teach me the art of war

AKA 'multifandom gift exchanges are a great way to hoist colours on my teeny-tiny ships that would otherwise never float, and I've been abusing the privilege for a while now'. All these ships have less than 100 fics on ao3 (and usually a lot less). Most of what I'm linking here is either for me or by me; the remainder are also exchange fics, but have nothing to do with me except that I like them. All fics are comfortably under 10k (most within the 1-5k band).

This might end up being part one of two, because I have enough recs for Kylo/various trio members to flesh out a whole second post.

Qi'ra/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

I'm starting with this ship because it was my first, emboldening experience willing a non-existent ship into existence (six fics on ao3 are tagged with this ship; five of them have my name attached somewhere). Consider: hot older lady/messy disaster lover she can wrap around her finger! Both of them have betrayed Han Solo! Qi'ra literally used to date Ben's dad! It's just such a terrible idea, and terrible ideas make for wonderful stories. If that sounds appealing, here are two great places to start:

a million ways to toe the line by spookykingdomstarlight draws deep from the well of Han Solo angst to portray a desperately unhealthy fling that nonetheless meets an important need for both characters involved and me, it also meets an important need for me. It belongs to the laudable genre of 'sex scene as character study' and (to quote from my own comment) "the overall effect is intensely claustrophobic - like, get them both out of here, let this all be a bad dream, let this not really be their lives." It's deliciously angsty.

Ostinato by ambiguityisnoonesfriend is just as dysfunctional on the romantic front, with a really satisfying 'actually quite an effective match in the professional sphere' angle - Ben has fled his Kylo Ren identity, made up yet another new name, and is working as Qi'ra's bodyguard in the dangerous world of intergalactic criminal cartels. This fic looks Qi'ra's past with Ben's father dead in the eye in a way that's equal parts poetic and (intentionally) crude, and the result is as beautiful as it is uncomfortable. 

Zorii Bliss/Ben Solo

Now for something even rarer! To the best of my knowledge, there's only one canonverse fic for this ship on ao3. It's a lot less twisted than Qi'ra/Kylo, though not necessarily less fraught - Ben headed the regime that destroyed Zorii's homeworld, first by conscripting all its children as soldiers and brutally oppressing its remaining citizens, then by literally blowing it up. 

But Harm Reduction by magnetgirl is a masterclass in the kind of redemption story I like best: one where Ben is truly willing to work at making amends with or without the prospect of being forgiven, and where Zorii's forgiveness is more about finding her own peace than helping him find his. Plot-wise, it's a super fun riff on Leverage in which Zorii heads up a small crew of misfits who devote themselves, after the war with the First Order is over, to trawling the galaxy and mopping up the damage by questionably legal means.

Ren/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

The character of Ren was introduced in The Rise of Kylo Ren, a four-part comic miniseries that was released in the lead-up to the final Star Wars sequel movie. He's the former leader of the Knights of Ren, an opportunistic Force-sensitive criminal with a deeply nihilistic, 'survival of the fittest' type outlook. World's most predictable spoiler alert, Kylo kills him and takes his place.

got no heroes 'cause our heroes are dead is my shot at fleshing out Ren's character a bit more, and exploring his failure of perception re. the power dynamic between him and Kylo: in canon, he misreads Kylo's struggle with the dark side as a lack of aptitude for it, and gets himself super dead as a result. He strikes me as someone who has a really crude, simplistic, blanket kind of understanding of strength vs weakness, and I thought that would be fun to play out in the context of an intimate relationship. He thinks he's found himself a boytoy; Kylo thinks something else.

One other fun tidbit of characterisation we have for Ren is that he's image-conscious: the first thing he does on allowing Kylo to join the Knights of Ren is insist he go change into an outfit of fitted black leather, in keeping with the gang's reputation. From that fertile soil grows Doing the Right Thing by thedevilchicken, which contains both excellent clothing kink and a really compelling portrait of the unbalanced, somewhat pathetic state Kylo's in around the time of his fall to the dark side.

Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Rose Tico

lay him down on a bed of thorns by lamiacalls is richly angsty, darkly smutty needleplay-as-character-study and I don't know how better to sell it than that. I love how this fic showcases Rose's compassion and rage in equal parts, as well as Ben's broken relationship with pain - this is a man we've seen deliberately punch himself in the fresh gut wound, so I'm more than willing to believe that his version of intimacy veers towards the masochistic as well.

