Hihihihi what's your fave trope to read and what are your Barson recs?
Ohhhhh. It's actually a little tough to think of specific tropes? I read pretty much anything, so I never really focus on tropes in particular.
I love a good Rivals to Lovers or Enemies to Lovers. I like tension and angst and pining. A Jealous! character too, though I don't know if that's an actual trope. I do love a Fake Relationship trope too, those are always fun!
But mostly any trope can work for me as long as it's well written and the characterisations feel true to character.
Barson recs under the cut! All on AO3. I'm so sorry if I'm reccing any fics you've already read but these are some of my faves. The list also got longer than I intended, whoops! Also, I'd encourage you to check out the writers other fics too if they have them. There's a lot of good stuff around, this is just a list of some of my favourites.
Okay, I'm so sorry but I'm starting y'all off with a heartbreaking one. That I may have inspired and absolutely loved. It does involve Major Character Death.
at your best, you were love by twentyfive_acts
By the same writer, it's a bit of a slow burn and it's only 4 chapters right now but still a great read! Honestly, any fic by twentyfive_acts I recommend. Warning: the first chapter does involve some 🤢Benson/Stabler🤮
Unlove You by twentyfive_acts
The next one is a fun, light-hearted AU of season 22 involving a Fake Relationship between Olivia and Barba. It's a nice contrast to most of the angst that comes out of the Barson fandom. Also just really enjoy most of what praxidikai has written for Barson.
Wicked Game by praxidikai
A complete AU and more pre-Barson than Barson but absolutely devastatingly emotional and poignant. Also wonderfully well-written. Check the tags and warnings before reading though!
Echoes of the Act by KelpieLurks & MargoBlack
A fun and sexy Five Times fic in essence! There's only 3 chapters of 7 so far but it's so, so funny and it's another by MargoBlack who is a fantastic writer! I'd recommend checking out any of their other Barson fics too.
All the Good Things by MargoBlack
The next is a plane crash and survival fic with lots of mutual pining and undertones of love. Barson aren't exactly together but it's still very Barson.
Sky Above, Ground Below by iridiumflower
Anything by adrianna_m_scovill is Barson gold in my opinion. Set during the show and is essentially a baby!fic. I love a surprise baby/child in fics and this one is a brilliant one.
Making a Family by adrianna_m_scovill
This one may not be to your liking since it's a crossover with Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. It's very fun and slightly angsty Barson fic. But seriously, read pretty much anything by adrianna_m_scovill.
About Time by adrianna_m_scovill
One of the very first fics I ever read of Barson and it was so good and so beautifully well-written. It's a Barson slow-burn and one of the best in my opinion. I would suggest checking the tags and warnings though.
A Hand On Your Face In The Dark by rosehips
Another by rosehips. It's an Established angsty Barson fic but is unfortunately unfinished and will remain so. But it's still very, very much worth the read! Once again, check the tags and warnings.
Reasonable Doubt by rosehips
Long and hilarious Marriage of Convenience fic with kids! Pining galore! I think about this one so often and reread it cause it makes me giggle. Great appearances by Rita Calhoun too if you're a fan.
light becomes what it touches by awkwardspiritanimals
Another by awkwardspiritanimals. Long oneshot about a truth spell that wreaks havoc on Barba and Benson. It's delightful but also a little sad in my opinion. Very, very good read though and I kind of love the characterisations in this one.
and we found our song and we found our truth by awkwardspiritanimals
A very fun AU where Barson meet when they're much, much younger. If you like alternate versions of their story, this is definitely a good fic for you. Lewd_Intentions is a very good writer with some really interesting characterisations with a ton of Barson fics.
Wear the Same Crown by Lewd_Intentions
One of my favourite Barson fics I've ever read! A Witness Protection AU set in the timeline of the show complete with angst, mutual pining, slow burn and sex. Just a great all round read!
Broken Compasses by immen_sity
Another by immen_sity! This one is an angsty slow burn Barson cheating fic with a smidge of Tuckson. I honestly love it though and go back to reread it quite often.
