DEAR YULETIDE AUTHOR
Oct. 29th, 2014 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gogollescentHi! I'm a dreadful person and neglected to actually include any optional details in my sign-up before closing time, so hopefully you've found this letter and don't mind getting only the longer-winded version. Probably this is where I should note--with extra emphasis this year--that everything I put down here amounts to no more than a wild suggestion. Thank you in advance for the gift!
As far as overall preferences go, I'm a pretty eclectic reader, and if you're into it I probably will be too. I like humor? Most of the fandoms I'm requesting this year have canons that I think of as very funny, on a level that's hard to disentangle from the content; therefore I will appreciate anything you include by way of either canon-esque jokes or your own personal comedic spin. On the other hand, if you'd rather exploit the differences in medium and take your fic down a more introspective or dramatic route than the tonal parameters of anime/Disney cartoons/Susanna Clarke's footnotes permit, I'd be down for that, too.
Okay, turning to individual fandoms:
1. Ghost Trick (Lynne, Sissel, and Yomiel)
Geez, I loved this game. I'd be happy with any kind of ensemble piece depicting the post-reset status quo, but the reason I requested the above three characters is that I a) adored Lynne and Sissel's silly attempt at a distrustful and self-serving alliance, as conducted by two really good-natured people who just wanted to save lives; b) was stupidly affected by Sissel and Yomiel's backstory for someone who claims to be indifferent to cats; and c) thought Lynne's ability to reach out to Yomiel, after ten years of loneliness and one mutually traumatic hostage-taking attempt, was really the emotional lynchpin of the story, and totally sold me on the comprehensive happy ending. So that's a trio of relationships I find interesting and endearing, and one I hope would survive, in altered form, in the new and improved universe we're given come Ghost Trick's epilogue.
How you want to explore it is up to you; I can imagine that Lynne would continue to have need of an undead meteorite-powered feline on detective adventures--and just maybe for a star ex-con programmer, albeit he's probably not going to be officially allowed near any security systems for a long time. Alternatively, quiet found family time! Alternatively, something set within the action of the game, or a darker AU of the ending--whatever's most conducive to playing with these particular character dynamics. I'm not averse to shipping, except as it would hypothetically involve Yomiel and his cat (I do not have these qualms with Lynne and Yomiel's cat); on the other hand, I'm not really looking for it with this fandom either. Follow your heart.
(Totally self-indulgent bonus: if you have, by any chance, also played the Ace Attorney games, I would love any form of crossover--whether that's a cameo appearance from Ema Skye or a full-blown merger plot involving, like, Kurain's scandalous afterlife connections. Obviously this is 100% at your discretion, even beyond the optional-detailness of everything else I've asked for. But Shu Takumi seeds so many repeated injokes that I can't resist speculating a little.)
2. Fate/Zero (Arturia Pendragon, Irisviel von Einzbern)
Iri/Saber is one of those pairings that seems to live in the shadow of a number of other relationships, while still retaining a peculiar emotional signature all its own. I'm super interested in it as something that Arturia treats almost as her due, upon arriving in present-day England, even though--from what we gather about the Fate-verse Round Table and associated cast members--she did not have an equivalent bond with Guinevere (or anyone else around her. Note that I'm casually enthusiastic about the Matter of Britain in general, so any flashbacks, bits of conversational reminiscing, and historickal dream sequences you might put in would be eagerly received.) And while it serves to illustrate her chivalry, and her attitude of patriarchal entitlement, it also presumably arises from some genuine, surprising chemistry, of a type that she didn't necessarily encounter or have the ability to act on in life.
At the same time, as King Arthur, she represses pretty hard on any infidelity-related subjects, and hardly seems able to engage with concepts of shame and culpability except at the level of nation-building. There's this weird way in which she skims right over her newfound position as the extramarital gallant, rather than the betrayed husband; and Irisviel encourages it, I think, for obvious practical reasons. I'm really interested in Irisviel's pragmatism in general, and the ambiguity of her actual feelings on Kiritsugu/his ideals--clearly there's an intense loyalty and gratitude at work there, but beyond that the picture starts to break down. I'd buy a reading in which she loves him in a recognizably romantic way, and her relationship with Saber falls under the umbrella of tasks undertaken to help Kiritsugu (albeit as a mission that, once she takes it up, she pursues single-mindedly and with no tolerance for outside threats to her control over Saber, e.g. Diarmuid). I'm equally willing to suppose that her feelings for her husband are more along the lines of pity and faithfulness, augmented, maybe, by the unconscious influence of the Grail. And of course you don't have to make mention of Kerry at all--I would probably have nominated him if I had noticed he didn't make it into the tagset this year, but as things stand, I'm not that fussed about it either way; inclusion of things like Saber getting Kerry's dreams + correspondent insight into Iri's life and personality would be welcome, but only if you're moved to it. Mostly I just think the fact of Iri/Saber being adulterous and utilitarian is important to even their fluffiest isolated interactions.
