J.M. Frey

Author. Cosplayer. Voice Actor. Lapsed Academic. Lived in France and Japan. Wrote my MA thesis on Mary Sues. Have a great affinity for scarves and tea.  Bisexual | Cane-wielder | She/Her If you would like a review copy of one of my books, please message me.

[scifrey]

FANFICTION MASTERPOST

Hob Adherent Series

(The Sandman, extended Gaiman-verse)

Hob Gadling is a clingy bastard, and he’s not ashamed to admit it. He clings to life. He clings to hope. He clings to his love of humanity. He clings to his Stranger. He also, unfortunately, has a habit of clinging to his name.

Which means that when the BBC is looking for a new pet history expert to appear in their educational docudrama series “Elizabethan Manor,” they’re overjoyed to find a professor who (according to their meticulous research) is actually descended from the Master of the National Trust building they’re filming in - Gadlen House.

Only Hob knows how right they are.

Cling Fast

Carpe Diem

Hold Tight 

Keepsakes

The F-Words Series (the Rovai-verse)

(Loki, MCU; based on the art of @alicerovai)

Loki has fallen for false promises, fallen for Odin's lies, fallen off of a bridge, fallen into the wrong hands... can he let himself fall into the arms of a potential rescuer? Or will he just end up falling for another trick?

Fall

Fold 

Fight

Flirt 

Forgive 

To A Stranger

(Sherlock, Performance in a Leading Role by @madlori)

Here - for the first time - is the screenplay for the unexpected and sizzling hit which swept awards shows; was lauded in Time, Variety, and major publications the world over; snagged a Best Actor Oscar for first-time nominee John Watson; heralded a revolution in LQBTQA+ cinema; and was the catalyst for the incredible romantic journey of two of the greatest actors of our generation.

The Heart of the TARDIS

Rose: Feels to me like a temper tantrum because it can't get it's own way.

The Doctor: It's scared. Come on, you were a kid once.

Rose: Yes, and I know what kids can be like. Right little terrors. I've got cousins. Kids can't have it all their own way. That's part of being a family.

The Doctor: What about trying to understand them?

Rose: Easy for you to say. You don't have kids.

The Doctor: I was a Dad once.

Rose: What did you say?

--"Fear Her"

Respected

(Stargate: Atlantis, Torchwood)

Ianto Jones only wanted a nice, quiet beer. And maybe some damned respect, already.

Tobogganing Series

(Stargate: Atlantis, Casper)

When Johnny Sheppard was ten years old, he begged his father for a toboggan for Christmas.

He Kissed Me First 

(Stargate: Atlantis, The Farm in Iowa-verse by @sheafrotherdon)

"Rodnies? Rodneys? Rodni? How do you conjugate the plural?" John wondered.

The Once And Future Kingdom 

(Stargate: Atlantis, Merlin)

"I am Prince Arthur of Camelot!" the boy in the chainmail said. For a small, infinitesimal moment, Rodney considered losing it.

"Right, Prince Arthur, the Prince Arthur," Rodney scoffed instead. "And I'm Merlin."

The dark haired boy that stood a few paces behind his golden Prince cleared his throat. "Uh, no," he said, shifting uneasily from foot to foot, "Actually, I am."

Right, of course. Because this totally was Rodney's LIFE.

The Driver 

(Agent Carter, Captain America, British Royalty RPF)

“What?” Dum Dum asked, prodding his seatmate in the ribs with his meaty elbow for the umpteenth time. “Seriously, Falsy, what?”

“Squirfle,” the Brit said, or something like it. His face, under the mustache, had turned an amusing shade of puce that was rapidly verging on the alarming.

“Yeah, buddy, I know she’s pretty, but she’s just a dame, ain’t she?” Dum Dum said. He jerked his head at their driver. She was just a short brown-blonde coif from the back, though from his position against the side of the transportation jeep, Dum Dum could make out a smooth, pale cheek, an archly-painted eyebrow, and impeccable red lips.

The Nihongo Series

(Stargate: Atlantis)

In Japan, it is not too much to say that a great deal is about appearances. It is a habit cultivated over a life-time, and not one easy to break.

