oh, boys

[healingmirth]

bb_shousetsu recs! Posted mostly because the stories don't have summaries! The theme for the issue was "Schoolboys" and theme for these recs is my brain is stuck in the past, but there's some other stuff too. If you believe that, like, Bridget Jones Diary could be spoiled by knowing who she ends up with, then these summaries may contain spoilers.

Welcome Back, Class of 1990 - high school reunion fic, as the title implies. Several of the commenters seem to be all "but Ryan deserves a happy ending!!1!" which he does, but I'm not convinced that he doesn't get one. First person, and awesome for it. Hooray for stories about grownups \o/

Little America - I wasn't in high school in the 1980s, but my love for high school movies of the 80s is well-documented. There's something about the first third of the story that feels almost misleading. Reading it as a romance, I wish that some of the opening sections had been peppered in as flashbacks. As a story about Nate - like, if I'd been able to read the whole thing for it's own sake, instead of being distracted by actively wondering where it was going - it works better, but. I don't know. As it sits on the page, it feels like a bit of an uncomfortable hybrid. The second half of the story, I love unreservedly, and it is like the best bits of John Hughes.

Love to an 80s Soundtrack - present-day, more or less, just a guy whose musical tastes are awkwardly retro. Short and sweet high school sort-of-friends.

Unwound - slightly D/s, of the you-need-to-take-care-of-yourself and just-stop-thinking-for-a-minute variety. It's not infodump-y, but it's set in grad school (or maybe college. whatever, I didn't pay a lot of attention to those sentences) and so it's a bit of hello! random academic references! by way of detail.

Let it Snow - younger guy works at a bar, older guy stops in to warm up on a blizzardy night, friend does her best to ensure that older guy is not in fact an axe murderer before he takes younger guy away to do naughty things.

No one said it would be easy - I didn't actually read this one past the first couple hundred words, but it seems well-written and interesting, just not my thing. It's about two guys who meet up in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. I looked at the last paragraph, and it appears that no one dies tragically.