Apologies if a thread like this already exists (I couldn't find a recent one in my search that wasn't entirely HP related).

I do an annual audit of my favorites on FFN (and ao3 more recently), and it always brings back a host of memories about the various fics listed. All of them have a reason for being there, sometimes as little a single scene that leapt out as worthwhile. This lead me to thinking about the scene/moment that most stands out to me across all my years of reading and writing fanfics.

For me, it's Vader's sacrifice in blank101's Sun of Sun's trilogy. I reread it once a year, and that scene always leaps out as a near perfect culmination of the narrative up until that point. Hundreds of thousands of words spent inching toward a single moment that completely and utterly changes the narrative. It doubles as a wonderful character study on Anakin/Vader, canon and otherwise. It's a fitting culmination of everything he was and everything he's become canonically as well as in the trilogy, capped off, brilliantly, with a paraphrased rendition of Obi-Wan's line from A New Hope.

"If you cut me down...you will make me more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

So it got me thinking, what moments in fanfiction are your absolute favorite?

 

Shezza's Life in Konoha's Anbu - The fight between Naruto and Yagura. Shezza can write an awesome fight scene, but in my opinion, they just keep going and have a tendency to start to drag. The Yagura fight was Shezza at his best.

Awaken Sleeper - The whole fight between Aurora and Summer versus the two Harry's groups.

 

The Skyeater fight in @Lamora's Game of Champions.

The death of the starmie in the same.

The fight between Harry and Voldemort in The One He Feared.

The confrontation in The Last Avatar (?name?).

Renegade Cause's entire climax.

All of Year 6 in Annerb's first work (blanking).

The dementor and the muggleborn discussion in [the one where Ginny dies].

The Voldemort-Harry fight in Azkaban in @Newcomb's second work.

The dueling discussion in Newcombs first work.

Man, I cannot remember names right now. I'll come back and edit when I'm not blanking.

 

From [Harry Potter and the Not-Fatal-At-All Cultural Exchange Program]

I really enjoyed Harry build up in The Other Boy Who Lived, especially when he became a leader in the wargames and fought Neville. This fic singlehandedly created my interest, even until today for Not-boy-who-lived Harry.

 

Peeta's death in The Asking Price still gets me every time.

 

Maybe it's more of a DLP moment than a fan-fic moment, but when @Nuhuh updated Retsu's Folly after twenty years of it sitting in an abandoned barn was probably the best thing that happened in fan-fiction over the previous decade.

 

There's a scene in a Buffy fanfic called American girls slays me every fucking time.

Everyone had one. That one day in your life when you could look back and say, without a doubt, “Yeah, that was the very best one.” The details of it--sights, sounds, smells--still stood out with perfect clarity in your memory even fifty years later, and as good as it had been then, the lens of time would improve it even more, filtering out the few not-so-good moments. Maybe it would take months or years of reflection to realize how perfect it had been; maybe you would realize and appreciate it right then, as it was happening. But one thing was almost always true: you never saw it coming.


Cue some cutesy dating, lovemaking, bla bla bla.


Back to that thing about the perfect-day memories. Dawn didn’t have fifty years ahead of her. She didn’t even have ten. But on the day she lay dying, with her life’s blood pouring out onto grimy pavement, this was the greatest hit that played last in her head: the two of them sitting by this river, Kait still looking young and fresh and innocent, not yet beaten down by life and the burdens of being a slayer, and Dawn herself still feeling like a wide-eyed girl who was just getting her first taste of love.

Dawn always remembered that before their lives had gotten hard and complicated, before the arguments and betrayals, the tears and recriminations, and before the sad endings each of them finally met with, that they'd had this one perfect time together. And the reason that this moment flashed back to her at the very end of her life was because the words of Kait's song so perfectly captured how she felt about how everything ended up turning out.


It's brilliant set-up in my opinion because you know the fate of the protagonists, so when shit's tough you're dreading you've reached that moment. When it's happy, it's bittersweet as fuck because you know full well it's not going to last.

 

• Harry and Bellatrix fighting together against the Order in Only Enemies. One of the most impressive fight scenes in HP fanfiction.
• Harry and Romilda storming Narcissa's building in Ambient.
• Demon's Pain, Merlin's Gain and the fight between Voldemort and the Merlin.
  
• There's a scene, in Heartlands of Time, in which Harry visits Fleur in France and they just sit on a blanket and enjoy being together. Then Harry gets called back to Hogwarts and life—well, lives—catch back up to him.

I'm sure I forgot a ton. Thanks for sending me down memory lane, it's not as if I've got stuff to do or anything and now am going through my bookmarks...

 

Reading Kingdoms at War right now and while to some the rest of the fic is questionable in quality, I actually laughed out loud at the below passage:

Alone, Tywin directed his attention to Tyrion. “Your jokes are not appreciated.”

“I wasn’t joking at all.” Tyrion replied.

Inwardly Cersei seethed. Perhaps they’d like to get their cocks out and measure them on the table. I’m sure Varys could prove to be an objective judge.

 

It's got to be this. One of the best bits of fiction I've read.

 

The Asking Price is probably the best fanfic I've ever read, and I've never even read The Hunger Games.

 

It's been a while since I've read any fanfics, but just thinking about the Dumbledore interlude inA Long Journey Home makes me feel happy.

 

All of the tasks from Jbern The Lie I've Lived.

iroh vs. the Plague spirit and the Train Fight in Vatahra's Embers.