*

This is just a partial list of my most popular fics. Please visit my A03 and FF.NET profiles for the full list of fics.

You can also find a master post of my original fiction here.

[depsidase]

[do-not-u-dare]

Stole this from somewhere but i think it’s appropriate

[tworulerecovery]

Do it wrong!

Creative, it’s time to talk about a superpower you don’t realize you have: doing it wrong.

That is the secret. If you’re willing to make it wrong, you will learn how to make it right because practice and problem solving are how humans do anything well.

——

My weird books: https://ruthannereid.com

[nondelphic]

writing tip: put words on page. hope this helps. i will not be taking questions because i have not done this

[scifrey]

[scifrey]

🔗JMFREY.NET/BOOKS

Pride Month is here! Which of my characters are going to the Pride Parade? Well, all of them!

And to celebrate, NINE-TENTHS ebooks are on sale for just 99¢ at all major retailers until the end of June.

[omgthatdress]

ily, menswear guy

[rika-mortis]

Life is beach

[bikuwana-still-on-discord-deact]

girls when the media they're obsessed with is never going to be as good as they wish it could be

[lordofseagulls]

girls when the media they're obsessed with is never going to be as good as they wish it could be

[qillermeme]

[thedeepmiracleperfection]

Isn't one of the major thematic points of the book and season 1 and 2 that Crowley and Aziracrow actually do have free will? That they have the power to make choices and be affected or affect others by the consequences of those choices? They believe they can't choose to be good or evil, that they're stuck in their natures, but then they go and do each other's miracles, and interfere with human affairs, sometimes messing up (graveyard) sometimes making better (Job) sometimes having no effect at all (first apocalypse). Aziraphale chose to go to heaven to save everything. Crowley chose to stay. Just because they're oppressed by the system doesn't mean they lack free will. Their creativity, imagination, and refusal to only do what is allowed were their greatest assets.

Wasn't one of the major thematic points the fact that no one is completely good or bad, we simply make choices, therefore the dichotomy between heaven and hell and angels and demons is an illusion? Both demons and angels suffer and are lonely under the system. Wouldn't it have made more sense to create a world where angels and demons can have the opportunity to learn and grow with humanity the way Aziraphale and Crowley did?

The finale doesn't actually address these points because they remove the problems by just starting everything over, which is in direct contradiction to everything they fought for in season 1 and with the Job minisode.

I agree that the ending should have always involved dismantling the system and creating an entirely new one. But it should have been a new system in the world they knew with the humans they'd come to love, and allowed everyone a chance at redemption. Or at least the autonomy to choose for themselves.

Crowley making one choice for the whole universe and undoing all of their work isn't thematically consistent and doesn't actually address anything that's been introduced this far. Why go through the trouble of establishing all this world building just to erase it?

How is the new human world better? What is the consequence of no heaven and hell other than Crowley and Aziraphale can be openly together (in the time period they occupy. I'm pretty certain homophobia would still exist)? Is the human experience fundamentally altered? Wasn't the whole point that humans actually do what they want regardless of heaven and hell's agenda because they're unpredictable and have imagination?

Isn't one of the themes from season 1 that the four horsemen, war famine pollution death, are actually man made concepts (well except for death)? And that one of the reasons Adam left the world as it was was because he felt humans needed to take responsibility for the earth and have the opportunity to fix their own mistakes? Isn't that why he didn't rebuild the whale population? Doesn't killing off all the humans and not letting them have a choice in making the new world really undermine that?

Isn't one of the themes that humanity is worth saving, and one of the major points demonstrating that theme being there are two nonhuman beings who still love humans despite witnessing them commit the same mistakes over and over? Isn't that nuance kind of lost when they become human themselves? Then their love for humanity is more self preservation and without the benefit of a long term view. DO they even love humanity as much when they're humans? I didn't exactly see a lot of general human love, mostly interpersonal romantic connection between them two.

Am I crazy? Am I going crazy? Did anyone in that writer's room watch more than 5 minutes of the same series I did?

[ifisay]

Yeah, OP really captured my issues with the finale here.

I think it is very poetic for Aziraphael and Crowley to sacrifice themselves for humanity; but I feel like that sacrifice was completely unneccessary. There were other ways to dismantle the system that wouldn't require their entire reality to be rewritten!

