LINKDING

<blockquote>Cassian and K-2 left an intangible legacy behind. They also left a literal one.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I’ve done all this before. Hundreds of times, every morning since I was made captain.</blockquote> ➤ does not end with the time loop resolved

<blockquote>Daphne and Osgood, from Havana to Tijuana and back again.</blockquote>

<blockquote>What happens when a disembodied AI and her amorphous slime best friend get a synthesized body to experiment with? To start with....mammal bodies are weird. But also: they're kind of fun. </blockquote>

<blockquote>The past month and a half had been no saga, no epic journey worthy of telling. He’d believed that what was happening to him would be the rest of his life. It hadn’t. Nusuth; a wave of a hand, to recreate the snow untrodden. Therem survives crossing the border but spends some time detained in Orgoreyn. Genly gets him back.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Nyalu squeezes my hand, burying a blunt talon into my flesh as if to wake me up from sleep. It’s time to wear our wedding rings—the gifts sent to the island two moons ago, for our husband to mark us as his. Nyalu slips one pearl-white ring over my wrist, then traces the chain to find the other one; I push it down gently over his hand. His fingers shake—it’s not the boat’s rocking. The pairs of brides around us are already restless, already standing on their feet inside the boats, wings flapping anxiously underneath their veils. The hairless, featherless arms of men are tying our boats to the pier, unloading the stacks of lacquered boxes. A gloved hand reaches out. Nyalu is behind me and almost loses his balance as he hops from wood over water and onto the earth. Beneath our feet we find flat, concrete rock. We careen through the silent faces of husbands, through a swarm of veils, feathers, hands, and feet covered in bridal tattoos. No words of welcome, no music or dance to celebrate the group wedding. No mothers-in-law to host us. This is a nation of men.</blockquote>

<blockquote>At the end of his life, retired Stabile of the Ekumen Genly Ai shares a part of his story on Gethen that he never told.</blockquote> ➤ Wow, that was really good. Did an amazing job of feeling like something that fits with canon

<blockquote>A hapless imugi is determined to attain the form of a full-fledged dragon and gain entry to the gates of heaven. For a long time, things don’t go well. Then, it meets a girl. </blockquote>

<blockquote>The first thing he does, when everyone is dead, is listen.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Dan had thought the Brock Report was great and that Eddie Brock was the coolest man in San Francisco. He still, painfully, kind of thinks this.</blockquote> ➤ love the outside pov on Eddie&Venom

<blockquote>Infrastructure. It’s all the stuff you don’t think about, the stuff that works until it doesn’t, and then your tube of personal lubricant turns out to be full of toothpaste or you end up knee-deep in chocolate milkshake. That’s not the fun kind of surprise, and it’s not a random example either. I’d had a lively morning, and I was hoping that the afternoon was going to be more on the calm side. At least with the replicator I was working on there was no obvious mess to clean up, though I wouldn’t know for sure until the skeleton key had finished running and I could rummage around inside it and see what it had choked on.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Polly's comfortable back at The Duchess, with her well-worn routines and her well-worn life, and she's . . . absolutely not pining for her best friend, Mal, who forgot – hah! – to say goodbye before vanishing after the last peace negotiations. For the second time. Not that she's counting. But when Commander Vimes personally asks her to come to Ankh Morpork and learn the ways of the City Watch, for the good of Borogrovia, she feels she can't say no. She's forgotten Mal, she absolutely has. But then a mysterious someone starts sending her coffee. And that's only the beginning . . .</blockquote> ➤ I approve of this fic's opinions on Mal's gender

<blockquote>I don’t really care about the new guy, even if he did murder someone once. I’m mostly just out here to not have to listen to old Mrs. Francis concern-trolling my mom. When I was a kid who sometimes acted like a boy and sometimes like a girl, it was “just a phase.” Now that I’m sixteen, it’s “worrying” and “not safe for the younger children” and something we should “talk to a therapist about.” What Mrs. Francis doesn’t know is that I remember every life I’ve lived for nearly four hundred years—not in detail, but like a book I read once and have a few hazy recollections about. In over a dozen lifetimes I can recall, I’ve been male and female enough times for those words to mean little more to me than a particular shirt—not who I am.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Ratchet shrugged tolerantly when Optimus asked his opinion. "I think it’s more a lark than anything, but we can all use a lark, now and then."</blockquote> ➤ the transformers find a use for more human-style sexual contact between robots

