I love good guys

fkficfest '25 has concluded! We had lovely, diverse stories, and lovely, kind interactions, all around. Forever Knight fandom has always been such a jumble of approaches, with its mishmash of genres and themes attracting wildly dissimilar approaches and interpretations. It's touching and heartening that we can play together at all, much less this successfully. Thank you.

Some years, I feel that being the game's moderator should block me from making story recommendations, and I hold my peace. This year, I feel that it's okay to go ahead and point out a few stories that happened to offer particularly distinct elements to me, personally, subjectively, as a reader and not moderator.

• "A Duty to Serve" by Calliope24 (G, gen, ~2K words): Set during the tumult of "A More Permanent Hell," a uniformed Tracy tries to serve while her father orders her off the streets, and Stonetree steps in. I found the efforts of all the characters to endure and serve the common good during this civilizational collapse powerful, and Stonetree's measured optimism -- not just about the ultimate end, but faith in people -- invigorating. I also admire the imagination and depiction of this canon bubble; of course the third-season characters lived second-season, and of course Stonetree knew Commissioner Vetter.


• "Unpacking" by SwitchbladeEyes (T, gen, ~11K words): Set immediately after "Sons of Belial," Nick's reaction to the demon incident brings all of Natalie's undealt-with feelings about Richard's death in "I Will Repay" roaring to the surface. I found this story's cadence, tone, and voice so resonantly third-season that it felt -- for better and for worse, for familiarity and for discomfort -- like it could indeed have been the next canonical episode after "Sons of Belial," if such continuity had been a thing in those days, and also that it could then have broken third-season's fall and climbed back up onto a more promising path by dealing with pain and not only piling it up.


• "Daylight" by Nicholas_Lucien (T, gen, ~2K words): This songfic goes around and around, like the verses of a song with a refrain, in a way that made my brain react to it more like poetry than prose. It makes an interesting choice, to call Nick/Nicolas/Nicholas by those different names as it shifts through Nick's, Janette's, and Lacroix's perspectives regardless of the historical era, creating prism-like views on each situation. The reader may interpret the cyclical structure to indicate that Nick will never win. I choose to interpret it, for myself, instead to indicate that Nick will never stop striving.

Separately, the story that I contributed myself is "Reconcilable Differences" (T, gen, ~5K words). Thank you, batdina, for beta-reading! Set early in the long hiatus between the first and second seasons, it pokes at the trope of Natalie treating a badly injured Nick by dosing him with the blood that she otherwise insists is the barrier to all his hopes. Both Nick and Natalie, of course, want Nick to both live and become human, but when something happens to make Nick believe that he can have only one or the other, he and Natalie are not necessarily in harmony on which and why and how. The story addresses the game prompt "I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear;" I think that it goes both ways between them. I definitely found it easier to put Nick and Natalie into this mess than to get them out again, but I like to think that I did so in the end.

I've posted my first The Legend of Zelda prose story. (I'd previously posted TLOZ poems.) It's short and cozy. I'd originally intended it to be solely about swimming, as a point of mechanics-meet-lore, but it somehow picked up allusions to the common good and the nature of successful leadership along the way. Can't imagine what brought that to mind; must be exclusively how fair and earnest a servant-leader Zelda canonically is...

Fandom: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Title: "The Water in Which We Swim"
Rating: G, gen, no archive warnings apply
Length: 1,785 words
Summary: [Post-canon] On a family visit to Zora’s Domain, Zelda sees Hyrule through Yona’s eyes and realizes why Link never learned to swim underwater.

Many thanks to kirbyfest for beta-reading. Her help made the story clearer and richer.

As this year's halfamoon comes to a close, lightbird did me the honor of remembering and recommending one of my old -- 2001! -- Forever Knight stories for the theme "One-hit Wonders." Read her kind rec.

"Kindred Spirits" (T, gen, ~13K words) is from Nick's perspective, but features Urs and Jacqueline (Ellen-Monika-Jacqueline of "Hearts of Darkness," the theme's "One-hit Wonder"), with cameos by Natalie and Lacroix, and "off-screen" actions by others.