Like, in season 1 the "ineffable plan" was the punchline: nobody knows what the plan is, so can we really be sure that god wants the apocalypse? Those who wanted free will took it for themselves by sowing doubts in the minds of the extra-faithful.

Crowley and Aziraphael were living proof that angels and demons are not ontologically good or evil, and they lived their lives as something in between. Why weren't the other angels and demons given the same option? Take Heaven and Hell out of the picture, remove the Plan, and let them figure it out on their own.

(It's also not Crowley's decision to make, actually: he doomed a whole universe, regardless of what the show is trying to tell us when it shows all the faces that we know)

[embracing-the-ineffable]

These are the things the fandom is wrestling with now, for sure. Wasn't there a better way? How could it end like THIS? Even if you overlook the sudden shift in the pace of the story telling, or the way s3 is really just a loosely connected highlights reel of the much longer s3 that was written, gutted of all the nuance and character development and mirror stories we were meant to have to help us interpret and understand the other subplots - it doesn't even seem thematically consistent.

I guess we can imagine that OUR universe is the one that they created at the end of season 3, and so they became Christ figures who sacrificed everything for humankind's salvation and a better world, but... I didn't think that was supposed to be the point of it all.

So what was the point?

WAS there a point? I don't know, maybe I'll rewatch it when my feelings are less raw and see what meaning I can pull from it.

I'm also really disappointed that there was very little resolution to the unbelievable number of discontinuities built into the show. The explanation I'm trying to sort out involves a constant cycle of God creating and recreating similar universes, and in each one, the same souls appear again and again. In that interpretation, maybe Asa and Anthony really are the same souls in one more iteration of their endless lives together. And that also explains the weird scene at the end where so many familiar faces were back, together again.

[scifrey]

The point was to make NG more money.

That's it. Clean and simple. And we fell for it.

The story ought to have ended at S1. There was no need for more. Anything NG added without Terry was always going to be just be his usual vaugely mysoginistic, vaugely homophobic, jumbled storytelling mud.

But NG has never created a property he hasn't wholeheartedly exploited. He has always adapted and remade things as many times as people were willing to give him money for.

"Terry wanted this..." he said, while providing no proof at all beyond "Oh, he told me so on his deathbed." (If Terry wanted to write more, he'd had a decade to do it in.)

It was never going to be what the characters deserved, because the creator who understood and imbued the story with themes and thesis and a heart, the one who understood the POINT of the tale, was never NG.

[antlered-vixen]

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

[scifrey]

This is why, in the end, I elected to self-publish my last novel. I probably could have published it traditionally and had an agent represent it, if I had cut fully a third of it.

But I didn't want to. I didn't want to trim the fat. The fat is the point. The fat is where all the flavor is.

[blackjeans93]

My positive thoughts on why I found the Good Omens finale satisfying:

I think it's important to consider that a good character based narrative is about the characters feelings, rather than the reader or the audiences.

Crowley and Aziraphale, while we as the audience have known them almost exclusively as a demon and an angel, have never been particularly good at their roles, nor was it their core identify. Their identities were based on how they rejected their roles, and embraced something else.

And what did they embrace? Earth and humanity. The things they found and chose to define them are the Bentley, the bookshop, food and drink, music, film, television, theatre, all very human creations. And the list goes on.

They always wanted to be human, and be together.

And that's the ending they got to have.

That's the only one there could have been, to close the circle of who they are as characters.

Neither Heaven incarnate, nor Hell incarnate.

But human incarnate.

[ftmtftm]

Sometimes I really want to take everyone under the age of 24 (as of 2026) by the shoulders and say:

"I'm really sorry that lockdown and the ongoing pandemic interrupted pivotal educational and social/emotional development moments for you. You have an uphill battle towards adjusting to a lot of community based efforts because you experienced a mass trauma during an incredibly important time in your life where you should have physically been around your peers learning to engage in shared community. There is no "but" here, I'm genuinely really sorry. Something many of us consider key points in our interpersonal growth as youths was taken from you, not without reason but without care for its impact on you. I hope you know we are eternally allies in our struggles and if that is something you struggle to know I hope you can learn it someday."

