>VERBOSE

That Supreme Charm by thestarsapart
Fandom: Princess Bride (1987)
Pairing/Characters: Fezzik, Inigo Montoya, Westley/Buttercup
Rating: General Audiences
Words: 2912

Author's summary: Fezzik's lifelong journey to understand his love of rhymes.
Author's notes: The title is from a quote by Victor Hugo: "Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter."
Author's warnings: None
Additional tags: Missing Scene, Rhyming, Found Family, Character Study

My comment: "gah *flail* this is marvelous!"

Quote:
If only he could figure out how to explain it in a way that other people could understand… but Fezzik didn’t really understand it either; he just felt it. When he found a thyme and said it aloud, it just… fit. Like his father sliding two hand-carved planks together in a dovetailed joint. A smooth slide, then a gentle “clunk” in his ear. Just right.

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Graduate Student-Snake Alliance: Fall Schedule of Events by ipreferaviators
Fandom: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense - Luke Burns
Rating: General Audiences
Words: 447

Author's summary: The Graduate Student-Snake Alliance is committed to providing high-quality training and practical education to facilitate successful thesis defenses for the greater university community.
Author's warnings: Chose Not To Use, but none

My comment: "This is deranged 😆I love it."

Quote:
Clobbering a Colossus: Techniques for Big Snakes
Maybe research hasn't gone as planned, or you can't find the sources you need. Maybe you're just not sure how your results will be taken. Regardless of why you think you might be up against a huge snake, the GSSA is here to help you prepare!

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"God Damned Them All"? Documenting the Loss of the Privateer Antelope by machiavellijr
Fandom: Barrett's Privateers (Song)
Pairing/Characters: Elcid Barrett, Narrator
Rating: General Audiences
Words: 1674

Author's summary: A grim narrative of fraud, deception, false advertising, murders, robberies, puttings in fear and operating without a Board of Trade Certificate.
Author's notes: All errors of history, chronology and musicology are my own.
Author's warnings: None

My comment: "Love a good epistolary format. The bit about it being insurance fraud was funny 😆"

Quote:
Note from Naval Storekeeper Richard Williams to Master Attendant David Hooper
Davey - Antelope is to be condemned, we’ll have her towed round to Sherbrooke ‘for breaking up’, and if the buyer sails her away from there, not our problem is it?

Snow by Nyx_Knacks
Fandom: Takin' Over the Asylum
Characters: Campbell Bain, Campbell's father, Campbell's mother
Rating: Teen
Words: 818

Author's summary: Campbell runs out into a snowstorm after an argument with his father and subsequently gets lost in his thoughts.
Author's notes: DON'T READ IF SUICIDAL THOUGHTS TRIGGER YOU. I never explicitly wrote in that that's what was going through his head, but it's certainly implied.
Author's warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Suicidal Thoughts

Quote:
How many times had he told Campbell to control himself? How many times had he told the poor boy to calm down, mind his volume, think rationally? How many times had he told his own son to muscle through, stop being lazy, just get up and do something? Too many times.

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Missing Mirth by smilingformoney
Fandom: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (nominally the 2005 movie as this is for an Alan Rickman challenge, but there's not really anything that wouldn't work for other incarnations of Marvin)
Characters: Marvin, OC (nominally "Reader" as the fic is reader-insert second person for some reason, but it works just as well imagining whatever you like)
Rating: General
Words: 1190

Prompt: Rickmas 2024 (an Alan Rickman prompt challenge) day 12: Missing Mirth
Author's warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

My comment: "Waaah my Marvin 😭 🥰 I'm not crying, you're crying. idk why, he's just always been my little blorbo in this series since long before that word existed; he's a completely miserable little git but I'm weirdly protective of him. Seems like there's a metaphor in here for what I hear it's like when people who need medications for their mental health finally find the right one for them."

Quote:
“And it’s a miracle you survived,” you commented as you examined the gaping hole in the robot’s head. “You should count yourself lucky.”
“Oh, yes, lucky. Vogons are the worst marksmen in the galaxy, and I managed to get hit by one. Just my luck that I had to survive.”

Poker Night by MinMinGood
Fandom: Monkey Island
Characters: LeChuck, Iron Rose, Putra, Gullet, Apple Bob, Yancy, Mad Flora, Cutthroat Kelly, Flambé; a little bit of Flambé/Mad Flora
Rating: Teen
Words: 5090

Author's summary: Every so often, the crew of LeShip has a poker night. It never ends well.
Author's warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply (but there's some grossout imagery around Gullet which some might consider body horror)
Additional tags: Pre-Return to Monkey Island, Sometimes Flambé does things other than eating and sleeping, Scroll to the bottom for art

Quote:
“Do you want a haggis dumpling, sir?” Putra pointed at the last few on the table.
LeChuck took one and rolled it in his hand, eyeing it carefully. “Ye’ve made ‘em better than this before. I do hope ye ain’t losin’ yer touch.”
“No, sir,” Putra said, annoyed, although she didn’t let it show in her tone. He ate it and didn’t say anything else, so Putra concluded he couldn’t have actually disliked it. When he didn’t like something, everyone heard about it and suffered for it.

