#answering this instead of working on my flonks ship manifesto hahaha

[broomsticks]

help needed??? i've been in fandom for 5 years and i still haven't proper *proper* read a femslash fic???? i'm not counting side relationships and established relationships. shame on me, i know, but i'm here requesting for a guide because i thought i could start anywhere, and then realised i didn't know what i wanted - or who i wanted to watch fall in love. which is.... sort of absurd, like i'm a multishipper, and i have female faves too. anyway! would you be so kind as to rec your fav recs, fics, or metas, or fav ships so i could jump aboard one?

many thanks in advance 🤗

ykw i actually think i get what you mean anon. especially in HP fandom, where so many of the main characters are male and so many of the important relationships are het or between two male characters, you do have to make a special effort, go out of your way almost, to consider female characters. and then in that light femslash seems almost - contrived? forced? and not only is that not fun for a lot of people, there’s also the side of ‘am i just rehashing amatonormativity again???!’ you just can’t win, etc

all of which is to say, if you (more so anyone else reading this) don’t feel particularly drawn to femslash, especially in the HP fandom, that’s okay! maybe think about trying out more original media that centers female characters and relationships between them—i’ve recently loved both a league of their own (1940s american girls professional baseball league! so much canon wlw) and house of the dragon (dyke drama with dragons! canon is only het though) for this—but, meh, your fannish brain wants what it wants. ❤️

THAT was a really long way of saying: that’s why i think probably the first fic that really unlocked my femslash brain was this 200k longfic by @hawksquill, Luna Lovegood and the Forgotten Circle. it’s tagged luna/ginny but is really more of a luna centric AU, set parallel to the canon timeline. several canon events happen ‘in the background,’ like the chamber being opened in COS and sirius escaping pre POA, but luna is the main character, with a prophecy centered around her, and the story basically completely diverges from canon by the mid Hogwarts years. the main cast is almost all female characters: luna, her mother, ginny, mrs figg, mcgonagall, gwenog jones - everyone from bellatrix to lavender! really opened my eyes to the potential stories that could be told with the little scraps and tidbits of characterization given to these female characters.

have a little excerpt from chapter 17 that i still think about way too often:

“If you could have magic, like with a snap of your fingers, would you do it?” “You know, I’ve wondered about that for a long time. There will always be a part of me, a large part, that thinks I should say yes in an instant. But there are a lot of scammers trying to prey on us Squibs, and we have to be careful. And we ought to remember that fairy tales teach us to be careful what we wish for, particularly when we are offered something that seems too good to be true,” Mrs. Figg reflected as she added the valerian root and passed some to Luna. “So I suppose that if I were to get magic after all this time, I should want to work for it, so I could truly appreciate it, and be sure it was real. Which is why I keep pottering on at the Circle, and why you all think I’m such a fool.” “I don’t think you’re a fool,” Luna said quickly, but the lie tasted bitter on her tongue, and she was sure Mrs. Figg could sense it too.

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(theres like a million and one things under the read more)

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a couple of shorter femslash recs that hew slightly closer to canon: 

Two Quaffles Pub by @thistlecatfics: postwar, cho and ginny meet at a bar and get to talking about what they have in common. harry. quidditch. michael corner. definitely not war trauma and definitely not unhealthy coping mechanisms!

tags: sometimes you get drunk and trauma dump on your ex's ex at the gay bar, and then make out in the bathroom. messy trauma recovery, Getting Together, not the healthiest of relationships but c'est la vie

“The war impacted me too. Just because I don’t spill my war stories to random girls in bars, doesn’t mean I don’t also have my shit.”  “Tell me, then,” Ginny dared. She leaned across the table, staring at Cho. “I told you about Tom, the man in my body when I was eleven. What have you got?”  Cho knew she shouldn't let this hot woman - no - hot mess of a woman bait her. Not when she was already feeling the alcohol. Not on a date. Well, this wasn’t a date, whatever she had implied earlier. She was not on a date with Harry’s Quidditch star ex who, apparently, had more trauma than anyone knew and a bit of a drinking problem to match.

hermione/ginny: it’s practically canon. they share so much gossip, they share a tent in GOF. here's a sweet untitled vignette series, Ginny is all warmth and strength and movement.

i’m not normally overly one for friends-to-lovers, but i really enjoyed these postwar parvender + werewolf lavender brown fics. again more established relationship than falling in love, but it’s not implausible to imagine given canon basis and there’s plenty more relationship development story to tell! 

beautiful enough for the both of us by dirgewithoutmusic

like the careful undressing of love by comosum

Where Roses Bloom by monetstcroix

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some marauders era: first thing that came to mind was alice/narcissa, actually! pre first war canon compliant is a fun space to play around in, because it’s circumscribed to an extent — you know you’re writing a doomed angsty romance, you know you’re reading a doomed angsty romance, you know where this story is headed but until then, until then, there is room to put your own stamp on things, your own interpretation of “how it might have gone”

Alice, Look at Me by Rollercoasterwords is probably the definitive marauderstok fic for the ship;

Devil's Snare by endocrine was written in 2015 and has several similar story beats/HCs!

