Fandom: SOUTH PARK
Pairing: Gregory/Mole, with slight Stan/Kyle and Kenny/Bebe
Length: 50K
Author on LJ: effingbirds
Author Website: Here on FF.net
Why this must be read: The Second World War historical AU is a major subgenre in the SP fandom. Often you get writers structuring their stories taking place during this period around the relationship between Kyle, who is canonically Jewish, and Eric Cartman, who is hugely anti-Semitic and has been shown to idolize Hitler. Often Cartman is cast as a Nazi with a crush who saves Kyle from certain doom. Other times, Stan and Kyle meet in a concentration camp and fall in love there. I am not kidding, this is seriously a thing. Effingbirds' story turns the WWII dynamic on its head by setting her fic in occupied France. Her protagonist is Gregory, a romantic foil for Stan in the South Park movie. Here, Gregory is a British agent who parachutes into Rouen alongside Kenny in order to aid the resistance movement there. In France, Gregory meets Christophe, "the Mole," who is harboring refugee Kyle in his organizational role. Chris and Greg do end up together, but this story is, essentially, about Gregory's reclaiming his sense of self. In the process, the story subverts most of the cliches from a familiar pastiche and demonstrates how well AU works for South Park fic.


The Well and the Lighthouse

Fandom: SOUTH PARK
Pairing: Stan/Kyle, Craig/Thomas, Pip/Damien ("others are secret, or minor")
Length: 70K
Author on LJ: imaginaaation
Author Website: Here on FF.net
Why this must be read: I no longer find this to be that great a story. I hate recommending stories I don't find that great because, well, what's the point? But I think this is essential reading because it looms so large over the SP fandom as it is today. It's a mystery in the mode of a police procedural, and features meaty cameos for basically every character. Most of them are written out-of-character, and I take real offense at how the story purports to be about Stan and Kyle but, instead, follows Kenny's investigation into the mystery of who murdered Eric Cartman. Kenny himself, though the narrator through whom the plot flows, is barely a presence, affecting little and characterized as having no life or internal working of his own. I've had friends tell me that they're annoyed by how hard the story works to shoehorn in other characters, or annoyed with how sensationalist and impossible the story's main injustice feels.

But -- and this is the enormous but that makes me want to rec this story -- when it was first published, in early 2008, nothing like this had been done. Lex Talionis is an insanely ambitious story, often cited as the best of the fandom. It's the only SP fanfic with its own page on TV Tropes. It's missing a promised epilogue, though the main plot is concluded and it reads complete. Is, for all intents and purposes, complete. This is the story that, for many, changes opinions on what SP fanfic is or what it can do. It is, in that sense, a game-changer. People still speculate about Foodstamp, wondering what happened to her. The myth of this story is insurrmountable. In a certain sense everything that's come after has been a kind of response to this fic. So I think the only right thing to do is to rec the thing and put it out there.


Lex Talionis

Now that I've posted an overview, back to recs:

Fandom: SOUTH PARK
Pairing: Stan/Kyle; Cartman/Wendy; Kenny/Butters
Length: 115K
Author on LJ: formerdinosaur (SP writing journal for hollycomb)
Author Website: here on FF.net
Why this must be read: The Stan/Kyle first-time high school romance story has been written about a zillion times in the South Park fandom. Everyone's written one, basically. I have. This one's worth reading, all 100,000+ words of it, because it changes the formula by taking the boys out of high school and putting them on the road. Writing a road trip is hard, because the characters are stuck in a car, but Holly keeps the tension palpable by giving the trip a meaningful bookend: the boys are driving from South Park to LA to drop Stan off at college, where he's starting football training camp in the fall. When writing this first-time S/K story most authors create anxiety for Stan and Kyle by forcing them to wonder whether they'll end up at the same college. For Kyle in this story, the definitive end of the road trip represents a real goodbye, so instead of framing a gay romance around a mystery, there's only angst and tension. Like the characters, you might start to feel trapped in that car, dreading what happens on the other end.

Also, Holly writes some of the best porn ever. When you get to the porn -- and yes, there will be porn, a lot of it -- it feels totally justified.

The Scenic Route

INTRODUCTION TO SOUTH PARK
South Park debuted on Comedy Central on August 13, 1997 and quickly became a media phenomenon. It’s essentially a half-hour cartoon about four boys living in a magical-reality mountain town in Park Country, Colorado, about an hour outside of Denver. The premise is based on the experiences of creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who both grew up in the area. The show caught on mostly due to its juxtaposition of rough, primary-colored construction-paper stop-motion animation and adult humor. The four boys swear, love toilet humor, and are generally irreverent. The adults in their town are misguided at best, and the boys seem very well aware of it. This made the show initially shocking to some, and South Park has continued to generate controversy by becoming an equal-opportunity offender.

( Read more... )

Hi there! I'm sekrit_omg, and I'm really really excited to be reccing South Park fics for you this month. I have a fandom overview in the works, and was waiting to get that completed before posting recs, but I can't help it, I'm too excited. I've been in the SP fandom for almost five years now, and man, it is a weird fandom. But I think it's amazingly fun and, just by coincidence, the second half of season 16 happens to be airing right now. I am an unabashed Stan/Kyle shipper, so I'll try to break things up, but I'm clearly biased and have to start here:

Fandom: SOUTH PARK
Pairing: Stan/Kyle; Cartman/Wendy
Length: 7K
Author on LJ: N/A
Author Website: here on FF.net
Why this must be read: The single most basic Stan/Kyle plot goes as follows: Stan has been dating Wendy since elementary school, much to Kyle's great annoyance. Stan and Kyle struggle through their sexual tension, and things come to a head right at the end of high school, when everyone's about to go off and leave South Park for college. "Writing on the Wall" doesn't do anything new, but it does it so well that in a fandom with about 100 takes on this plot, it really stands out for excelling overall.

A good SP fic will show you the characters you know, just grown up. This story avoids the obnoxious cliches while improving upon others. South Park itself is often compared to a character, in how sharply it impacts the people who inhabit the town. This story keeps the integrity of that idea while really making you get the closed-off, tiny, hopeless dead-end feel of a small rural town where a high school senior would feel trapped. It also serves every character a measure of dignity. No one's overfeminized or unsympathetic. They're all a bit pathetic, but you want to them to get what they want. Combined with some extremely vibrant imagery, it makes for one of the most memorable stories in the fandom, one of the few that everyone can point to as an example of a satisfying Stan/Kyle high school first-time oneshot.

I wanted to start with a story that demonstrates what you can do with these characters while keeping the setting recognizable. This would be that story.

Writing on the Wall

Title: Voyage of the Damned, by Tiffany Park
Pairing: none, thank goodness!
Author on LJ: unknown
Author Website: Tiffany Park's Starsky and Hutch Fanfiction
Why this must be read:

Because it's insane. Absolutely, utterly insane.

And because Starsky and Hutch somehow manage to sound and act like themselves, or anyway, the way they would if they were caught in an insane universe. Which they are.

And because it's got lines like this:

"Are you being a good boy while Mommy evokes Satan to visible manifestation?"

So grab yourself a big bag of Cheesy Poofs and enjoy!

Voyage of the Damned