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thegeminisage · 1 year

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okay liz. i want to start reading cambionverse. where do i start?

HELLO AND OH MY GOD THANK YOU.......you've made this old woman's dream come true :') (i am only being a little dramatic)

i'm gonna give you a short answer and a long answer. you don't really need to read the long answer if it seems overwhelming. i get excited and overexplain things!!!

short answer:

the very first thing to read is the fic cambion. we wrote this fic first, which is why the verse is named after it. after you read cambion, you can reasonably jump in anywhere else on the series page and not be too confused, as long you don't jump to envesseled. cambion first, envesseled last. if you can just remember that, then any amount of shuffling the middle will be perfectly fine.

i have my own opinion for how to read the middle but i'm saving it for the end. please feel free to skip to it!

long answer:

this series is about jesse (half-demon kid from 5.06), ben (dean's maybe-kid from seasons 3 & 6), and claire (cas's temporary vessel in 4.20, and the daughter of his current vessel; she technically returned in s10, but "our" claire had already become her own totally different character by then), and their search for sam and dean, who have been missing for three years. cambion is jesse's fic, only human is ben's fic, and envesseled is claire's fic. but there are a lot of other fics that we wrote taking place in between them.

since we started writing this series while the end of s6 was airing, it will be helpful, but not necessary, to have passing knowledge of s6. we have plenty of exposition to fill in people who didn't watch but the added context is always nice.

ok, down to business! you know how the narnia books and star wars movies were published not chronologically? as in, stuff that happened later was published before stuff that happened earlier? @cambionverse is kinda like that. we have the jesse-ben-claire era and the sam-dean-cas era and even the ben-claire only era, and everyone will have their own preferences about which order to read it in. some options are as follows:

you can read it in the order we published it. pros: you can see things unfold in the same way we did as we went along, and the relationships will feel like they build more organically. cons: you will be going back and forth in time a lot, which may get confusing.

you can read it in chronological order. pros: you can go start to finish without skipping around too much in time. cons: it will take absolute ages to meet jesse, the star of this show. also, the first chronological fics have massive spoilers for cambion, so if you read them before you read cambion you're kind of ruining that fic for yourself, which is a huge bummer.

the published order and the chronological order are both on the series page. here is a screenshot:

WHAT I WOULD DO:

since both of these orders are flawed, i made my own idea, which is to read cambion, then go (mostly) chronologically. like this:

cambion - jesse's big pov fic, the ultimate verse-establisher

enter night - sam-dean-cas prequel. also meg is there <3

synchronicity - ben and claire's meetcute & budding partnership

antichrist problems - jesse, post-cambion, going thru it

only human - ben's big pov fic, an adventure w/ djinn & bisexuality

a house in nebraska - this one is about jesse's adoptive parents

oneshots collection - odds and ends

envesseled - claire's big pov fic, which we are currently publishing

i think this is the best of both worlds. you avoid most major spoilers, get to meet jesse early, and there's not so much going back and forth along the timeline that you get confused (you only really jump like twice).

thank you SOOOOO much for asking, i hope this post didn't put you off or anything and that if you decide to give it a try you enjoy it...it's definitely my pride and joy more than anything else i have ever put on ao3

edit also i forgot to add we have a blog specifically for the series if you wanna peruse it, it's @cambionverse

#liz answers asks #alreadykindled #cambionverse #sorry i didn't finish writing this until like 2am...i thought it would be better to schedule it #we actually have them in the ''''''''recommended reading order'''''''' on the series page #but cally and i did that YEARS ago and i looked at it just now and decided i fucking hated it. so you get this personalized rec instead #(dear cally sorry if this is how you find out we need to review the series order)

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hardpacker · 2 years

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i finished a big project i was working on. ("Finished"... i want to add to it as a forever-WIP, but it's also complete.) reading queer theory is one thing and is in a way useful, but being able to find and peruse firsthand accounts of real run of the mill people through their ephemera is pretty soothing. it is mournful in many ways, too. i really do try to avoid thinking things like "i'm past expiry" or "maybe my work will outlast me" and this project put that to the test for sure. it's easy to look at the most formative things of my life and, with them gone, feel lost. if those touchpoints become more and more removed, and all that's left is the curated memory of a curated memory... i guess i worry about even losing language.

