I've been on this site for the better part of a decade and I tend to ignore doujins. I'll of course read doujins for series I'm familiar with, like Akuma no Riddle and Little With Academia. But I don't watch/am not familiar with Madoka Magicka (don't even know if that's correct), KanColle, Touhou, Love Live!, and I never finished K-On. But, over the years, I've stumbled into a few really good doujins that I just read spontaneously from Love Live! and Vocaloid that I absolutely adored, despite not knowing the characters. By ignoring probably 90% of the doujins on this site, I feel like I'm missing out on some seriously good stories.

Asking anyone who reads this post: What are you favorite doujins on Dynasty Reader? What ones would you recommend to someone who doesn't watch/read the series they're based on? And don't tell me to "just watch [insert popular yuri sponge anime]" 'cause I have no desire to watch a lot of those. I might watch Sailor Moon, but that's a big maybe. Right now, I'm just looking for doujins, preferably stand-alone i.e. can be enjoyed without prior knowledge of established characters/relationships.

I apologize if this is a repost. When I tried posting earlier, I got a site error message and couldn't find this post when I came back to the site later.

For me it started out similarly (having seen LWA but none of the others you listed), and just like you I sometimes found a doujin I liked very much despite not knowing the series. At some point I then, whenever I read a good doujin, checked the author's page for related (same series/pairing) doujin, hoping they had the same quality. That lead to having read multiple doujins of certain pairings, so after getting to know the characters in that way, I checked their pairing page. And after reading multiple doujins I knew if the series was interesting or maybe found other characters I liked.

So I got into it bit by bit, and can't link you to some great doujin that will get you to read all of them. Also it's obviously subjective which setting or pairing will be interesting to you, and I personally think that some works are more reliant on you knowing the source material (half of Touhou and KanColle doujins do nothing for me because I don't know character motivations and relations), while for example Love Live is pretty easy to get into if you find one or two characters you like.

Edit: I found that doujin that were not tagged as yuri but drama/comedy/slice of life/introspection were more reliant on existing knowledge of the series, maybe that helps.

last edited at Oct 1, 2018 4:14PM

Welcome to sangakubu and Sakura-chan’s Amazing Adventure Book 1

I found that doujin that were not tagged as yuri but drama/comedy/slice of life/introspection were more reliant on existing knowledge of the series

I think this is good advice, as is checking other works by authors of stuff you've liked