rubywisp recommended the Spike/Wes story Other Victorians and Jesus, it's so good I'm left vividly green. All that literate and authentic detail and gorgeously English character building triggers the worst of my thumb-sucking little-girl fears of being found out as a complete fake as a writer. I could never write this, thus I am utter crap. Gah. Which is a terribly backhanded way of reccing such a brilliant story, but I am tragically self-absorbed.
I used to have a list of five or six stories with which to justify the existence of fan-fiction. Not that you should need to on a day-to-day basis, but sometimes you'll come across supremely irritating people who just Don't Get It and you want to shove some text in their faces and say: "Here. Look, you dozy twat. This is the point." Trying to pimp people into fan-fiction who've never read it before--that might call for another, different list of stories, possibly one tailored to the individual. And the Justification List isn't necessarily all of my favorite stories because I could list dozens and dozens of those. They're more like the stories that you'd have to be utterly stupid, a pinhead, a thick git of infinite thickness not to see the value of even outside the context of fandom. I could use the dirty L-word I suppose and just say literature, I guess. But it's weird labeling stuff, because it implies this huge hierarchary of stories and that makes everyone including myself twitchy.
But anyway. I am long-winded at trying to say that I think this particular story makes the short list of things that wow me and leave me stupid.
I'd tell you the rest of the list but I've forgotten. *g* Yes, right, the point of the list would seem to be stories that are unforgettable. But the pudding in my head tires so easily...oh, except that one of the other stories was "Book of Daniel," by the same author, Glossolalia (
glossing), which I see when I click to the main story index. Unsurprising coincidence.My inferiority complex needs a drink. And my fucking pager just went off! Sons of bitches. On a Saturday night.