It's Epic week, and I've been saving this one up! This should have been posted last night, but I fell foul of misbehaving hotel wifi. Sorry about that.


Title: The League of Extraordinary Women
Fandom: Harry Potter/Buffy/Stargate SG-1/DCU/The Secret World of Alex Mack/Bionic Woman
Pairing: Gen
Categories: Crossover, action/adventure, crossover,
Length: Super!Epic (134,500 words)

Author Website: Diane's page on the Whateley Acadamy fanfiction wiki.
Author Website: Twisting the Hellmouth author page.

Summary:
Hermione Granger has to recruit six women to help her stop an army of monsters before her world is overrun. But none of the women are even in her dimension...

Review:
This massive story is a response to a site challenge that basically amounts to "get a bunch of women together to save the world." The resulting story is so much more than that.

Yes, OK, so a lot of women from different worlds do get together under the direction of Hermione Granger to defeat a hellgoddess intent on invading other dimensions, but they do it with intelligence and style, making full use of the widely varied skillsets they have. There are fights, but they are conducted with tactical sense and use of such extra resources that are available. In general it hits that wonderful balance point where the characters are intelligent and competent, but not so smart and capable that you stop believing in them.

It's not perfect, of course. The prophecy has all the usual credibility problems of prophecies in being both too specific and too vague, as well as a bit cringeworthy; as usual it would have been more believable if we didn't see the whole thing and immediately treat it as an indifferent acrostic. There is also maybe a bit much random discussion and phoning home before the main event, throwing the pacing off a bit. It's still a very good story with a great deal to commend it to all readers.

There are two sequels, using the term loosely. The first, Cross Purposes is really a collection of shorts in which various characters look up the equivalents of their team-mates in their own universes. Thus SG-1 attempt to recruit Rupert Giles from the British Museum, unaware that he is a double-oh; Bruce Wayne contacts an embittered Sam Carter just before she turns into a supervillain; the Scoobies discover just how paranoid a retired air-force colonel can be; and so on. Some of the stories have been extended into novellas, but are confusingly intertwined and could do with a good sorting out.

The second is the super-epic The Secret Return of Alex Mack. Weighing in at a whopping 1,000,000 words — yes, you read that right, one million words — and still climbing, it continues Alex's story as she returns home and takes up the the identity of "Terawatt." Crossovers abound; I won't spoil your enjoyment by saying much. Suffice it to say that an awful lot of my B-movie guilty pleasures get checked off, and my admiration for Riley Jerome Finn knows no bounds. Again, there are faults; I could cheerfully live without ever seeing Alex's morning exercise routine again, and the emphasis on how much Alex has to eat to fuel her powers is a overdone. Personally I'm not at all taken by the teen drama parts, but that's probably more a reflection of me being a middle-aged man rather than a sixteen year old girl; either way none of the flaws are fatal.

Just a little light reading for you as you head off on holiday :-)

The League of Extraordinary Women

Title: 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101
Fandom: DCU
Pairing: Tim Drake/Kon-El
Categories: AU, science fiction, androids, romance, slash
Length: Medium (10,800 words)

Author on AO3: Meeya8587

Summary:
In the midst of all the white, chrome and plastic skin coating metal skeletons, the only splash of color present was his workmate's blue eyes. An AU where Tim is human and involved with his work colleague, Conner, who happens to be a prototype 'doll' going through a series of puzzling changes.

Review:
Before you ask, the title is the ASCII code for "love" in binary. And that's a good indication of how weird reading this story felt.

This is one of those AUs that almost just takes the names. We see things from Tim's point of view, which is a confused place to be. This Tim is a lot more tentative than the usual portrayals of him as the super-competent Robin. He aware that his colleague is an android, meaning that Conner's personality is very muted indeed. Tim is attracted to him all the same. There are things that don't add up about Conner either, from his behaviour to the way Tim convinces himself he can hear Conner's heartbeat. It's all very disorienting.

I quite like the basic story, I like the confused way things proceed as neither Tim nor Conner really know what they're doing or why. It's the small things that tend to annoy me about this story, like writing small numbers as numerals rather than words. While I don't find various small bits of the story construction convincing, the overall effect works. We do empathise with Tim, even when he's not sure he likes himself much. I'm not entirely sure that the grand denouement works, but that's mostly for the sheer amount of new information — not completely unexpected stuff given the source material, but still — that gets thrown our way. Oddly, I found the story a lot easier to handle a few months ago when I first read it; re-reading it for this rec was much stranger experience.

Well worth a read, though, and not just for the binary.

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

Title: Detention's the Least of Your Problems in this Dimension
Fandom: DCU
Pairing: (pre) Tim/Kon, implied Dick/Jason
Categories: AU, high school, dimension travel
Length: Medium (3,400)

Author Website: Hawk's Perch (tumblr), Hawkstout

Summary:
Tim is an average high school student, but he has a problem. He's locked in the math room's closet with Jason Todd and it turns out his crush Mr. Grayson is from another dimension.

Review:
This isn't a particularly long story, but it paints a nice little picture. Tim Drake is in high school, and has a slightly enormous crush on his math teacher, Mr Grayson. Jason Todd is also in high school, but is bored and disruptive, and decides to vandalize the Math room for laughs. Both of them end up squashed in the closet while Mr Grayson has a seriously weird conversation with Damian Wayne, the headmaster's genius son, and from there things just get stranger for the boys.

This is a light, gentle read despite the fact that it spends most of its time playing with your head. It's very much a slice-of-life story, skipping around what in another story would be the entire action plot to bring out what matters to the characters, and what changes in them. I particularly enjoyed Tim's initial obliviousness to the anvil-like hints his friend Kon drops about trying for someone more obtainable than a student teacher, and in general getting to be a stressed, angsty teenager. Jason too gets to be a real person in Tim's eyes, and by the end they are joking about things that would have started a fight at the beginning of the story.

Pleasant, mildly outrageous reading. Have fun!

Detention's the Least of Your Problems in this Dimension