<blockquote>After the roc's prophecy threatens to separate them forever, Sylvi works to get Ebon back and save the kingdom.</blockquote> ➤ Haven't yet read Pegasus because I hear it really really needs a sequel that doesn't (yet) exist, but this is fixit fic for the cliffhanger ending of Pegasus and it's lovely on its own

<blockquote>Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. Estraven the Traitor. “A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness</blockquote>

<blockquote>“I never went down,” Ratchet said.</blockquote> ➤ every single transformers fic Astolat has written so far is basically: given different base assumptions about how the universe works, how to end the war. And I love all of it, omg, both the different choices of worldbuilding in each fic and also the commitment to ending the war. ➤ (look, yeah, I know that I know nothing about transformers and don't care about this fandom at all, sometimes it's just really soothing to read well-constructed fic about characters I don't have any emotional investment in)

<blockquote>“Well, uh, congratulations,” Ultra Magnus said, blankly. Cyclonus paused and said sincerely, “Thank you, Magnus,” looking touched, and then punched him in the head.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“This is like some kinda bad dream,” Ironhide said aloud. “No,” Cyclonus said, low and harsh. “But it will be.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Amir Tarabi is scrubbing himself down in the misting rooms the first time he meets Mani Rizk. The mister in Beirut-4 is being upgraded, the zone’s residents using Beirut-3’s misting rooms on rotation, so it is especially crowded that day. Amir avoids making eye contact with the bathers in adjacent patches with rigorous politeness. At sixteen, he’s already spent a hundred personal growth hours thinking about civic decency, appreciates the role of uninterrupted private rituals in fostering social cohesion—</blockquote>

<blockquote>Zeiat is determined to find out how humans reproduce. Sphene doesn't really help.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Miles introduces the prospective Lady Vorkosigan to the current one, who finds Bel's attempts to walk in Barrayaran skirts lacking.</blockquote>

<blockquote>"Do you anticipate not being worried?" "Over you? Never."</blockquote> ➤ does what it says on the tin. I was a little confused by the timeline but still an enjoyable fic

<blockquote>Two trained specialists handle a problem in the usual professional manner, though there's something different back at HQ.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Here’s how I remember it: A touch shocked me. I was reaching for a flash-seared bog-oyster, and then a fingertip, softer than I’d ever felt, brushed my knuckle. The softness startled me so much, it took me a moment to realize the hand had seven fingers, three more than mine. Be held a striped cloth in ber other hand. I came up with the correct pronoun by instinct, even before my mind took in the fact that a pilot was touching my hand. Holy shit, a pilot!</blockquote> ➤ here for it omg! both the A+ gender/sexuality stuff (wayyyyy more than a binary, though still binarized thinking about who is the penetrator/penetratee in sex, and a main character who doesn't want to fulfill the expectations set out for ym), and the scifi worldbuilding stuff, and the extremely pragmatic approach the main character takes to yr relationship with Dot. ➤ Saw someone refer to this as a/b/o fic before a/b/o was a thing, and yeah, this story does exactly the gender deconstruction things that my fave kinds of a/b/o fics do (although this story never really gets to a place of explicitly criticizing the binarization of penetration roles as a whole, just the main character's discomfort with yr place in that system) ➤ also WAIT this author is the author of that book I keep seeing like everyone talk about (All the birds in the sky)? okay fiiiiiiine I guess I will put that book on my to read list after all

<blockquote>there are tentacle monsters in the sea outside of toulon. valjean thinks he knows what he's getting into.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Is that you, Mrs. Fielding?” said Osgood. “Sure,” said Jerry.</blockquote> ➤ idk how well I've tagged this for what it is but I've done my best

<blockquote>A Halál/der Tod because what happens when death kisses death oooo (I'm so sorry)</blockquote> ➤ a three-sentence kiss fic that is longer than three sentences

<blockquote>(Well, there goes “I’ll never write this again.” Under the cut because intelligent dinosaur/human, sorry if you’re on mobile, sorry about everything. HEY AT LEAST IT’S LESS CREEPY THIS TIME.)</blockquote> ➤ a three-sentence kiss fic that is longer than three sentences.

<blockquote>Living dangerously is far preferable to dying safely.</blockquote>