Yup, they're here as well! So aye, we've got our share of both.
Well, I'm pretty sure flounders go well with champagne.
Especially if you deep-fry the flounders and serve the champagne from stone tankards.
With this, as there's only about half an hour till Sunday ends, I'd like to make known my successor:
I'd like to nominate
RossN for Ol' King Hal and his short-lived son Godwin in
A very different England: A Godwin AAR, not like Earled (husband of Princess Ragnheid, the latter winning this award at some point earlier on for RossN). Since you may wonder what the other one was that I mentioned, it was werewhale's
The Grace of Rome, A de Brienne Latin Empire AAR, also an abandoned project. There were several memorable moments (including, for example, Harold and William shaking hands before battle) but what touched me especially was this part of
#59:
In March he married his former common low wife Ældgyth de Gaunt. This Ældgyth was far from young (she was seven years older than Harol's previous consort) and from no very great family but she was famously fair looking with chesnut hair and deep green eyes and she was mother of Harold's older children - and thus grandmother to the infant Earled. It seems that given the shocks his family had recently suffered the King wished to provide a warmer and more stable home for his family. Certainly she was a choice that even Harold's perpetually ungrateful and quarellsome Witan could find little fault with.
But a vegetarian cynical Jean de Brienne was a blast too (much as I didn't like his apparent loss of faith in a twice leader of a crusade and powerful figure in the papal faction, though I have no doubts that what he'd seen was enough to make him digest difficult questions), as was the French-speaking Basileus Ioannes Vatatzes. It was hard to pick. The short-livedness of Grace of Rome did play some part. I will have misgivings for a long time, I think, as Grace of Rome would have been my initial choice, in fact the first one I thought about in connection with this award, and remained a close contender as I went fourteen pages back and looked at some CK1 AARs too.
As for more current AARs, I didn't want to repeat an award explicitly identical to one already made before, especially a recent one, and I felt some of the new guys, while promising, still had to work their way (with all due humility as my own Land's End was itself a new and low-profile AAR), while others weren't really much into the character category. My penchant for goodie two shoes characters and profound dislike of chain assassination and claim forgery (much more so when not in character than otherwise) wasn't making things any easier, either, with the popular choice being towards a different type of character, darker, or with a more prominent mean streak than any of the characters I mentioned above (since Harold definitely had one).
I'd like to stress the choice was very subjective and difficult to make (between the Different England and the Grace of Rome, it was literally close to a coinflip and I feel a little sad I couldn't name both), so I hope nobody feels unjustly skipped, especially of the newer authors. If you do, just drop me a line and I'll try to set things right by recommending your AAR to my own readers and dropping by to say hi to yours, but at the same time I believe Ol' King Hal and his bookish son deserve it well.
So here's one for Harold & Godwin (Earled's gotta grow some beard to earn it yet)!