2019 Fandom Promo!

[crantz]

Welcome to the Fandom Promo post, everyone!

Here's where you get those eyes on your fandoms for sign ups!

Share what makes your Yuletide fandoms the shiniest and why you love them. A big part of Yuletide is how small our fandoms can be, and this is a good way to make sure other people know what gems there are out there!

Suggested form to use:

<b>FANDOM NAME</b>:
<b>WHAT MAKES IT GREAT</b>:
<b>WHERE CAN I FIND IT?(optional)</b>:


For reference, last year's promo post!

This post on LJ

Comments

Black Box - Jennifer Egan

[fencesit]

FANDOM NAME: Black Box - Jennifer Egan

WHAT MAKES IT GREAT:

"Black Box" is a short story told in second person POV about a lady spy in the near future! It was posted via the New Yorker's twitter and the conceit of the second person format is that spies like the narrator record advice and observations for the spies who will come after them to learn from.

The narrator is a normal person driven by her duty to her country, struggling with extreme circumstances and coping partially through her incredibly focused, factual, for-the-most-part emotionally distant recorded instructions, which the rigid structure of the text and the narrative distance mirror so incredibly perfectly. I know second person isn't everyone's cup of tea, but IMO this is one of those incredible stories that could only be told effectively in second person, so even if you're not usually a fan of the POV or aren't considering requesting, I think it's definitely worth a look just because it's such a dang good short story.

Major relationships include the narrator and her husband (who does not appear in-scene but who she thinks about often) and several enemies &mdash two men she's investigating and a woman who lives with one of them! Also it's implied that there are other spies like the narrator and presumably someone trained her to go out and seduce men to get information from them.

I think in terms of fic you could produce from this canon there's a lot of potential for darkfic exploring the harsh realities of the narrator's job, tropey fic about having to work with the enemy or trust someone who might be the enemy, and relationship-focused pieces about the narrator and her husband or the Alpha Beauty and her man. And probably other things I'm not thinking of! I have to admit I won't be signing up for Yuletide but I've requested this a couple times in recent exchanges and will be keeping my eye out to treat, so I'd love to see requests for this. I've nominated it with Narrator, Narrator's Husband, and Alpha Beauty; please feel free to let me know if you want those nominations added to or switched up at all.

In terms of content warnings, this story does involve the narrator having sex while undercover and dissociating during the experience.

WHERE CAN I FIND IT?:

You can read it for free here at The New Yorker, unless you've read all of your free articles already this month, in which case you can read it via the Wayback Machine.