Because so many of the angriest, most disenfranchised people I see on this website are under 24 and I often try to put younger people's behavior in the context of where they might have been 2020. I've seen the impact on my siblings and their peers+friends first hand, all ages 18-24. We've talked about how its impacted them, the isolation, the attachment to the internet, the anxieties and phobias and fears it developed in them due to the pandemic, the political unrest, and the responses to both that we've seen since. I know they're not the only ones and I know how much being marginalized also influences that impact too.

It's terrifying. I know it must be terrifying for a lot of the young people on Tumblr too. I hope one day we're able to bridge all of those complex feelings into something collective and positive so we can do our best to prevent similar traumas from happening to future generations.

[aduckwithears]

Hope this helps

[scxrbusx]

"we didn't get a new wing scene" but we did. their chairs are their wings. they're a set, hence only one pair of wings instead of two. and the chairs forming a heart is just the icing on the cake. they're each other's heart and all the other will ever need.

[rocksandboulders]

I really thought that Aziraphale and Crowley were going to rewrite the Book of Life.

I really thought they were going to become the Illustrator and Author.

I really thought that's why all the books in the shop were made blank.

I really thought God wasn't going to actually exist in a true form, and instead be a kind of omnipresent power of creation.

I really thought that they were going to have their forced-proximity-making-up-with-each-other as they were required to work together to write the new Book of Life.

I really thought that they were going to choose *their* humanity and not a new one.

I really thought they would still be themselves at the end.

I really thought the moral of the story was that the humanity they had was worth protecting, and that life itself (whether mortal or otherwise) was beautiful and inherently important.

I really thought this story was about a love that transcends.

I understand the path they took. However. I do think it missed the mark on what the show was really trying to say.

[highlyincorrect]

Honest (SPOILER) thoughts regarding the GO finale, I think a valuable piece of writing people are kinda overlooking is the INCREDIBLE subversion of their main motivations

Like we as the audience are lead to believe from the start that Crowley is this jaded, cynical little fucker who’s fond of one person and one person only. The typical “nothing in this world matters except you” grumpy who doesn’t give a shit about a universe that rejected him. Aziraphale, likewise, is pretty easily seen as the bigger picture guy, it’s obvious he loves Crowley deeply but it’s the mission of the larger world, the good of the people, that draws his time and energy- he chooses that responsibility more than Crowley. These are the roles we’ve seen them play and the archetypes we’ve kinda locked them in to. It matches with their grumpy vs sunshine attitudes, their aesthetics etc

Then in s2 we started noticing some cracks in it. We’ve met Angel Crowley who is a beautiful sunshiny dreamer who cares so deeply about the gorgeous world around him. Aziraphale starts to get a bit wrapped up in his own self interest from time to time, caring more about his bookshop or Crowley or even Jim than his larger mission. These little moments added depth to their characters, but ultimately didn’t shake our ideas of them. But THEN-

When they were asked by God what they would save, everything in the world has been stripped from them. The universe is lost- all that remains is each other and the final question of “what in the whole of existence matters to you most?” And we think we know what they’ll say, we think the way we’ve been taught all this time- Crowley is the selfish lover and Aziraphale is the heartbroken rejector.

But instead we meet their cores. We meet the truest stripped down versions of themselves and we learn the truth. Aziraphale picks Crowley. His lover, his life, the being that completes him. He makes the selfish, or loving, choice, no matter what it means to the world. And Crowley- Crowley is crying for the world. He is so utterly helplessly desperate for humanity to have their chance that he’s willing to throw away everything out of his sheer love for them. We’ve met the old part of him again, the artist and the lover, the selfless one he’s had within him all along. And for Aziraphale we’ve finally met the lover in him too, the one who’s finally willing to put his love for Crowley above all else.

I don’t know but I think it’s absolutely beautiful to get to know characters that you thought had these black and white motivations, only to discover that when it all comes down to it, they are capable of throwing everything we assumed about them out the window. There’s no black and white or even grey, but a whole world of mixed up colours and choices that make them whole. The sinful Angel and the selfless demon to the last.