This is one of my personal favorites of my own FK fanfic (it's even tagged "author's favorite" from back when that was a thing). I love these characters and the questions I think they raise. I hadn't re-read it in so long that I had literally forgotten just how it ends, and I made myself cry, if that's not too silly to admit. I now feel that (a) I should be daring like that more often in the present, so yay! '01 me and the beta-readers who helped me, and (b) wow, did I ever use oodles of unnecessary words and overlong sentences, so hey! '25 me take warning and never backslide. ;-) I was also surprised that the story was this long; in my memory, it was much shorter... because, in proportion to the norm then, it was indeed shorter.

Thank you, lightbird! You absolutely made my day.


(halfamoon has many assorted recs across fandom. If you haven't, consider taking a look?)

In 2024, I posted 6 fanworks (4 stories, 2 poems). The work that earned the most hits got 127 (fewest 19). Most kudos 15 (fewest 1). Most comment threads 12 (fewest 1). As usual, exchanges and events earned the most interaction of all kinds by leaps and bounds -- which is surely one reason we love exchanges and events!

(Curiously -- and I did not know this until I glanced at the Statistics tab to make this post; I have no idea where to actually view these, if anywhere -- two of this year's pieces each earned one "subscription." Apparently some kind folks want to be there if those pieces spawn series, which is super neat... but super puzzling in the case of the short poem? I loved writing the poem! But it's not exactly sequel-etic.)


"Found in the Fog" (T, gen, ~5K words)
Forever Knight: As a lighthouse keeper in 1890s California, Nick fights a deadly fog and wrestles with the epiphany that cost Sylvaine's life.

"The Map in Adarbrent Manor" (G, m/f, ~10K words)
Dungeons & Dragons (Cartoon): A special map promises a way home, if our gang can get to it in time. Sheila feels the weight of change. And Eric decides that he has to tell Sheila how he feels before it’s too late.

"Beyond Illusion" (G, gen, ~4K words)
Dungeons & Dragons (Cartoon): After escaping Venger’s Forbidden Tower, Varla must decide whether to stay with her parents, join Presto and his companions, or forge her own place in the Realm.

"Garbage and Flowers" (T, gen, ~5K words)
Highlander: The Series: Gregor, having started a new life, drops by Alec Hill’s house to make amends. But Alec is dead and Richie is the one who killed him.

"The Secrets He Holds" [poem] (G, gen, 192 words)
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess / The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time: The Golden Wolf need not understand the Hero's Shade; the Hero's Shade understands the Golden Wolf.

"However Briefly" [poem] (G, gen; 657 words)
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: As Zelda and Link escort Midna to her departure, Zelda thinks on what they’ve been through and knows what Midna will choose.


Many, many thanks to everyone who read this year! Extra thanks to those who commented! And profound thanks to those who brainstormed, beta-read, and otherwise helped me do better by the folks who read (and by the characters we love)!

A very kind person generously commented on a 2008 story of mine on the AO3 ("Milepost," FK, Tracy & Natalie), and when I re-read it to refresh my memory -- it was a fill in an LJ ficathon for a prompt by Wiliqueen -- I discovered that all the ellipses are gone. Wherever an ellipsis originally sat, there is now a blank space.

Has something happened to ellipses over the years? Some old formatting or code become incompatible? This story is from the days when I wrote in MS Word (presently, I write in Google Docs). Probably, the missing ellipses were the MS Word character for an ellipsis with which it would have automatically replaced the three periods I would have typed.

I usually re-read my stories in their entirety on posting to scrutinize for exactly this kind of thing. (You know the old truism: Typos are invisible until publication.) Of course, this particular story was uploaded later and backdated -- the AO3 didn't open until 2009 -- and perhaps I was loading several at a time and not paying as close attention as I should.

Could it be that all my vintage stories have blank spaces where their ellipses should be? Eeek. If so... to what extent do I need to go back and fix them, as a courtesy to anyone trying to read them from now on?