recs and links

Sweet, melancholy story in which Jo travels back in time and winds up entangled in the Winchesters' lives in 1988. Jo and John's relationship is handled nicely, but I especially liked how wee!Sam and wee!Dean (especially Dean) take to her and invite her into the family circle. (There is also, in the narrative present, an allusion to Sam/Dean that was unnecessary and can be skipped if that's not your sort of thing - it's only about a paragraph and it's not graphic.)

Really lovely look at Dean's journey down into grief and finally out through the other side. Let's hope the show handles things as gracefully as this story does.

Really fantastic season 2 era casefile featuring a haunted hotel that closes down for the winter; Sam and Dean want to clear out the ghosts, but the people who live there aren't so keen on that plan. There's something else, something far more dangerous lurking, as well, and maybe Sam and Dean have bitten off more than they can chew with this one. I really liked Fay and Oliver and how their relationship mirrored Sam and Dean's. There was a lovely sense of atmosphere and mounting dread as the story unfolded, and if I figured out what was going on before Sam and Dean did, well, it was still really well put together. Could use another line edit for typos, but totally worth reading anyway - highly recommended.

AU in which Sam has a different role in the apocalypse, and it doesn't sit too well with him at first, but he slowly adjusts. Long and lovely, unfolds a little too slowly in the middle, maybe, but full of interesting OCs with whom Sam develops relationships, and of course, his relationship with Dean develops as well, into something new. (Wincest)

Lovely, melancholy story set in the AU of "The End". Sam says yes. After Lucifer is banished, Dean deals with the fallout. (Wincest)

Supernatural/Simpsons fusion in which Lisa=Sam. YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE! *hearts*

beautifully done Olivia vid

Nyota goes home after the movie. This is gorgeous, and it made me cry. Her mother hugs her fiercely, without care or delicacy but with love, and Nyota thinks about the long nights she spent in this room, sitting straight-backed at her desk while her mother lay on the bed, leaning on a stack of pillows, grading papers. She tried to persuade her daughter to sleep late on weekends and not to drive herself so hard, and Nyota didn't listen; so Nyota studied late into the night, every night, and her mother made tea after dark and poured out mute, loving cups. Nyota passed the entrance exams for the Academy with the highest distinction, and took packets of tea leaves to San Francisco. "I'm so sorry," her mother says, softly. "I'm so, so sorry. I know I can't understand." She lets go and stands up. "Let me make you some tea, baby, okay?" She's gone without waiting for an answer, which is just how Nyota remembers things should be.

Gorgeous look at Sports Night as if it existed in the Trek Reboot universe. But what I do is important. Sports are important. Do you think the Federation only does battles and science and politics? I am a Federation citizen and I think sports are important and of our, I don't know, one thousand five hundred member worlds and ten trillion citizens, I think there are enough people who agree to make it worthwhile for me to do my job. And even if there weren't I would still do it, because it is important."

i love this song and i liked this vid despite it having castiel in it. the jo and ellen bits made me sob (okay, the song always makes me cry, but i sobbed especially hard over them)

AU of season 1, wherein Dean's the one who's gone missing, and John is the one who comes to Sam for help in finding him. Long, well-plotted, interesting spin on season 1 and especially good at John and Sam's contentious relationship. Dean was a good son, but he was a better brother.

excellent explanation of why manpain is so infuriating

Sam vid to watch

Well-crafted, melancholy, moving story of Sam and Dean's first hunt after the apocalypse, with the slow reveal of what happened to them while they saved the world to leave them in such bad shape. (AU)

He’s not sure why he’s decided to start this up now. This thing which is new and fragile between them. He kissed Sam, or he let Sam kiss him, night that they killed Yellow Eyes. Sam holding onto Dean with the fear of losing him and Dean clinging to Sam with the relief of keeping him. They hadn’t done much beyond kissing, Dean pushing Sam into the wall, Sam wonderfully alive beneath his hands. It wasn’t a sex thing. Dean still looks at Sam and thinks brother before anything else, not his fault that that’s a more complicated word for him than it is for most others. He’s trying to figure out a language that’ll make it possible to explain Sam why he did what he did. That Sam’s always been what marks Dean’s way home. Haunting, heartbreaking story set in season 3, where Dean's resignation rubs up against Sam's desperation to save him. Lovely.