when i look at this-- no. that's not right. when i indulge myself with time to look and build something that has a slightly more complex (aka worth 0 dollars) metric for value, i feel very guilty. the guilt makes it feel all the more like a compulsion i can't curb. I'M not even adept at judging its value. or advertising it as having value, in words that signal the right meaning. i'm still thinking of myself as having the skills and the speed of an earlier time in my life and if i don't have a Product every few days i feel like irredeemable shit. it's all about product. representing that product. being the person expected to have made it.

i tiptoe around my own person, feeling like i need to settle on One Thing instead of embracing all of me-- because what if i lose money off my many facets, or somehow even fucking stupider, what if i lose respect? you're never gonna have context for everything. i don't even have it. entire chunks of what feels like multiple lifetimes are all gone, no keepsakes, not by choice. i'm jealous of permanence, to readily have whatever proof is expected. permanence sounds like family, chosen or otherwise. choice itself, selecting the best from multiple options instead of only having one. being able to remember. having something to remember. being remembered.

there are many specific archives for printed/physical material, so i wanted to focus on the digital because it's so easy to lose. not that physical items aren't also, but once one has them, losing them is a little harder. without a way to Have a webpage, corporations can just pull a plug and it's gone. i can't scroll back to the beginning-- or even a couple years ago-- on my own twitter account. we're lucky to have the Internet Archive, 1 Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, etc.

of course, it's also very scary. it gets scarier and scarier. we're more desperate. the stakes are higher. we much too often see the consequences of personal information being accessed/stolen. it's miserable. it's not even recent anymore and a lot of tactics are similar with the same end goals but the deployment of them has changed.

it is mournful to look at the most formative memories of the internet-- a thing i didn't have much of until my later teens-- and long for something scrappier. black backgrounds feel like home to me, like a physical room. but it's also very moving that these people found each other at all, and talked, for years. (and in many cases it started in identity, because that's how you found groups on yahoo, webring, fanlisting.) i see first names, transition timelines, memorials, histories, goals, pets, artwork, writing, some detailed and some not. they used words to describe themselves that you might be afraid to now, or feel you're not "allowed" to use them, but by doing so they found each other and built connection from scratch on an otherwise disconnected internet. anything i could say feels like it's been said a million times before and i don't have a firm conclusion from this.

i'm sure i'm spending too much time inside the computer in a way that's like exceptionally unrelatable. i guess my justification, if i need one, is that i'm not having fun anymore. i'm simultaneously knocked the fuck out, the last of my energy depleted-- and very worried of what will happen if i continue to be this alone. i've never been this despairingly alone, and without any vision of the future, ever in my life. there have been points, for sure, that came close-- but even then i had school, friends, and personal work that (for better or worse) kept me moving in a way that felt forward. i did a lot of ill-advised things too. and i still thought i might turn shit around. or at least exist as an equal among others. with no guarantees on anything, community smoothed over that fear.

everyone around me has always said that taking a break nurtures you. no one should work all the time in the same way. you should have things beyond that. burnout is inevitable. some even admit the systems that create this are soul-crushing and body-destroying. but every break i take turns out the same: i lose something integral. nothing feels right. i'm lost. there's no footing, nothing to hold onto. i feel like reintroducing myself. i don't know how to act or participate, if i'm expected/wanted to participate, if i'm missed at all, and it happens over and over, something unknown is just wrong. if i knew what it was, i'd attack it head on, but i don't. i just know i have a very bad habit of chasing what won't meet me and i don't want to anymore. if anything, i wish i could just stop caring and be content with having a tiny unknown life. i wish i could cut the rest out of me and never worry about it again. it is an agony that won't go away or i don't know what i'm missing in trying to fix it, because i do try. saying this isn't enough.

i understand it's wrong to think about what remains when i'm gone. there's no failproof way to predict when the end comes. i think i'm finding that what remains may not even be sought after, and what was once enjoyed was propped up by projection. even so i can't stop myself from hoping i'll have something saved that's worth visiting. that someone will imagine my life from it but not as a spectacle, just a moment to sit in or with. this probably sounds melodramatic and if so... whatever. i'm not sure how to say it a different way.

#writing

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