Fannish 50 Challenge 2024: Post # 21: "30 Below Fest" Headcanon Week

[ride_4ever]

This week in the due South 30th Anniversary "30 Below Fest" one of the things being highlighted is headcanons. I'm sharing two of my Ray Kowalski headcanons here.

There are Kowalskis in my RL family and those Kowalskis are Jewish, so I headcanon that there are Jewish Kowalskis in RayK's family.

If you want to know my headcanon for how it is that Chicagoan Ray Kowalski can go undercover in Chicago as Ray Vecchio without any Chicagoans recognizing him as Ray Kowalski from an earlier life, you will find that in feroxargentea's 2019 dSC6D Big Bang fic "Long Way Down" on AO3. (BTW, this is one of my fave fics for about a bazillion reasons, the headcanon aspect being just one of those reasons.)

Note: for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, these two headcanons exist in separate 'verses.

Comments

[vivarocksteady]

I love all of ferox's fics, but that one is definitely top of the list. I have a shameful secret fic kink for traumatic brain injuries and uh..... yeah lol.

RayK having Jewish family makes a lot of sense, and it makes me wish we had seen him interact more with the Vecchios instead of just Frannie. I guess it's really just fanon that he would like, go to Sunday dinners or whatever, but it would have been fun to explore that more!

I guess I've read more fics where RayK is a lapsed/cultural Catholic, which also makes sense, so going to mass with Ma Vecchio is NBD. But now I want to see a culturally Jewish RayK have to sit through mass, haha. Or Ma Vecchio's well-meaning attempts to include his faith in her family gatherings? That would be cute, too.

[ride_4ever]

I see some plotbunnies there for Jewish!RayK.

Traumatic brain injury fic kink: have you read "The Harder They Fall" by secretlybronte?

[vivarocksteady]

No! At least I don't think so. Omg I'm excited. Do you have a link? I don't see it on her fanfic list on her journal.