Radio Killed the Semaphore Star by SweetPollyOliver
Fandom: Discworld
Characters: Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Original Male Character(s), Boddony, William de Worde, Sacharissa Cripslock, Otto von Chriek, Gytha "Nanny" Ogg, Agnes Nitt, Polly "Ozzer" Perks, Maladict, Moist von Lipwig, Anoia, Samuel Vimes
Rating: Teen [although tbh I don't understand why; seems quite tame to me. certainly it's not higher-rated than the canon.]
Words: 3657

Author's summary: In 1895 on Roundworld, the inventor Guglielmo Marconi invented the wireless telegraph, which used radio waves—a form of electromagnetic radiation that is outside the visible spectrum—to transmit messages from a sending operator to a radio receiver. But, like the invention of bread*, few truly good wheezes are only thought of once, and so in the early 2000s UC on Discworld, Liam Macaroni invented a similar device that used a different form of electromagnetic radiation: octarine. And, due to the preponderance of narrativium on Discworld, radio got around to audio transmission, rather than being confined to the old dots and dashes routine, quite a bit more promptly than it did on Roundworld.
Author's notes: This fic was written as part of Pod Together 2023 in collaboration with semperfiona, who recorded the audio version of the fic which you can listen to here. Pod Together is an annual challenge where fic writers and podficcers work together to create new works in parallel with each other, i.e. authors write new fics (or other text-based fanworks) with the intention that their podfic partners will record them.
Thank you to trinityofone and bookhobbit for betaing this for me and to my Pod Together partner semperfiona for the wonderful idea of writing a story about radio on Discworld and for helping me brainstorming ideas around this premise. This was a real blast to write and I hope you enjoy reading (and listening!) to it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
There is a homeopathic amount of references to ham radio etiquette and culture in this, but all you need to know to understand that section that may otherwise be confusing is that QSO means radio contact. Also, I am not an expert on the history of radio or how radio technology works, nor did I do as much research as our beloved and behatted Pterry would have if he had gotten around to having radio on Discworld, so please excuse any inexactitude in my explanations and chalk it up to octarine radiation working differently to radio waves.

Author's warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional tags: Podfic Available, Pod Together 2023, TechnologyRadio, original characters based on historical figures, Mostly Gen, multiple connected vignettes, Ensemble Cast, Humor, Puns & Word Play, Footnotes, Cats, Octarine, Collaboration

Quote:
“If you aren’t involved then I like this whole thing even less!” Ridcully said. “Someone who we don’t know anything about is making magical talking boxes? Whole damn thing smacks of sourcery. Next thing you know there’ll be creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions all over the place and we’ll be up to our eyeballs in unmentionables. And up to our unmentionables in eyeballs, come to that! Whatever’s going on, you figure it out immediately and put a stop to it!”

5 fic recs in a real grab-bag of fandoms here: ( Discworld, The Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn, Takin' Over the Asylum, Harry Potter )

Title: The Mad Headless Monkey
Fandoms: Monkey Island, Sea of Thieves (specifically the expansions A Pirate's Life and The Legend of Monkey Island)
Characters: Kate Capsize, Guybrush Threepwood, the Mad Monkey a.k.a. the Headless Monkey
Rating: General
Warnings: None
Words: 510
Summary: Captain Kate Capsize's journey on the Headless Monkey, née Mad Monkey, to make Guybrush Threepwood pay for what he did to her and to the ship -- from the point of view of the ship. To the tune of "Barrett's Privateers" by Stan Rogers.
Additional Tags: Anthropomorphic, The Legend of Monkey Island, Boats and Ships, Filk, Sea Shanties, Barrett's Privateers

Notes: This filk of "Barrett's Privateers" draws on material from the Sea of Thieves expansions A Pirate's Life and The Legend of Monkey Island. A Pirate's Life has a wrecked ship in the Sea of the Damned with several journals written by Kate Capsize, describing her vendetta against Guybrush, salvaging the Mad Monkey to get a ship to pursue him to the Sea of Thieves with, renaming it the Headless Monkey, and it getting wrecked again in the Sea of the Damned. In Legend Smilin' Stan has come into possession of the abandoned ship, which is now "some kind of weird ghost galleon", and replaced the stolen figurehead with a replica. Eventually Kate regains the ship and shows up under Monkey Island at the last minute to help the player defeat LeChuck.

Title: The Ballad of Hermie, the Giant Sea Pig of Mêlée Island
Fandom: Monkey Island
Characters: Important-Looking Pirates (well one of them), Guybrush Threepwood, other cameos
Rating: General
Words: 642
Summary: A heartfelt (?) ditty about the rise and the demise of this fantastic creature of the deep.
Additional Tags: Poetry, Ballads
Notes: So there's this on the wall in the Scumm Bar in Escape from Monkey Island:

It's not there in The Secret of Monkey Island, so clearly its origin is somewhere in between that and Escape. And one morning I literally woke up with a verse of a ballad about this creature in my head. Pirates are not a very well-mannered and attentive audience, by the way. (The specific characters given some interjecting lines in this aren't really important, so I didn't tag for them; it was mostly a gag from when I posted this to a Monkey Island Discord server using emotes, and I decided to keep the attributions.)

Severus Snape. Potions Master. by Mirzaeva on Deviantart

Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy - "a little Drarry with a Christmas tree". Rating: G. Animated. Could also be read as not-shippy if you prefer.
Severus Snape and Minerva McGonagall - building snowmen. Rating: G/PGish depending on how you think a depiction of Michelangelo's "David" should be rated.
Hermione Granger and Severus Snape - "I didn't have a prompt so I thought I'd retell an old joke, cuz old jokes are the best." Rating: G visually, but said joke does have a dark theme (murdering someone by poison). Animated. Lots of fun details in the backgrounds.
Severus Snape, Hermione Granger, and Lucius Malfoy - " what kind of familiars these three would have". Rating: G, for "Geez, Lucius does not know how to not be ostentatious, does he?"

Professor Minerva McGonagall-FanArt2 by VladislavPANtic on DeviantArt