Leave No Trace Behind by immen_sity
Another Barba with a child fic (which is like, probably my favourite situation to see him in apparently!) but this one is full of angst and a slow burn. One of the first Barson fics I read. Not complete but one off of finished, so still definitely worth reading. It does deal with Abuse pretty heavily so definitely check the tags and warnings before reading.
you can run (but only so far) by bcofl0ve
An immediate follow-up to 19x13 The Undiscovered Country where Barba doesn't just disappear into the ether without a word. A really, really lovely story about healing and becoming a family. One of my favourites.
The Rediscovered Country by theoofoof
This one is long but very worth it. An AU where Barson meet during 1.0 time and fall in love. It's really, really good. Very human and a little heartbreaking at times but still worth the read.
Inevitable by scintillatingtart
The last is a sort of funny one set during the 1.0 era where Olivia and Barba are married long before Olivia joins SVU and Stabler is an idiot. Very funny if not exactly in character. Not completely finished but still definitely worth the read.
HIM?! Really? by AnneOwl2803
Would it be incredibly self-serving to rec one of my own fics? I'm going to anyway because even though this one isn't tagged Barson, it is absolutely a Barson fic in my soul! Set post season 23 and just complete angst but deals with the unresolved feelings between Olivia and Rafael, in a fashion.
Too Close To The Sun by me! LittleTayy
EDITED ADDITION:
Apparently the underlying theme here is Barba with a Baby which really shouldn't be a surprise for anyone that knows me. Haha. I apparently enjoy that trope so much I've contributed to it. I'm surprised this list isn't all just Barba with a Baby fics tbh.
This one is another fun one that features baby daddy Barba, jealous Olivia and a history with Rita Calhoun. Not finished but still very worth the read in my opinion!
Every time Sean Astin makes a statement on whether or not Sam and Frodo were indeed gay for each other in lord of the rings he’s always like “well we have to acknowledge that attitudes around sexuality have changed dramatically over the past several decades and since authorial intent is only up to speculation, the story is open to multiple readings, some of which might have different significances for different groups of people also they kiss on the lips because I said so”
Rosie: "This is my husband Sam, and that's his husband, Frodo. Frodo is my husband-in-law. I'm not into him, he's he's a bit too 'elfy' for my taste, but Sam likes him, and that's fine with me. As far as I know, Frodo can't give Sam children, but Frodo looks after ours all the same, so I don't mind sharing Sam if it means another pair of eyes on the wee ones. In all honesty, our family tree is right simple compared to some hobbits. Yes, I'm referrin' to you Lobelia, over there pretendin' you ain't eavesdroppin'. Still bitter you ain't got either of my boys or their house, eh?"
Tbh it's canon that Frodo invited Sam and Rosie to move in to Bag End after their wedding and they all lived there for a couple of years until Frodo went to Valinor, so yeah. Running with it.
And once Rosie dies, Sam says his goodbyes and disappears after him.
what’s funny is people assuming that rosie would somehow be too dim or naive to KNOW that sam loved frodo, instead of looking at a guy who would loyally follow a beloved friend to hell and then help carry him home again, and not be like ‘oh i can’t not fuck that.’
Polyamory, specifically polyandry, would be an interesting solution to the oddball population of the Shire.
The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.
What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.
Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)
Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..
In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.
When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.
Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.
No outsider ever parses hobbit genealogy well enough to understand this except for Gandalf, who never explains anything either.