I realize that this was a lot of ship thoughts without much actual prompt. I am open to anything in the way of filling in the blanks of Team Saber's activities when preparing for and taking downtime from the Grail War! But I'd be particularly interested in stuff from the last few days, when Irisviel has been dramatically weakened and the weirdness of her homunculus status is enhanced. Also, if you wanted to do some kind of equivalent fantasy sequence to what Kiritsugu gets from conversing with Grail, only with Saber and Grail!Irisviel and Saber's wish instead, I would be really into that. It feels like a natural but absent complement to what we see in the show. Plus it's a possible opportunity to make explicit the tension between Saber's real priorities and her nearly absent-minded protectiveness and honest affection toward Irisviel, which, as has probably been made evident, is one of my major points of interest in their dynamic. That said, my main wish is for more of these two, and any plot you come up with where they're front-and-center will delight me.
3. Madoka (Miki Sayaka, Kaname Madoka, Sakura Kyouko, Akemi Homura)
Ha ha ha, Madoka! Oh, what a silly show. What a riot. Okay, anyway, I just watched this quite recently and am still nursing a few bruises, but I basically enjoyed everything about Sayaka's compact tragedy-within-a-tragedy, and she's the person I really want fic about. I've included the other three for a couple of reasons: I ship Sayaka/Madoka fairly hard, though not at all to the exclusion of Sayaka/Kyouko and outsider-POV Homura/Madoka--if possible, I'd love it if you got in snippets of both in whatever you write, though of course depending on the length of the fic there may not be practical room; and I specifically like Sayaka's resentful mistrust and jealousy toward Homura, as part of Sayaka/Madoka-type subtext, and the way in which it impacts and twists her rapid descent. It's also something that seems to be a constant between timelines, and if you want to write something that samples from multiple Sayaka's downfalls, I'd be into it.
Other things I liked and would like to see kept from her arc--I love the Soul Gem stuff, I love the creepiness of a displaced self and the ambiguity of how it affects her sensory experience. If you read my Fate/Zero request, I guess my enthusiasm for it comes from a similar place as my interest in Irisviel's dying-homunculus problems--mastery over a body as distinct from really inhabiting it, and how that does and doesn't make life/significant relationships easier to surrender. I like the mixture of callousness and grace with which she accepts Kyouko's backstory infodump, and by extension Kyouko--again, the uncertainty about how we're supposed to view her rising above her old grudges, as something that's both a manifestation of her apathy and despair, but also ends up simulating a certain form of clear-sighted, incidental kindness, and even an enviable black humor about the whole affair. I love when she cracks and urges Madoka to make a contract and join her; I love that Madoka refuses, and Sayaka regrets it. This is obviously not a pairing I'm going to seek porn for, unless you want to explore some kind of AU where they last much longer before Walpurgisnacht, but other forms of attempted intimacy and rejection I am all about, as an extension of Sayaka's feelings of disconnect from her own body and Madoka's guilt.
4. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
This is one Yuletide fandom I've requested before, and my prompts from last year still hold as things I'd be embarrassingly excited to read if you wanted to write them. In general, I was invested enough in the many subplots and characters that anybody you want to catch up on post-book--or if you want to shade in the parts of their lives that Clarke's narrative didn't have space to home in on--would be great for me. I love JSMN's world, I love the style, I love its moral reasoning and structure; there are a lot of holes to fill in on that honeycomb, so if you have a fic you've always wanted to write for this fandom but not the impetus to, this is where I say, do that.
If not, I also have a ludicrously specific idfic prompt! To wit, I'm interested in Rule 63 scenarios, especially as they involve Johanna Strange. Strange is, imo, one of those character for whom gender is an even more decisive factor than it initially appears to be; it's specifically as an upper-class, previously fortunate cis man that he's primed to react to Norrell's abuse with surprise, disbelief, and eventually indifference. Well, no, anyone might be surprised--but there's a level on which only an innately decent and fairly sheltered gentleman could take the road Strange does. For Johanna Strange, I think, Norrell's manipulation campaign would look very different, and so would his treatment of people like Childermass and Emma Pole; she would have an easier time bitterly relating their plights back to hers, and her relationships with them would have to shift accordingly. Her determination to save Arabella takes on a different tenor too. In general, if you actually do pick up this idea for an AU, I'd prefer that you kept the (socially recognized) genders of other players the same; but I'm up for either Arabella as Johanna's husband or as her, ahem, good friend.
