ein_myria | Reading

runpunkrun posting in

Fandom: Star Trek: The Original Series
Characters/Pairings: James T. Kirk's nipples
Rating: Not rated, but G+ for fondant nipples
Creator Link:

jb612 &

violetnebula19
Theme: Food & Cooking, (Not Really) Character Death

Summary: A birthday cake.

Reccer's Notes: Our founder

jerakeen once lamented that we hadn't ever had a fancake recced on the comm. Now that we've had The Untamed cupcakes, it reminded me I've had this rec sitting in my drafts for literal years, so: Please enjoy this beautifully rendered cake of James T. Kirk's nipple window as seen on TV in the episode Amok Time, 1967.

Fanwork Link: Star Trek Amok Time Cake

full_metal_ox posting in

fancake

Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi, Chen Qing Ling
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng, Lan Xichen, Jiang Yanli, Jin Zixuan
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 26 photos
Creator Tags: char: jiang cheng, char: jiang yanli, char: jin zixuan, char: lan wangji, char: lan xichen, char: wei wuxian, fanwork: other
Creator Links: (AO3)

Technomancer28; (DeviantArt)

Abyss-Valkyrie; (Dreamwidth)

abyss_valkyrie; (Tumblr)

abyss-valkyrie

Theme: Food and Cooking, Non-Fic Recs: Crafts

Summary: So I spent all of yesterday and the night before making cupcakes and I wanted to try making some MDZS/Untamed character themed ones so these were very self indulgent and made me happy,lol.

Reccer's Notes: Exactly what it says on the tin: various characters from The Untamed, as symbolized by a photospread of fluffily ornate cupcakes; my own favorite is the Jiang Cheng one in fluorite swirls of violet and teal.

Fanwork Links: The Untamed cupcakes

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: due South
Characters/Pairings: Benton Fraser, Ray Vecchio, Diefenbaker, Francesca Vecchio, Ma Vecchio, Vecchio family
Rating: Gen
Length: three-panel comic
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: ArtConundrum (SpaceTimeConundrum) on AO3
Themes: Food and cooking, Family, Domestic

Summary: Dinner at the Vecchio house is always an adventure.

Reccer's Notes: An excellent set of panels with Dief and Ma Vecchio cooking, Fraser feeding the smallest Vecchio, and all of them at the dinner table. It's cheerfully domestic and perfectly captures the warm chaos of a Vecchio family dinner.

Fanwork Links: Sunday Dinner

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan, Radek Zelenka, Elizabeth, Carson, and other Stargate characters
Rating: General (later works in the series are explicit)
Length: 8467
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: Cesare on AO3, anatsuno on AO3, rhea314 on AO3, rhea314 on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Food and cooking, Friendship, Friends to Lovers, Series, Comfortfic, Complete AU

Summary: Grounded by an injury, John Sheppard leaves the Air Force and, at loose ends, takes up running the bakery he inherited from his mother's family in Colorado Springs.

Reccer's Notes:
This is the first story in a long series called Foster's Bakery. It's a "coffee shop" AU in which John's a baker, and Rodney is of course drawn in by the coffee he serves and becomes a friend, and then a lot more. The relationship is established in this initial fic, and is deepened in later stories in the series. It's a charming story, with the usual Stargate characters as regulars at the bakery - Radek even does a bit of matchmaking. The whole series is very much recommended.

Fanwork Links: A Place On The Corner, and the podfic read by

rhea314 is here

full_metal_ox posting in

fancake

Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia; No Reservations
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Anthony Bourdain, “Global” Alan Weeks, Todd Liebler, Tracey Godwin, Reepicheep, Aslan, and a cast of colorful Narnian OCs.
Rating: Teen and up (mostly for Bourdain-characteristic profanity.)
Length: 6,228 words
Content Notes: a vast variety of food, some narratively presented as off-putting; drunkenness; smoking; weed (that he doesn’t get to use); Bourdain’s typical abrasive impertinence; Author Showed Her Work.
Creator Links: (AO3)

Edonohana; (Dreamwidth)

rachelmanija
Theme: Food and Cooking, previously recced for Crossovers/Fusions, previously recced for Small Fandoms, Cultural Differences, Fandom Classics, Older Characters, Research, Worldbuilding

Summary: I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table.