The production history of NBC’s critically lauded, but chronically underperforming series Friday Nights Lights has always had much in common with its scr...

Ableist Word Profile is an ongoing FWD/Forward series in which we explore ableism and the way it manifests in language usage.

SHIELD kidnaps Hardison to do some consulting. Hijinks ensue. Highly enjoyable crossover full of amazing nerdery and spot-on characterization.

Figuring her out is like looking into a cave he visited once in South America – it went down and down, and at the bottom it was so black it was almost a negative light. Not in an unfriendly way, exactly, but in a way that promised that once you lowered yourself in, you were not coming back out the same person. Peter is kind of an expert on risk and he's sure that Olivia is a risk that, once taken, will pay off in a big way. Sometimes she looks at him sideways out of those eyes of hers and it's a kind of voltage, the kind he's been searching for all his life. Nicely done mid-season 2 Peter/Olivia.

Hot, sad Dean/Ellen post Good God, Y'all.

Short, sharp, breathtaking with a narrative voice like a runaway train. Sam and Dean try to outrun a storm. (girl!Sam, Wincest)

Lovely, quiet, happy story detailing what Sam and Dean do after they avert the apocalypse. AU for season 5. (Wincest)

Six genre-show pros — veterans of shows like Lost, BSG, and Fringe — reveal what happens behind closed doors. For this roundtable, we recruited writers and producers from all over: rookie "baby" writers like Deric A. Hughes (Warehouse 13); mid-level writer-producers like Zack Stentz (Fringe, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles); co-executive producers like Amy Berg (Eureka, The 4400); and top-level wizards who've run their own shows, like Jane Espenson (Caprica, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), John Rogers (Leverage, The Jackie Chan Adventures), and Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman, Lost). And here's what they had to say.

Highly enjoyable AU in which Sam and Dean never reunite to find John; ten years after he left for Stanford, kids in Sam's daughter's preschool class start getting sick, and Sam suspects it's something supernatural. his quest for answers takes him to a hunter known as Rick, and Sam learns a lot more than he expected when they meet.

Very short Sam-POV coda to Swan Song that is absolutely heartbreaking. Oh, Sam...

The Good Wife is unique in that, though it is a story about a woman in a man's world, it surrounds her with examples of other women in exactly the same position, none of whom are super-special, none of whom get a pass on dealing with the patriarchy, none of whom have chosen to band together and leave the world of men behind (there are, presumably, such women in Alicia's world, but her choices mean that she's not exposed to them). All of these women want the same thing--power--and each of them has come up with a different strategy of achieving it without waiting for men to hand it to her, sometimes working against her femininity, sometimes trading on it.

Tony takes Pepper to Paris for dinner. I really enjoyed this. She’s glad about the hotel room, after all; she’s ready for a hot shower and a soft bed. She always sleeps especially soundly after really good sex, and it’s been a long time since she had a decent night’s sleep. Tony’s more wired than ever, his mind racing with possibility. He always does his best thinking after really good sex, and what just happened has given him a lot of new data to parse. He feels as though his next step should be to repeat the experiment in a different setting, under more controlled conditions. He’d like the chance to put his best foot forward. Metaphorically speaking.

Detailed substitutions for various baking ingredients.

"What do you remember?" "About what?" Dean hears the mulish tone of his own voice and sighs. Sam's like a fucking terrier with this stuff. Nosing around, sinking his teeth in. Shaking everything to pieces and not even knowing why half the time. Like it's reflex. "The fire. What happened after mom died." "Those are two separate things," Dean says. Sam blinks at him. Sometimes Dean forgets he and Sammy are from different continents. Sharp, achy look at the boys in season 1, with Sam trying to come to grips with the past he's just starting to figure out.

Wicked cool multimedia story about the Leverage team helping people survive the zombie apocalypse.