5. Gravity Falls
This is another fandom where I'm primarily looking for stuff that reproduces and embroiders on the atmosphere of the original: whether that's a story about Wendy vs. an angry dryad, or "Grunkle Stan recruits Mabel as bodyguard and enforcer after the leprechauns launch assassination attempts," or "Dipper and Candy combine their designated-nerd powers for good, but the alliance falls apart when Candy puts on the ring they've forged, steals notebook 2, and becomes Witch Queen of the Forest..." You know, just whatever. I'm very fond of the main five, though I'd prefer not to have a Soos-centric story, I guess; I also wouldn't mind a spotlight on more minor characters, like Pacifica or Robbie. Dipper and Mabel's sibling bond is a favorite, as well as their respective amounts of sway over Stan's embalmed black heart, and I've been really digging Wendy's recent characterization as an awkward, nervous, lonely kid whose casual social graces aren't very, and who's attached herself to the Pines family more or less accidentally but is finding it a useful outlet.
What else. Mabel is probably my favorite character on the show! One thing I WOULD love, if you wanted to do a plottier fic, would be a situation in which Mabel, rather than Dipper, makes an ill-advised bargain with the supernatural and has to single-handedly repair the damage; it's happened in canon before, sort of, but almost exclusively in the context of romance and usually not to the same catastrophic degree as it does for Dipper. Mabel strikes me as pretty high-strung and, while not normally as unwilling to seek outside help or admit error as Dipper is, I think there are circumstances under which she might revert to that sort of lone-ranger mentality, particularly if Dipper himself isn't available. More interactions with Bill would be cute, more emphasis on her resemblance to Stan as a driven, occasionally ruthless personality--okay, that's a little too serious of a description, given that this is Gravity Falls we're talking about. But the show goes darkest when dealing with various shades of unscrupulous ambition, and I think Mabel gets underused for that.
And that's it for my input. Thank you again for taking the time out to do this; I really look forward to reading your fic.
As far as overall preferences go, I'm a pretty eclectic reader, and if you're into it I probably will be too. I like humor? Most of the fandoms I'm requesting this year have canons that I think of as very funny, on a level that's hard to disentangle from the content; therefore I will appreciate anything you include by way of either canon-esque jokes or your own personal comedic spin. On the other hand, if you'd rather exploit the differences in medium and take your fic down a more introspective or dramatic route than the tonal parameters of anime/Disney cartoons/Susanna Clarke's footnotes permit, I'd be down for that, too.
Okay, turning to individual fandoms:
1. Ghost Trick (Lynne, Sissel, and Yomiel)
Geez, I loved this game. I'd be happy with any kind of ensemble piece depicting the post-reset status quo, but the reason I requested the above three characters is that I a) adored Lynne and Sissel's silly attempt at a distrustful and self-serving alliance, as conducted by two really good-natured people who just wanted to save lives; b) was stupidly affected by Sissel and Yomiel's backstory for someone who claims to be indifferent to cats; and c) thought Lynne's ability to reach out to Yomiel, after ten years of loneliness and one mutually traumatic hostage-taking attempt, was really the emotional lynchpin of the story, and totally sold me on the comprehensive happy ending. So that's a trio of relationships I find interesting and endearing, and one I hope would survive, in altered form, in the new and improved universe we're given come Ghost Trick's epilogue.
How you want to explore it is up to you; I can imagine that Lynne would continue to have need of an undead meteorite-powered feline on detective adventures--and just maybe for a star ex-con programmer, albeit he's probably not going to be officially allowed near any security systems for a long time. Alternatively, quiet found family time! Alternatively, something set within the action of the game, or a darker AU of the ending--whatever's most conducive to playing with these particular character dynamics. I'm not averse to shipping, except as it would hypothetically involve Yomiel and his cat (I do not have these qualms with Lynne and Yomiel's cat); on the other hand, I'm not really looking for it with this fandom either. Follow your heart.