Author’s Notes: ( Cut_for_length. )

Reccer's Notes: Okay; what’s the September 2025 Food & Cooking theme even for if this classic doesn’t circle around for a threepeat? (Twelve years since the last mention should be a sufficient interval.)

This brilliant crossover, all the more poignant in hindsight, nails both Bourdain’s voice and the Narnian sense of place, painstakingly hitting all the beats: Food Porn; Food Gorn (with the acknowledgement that the difference between the two is in the palate of the beholder); departure from what Diana Wynne-Jones would term the Guided Tour into Parts Unknown, with the aid of knowledgeable locals; hospitality in austere circumstances; martial arts (with thought given to the size logistics!); scary local politics; above all, food as a vehicle of cross-cultural understanding.

“No Reservations: Narnia” has the additional distinction of being RPF that not only reached but impressed the subject:

“This is astonishingly well written with an attention to detail that’s frankly a bit frightening…I’m both flattered and disturbed. I think I need a drink.”—Anthony Bourdain.

Fanwork Links: No Reservations: Narnia, by

Edonohana for

innocentsmith.

Inspired Works:
Cover art by

moonblossom_graphics
Podfic by

duckgirlie (also available on Jinjurly: https://audiofic.jinjurly.com/no-reservations-narnia)

Current Music: ”Parts Unknown”.

full_metal_ox posting in

fancake

Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling
Pairings/Characters: M/M; Song Lan | Song Zichen/Xiao Zingchen; Song Lan | Song Zichen, Xiao Xingchen
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 3,632 words
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, determinedly Taiwanese cuisine, Food Porn because the author inexplicably omitted that tag, racist microaggression (a character recounts getting renamed by his exchange host family.)
Creator Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, First Meetings, Taiwan, Street food, chinese diaspora feelings and food as love language, SongXiao Feast
Creator Links: (AO3)

Irrelevancy; (Tumblr)

touchmycoat
Theme: Food & Cooking, Cultural Differences, Fluff, Going Home, Identity, Modern AU, Slice of Life

Summary: Flirting and cultural reclamation via Taiwanese street food. Songxiao modern meet-cute.

Author’s Notes:
For the #songxiaofeast on twitter, thanks for organizing the event~!!!! There's so much great art in the hashtag *~* love me some food love....

Chinese glossary at end lolol, and is this all a shameless marketing ploy for Taiwan night markets? yes.

…The menu (a twitter thread w pictures) (Unfortunately no longer accessible—FMO.)

大腸包小腸 (dà cháng bāo xiǎo cháng): "little sausage wrapped around a big sausage" lol
蚵仔煎 (ó-à-tsiān): oyster pancake. I'm using the Taiwanese romanization here because it better captures that Hokkien pronunciation. Ningxia Night Market seriously has the best ones.
臭豆腐 (chò dò fǔ): stinky tofu!! I think it smells delicious; don't be like SL eat it normally without that crazy amount of sauce nkfsjdfds
肉圓麵線 (bà wán miàn xiàn): meatball & rice noodles. Two separate things but they're typically sold together. Meatball is always pronounced in Hokkien and sometimes rice noodle is too (mǐ suǎ)
豆花 (dòu huā): tofu pudding. It's not too sweet and it's sooooo refreshing to have on a hot taiwan evening with ice!
雞蛋糕 (jī dàn gāo): egg cake! They're seriously very good but a hit-or-miss from street vendors lmfao.

Drop a comment~! Happy feastings!!!!!!!

Reccer’s Notes: Taiwanese bartender Song Zichen, taking both pity on and a fancy to diasporic American tourist Xiao Xingchen, proceeds to initiate him into the ways of local street food (as both a welcome into his heritage and a courtship overture.) This fic, stuffed with delicious Unresolved Sexual Tension, serves as a reminder that the Sinosphere is a very big and diverse place, and brought an outpouring of nostalgic yearning for the Taste Of Home from diasporic commenters.

