglect

5. Broken, Accidental Stars

Author: HarpiaHarpyja; Tumblr; Twitter

Here we have a fic dealing with one of crucial the tipping points of the sequel trilogy - Kylo Ren and Han Solo on the bridge in Starkiller Base. In this fic, Kylo Ren makes a different choice, he leaves the First Order and returns to the Resistance with Han. But this is not a happy ending, just a difficult beginning. He is not entirely healed, not entirely forgiven, and not entirely comfortable. And Rey? Rey is conflicted and difficult. Honestly, this is one of my favorite characterizations of Rey out there - she is stubborn, smart, angry, compassionate, curious, and utterly herself.

Status: WIP 34/40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: nothing i can remember

6. Holo Porn Stars: The Career Change

Author: CaptainMarvel42; Twitter; Tumblr

Oh crack!fic, the engine that keeps many, if not all, of us going. This is a canon fic where footage of the Interrogation leaks on the holonet and many in the galaxy read the encounter as . . . sexually charged. So naturally, the galaxy starts making porn about it. Rey and Kylo are appalled at the low quality of much of the porn and decide to see if they can do better.

Status: Complete
Rating: Mature
Warnings: dub-con is a plot point in the in-universe porn

Happy Reading Everyone!

Hi! My name is earis, or at least that is says on my AO3 account - earis. Here, on dreamwidth, I am earisparticipates, and on Tumblr as earisridesagain. I also am on Twitter as archaelologog and EarisRecs.

I’ve had the opportunity to take some time to reflect on fandom and fannish activities, especially as I am coming up on 20 years of participation in fandom. A variety of recent events, talking on a podcast about my experiences, some popular writers taking down works or leaving fandom, researching the intersection between massive ip and fanfiction, and the increasingly loud and troubling voices who advocate for censorship, have encouraged me to think about who I am as a fan and who I want to be.

I remember reading a book that opened with a discussion of broken hyperlinks. As a fanfic reader, when I find a fic I like, I bookmark it, or the site hosting it, and return to it when I need to. But eventually, links break, people leave, and fics are taken down, either by the author or someone else. And while a broken link is not the burning of the library of Alexandria, there is still a loss when it happens.

The ephemerality of fannish activities and the ‘products’ of fandom is part of what makes participation precious. We revel in works, and then they are lost. We lose ourselves in a fandom, and then our enthusiasm wanes. We join servers and then abandon them. We forge intimate friendships, and then we drift apart. We get hooked on a fic, and it is never finished.

I am tempted to look back and forward with no small measure of despair. And if I did, that would be my experience in fandom. Doom, gloom, and mourning something that may have never existed.

Instead, I’ll do something different. I’ll celebrate. And my favorite way to celebrate fandom is by recommending fanfic, and other fannish things I adore.

Rec’ing is one of the great joys of fanfiction. Sharing a wonderful piece of writing with the world - or at least the portion of it that pays attention to me on the internet - makes me feel connected to readers and writers.

I used to make reclists all the time, on my livejournal (RIP). But, now that I am on twitter (mostly), there isn’t space to do it justice. So I am going to do something different. I am moving back to the blog - specifically, to dreamwidth. And I am going to put together recs for people to enjoy.

So strap in, because earis is back, she is participating, and she is ready to rock.