(Totally self-indulgent bonus: if you have, by any chance, also played the Ace Attorney games, I would love any form of crossover--whether that's a cameo appearance from Ema Skye or a full-blown merger plot involving, like, Kurain's scandalous afterlife connections. Obviously this is 100% at your discretion, even beyond the optional-detailness of everything else I've asked for. But Shu Takumi seeds so many repeated injokes that I can't resist speculating a little.)
2. Fate/Zero (Arturia Pendragon, Irisviel von Einzbern)
Iri/Saber is one of those pairings that seems to live in the shadow of a number of other relationships, while still retaining a peculiar emotional signature all its own. I'm super interested in it as something that Arturia treats almost as her due, upon arriving in present-day England, even though--from what we gather about the Fate-verse Round Table and associated cast members--she did not have an equivalent bond with Guinevere (or anyone else around her. Note that I'm casually enthusiastic about the Matter of Britain in general, so any flashbacks, bits of conversational reminiscing, and historickal dream sequences you might put in would be eagerly received.) And while it serves to illustrate her chivalry, and her attitude of patriarchal entitlement, it also presumably arises from some genuine, surprising chemistry, of a type that she didn't necessarily encounter or have the ability to act on in life.
At the same time, as King Arthur, she represses pretty hard on any infidelity-related subjects, and hardly seems able to engage with concepts of shame and culpability except at the level of nation-building. There's this weird way in which she skims right over her newfound position as the extramarital gallant, rather than the betrayed husband; and Irisviel encourages it, I think, for obvious practical reasons. I'm really interested in Irisviel's pragmatism in general, and the ambiguity of her actual feelings on Kiritsugu/his ideals--clearly there's an intense loyalty and gratitude at work there, but beyond that the picture starts to break down. I'd buy a reading in which she loves him in a recognizably romantic way, and her relationship with Saber falls under the umbrella of tasks undertaken to help Kiritsugu (albeit as a mission that, once she takes it up, she pursues single-mindedly and with no tolerance for outside threats to her control over Saber, e.g. Diarmuid). I'm equally willing to suppose that her feelings for her husband are more along the lines of pity and faithfulness, augmented, maybe, by the unconscious influence of the Grail. And of course you don't have to make mention of Kerry at all--I would probably have nominated him if I had noticed he didn't make it into the tagset this year, but as things stand, I'm not that fussed about it either way; inclusion of things like Saber getting Kerry's dreams + correspondent insight into Iri's life and personality would be welcome, but only if you're moved to it. Mostly I just think the fact of Iri/Saber being adulterous and utilitarian is important to even their fluffiest isolated interactions.
I realize that this was a lot of ship thoughts without much actual prompt. I am open to anything in the way of filling in the blanks of Team Saber's activities when preparing for and taking downtime from the Grail War! But I'd be particularly interested in stuff from the last few days, when Irisviel has been dramatically weakened and the weirdness of her homunculus status is enhanced. Also, if you wanted to do some kind of equivalent fantasy sequence to what Kiritsugu gets from conversing with Grail, only with Saber and Grail!Irisviel and Saber's wish instead, I would be really into that. It feels like a natural but absent complement to what we see in the show. Plus it's a possible opportunity to make explicit the tension between Saber's real priorities and her nearly absent-minded protectiveness and honest affection toward Irisviel, which, as has probably been made evident, is one of my major points of interest in their dynamic. That said, my main wish is for more of these two, and any plot you come up with where they're front-and-center will delight me.
3. Madoka (Miki Sayaka, Kaname Madoka, Sakura Kyouko, Akemi Homura)
Ha ha ha, Madoka! Oh, what a silly show. What a riot. Okay, anyway, I just watched this quite recently and am still nursing a few bruises, but I basically enjoyed everything about Sayaka's compact tragedy-within-a-tragedy, and she's the person I really want fic about. I've included the other three for a couple of reasons: I ship Sayaka/Madoka fairly hard, though not at all to the exclusion of Sayaka/Kyouko and outsider-POV Homura/Madoka--if possible, I'd love it if you got in snippets of both in whatever you write, though of course depending on the length of the fic there may not be practical room; and I specifically like Sayaka's resentful mistrust and jealousy toward Homura, as part of Sayaka/Madoka-type subtext, and the way in which it impacts and twists her rapid descent. It's also something that seems to be a constant between timelines, and if you want to write something that samples from multiple Sayaka's downfalls, I'd be into it.