(And Ningxia Night Market needs to hire Irrelevancy as a publicist, dammit; I was fervently wishing my neighborhood had something like that up the alley!)

Fanwork links: Comfort Food / 有可能的夜晚 (AO3-locked.)

rocky41_7 posting in

fffriday

Last night I finished Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a sci-fi book about a motley crew of spacefarers who "drill" wormholes to enable rapid travel across space for the diverse galactic alliance known as the GC. At the start of the book, they are offered a bid on a particularly difficult, lucrative job, and can't resist taking the bait.

This should be (another) lesson to me in not going all-in on a creator because I've enjoyed one of their works. I loved Chambers' To Be Taught, if Fortunate, and I've heard plenty of internet praise for The Long Way, so when I saw it at the bookstore recently, I dropped $20 on it readily. If I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

First - if you picked up this book looking for the femslash, it's barely there, and it's a lot more friends-with-benefits than romance. The other two romances in the book get a lot more attention. If what you really want is F/F romance, it's not really here.

This is a character-driven book with barely a plot, which wouldn't be a problem if the characters were interesting. As it is, they are functionally interchangeable: a crew of people who are all optimistic, friendly, emotionally open, painstakingly polite, and obsessively well-intentioned (except for the one guy who's a Jerk, who exists to be a jerk whenever the scene calls for someone who needs to be less-than-fanatically-polite or there's a chance for Chambers to squeeze in another instance of his being a jerk, even when he's technically right). There is no character growth to speak of; none of these characters changes at all between the start of the book and the end. There's no complexity to anyone.

( Read more... )

sinesofinsanity posting in

fancake

Fandom: Avatar the Last Airbender
Pairings/Characters: Zuko, Iroh, the GAang in the background
Rating: G
Length: 2,889 words, 19min 30s
Creator Links: Haicrescendo
Theme: Food & Cooking, character development, family, families of choice, going home, missing scenes,

Summary:

[Zuko’s greatest failing, not his only but just one that stands out the most in a very long list, is that he’s never known quite what he had until it’s gone. Or, on the opposite hand, he covets the things that don’t matter, that seem to matter so much at the time and turn out, in the end, to be something that Zuko’s made up in his head.

And then Zuko finds, of all things after it all, that he misses Uncle Iroh’s tea.]

Or,

Zuko screws up his life and in the process of fixing it, figures out some tea wisdom along the way.

Reccer's Notes: This story is so beautiful and gentle. I absolutely love seeing how Zuko's growth and character development is mirrored with his finally learning to make a decent cup of tea. Plus the neat detail of how he despite learning from and trying to emulate his uncle, he makes it his own way. Zuko and Iroh's relationship is lovely in this too. Just an all around lovely story. klainelynch does a beautiful job with the podfic as well

Fanwork Links:
Heat, Wait, Steep, Repeat
and the Podfic both on AO3

full_metal_ox posting in

fancake

Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling
Pairings/Characters: Gen; M/M; Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian; Jin Zixuan, Wen Qing, Wen Ning, Nie Mingjue, Nie Huaisang, Jiang Fengmian, Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, Jiang Yanli, Lan Xichen, Lan An, Lan Wangji
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 1,209 words
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, arrant pedantry, Author Showed Her Work, Food Porn, gastrotravelogue, tea nerdery, Tumblr work
Creator Tags:
headcanon, the untamed 陈情令, cql, mo dao zu shi, mdzs, wei wuxian, lan wangji, nie huaisang, jin zixuan, wen qing, nie mingjue, wangxian headcanon at the very end because that's what i'm here for, tea, i really like tea, heicha, oolong, white tea, green tea, dragonwell, my ramblings, qi is a thing for some tea drinkers

Creator Links: (AO3)

Haoppopotamus; (Instagram)

haoppopotamus; (Tumblr)

watch-grok-brainrot (formerly ~~wangxianbunnydoodles~~)
Theme: Food & Cooking, Cultural Differences, Meta, Research, Worldbuilding

Summary: Since watching ep 3 for the first time (i.e. january), this has been knocking around in my brain. In ep 3, we see JZXuan waltzing into the same inn as the Yunmeng Trio, booting them, and then rejecting “bad tea”. Ever since, I’ve watched a lot of tea being poured in CQL. It got me thinking, what kind of tea would different sects prefer and what would different characters drink?

