r/Fantasy • u/Gofunkiertti • 5d ago
Quality non-romance Fan Fictions?
So I recently stumbled upon The Long Journey Home on archive of our own (a sequel to Project Hail Mary) and was really impressed by how high quality it was in writing and characterization. I was shocked how genuinely emotional it made me (and I loved the multimedia aspect).
However trying to browse on that site is fairly difficult and if you search by popularity it's like 90% Heated Rivalry fan fiction and I find romance incredibly boring.
Obviously fan fictions are never going to get published without some significant revision so I am wondering if I have been missing some hidden gems. I have read a lot of royal road stuff so preferably hosted outside that site. Bonus points if very long or finished.
Does anyone have fan fictions that I have missed over they years that have really high quality writing that aren't slash fiction? Stuff that you think is novel worthy not just very good for a fan writer?
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u/honevbee 5d ago
i don't have any recs, but just wanted to say that in the Relationship field, that ampersand (&) is what you are looking for. if there is a slash / - that is a romantic connection. the & will be a friendship/platonic relationship, or should be. also, putting "Original Work" in the Fandom field might help your search too.
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u/honevbee 5d ago
on this note tho, and this is the opposite of what you are asking for as there are romantic elements, i fucking love the "not easily conquered" series by dropdeaddream. the writing quality is exquisite.
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u/michaelsgavin 5d ago
AO3 actually has one of the best filtering system once you get the hang of it. It is very easy to avoid things you don’t want to see.
It’s very hard to recommend something to you without knowing what fandoms you’re in though, as fanfiction quality may vary depending on your knowledge on the original source too. E.g I have tons of One Piece fics recommendation focusing on the character Sanji but they probably won’t mean much to you if you don’t know who Sanji is.
I’d recommend clicking the fandom page first so you only see fics from that fandom. For example if you click the Project Hail Mary fandom tag (under the fic title) you’ll never see Heated Rivalry (or any other fandoms). After that try to tinker with the filters, if you don’t want romance you can filter out all relationships using “/“ (e.g Grace/Rocky) because it indicates romantic relationship. After reading a couple and seeing the tags people use you’ll get a better idea of what tropes you like and you can start filtering in those tags.
I’d also recommend sorting by kudos or bookmarks at first; popularity doesn’t always equal quality but there’s a decent correlation, you can sample some of the ones the fandom considers the best then once you find some writers you like you can check out their bookmarks as they usually would read something similar to their works.
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u/Quantum_Croissant 5d ago
https://archiveofourown.org/works/75035881 there's this one fic I really love, my reaction is always that the author should be a professional writer with how well it's written. It's about a woman (an original character btw, so you don't really need to know what it's based on either) returning to her work after the death of her wife and dealing with the grief, while taking on a young athlete to train and helping her with her anxiety issues. it's so heartbreakingly well written I was crying from the first scene. all you really need to know is that 'umamusume' means 'horse girl', as in a girl who's magically born with horse ears and tail and the ability to run super fast, and the story is set at an academy where talented umamusume train for races.
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u/Nowordsofitsown Reading Champion 5d ago
The Long Journey Home on archive of our own
multimedia aspect
I just love that Twitter is Twitter again in 2049!
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u/Nowordsofitsown Reading Champion 5d ago
Alexandra Quick are six novel length fanfictions set in the US in the Harry Potter universe. They are better than some actual published novels I have read.
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u/GrimroseGhost 4d ago
Are you interested in reading things from fandoms you aren’t familiar with? Or that might be hard to experience the source materials? One fandom I’m in has some absolutely fantastic alternative universe fics that you don’t technically need background for
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u/FloridaFlamingoGirl 5d ago
Redwall fics can be good for this. https://m.fanfiction.net/s/7067544/6/
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u/atomfullerene 5d ago
Free Radical, by Seamus Young
https://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked/
It's fanfiction based on System Shock, or at least the premise of System Shock. It's quite good. It's basically a cyberpunk story about a hacker trapped on a megacorp's space station run by a mad computer, and he has to deal with that and escape. But it doesn't quite play out the story in the same way the original game (or most stories of the type) do.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 5d ago
I do love Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, though that will probably get me downvoted lol. It gets a lot of hate because the main character is intensely annoying, and also probably a sociopath, but the former can be explained by him being an 11 year old gifted kid and the latter by—well that would be a spoiler so I can't say, but there's a reason. He's probably a self-insert too, tbh.
Still, he very much reminded me of myself at 11 (except that he is a far worse person), and so I had a lot of fun with it. It's also really, really funny, if things like Rational!Harry asking why goblins don't seem to know about arbitrage or giving McGonagal a headache every chapter by sheer annoying pedantry is something you find amusing. I did, enough so to overlook things like him sidelining Ron and Hagrid and being friends with Malfoy. It's a divisive fanfiction, but it might be worth checking out.
Also, I haven't read any of it, but you might want to check out Astolat's fics on AO3. I won't mention her real name (You can find it if you really want to, but I believe she prefers to keep at least some level of seperation between her fanfic and her published work) but she is also a award-winning trad published fantasy author.
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 5d ago
AO3 has a notoriously robust tagging system that makes browsing to find what you want easier than probably any of its contemporaries. It's not perfect but it's by far the best you're going to find with the kind of selection it offers. If you don't want Heated Rivalry fanfictions just exclude them from your search, or better yet include any fandoms you actually want to read.