driveby recs, january 2024

[deadfinch]

two!

take back all my regrets by jan
T, Link Click, Cheng Xiaoshi/Lu Guang, 3k
As they battle the regrets of others, Lu Guang has to confront his own. (Madoka Magica-esque AU)

a stellar fusion that uses puella magi madoka magica's aesthetics and worldbuilding elements and totally flips them in the service of link click's themes.

Mother Bonesplitter's Children by Fontainebleau
G, The Author of the Acacia Seeds, worldbuilding gen, 2k
An account of a paper presented at the Ninth Congress of Theriolinguistic Research in Sfax (2066): ‘Temporal Persistence of Mythemes in Written Hyena: evidence from cave den sites at Arcy-sur-Cure and Chlum-Komin’.

if you like fictional academia and haven't read le guin's short story "the author of the acacia seeds," please go find a copy of the compass rose at your local library or find it on the internet via other means and then when you're finished with that come back and read this fic. it's just more excellence. (also, the bibliography at the end is real! and led me down some interesting rabbitholes.)