Flying Lessons by Phantomato is a postwar andromeda/rolanda hooch i raved about recently that does a great job of pulling from canon and delving into some aspects of postwar trauma not often explored.

some other i never really thought about these!! ships i’m personally very fond of/ very intrigued by: 

myrtle x mcgonagall: their student years at hogwarts overlapped! katie x cho, they were yearmates and both quidditch girls!  

the (cho/)fleur/angelina/tonks “older than golden trio” girls. cho/fleur (delachang) and flonks are the biggest ships (and i have a couple more flonks recs later), but any of these dynamics would be fascinating, imo.

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there is a limited amount of room to play around if you aren’t open to softening the lightning gen slytherins (in the way a lot of drarry fandom does, queer lightning gen cuddle puddle) (which i do get, i personally have to be in a specific mood for it) - but if you are, there’s a ton more fic! on the longer end too, because the character journeys are typically longer.

i say that and here's a <3k sporty feels cho/pansy, HOT AS FUCK 

absolutely impeccable pansy/ginny double drabble by @nanneramma

delightful post war luna/pansy day at the beach 

if the slytherin x gryffindor dynamic does grab you and you’re okay with that level of ‘canon what canon?’ - there are a number of longer ginny/pansy, pansy/hermione, millicent/hermione, etc. that are as well crafted, plotted, worldbuilt, etc, as any drarry fic of that length - i’m particularly thinking of the largely 25-50k range written for WLWBB! 

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some of hp femslash’s best kept secrets, imo: the incredible inventiveness of some of the rarepair fic - particularly those written around maybe the early-mid 2010s, though there are some in every year. examples: 

Independent Love Song by Writcraft: Millicent Bulstrode is a tailor and Ginny is losing her mind over a woman in a tweed blazer and burgundy brogues.

A swagger, a twinkle, and a fine arse on a broom by Woldy: Tonks lets her eyes linger on Hooch's spiky grey hair, her shining leather boots, and thinks If that woman's straight, then I'm a monkey's uncle.

Stylemagic by Woldy (luna/tonks): Who would have thought that Charing Cross Road was style central?

City Life by holyfant (tonks/ginny): They travel, find each other and themselves.

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& since you mentioned meta, i have to shout out holyfant's essay for @femslashrevolution: Towards A Darker Femslash

I wanted to continue to write smaller pairings and explore female characters, too. And I did, but the point remains that when I look at my story stats now, it’s clear that my f/f stories are shorter in word count and are less varied in their plot and execution than my m/m stories. All this to show that I am 100% part of what I am about to describe: not a problem, per se, but an observation that I think is useful to be aware of and think about. The fact is that femslash, across fandoms, remains a niche category, and that while there are great amounts of people who read and write almost exclusively m/m this is barely ever the case for f/f.

i also really liked this other one On the personal as normal; on the normal as political:

I think one thing that stands out, from a majority of my interactions on this issue through the years, is the perception that the act of writing relationships among women is inherently political, in a way that the act of writing about relationships among men is not. The $64,000 question: do I agree with this? Are electrons particles, or waves?

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going to close this off with one of my self indulgently favorite femslash, both ship and writer: i am in love with the way montparnasse writes second war fleur/tonks and how reminiscent it is of first war wolfstar, the tension of attraction set against the tension of the war. vibe quote included, because either you like her style or it’s not your taste - but if you do, there’s nothing quite like it!!

Six Penny, Seven Stone: Timing is everything. Tonks's was always just a little bit off-kilter.

Fleur accompanied her to exclusive pureblood parties that summer, posing as a personal assistant or dear live-in friend to Tonks’s erectile dysfunction potion heiress while they listened to one of the Yaxleys moan about the dilution of sanctified old blood and got handsy over hors d’oeuvres. Still Fleur seemed disappointingly unaffected by her spectacular breasts in a vicious push-up bra or the Dietrich-esque raised eyebrow/lit cigarette combo: she made advances and spurned Tonks’s and eventually after reporting to the Powers That Be after nights out ruffling robes in enemy territory they ended up at a neon-sleazy diner or got takeout and ate it at one of their flats—Tonks in Southwark, Fleur in Camden—until they fell asleep at opposite ends of the couch after sharing a joint or chamomile tea and watching X-Files and EastEnders reruns. In theory, they kept to their own sides as well as they could, but in practice, their limbs did often wander.

Obscure Topography: Sometimes, Tonks realizes, coming at each other from awkward angles makes you stick, elbows and all.

Sometimes, when she’s either very drunk or feeling particularly soppy, she feels like she can slow time itself down to a sluggish, tipsy trickle, where nothing else matters but her own beating heart and the turn of the world, or—here, now—Fleur’s skin and hips beneath her skin and hips, moving to a rhythm of their own, no time like what your body keeps in its hollows and curves. The brush of a thigh takes hours; the glide of fingers riding over ribs, and she loses track of the day. War and worry and shattered nerves are nothing next to this, meaningless without the strange, humorous patchwork of two hearts beating out of tune, where the radius of the whole world condenses down to the bed and they’re the only women alive in London for a while.

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OKAY NO VERY LAST ONE

@consistentsquash's: