dazzlingsuethings

[setyourfireonme]

happy wincest wednesday! what's the fic that converted you to wincest? not necessarily the first you remember reading, but the first that impressed you and stayed with you all these years?

ooh ty, such a good question. and happy saturday, this clearly took me a while but believe it or not i cut out over half of this response lol. sorry in advance for the messiness of this answer <3

i have to say that since that was in 2014 (so the year after i started watching spn), i don't remember what fic really "converted" me (i do remember what finally made me find it compelling in-show: teasers from s10 the summer before it aired), or a fic that has stayed with me since that long ago (my memory is a black hole lol), but i always love a good excuse to go through my ao3 bookmarks and history, so let's see...

the first wincest fic that apparently impressed me the most back when i read it in late 2014 was sight lines by kissyn because it was, and i quote from my bookmarks, "the fic that made me want to use bookmarks". i reread it just now and while i wouldn't have called it an answer to this question before that, it might actually be one after all. and it still works, even when some of my preferences and views of what's IC and not have obviously changed since then. i guess that fic portrays that beginning for me quite well, it's a few months into me reading wincest fic and it shows how i had started reading fic for them, while sharing qualities with what i had read before (heed the tags lol). i was starting to get an idea of what i was looking for in s/d fic and their relationship in general, even if that fic wasn't it yet or now (but i contain multitudes,,,). i’ll let the beautiful opening paragraph speak for itself:

There's something eerie about driving into a small town just as real autumn twilight sets in, especially the kind of small towns you find in rural Appalachian territory. Tall pines loom in close over the winding roads and block all but the narrowest strip of overcast sky with their skinny grasping branches. Sweeping hills and valleys seem to tuck each village into its own isolated world. Impending darkness, already deep in the gaps between trees, makes claustrophobia threaten. Sam is used to long stretches of plains, where he can see on and on over yellow grass. Here, each curve in the road hides the next quarter mile. Gas stations and rundown liquor stores and intersections spring on them with no warning. ––

and i realised that these lines actually have stayed with me:

Sam has a theory that there are two types of people in the world. The first kind are regular people, like him and Dad and Mandy and Nancy the bartender, they're the sort that other people start to love over time. Not that the love is less powerful or real, but it's a growing thing, and it has to be nurtured, coaxed, earned, built into a lasting relationship brick by brick. They're the kind of people that not everyone is going to love, or even want to love. Then there are people like Dean and, Sam thinks, his mother. She must have been like Dean, else where did Dean get it from? They're the second type. People that go through life and everyone around can't help but fall a little bit in love with them. And it's not safe or good, it blows up fast and too often it dies just as quickly, but they barely know they're doing it and even if you recognize what's happening to you, you can't help falling anyway. And when they leave you behind, when you really did love them, that's how people like John Winchester happen.

i can't still really say that or any other fic made me be properly into wincest, it was a group effort with the show and tumblr (and this exploration into those beginnings has just left me more confused lol, this answer is me simplifying a lot), but it's probably the best early example? especially since while i did start reading sam/dean fics a few months earlier and there were some other formative and memorable fics from before, most were honestly pwps that IIRC i didn't read primarily for the sam and dean of it. the lines were blurry, but then another impactful "conversion" for me was maybe a year later when i found authors such as fleshflutter (forever <3 i wish i could link a specific fic but i just blanket bookmarked all of them) and candle_beck (although i never read that many fics from them until last year), who among others definitely left a mark. and then i took an almost four-year break from the fandom and had another ~conversion a year ago, which was especially important when it came to sam and dean's relationship for me. some things changed, some stayed the same...

i'd love to rec some All Time Favourites and give a clear answer so i'm still not satisfied with this, but there are so many deleted ones and ao3 history doesn't work like i'd want it to, not to mention lj... and the fics i read didn't maybe necessarily always reflect my thoughts about their relationship, which i now have a clearer and dearer idea of. and apparently i didn't even end up bookmarking that many sam/dean fics back then (it was one relationship among others for me but also i had some struggles finding fic among all the [redacted] that i came across)? also i could be misremembering everything here lol. anyway @ past me please start bookmarking more fics and also start doing it earlier thanks. this isn't probably the answer you were looking for, more just me pondering than talking about specific fics, but maybe it's something :)