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Have Been Posted
Congratulations to the Award Winners Click here for links to AWARD PAGES Thank you to our judges and those who sent nominations. |
Means there's a review of the story. Click on the banner to
go to the review page.Rule 1:The Magnificent Seven are seven, disparate men, each fighting the demons and tragedies of his own past. They came together by chance, by fate, by Karma to bond together, finding in each other brotherhood, trust, loyalty, companionship, courage and the need to fight for justice.
Sub-rule 1-A The Seven are adult men, ranging in age from late teens to early fifties. None of them are little boys adopted by the others. Though certainly there can be well written stories about boys with the names of one or more of the seven, for our purposes, these are not stories about our Seven; the adult dynamic is missing. However, just because they aren't what we're looking for in this list, doesn't mean we aren't aware of well- crafted stories which do employ the age disparity storyline. Check out the stories on our Kiddie Corral page. All of us on this site would love the Kiddie Corral stories if they were stories about little boys rescued/adopted/fostered by any of the seven. However, in the versions which age shrink one or more of the seven, the dynamic we love is missing because one or more of the seven isn't there to add his piece to the puzzle. Even so, although we find many of the stories in the child genre cloying, all the stories mentioned above were funny and/or touching (especially when before reading them we did a search and destroy and changed the kids names to NOT one of the Seven).Rule 2: If it ain't canon charaterization, if ain't Mag7 fanfic For our purposes, if a story doesn't reflect the original series characterization, it's not series fan fiction, it's just a story about seven men with a few similarities to the heroes of the orignal show. Of course, the original Magnificent 7 were 7 Samurai. The Seven of the several Magnificent 7 movies bear only superficial resemblance to the men in the TV series. It certainly is valid to write fiction about any seven mythical protectors of the innocent. However, for the purpose of this site - such stories wouldn't be Mag7 series fanfic. Some AU's, like ATF, lend themselves to very similar characterizations [although not everyone who writes in that AU reaches that goal].. A continuation AU (meaning an AU that starts with the original characters in the OW setting and builds from there like the wonderful Camino del Diablo by Diamondback) has no reason to deviate from the original characterizations. [Of course, writers are not always going to agree on what those characterizations should be. See our page Characterization, Canon and Fanon.]Exception to 1-A: Fellow TravelersSub-rule 1-B:The Seven have no blood ties. The bond that keeps them together had nothing to do with family but is one accepted by choice. To us that makes the bond more compelling.Exception to 1-B: Hospital
Exception to Rule 2: Our SUBLIMELY SURREAL category. We started with a satirical AU called Dark Angels by Cattraine. This AU spins all the Seven and many of the supporting canon characters a few turns to the sinister left. The Seven are not just haunted by troubled pasts, they've embraced the dark side as a pack of badass bikers. Yet each character somehow brings to mind his justice-seeking counterpart from the series. The Sublimely Surreal catgory is a place for the kind of Mag7 fiction David Lynch (Twin Peaks) might have written.
Rule 3:
Original
characters should never be the focal point of a story. We
haven't found an exception to this rule yet. But we have found lots
of good stories told from the POV of an outside observer.
Rule 4: H/C fanfic should have some purpose other than inflicting torture on a character and then patching him back together while his friends (or special friend) sit on the sidelines suffering the mental tortures of the damned. We've found lots a good H/C fanfic in which one or two characters are seriously damaged but the stories included character growth, clarification of a character's past, development or discovery of previously unknown or unacknowledged emotional ties and/or presentation of a complex, interesting villain and plot, etc. We've yet to find an exception to this rule.
Rule 5: Putting these men in sexual relationships with other men does not turn them into women - nor does it change the way they talk. We've found no truly excellent stories in which the men call each other baby, darling, sweetie or honey (with the exception of an occasional venture into sarcasm or a very occasional darlin' used by Buck because that's the way he talks and we read some humor into it). If there's an unsarcastic exception out there, the whole story is probably a satire. We have noticed that British writers tend to have the men call each other "love" a lot. That really isn't the way American men speak and sounds odd to the American reader even if the same type of men might use that expression in Britain. The problem with use of these kinds of endearments is that they take the reader out of the story.
Sort of exception to Rule 5: The Hound of the Standishs by Sammy Girl. We really haven't found any exceptions in Old West, Modern or SciFi settings, but heck one "sweetheart" and two "love"s in an 1896 British Sherlock Homes adaptation didn't send us over the edge (though we could have done without them). But then this is an adaptation - we should really read Hound of the Baskervillesagain, maybe Watson really did talk that way to Holmes.Caution: Okay we have rules; we've noted the exceptions. Wanna bet folks reading through our list will find more stories that violate our rules? Hell, Ezra would give odds on that bet - it's a sure thing. We're a contrary, fairly diverse group of readers. Although no stories make the list based on just one of us liking it. there are a few that a couple of people lobbied hard for that the others thought were iffy. But there are no stories that any of us are passionately against.
DEATH DOGS FAN FICTION SITE MAP
Stories are cross-indexed. One story
may appear in several categories. Stories with two to four main characters
will be listed under the names of each. Stories with five or more
will be listed under the All the Seven category. [We don't claim to be
good at math.] Stories with explicit sexual content are marked with
double asterisks**. Stories with
no explicit sexual content but which are likely to be in the adult section
of sites like Black Raptor due to reference to slash relationships are
marked with a single asterisk*
If an author has her own website or an index of stories on a website [and
we know about it] we'll provide a link to it. Just click on her name.
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2004 DEATH DOGS AWARDS FOR CANON STORYTELLING
Congratulations to the Award Winners
Click here for links to AWARD PAGES
Thank you to our judges and to the many fans who sent nominations.