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!!!
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!
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:
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