Since “pledge” kinships are multidimensional and can occur in different directions, hobbits can form - and formalise - family bonds simply because they choose to. Gandalf doesn’t tell anyone that the formation of Thorin’s Company, the Fellowship of the Ring, and Belladonna Took’s Accidental Troop of Mercenaries* are legal formations of pledge-siblings, a hobbit family structure usually claimed to increase social class and prestige (as high numbers of pledge-kin confer distinction on a hobbit, being a sort of popularity vote/endorsement that adds greatly to their social power. Incidentally, this is partly why Bilbo was both controversial and successful in his pledge-claim of Frodo; outsiders mistook his “bachelor” status as someone living outside of heteronormativity, while the Shire was bewildered and increasingly annoyed by his rejection of pledge and hearth commitments. By rights Bilbo had too few pledge-kin, and too little parenting experience, to claim rights to an orphan, especially one from Brandybuck hearth; but conversely, his social status was high enough that his belated bid for his very first pledge-son couldn’t reasonably be denied by anybody.)
In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)
Gandalf never explained.
* see the post about the Old Took’s “enchanted diamond cufflinks” that obeyed the wearer’s commands; which were probably, given the general state of things, two lost silmarils recovered by his Remarkable Daughters and gifted to him because things stay small and safe in the shire
Only through Boromir while Boromir was alive! Pippin’s familial claim through Boromir technically dissolved on Boromir’s death, as Denethor hadn’t been privy to it, and those bonds rarely stretch to a stranger when the person in the middle has died before introducing them; although Pippin, who was well-brought-up, perfectly and politely rectified the problem at once by simply swearing himself as Denethor’s pledge-son. but through his blood-cousinship to Frodo, who was older than Boromir, his status as the Took double-primarc (don’t ask) and the proximity-enhanced status-doubling effects of having a five-way cousin in Merry, Pippin was demonstrably higher status as a pledge-sibling and was also his own father-in-law and approved of himself. As such, he would have significantly raised Boromir’s social status and marital prospects in the Shire.
Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .
Ironically, the events in which Pippin realized this made Faramir his own hearth-son - so Pippin won in the end and took a great interest in ceremonially approving of Eowyn. Gandalf never explained
Every episode Xena’s like “Gabrielle I’m putting you in danger. You need to stay behind. You’re the only thing in the world I care about, I couldn’t bear for anything to happen to you.” and Gabrielle is like “Xena I could never leave you. My world revolves around you and I’m completely devoted to you forever. I’m staying by your side.” And then Xena does a bunch of backflips and immediately kills the bad guy by kicking him in the crotch
Yes, I understand, she killed people, manipulated many others, and all her actions are orchestrated for selfish purposes. She is, in a sense, a bad person. But have you considered the aspects of trauma, beauty, and the fact that I love her very much?
I went to a market recently that was absolutely swimming in appropriation of First Nations religious and cultural items.
I'm talkin white people selling rattles and dream catchers, white people banging First Nations style drums, white people teaching talking stick workshops, that kinda shit
So what do you do when you see this crap? How do you show your disapproval in a way that makes them give a shit?
I'll tell you what I do. The point is to show them that appropriating Indigenous cultures will lose them customers.
When I see fakey Native art I say something like "Oh wow, you make dreamcatchers! What nation are you from?" (Use tribe in the states)
I used to ask point blank if they were Native, but I'd nearly always get some Cherokee great grandmother bullshit, or even "I'm not sure, I could have some Native in me!"
Most of the time they don't know what I'm talking about, because they're not Native and don't know that this is a very normal thing to ask when meeting another Native.
When they ask me what I mean I say "I mean your tribe, which First Nation are you from?"
This is the point where they sheepishly mumble that they are not First Nations.
I let my face fall and say something like "Oh. That's disappointing" or "Wow. Unfortunate."
I let it get awkward. And then I leave, shaking my head in disapproval.
You may feel like you need to educate them on cultural appropriation but here's the thing: it's 2025. They know. Brenda the middle class reiki shaman is FULLY aware that her smudge fans are stolen culture. She doesn't care. The only way to make them care is to hit them where it hurts: the wallet.
Make them think that you would have purchased what they are selling if it was AUTHENTIC.
If you wanna go the extra mile send an email to the organizers, in your best white people voice, and tell them that you are disappointed that they are facilitating culture theft.
not to be a snitch, but if this is happening in the US you can also straight up report Brenda for a fine up to $250k under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act.
