It must be, because John Biles and Jeff Hosmer finished Sailor Moon Z. You can find it here:

http://www.thekeep.org/~wombat/Stories/Z/

If any of you even REMEMBER Sailor Moon Z, you may now be stunned.

Man, I really should finish Bean Pluto sometime, too...

As I get older, I find I am becoming more intractable in my fanfiction likes and dislikes, and especially in my liking of pairings. Sadly, I can't simply read 6 different fics where the main character pairs up with 6 different people like back in the days of Ranma 1/2.

This can sometimes be a problem with mediums where I like more than one ship. Take Buffy, for example. I love the Buffy/Faith ship, and used to read those fics all the time. But I cannot and will not read anything with Kennedy and Willow together. And 90% of the new B/F fics coming out are post-Chosen. I don't blame the writers, as post-series is a great place to make B/F actually work. But I can't get past the Kennedy in the fics enough to read it. Which means I'm reading far less B/F.

I was reminded of this recently with the end of Harry Potter. I find I am somewhat unusual in that my dislike of Harry/Ginny does not lead to a dislike of all things Weasley. In fact, I like Ron/Hermione. It's not huge, but I like how they work together and how they ended up. I've always quite liked that David and Maddie-esque relationship.

And I have a feeling that if I keep reading my preferred pairing (Harry/Luna), I'll be finding more and more Weasley-bashing. It's somewhat a consequence of Book 7, which once again shows the Weasleys as Harry's ideal family and what he most strives for, something that irritates a lot of fans. And indeed, I think it's a mistake for Harry to try and emulate their family. But I still like them. And I have a feeling I'll be seeing more anti-Weasley fics in the future, which makes me wonder if I can read that sort of thing.

Fanfiction, especially for Harry Potter but also in general, is written by young people. Teens, twenties, that sort of thing. And many of them turn to it because something in the source material upsets them and they want to see it changed. At its worst, that leads to things like what happened with Ranma fanfiction in the late 90s, or Love Hina fanfiction a couple of years ago, where the lead 'angry' girl is taught to know her place and beg forgiveness from the now menacing, masculine male lead. (Love Hina in particular has this, and always has Naru's friends turn against her and shun her, as if suddenly realizing her cartoon violence is HORRIBLE AND WRONG, as opposed to laughing like they do in the series.)

HP has a bit of this, but mostly it's less revenge-oriented fics than making the characters they dislike dislikeable. Don't like Ron? Hey, why not paint him as a homophobe and sexist twat? Don't care for the twins? Excellent, have them laugh as their pranks kill people. If you write them horribly enough, everyone will agree with you and you can all live happily ever after with the RIGHT characters.

I have a feeling if I looked through my backlog of LJ entries, I've ranted about this before. But Deathly Hallows has led to a lot of bashing (though not nearly as much as the record set by Half-Blood Prince), and it struck me once more while reading Nightbreak's entry about H/G/L on Flaming Nargles. (I'm one of the few on that comm, I suspect, who prefers Luna to Ginny in general).

So I took this thing called the Ultimate Mary-Sue Litmus test, using Made of Stone as an example. Needless to say, my character needs to die in a fire. XD Anything over 50 is totally unsalvageable, and I got 52. To be fair, you get 10 automatically for using your real name (as I did), and another 10 for ending up with Hotaru at the end. Being immortal also doesn't help. Luckily, I was able to get points deducted for Sean basically being a jerk through much of the story.

Still, it does remind me that this is a story I could get away with in 1997, but there is no way in God's green earth I could publish it today. And to be fair, I did get someone else to write the sex.

The test, btw, is here: http://www.springhole.net/quizzes/marysue.htm Needs javascript to total properly.

It's rare that I do fanfic recs at all.

It's also rare that I do a rec of a Buffy fic that's not femmeslash in some way.

And I have *never* recced a fic where a great deal of the writing is about Spike's 'redemption' or 'niceness' in any way, shape, or form, because a) most of those fics are Buffy/Spike, which, ew; and b) I didn't even like good guy Spike on the show itself, much less in fanfics where he can be the tortured, really sweet on the inside vamp.

And also, I think this fic is about four years old.

Nevertheless, the fic Elysium, by Dana Woods, and its two sequels, are ASTONISHINGLY good. They're addictive to read, she writes a fantastic Tara, and the whole thing is realistically handled. The basic premise is that everyone died in the battle against Glory except Dawn, Giles, Tara, and Spike, and we view the aftermath and fallout. But... *dang*, it's really good. Check it out. It's pretty much gen, btw, no ships.

Also, while I'm at it, there are three excellent stories by HonorH that deserve reccing as well. Go here and check out Dawn and the Dead (towards the last third of Season 5), and Elegy for a Fallen Heroine (post-Gift and Buffy's death), then go here and look for The Ties That Bind (in the summer right after Season 5). All very good fics, this author writes a fantastic Cordelia, and has some nice A/C without it being romantic or sexual, but these are also, again, mostly gen.

Now back to fluffy femmeslash. :)