Reccer’s Notes: In which Haoppo uses her tea connoisseurship as a vehicle for characterization and worldbuilding (and invites her imaginary friends to illustrate and share her interest.) For the likes of me (with no claim to Asian cred by birth or upbringing, and whose blunted sensory range reduces almost all tea to hot leaf juice), this serves as a window into an unfamiliar area of interest and body of cultural reference frames (the idea that tea might possess qi, not necessarily related to its flavor, was a new one on me—but of obvious importance to cultivators.)

Fanwork Links: Tea Preferences by CQL Sects - a Headcanon

(The original post, preserved on the Wayback Machine, includes a beautiful and apropos GIF header: Tea Preferences by CQL Sects - a Headcanon (~~wangxianbunnydoodles~~)

Current Music: “Cha Ge”

runpunkrun posting in

fancake

Photograph of steel spoons and spices in a dramatic setting with added text that gives it the look of a gourmet magazine cover: September 2025. Food & Cooking, at Fancake. Steel teaspoons are arranged in an elogated oval to suggest a fish, with the bowls acting as scales and some of the handles left visible to create the fins and tail, giving the creature a spiky appearance. The concave bowls are dusted with a powdery orange spice for color and one spoon at the front of the fish is filled with a coarse black spice to create an eye. The fish is on a black surface with a rough texture and around it are three skinny green peppers, a mound of salt, a mound of orange spice, and a dipping bowl filled with a clear amber liquid.

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: due South
Characters/Pairings: Diefenbaker
Rating: Gen
Length: n/a (artwork)
Content Notes: may induce donut cravings!
Creator Links: Wagnetic on AO3
Theme: Food and cooking, Happy endings, Crafts, Textiles

Summary: A bag featuring Dief and the imminent demise of some donuts.

Reccer's Notes:
I will never stop reccing this! An excellently crafted bag with a felt appliqué of Dief about to enjoy a stack of donuts. It's so good, and a perfect likeness of Dief with a "donuts incoming" gleam in his eye!

Fanwork Links: Hungry Like the Wolf

runpunkrun posting in

fancake

Poll #33623 round 179 theme poll

This poll is closed.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 111

Pick the next theme of fancake:

Mystery & Suspense
38 (34.2%)

Platonic Relationships
34 (30.6%)

Uncommon Settings
39 (35.1%)

denynothing1 posting in

fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairings/Characters: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Rating: Mature
Length: 7,571 words
Creator Links: whateverrrrwhatever on AO3
Theme: Food & Cooking

Summary: John decides that California doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

It's an AU where John Sheppard inherits a supermarket right next to Cal and meets Rodney McKay, physics professor. They kiss. That's it, that's the fic.

Reccer's Notes: This is an *almost* complete AU, shot through with wonderful location details, wherein John is a veteran who spent time in Antarctica and Rodney is a professor at Berkeley. In a series of snapshots, John inherits a run-down local market, decides he likes the neighborhood, and sets about making a place for himself. Then one day, an "unnecessarily dramatic" (as described in the tags) Rodney walks through the door.

This was one of the first SGA AUs I read and it stayed with me. I truly enjoyed following John as he problem solved; first the store, then Rodney. (Spoiler: the solution is snacks.)

Fanwork Links: Story on AO3

Current Mood: charmed

birdylion posting in

fancake

Fandom: Leverage
Pairings/Characters: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer, Peggy Milbank, Amy Palavi
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 21452 words
Creator Links:

page_runner
Theme: food & cooking, casefic, competence, outsider pov

Summary:
She was only here for a long weekend, using this convention as an excuse to see Alice for the first time in over a year, or using Alice as an excuse to get away for a convention, or using both as a reason to finally take a vacation, because it was about damn time.
At least, that was the original plan.

