Snowflake Challenge 2021 Challenge #9 - Brag about yourself/rec yourself

Because of the enormous Once Upon a Time WIP eating most of my writing time, I've done very little else in fandom recently. However, this year is the 50th anniversary of the Master's first appearance in Doctor Who, and I'm giving myself permission to celebrate that and recharge my fannish batteries. Doctor Who is normally one of my quiet, background fandoms, really - I'm more immersed in canon than active in dissecting it - but when I do get creative, I think I'm pretty good at it. I have a mindset/headcanon that trickles gently across my handful of works in the fandom, but they're usually written years or decades apart, and are in no way a series.

 

I'm nearly finished writing a two-part story featuring the current Master and Doctor, under the AO3-series heading of Madness for Two. The first piece, from the Thirteenth Doctor's POV, is called Interdict. Very smut, much bonking. That one's finished. The second, from the Master's POV, is called Mortification, and dissects their relationship on multiple levels. That one's nearly finished as I post this.

I've thrown all my pet tropes at this - pairing, angst, hurt/comfort, character-driven-smut, sickfic, plot-in-a-bottle, massively-unreliable-narrator - and wrangled my way through recent Doctor Who canon (2015-2020) that I've not fully processed before. As well as Thirteen/Dhawan's Master, it's got flashbacks to Twelve and Missy, and the momentum of what was, before those incarnations, a m/m slash pairing with its roots in the early 1970's - just before I was born. This show, these characters, this Doctor-Master relationship, has literally been part of me my whole life and has shaped everything fannish I've done since - hence me making a big deal of the 50th anniversary.

I think (I hope) that these stories capture a snapshot of both the central characters and my lifelong passion and love for this aspect of Doctor Who. I've given it everything I've got, and I'm proud of that.

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