Other things I liked and would like to see kept from her arc--I love the Soul Gem stuff, I love the creepiness of a displaced self and the ambiguity of how it affects her sensory experience. If you read my Fate/Zero request, I guess my enthusiasm for it comes from a similar place as my interest in Irisviel's dying-homunculus problems--mastery over a body as distinct from really inhabiting it, and how that does and doesn't make life/significant relationships easier to surrender. I like the mixture of callousness and grace with which she accepts Kyouko's backstory infodump, and by extension Kyouko--again, the uncertainty about how we're supposed to view her rising above her old grudges, as something that's both a manifestation of her apathy and despair, but also ends up simulating a certain form of clear-sighted, incidental kindness, and even an enviable black humor about the whole affair. I love when she cracks and urges Madoka to make a contract and join her; I love that Madoka refuses, and Sayaka regrets it. This is obviously not a pairing I'm going to seek porn for, unless you want to explore some kind of AU where they last much longer before Walpurgisnacht, but other forms of attempted intimacy and rejection I am all about, as an extension of Sayaka's feelings of disconnect from her own body and Madoka's guilt.
4. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
This is one Yuletide fandom I've requested before, and my prompts from last year still hold as things I'd be embarrassingly excited to read if you wanted to write them. In general, I was invested enough in the many subplots and characters that anybody you want to catch up on post-book--or if you want to shade in the parts of their lives that Clarke's narrative didn't have space to home in on--would be great for me. I love JSMN's world, I love the style, I love its moral reasoning and structure; there are a lot of holes to fill in on that honeycomb, so if you have a fic you've always wanted to write for this fandom but not the impetus to, this is where I say, do that.
If not, I also have a ludicrously specific idfic prompt! To wit, I'm interested in Rule 63 scenarios, especially as they involve Johanna Strange. Strange is, imo, one of those character for whom gender is an even more decisive factor than it initially appears to be; it's specifically as an upper-class, previously fortunate cis man that he's primed to react to Norrell's abuse with surprise, disbelief, and eventually indifference. Well, no, anyone might be surprised--but there's a level on which only an innately decent and fairly sheltered gentleman could take the road Strange does. For Johanna Strange, I think, Norrell's manipulation campaign would look very different, and so would his treatment of people like Childermass and Emma Pole; she would have an easier time bitterly relating their plights back to hers, and her relationships with them would have to shift accordingly. Her determination to save Arabella takes on a different tenor too. In general, if you actually do pick up this idea for an AU, I'd prefer that you kept the (socially recognized) genders of other players the same; but I'm up for either Arabella as Johanna's husband or as her, ahem, good friend.
5. Gravity Falls
This is another fandom where I'm primarily looking for stuff that reproduces and embroiders on the atmosphere of the original: whether that's a story about Wendy vs. an angry dryad, or "Grunkle Stan recruits Mabel as bodyguard and enforcer after the leprechauns launch assassination attempts," or "Dipper and Candy combine their designated-nerd powers for good, but the alliance falls apart when Candy puts on the ring they've forged, steals notebook 2, and becomes Witch Queen of the Forest..." You know, just whatever. I'm very fond of the main five, though I'd prefer not to have a Soos-centric story, I guess; I also wouldn't mind a spotlight on more minor characters, like Pacifica or Robbie. Dipper and Mabel's sibling bond is a favorite, as well as their respective amounts of sway over Stan's embalmed black heart, and I've been really digging Wendy's recent characterization as an awkward, nervous, lonely kid whose casual social graces aren't very, and who's attached herself to the Pines family more or less accidentally but is finding it a useful outlet.
What else. Mabel is probably my favorite character on the show! One thing I WOULD love, if you wanted to do a plottier fic, would be a situation in which Mabel, rather than Dipper, makes an ill-advised bargain with the supernatural and has to single-handedly repair the damage; it's happened in canon before, sort of, but almost exclusively in the context of romance and usually not to the same catastrophic degree as it does for Dipper. Mabel strikes me as pretty high-strung and, while not normally as unwilling to seek outside help or admit error as Dipper is, I think there are circumstances under which she might revert to that sort of lone-ranger mentality, particularly if Dipper himself isn't available. More interactions with Bill would be cute, more emphasis on her resemblance to Stan as a driven, occasionally ruthless personality--okay, that's a little too serious of a description, given that this is Gravity Falls we're talking about. But the show goes darkest when dealing with various shades of unscrupulous ambition, and I think Mabel gets underused for that.
And that's it for my input. Thank you again for taking the time out to do this; I really look forward to reading your fic.