Reccer's Notes:
Peggy Milbank is a side character who appears in 2 episodes: once when Parker's alias "Alice White" gets called in for jury duty, and once when Parker, Sophie and Tara sneak into a ball at an embassy for an event where Peggy does the catering.

This fic has her meeting the team once more, and has her involved in a job in Portland when they investigate a sketchy business man who drives independent food cart owners out of business, not shying away from inflicting violence on them in the process.

While the team does their thing, Peggy offers to take over the food cart, and does so with remarkable competence - learning a whole new cuisine on the fly. Food plays a big role in the whole story, because of their case, but also because now there are several people in one place who care a lot about food. It's also about a community of food cart owners. And just like Eliot found a way out of his violent life by learning how to cook, there's a side plot in this story how he does that for others too.

While the ship Eliot/Parker/Hardison isn't the main focus, it is definitely in the background, and Peggy's perspective is a really nice outsider POV on them, so I tagged it as such as well.

Fanwork Links: The Food Cart Job on ao3

birdylion posting in

fancake

Fandom: Leverage
Pairings/Characters: Maggie Collins, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker (Leverage), Amy Palavi
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 711 words
Creator Links:

Hagar
Theme: food & cooking, gen

Summary: Her ex-husband's associates are occasionally useful. For example, when Maggie has a really bad feeling about her latest client.

Reccer's Notes:
Maggie visits the brewpub looking for help regarding a client of hers. It's lovely how the food she is served there acts as kind of character description for the relationship between her, Eliot, Hardison and Parker.

Fanwork Links: What friends are for on ao3

full_metal_ox posting in

fancake

Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi
Pairings/Characters: Gen; M/M; Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian; Lan Yuan, Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, OCs
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 2,442 words
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, anonymous author, autobiographical incident, Chinese diaspora feels, inappropriate choice of rabbit food, racist microaggression, secondhand embarrassment
Creator Tags:
Based on a True Story, yes my mom really couldn't find a basic cake and so we had to go with bread, Fluff, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Baking, Icing, Frosting, AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHH THOSE ARE TAGS, Michael's (the store) makes a big appearance, Father's Day, but idc if it's not father's day yet, I was inspired, Inspired by Real Events
Creator Links: none
Theme: Food & Cooking, Cultural Differences, Family, Fluff, Modern AU, Slice of Life

Summary: In which Sizhui and his Baba ice a loaf of bread for Father's Day (plus some angst, but we don't really have to get into specifics do we?)

Author’s Notes:

something i wrote while having writers block

enjoy

(also stay safe and wash your hands and quit going outside if you are)

this isn't really asian rep it just happened when i was 10 and i typed for two hours also its may and here we are with a fictionalized crackheaded version of what happened

yes there were mean girls

… lan zhan's the one getting the cake because his personality's the closest to my dad's but like my dad cut off the frosting and we ended up using the bread for other stuff

Reccer’s Notes: The Chinese-American author posted this anonymously on 8 May 2020 for U.S. Asian and Pacific Islander Month, apologizing that “this isn’t really asian rep”; given that the canon creator is Asian, her target audience is Asian, the characters are Asian, and the OP is Asian fictionalizing their Asian family’s real-life experience, I personally don’t see how it can avoid being Asian Rep.

The author’s self-consciousness—both at the time of writing and in retrospect—is flying from the ramparts, and arguably an integral part of the story. They never did emerge from anonymity, and they’ve since deleted the story—which is a shame, because this is a valid slice-of-life in the Lynda Barry vein, with the OP’s imaginary friends as proxies. Since there seems to be no identifying information that could be used to trace them, I don’t think posting a Wayback Machine capture will expose them to further embarrassment.

And let’s not be like the Mean Girls at Michael’s, okay?

Fanwork links: a loaf of bread is not a substitute for a blank cake

Current Mood: listless

pronker posting in

fancake

Fandom: Dark Shadows

Pairings/Characters: Roger Collins, CC Female, Which Would Give Away Too Much If Named

Rating: G

Length: 2,394 words

Creator Links: AO3 Profile

Theme: Food & Cooking

Summary: Roger meets a friend for dinner who shares his discomfort regarding marriages.

