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This week’s Friday Five comes to us from atcDave, Chuck fanfiction guru and all around nice guy. You can usually find him hanging out at Chuck This Blog.
Chuck and Sarah’s romance is very much the heart of the show. This is even truer for fan fiction. Even the very earliest works were usually very optimistic about our favorite couple. So I’d like to share five favorite stories that feature the Charah relationship front and center.
1. Chuck vs The Missing Years by Malamoo.
This is a Chuck amnesia story from before they were cool (err, or obvious!). But in this early work its Chuck who’s missing five years of his life. He awakens in the hospital to a weepy nurse and few meaningful answers. Apparently he’s drifted away from Ellie and Morgan, and the things he learns seem to provide more questions than answers. A Charah story with very little Sarah until about the halfway point, but what we get is terrific. This was written mid-Season Two so Chuck’s missing years won’t quite match canon.
2. Chuck vs The Campaign by Ersk4.
This may be the definitive fluff piece. But hey, I mean that in a good way! Set right after the arrest of Jill, General Beckman decides she can’t have any more high risk “normal” girls getting involved with a high value asset, so Sarah is ordered to move in with him. For her part, Sarah decides she will prove to Chuck she can be that “normal” girl. Much of this plays out as a very sweet friendship story. The only tension is what will it take for Chuck to learn to settle for extraordinary?
3. A Chuckmas Carol by Mikki13.
I wasn’t quite sure how to classify this one. This is obviously a holiday story, and Sarah starts as a pretty Scrooge-like character! But this is easily one of the best stories of any sort in the fandom. It’s set the Christmas after Season Two. Between Bryce’s death and Chuck getting the Intersect 2.0, Sarah has forced herself into an all business mode. This story was written about when it is set, so the writer makes many non-canon assumptions about Sarah’s back story. It often amazes how great a story can be told by putting our favorite characters into a well-constructed classic.
4. Chuck vs The Fight and Chuck vs The Fight: New Year’s Edition by KateMcK.
It’s no secret that a significant number of viewers were unimpressed with the Season Three main story. The always creative fan fiction community responded with a large number of modifications to the canon story. KateMcK took a particularly interesting approach, The Fight is actually a series of short stories that start close to canon during a number of Season Three episodes; then explores how differently things could have gone with just a minimal sort of change. Her variation on Chuck vs The Final Exam may be my very favorite of the bunch. But this whole project is clever and fun.
5. Chuck vs The Sound of Music by Quistie64.
Readers familiar with me will know I had to mention this one! It’s a very favorite. The simplest description may not sound very inspiring to many readers; this puts the characters of Chuck into the classic musical The Sound of Music. The writer drew her inspiration from the comment “imagine Sarah Walker’s version of Favorite Things”. The result is nothing short of amazing. The story is fun, funny and sweet. The re-written song lyrics are laugh out loud funny. This is another of the very best things ever written for this fandom. But don’t stop there, Quistie has written a sequel (Chuck vs The Sound of Music II) that is more adventure, but with less singing than the original.