Across Enemy Lines by igrockspock features pre- (or non-?) redeemed Ben living a compartmentalised little life as a nerdy mechanic when he's not busy stomping around battlefields as Kylo Ren. He and Rose fall in love without either of them really knowing who the other is (at least in part because they don't want to know), and the resulting affair is as fraught and bittersweet as you could dream.

I'm also proud of my own writing for this ship! I've written a few fics, but my favourite is you tell me we can start the rain: Ben, who post-redemption is living in exile as a subsistence moisture farmer on Tatooine, has to look after a Rose who's been corrupted by a dark side artifact. Rose-who's-not-quite-herself was a really fun perspective to write from, and I also enjoyed turning the more natural dynamic - volatile Ben and grounded, righteous Rose - on its head.

Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Rose Tico

Tension bysyrupwit is a delightful pre-threesome fic: Reylo is a foregone conclusion in all its Force bond weirdness, Rose is desperately besotted with Rey, and getting close to Rey means putting up with her other half as well. 

Poe Dameron/Luke Skywalker/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

Lost in Translation by naughty_sock (archive-locked) is as much a love letter to fandom in all its unabashed weirdness as it is to this ship in particular. Ben and Poe, pre-canon, are travelling with Luke on a Jedi excursion that ends in tentacles, mpreg, and wildly inappropriate use of the Force. It's bitingly funny, tongue-in-cheek without being mocking, and hot even if tentacles aren't your usual thing (or at least, tentacles aren't my thing, and I still found it hot).

Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Voe

Okay, now I'm just being self-indulgent: this ship is probably my hardest sell, not least because in canon, he kills her (but what if he DIDN'T though???). Voe is another character from the Kylo Ren backstory comics, a fellow padawan at Luke's Jedi training temple who has a deeply lopsided competitive relationship with Ben - he's Luke's prize student, and she never quite feels she measures up. Their relationship is dismissive on his side, hostile and jealous on hers. But in my head, it's an epic love story for the ages in which Voe survives the comics and comes back to haunt Ben later in life.

Anyway, so far no one other than me has written the ship at all, and my only contribution has been a single piece of bite-sized kinkfic. But here it is: Losing Strategy, featuring fight sex, broken promises and very dubious consent.

Happy New Year, flist! Let’s do this thing.

So, my fannish style has always been more OTC (one true character) than ship centric. My process for getting into a new fandom generally goes:

1. fall consumingly in love with a character who ticks a couple of my very predictable boxes
2. dive headlong into whatever the most obvious ship for that character is because that’s where the content lives
3. spiral off into massively multishippy rarepair hell with heavy lashings of gen.

Often at some point I develop hype backlash from step 2 and start avoiding the big ship in favour of my rarepairs, though this doesn’t always happen: I can’t stomach Stucky at all anymore, but I still love Reylo as much as I did the day I saw TLJ. Another trend is that I start out a bit glarey at the main rival non-fave pairing (b/c uncomfortable when we are not about me my fave) and then resolve my issues by shipping it as an OT3: cf Finnreylo, Darkling/Alina/Mal, Byakuya/Renji/Ichigo.

I mentioned in my signup that my favourite characters are all really just the same couple of traits in different hats, and - look, there’s SOME variety, but I’m not really exaggerating. The following ingredients are not guaranteed to make a fave, but any fave I do have WILL contain some combination of:

• floppy dark hair
• track record of destructive behaviour that harms self as much as others
• aspirational toughness undermined by glaringly obvious emotional messiness
• some deep, deep unmet need or yearning I can pine over with them.

Kylo Ren is the only fave I can think of who checks all four boxes, and that’s probably why he has so thoroughly outstayed his rental term in my head (usually the consuming phase of an obsession burns out for me within about two years). Other faves I might blog about for this challenge include Faith Lehane, Kuchiki Byakuya, the Darkling, Ash Tyler, Adar, James Potter, movie Caspian, Aphra, Minn-Erva, James Norrington and Xue Yang.

So, villain-heavy, but not all villains by a long shot. I joke sometimes about being a villainfucker, but really, the “does horrible things on purpose” aspect is way less important to me than the “makes bad choices due to messy emotions and Suffers as a result” bit. There just happens to be a lot of overlap with common sympathetic villain tropes that makes my tastes look edgier than they actually are.