Reccer's Notes: Roger remains one of my favorite Dark Shadows characters, acted superbly by Louis Edmonds, a veteran of stage costume dramas. He always wears period clothing with impeccable insouciance despite figure-hugging trousers, wing collars, and Victorian handlebar moustaches. In this fic, we see how much food presents an opportunity for revealing, soul searching reflections with a sympathetic friend, in fact so much that they don't even eat until the last paragraph or so. The universality of sharing food provides a letting down of the hair, so to speak, voluminous in his friend's case and not-so-much in his. There's an absolutely delightful twist at fic's end. Also, the AO3 profile mentions Author's website, WickerManStudios which contains Dark Shadows stories along with more personal content.

Fanwork Links: Mysterious Circumstances

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: comatose in bed
Current Music: birdsong

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: Gen. Teyla Emmagan & Rodney McKay & John Sheppard & Ronon Dex
Rating: G
Length: 7229
Content Notes: No AO3 warnings apply.
Creator Links: fiercelydreamed on AO3, anatsuno on AO3, anatsuno on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Food and cooking, Team as family, Friendship, Hurt/comfort

Summary: The thing was, John had never been good at patient, and Teyla looked like okay was a couple galaxies over from wherever she was now.

Reccer's Notes: A touching hurt/comfort story set after the team rescues Teyla from Michael. Although Teyla and her baby are back in Atlantis, she's slow to recover and remains low and depleted. Rodney has a plan to cheer her up, though, involving food, and he ropes John in to help. It was I think written in the hiatus before the last season so a few minor details have been jossed, but that doesn't matter. This is the best sort of found family story, with them all rallying around to support Teyla. Lovely.

Fanwork Links: Battle Potato, and there's an excellent podfic read by anatsuno.

chibifukurou posting in

fancake

Fandom:The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
Pairings/Characters: Luo Binghe/Shen Yuan
Rating: T
Length: 14.5k
Creator Links: CheckersXIV
Theme: Food and cooking, (Five) Things, Complete AU

Summary: Luo Binghe has accepted his life for what it is: a dull repetition of a burned-out passion for a job. Back when he started his "Not Your Mother's" cooking channel on youtube, he had been ready to face the world. Now he just wants the world out of his face. When he hits one more bump in the road, he can't really say it's too surprising considering that the universe seems to just hate him.

And yet, the universe sends him to Shen Yuan.
_
Or 5 times Shen Yuan accidentally distracts Luo Binghe's attention from his videos, and the one time Luo Binghe gets his.

Reccer's Notes: This theme was a good excuse to go back for a reread. I love a fic where the point isn't so much falling in love as growing into the kind of person ready to love and be Loved.

5+1 is always a fun framing device. Particularly when combined with in universe comment section. And I love that this js a broad world with various people who know each other from various settings in it.

Fanwork Links: The Way to a Man's Heart is His Stomach

22degreehalo posting in

fancake

Fandom: The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
Pairings/Characters: Luo Binghe/Shen Yuan
Rating: T
Length: 143,334
Creator Links:

mellicindi
Theme: Food & Cooking, (Secret) Hobbies, Asexual & Demisexual Characters, Alternate Universe - Modern, Book Fandoms, Canon LGBTQ+ Characters, Characters of Color, Disability, Families of Choice, Favorite Fanworks, No Canon Required, Novel-Length Fic, Trauma & Recovery.

Summary: Shen Yuan isn't lonely. He's just overseas in a new city, trying to muddle his way through a business degree, and dealing with the side effects of his stupid intestines trying to kill him. So, maybe he sometimes watches ASMR to cope with his too-quiet apartment. Maybe he has a little bit of a parasocial-relationship-thing going on with one particular cooking ASMR channel. It's 2016, who doesn't? The point is, he's content with his quiet life.

And then Shang Qinghua strong-arms him into watching one Hallmark Christmas movie, and it all goes to hell.

Or: Shen Yuan is a Hallmark movie protagonist, Luo Binghe is a Lifetime movie protagonist, and somehow they make it work.

Reccer's Notes: I read this fic over three days right in the middle of Battleship and it instantly became one of my favourite fanfics of all time. I could seriously gush for hours about this fic and its themes: the recurring thread of food as a love language (especially given protagonist Shen Yuan's digestive disability he's too self-conscious to talk openly about), the differing nature of familial, romantic, and friendship bonds and the varying privileges and presumptions behind each, this Luo Binghe's long-term trauma that manifests in the best goddamn depiction of Borderline Personality Disorder I've seen outside Crazy Ex Girlfriend seemingly entirely on accident - and among all of that, it's just a goddamn well-written story, incredibly easy to read and funny and heartfelt and true to its characters while being 100% readable fandom-blind and just - if any of the above appeals to you, I really can't advise anything other than to read it ASAP. <333

Fanwork Links: Life is (not) a Hallmark Movie

Profile

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August 2025

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Page Summary

runpunkrun in fancake - Star Trek: Amok Time Cake, by jb612 and violetnebula19
full_metal_ox in fancake - Mo Dao Zu Shi, Chen Qing Ling: The Untamed cupcakes, by abyss_valkyrie.
mific in fancake - due South: Sunday Dinner by ArtConundrum (SpaceTimeConundrum)
mific in fancake - SGA: A Place On The Corner by Cesare, anatsuno
full_metal_ox in fancake - No Reservations RPF, Chronicles of Narnia: No Reservations: Narnia, by Edonohana.
full_metal_ox in fancake - Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling: Comfort Food / 有可能的夜晚, by Irrelevancy
rocky41_7 in fffriday - Book review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
sinesofinsanity in fancake - ATLA: Heat, Wait, Steep, Repeat by Haicrescendo
full_metal_ox in fancake - Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling: Tea Preferences by CQL Sects - a Headcanon, by watch-grok-brainrot
runpunkrun in fancake - Theme Reminder: Food & Cooking
mific in fancake - due South: Hungry Like the Wolf, by Wagnetic
runpunkrun in fancake - Round 179 Theme Poll
denynothing1 in fancake - Stargate Atlantis: A Supermarket in California
birdylion in fancake - Leverage: The Food Cart Job, by page_runner
birdylion in fancake - Leverage: What are friends for, by Hagar
full_metal_ox in fancake - Mo Dao Zu Shi: a loaf of bread is not a substitute for a blank cake, by Anonymous.
pronker in fancake - Dark Shadows: Mysterious Circumstances by WickerManStudios
mific in fancake - SGA: Battle Potato by fiercelydreamed
chibifukurou in fancake - SVSSS: The Way to a Man's Heart is His Stomach by CheckersXIV
22degreehalo in fancake - SVSSS: Life is (not) a Hallmark Movie by Mellicindi

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Style: Early Edition for Five AM by winterfish

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Reading

Star Trek: Amok Time Cake, by jb612 and violetnebula19

Mo Dao Zu Shi, Chen Qing Ling: The Untamed cupcakes, by abyss_valkyrie.

due South: Sunday Dinner by ArtConundrum (SpaceTimeConundrum)

SGA: A Place On The Corner by Cesare, anatsuno

No Reservations RPF, Chronicles of Narnia: No Reservations: Narnia, by Edonohana.

Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling: Comfort Food / 有可能的夜晚, by Irrelevancy

Book review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

ATLA: Heat, Wait, Steep, Repeat by Haicrescendo

Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling: Tea Preferences by CQL Sects - a Headcanon, by watch-grok-brainrot

Theme Reminder: Food & Cooking

due South: Hungry Like the Wolf, by Wagnetic

Round 179 Theme Poll

Stargate Atlantis: A Supermarket in California

Leverage: The Food Cart Job, by page_runner

Leverage: What are friends for, by Hagar

Mo Dao Zu Shi: a loaf of bread is not a substitute for a blank cake, by Anonymous.

Dark Shadows: Mysterious Circumstances by WickerManStudios

SGA: Battle Potato by fiercelydreamed

SVSSS: The Way to a Man's Heart is His Stomach by CheckersXIV

SVSSS: Life is (not) a Hallmark Movie by Mellicindi

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August 2025

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