Fandom: Dear Yuletide Author 2018
Dear Yuletide Author,
Yuletide is my favorite fannish time of the year, and I can’t wait to see what you create. It brings me great joy to write stories for people for Yuletide, and I hope that you have a lot of fun and a wonderful experience this Yuletide.
Below, I’ve provided some general likes and Do Not Wants, as well as a few thoughts about why I like specific fandoms and characters. If there is a discrepancy between the general likes and DNWs and the fandom-specific information, go with the fandom-specific information.
My absolute favorite things: werewolves, crossovers and alternate universes, and monsters and magic.
You can find me on DW, LJ, and AO3 as escritoireazul.
Likes
+ stories about women, including f/f, gen, and het
+ werewolves, werewolf packs as families, and werewolf alternate universes in any canon
+ chosen families and adoption stories where adoption is treated as totally normal and adoption = real family and the adoption is not a BIG DRAMATIC SECRET
+ polyam families, threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes, in all configurations (Vs, triangles, dodecahedrons)
+ monsters of the week, casefic, adventure stories, mysteries
+ friends and family teaming up to save the world, especially on road trips
+ crossovers and fusions
+ kink (female top or dom only except for the biting and bloodplay): biting, light bondage, impact play, rough body play, bloodplay for supernatural characters, fireplay, marking, sensory overload, orgasm denial/controls, pegging
+ weird west AUs in any canon: I particularly like the outlaw feel of it, untamed and wild, big spaces with nowhere to hide, big woods claustrophobic around you, danger at every turn (as long as it avoids the magical Indian/savage Indian/white savior bullshit that can come along with weird west and westerns in general)
+ ghost hunting AUs of all types, including this state-mandated idea, in any canon
Do Not Want
+ characters dealing with racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, fat hate, or ableism within the story
+ character bashing
+ rape, non-con, and dub-con
+ embarrassment/humiliation
+ animal cruelty or death
+ character death (unless it is, for example, a character dying to become a vampire and therefore still being part of the story)
+ incest
+ big age difference in romantic relationships (except for supernatural characters), particularly an older man/younger woman
+ a/b/o or werewolf stories with Big Tough Alpha Male tropes
+ pregnancy, including mpreg
+ poetry
Requests
There are spoilers below for each of my requests, which are:
Touchstone Series by Andrea K Höst: Cassandra Devlin
United States of Asgard Series by Tessa Gratton: any (Astrid Glyn, Glory | Fenris Wolf, Signy Valborn, Soren Bearskin)
Grease (1978): Betty Rizzo
Touchstone Series by Andrea K Höst: Cassandra Devlin
Source Material:
A delightful portal fantasy/sci-fi romp across three main books, one epilogue, and one follow-up book from a different POV. The three main books, Stray, Lab Rat One, and Caszandra, are told from the perspective of Cassandra Devlin, an Australian teenager who accidentally walks through a portal into another world on her way home from exams one day. The adventures she has next start as wilderness survival and turn into a mix of future technology, superheroes, and the monsters that lurk just out of sight.
I love this series a ton and reread it about once a year. It is silly and sometimes needlessly wordy and often completely ridiculous, but it has a lot of heart at the core of it, and Cassandra’s journey from scared, lost girl to superhero is fun, and touching, and little frightening, and wonderful.
I love the worldbuilding in this series, particularly around the special talents some people have and how they recruited a bunch of teenagers to go fight monsters over and over and over again. I love how awkward Cassandra is, but how hard she works to adapt, the issues of privacy and autonomy and government that the story touches on more than once, and the way she really builds a chosen family in a world very unlike her own.
Prompts:
General:
They’ve just made official contact with Earth at the end of the fourth book. They bring tech that can cure cancer and most other illnesses, puts a computer into your head, basically lets you download a language (though it is still complicated to use), and people who can fly and read emotions and have telekinesis and on and on and on. People who have never dealt with racism (though a lot with classism), and who have been fighting an unending fight to keep their entire world alive, are now faced with the complications and hatred and lack of technological advances that comes with Earth. I would love to see how this goes. It’s set up that there will be a lot more back and forth between the worlds, exchanges of information and technology, of media and people. I’d love to see the twists and turns of this.
This is filled with tropes and iddy fun and I think it is ripe for crossovers or alternate universes. Ghost hunters? (...not actually all that AU, I suppose.) Weird west? Different kinds of monsters? Canon divergence at any point for more peril and hurt/comfort? Crossovers with other types of superheroes? Werewolves? It’s all good.
There’s a ton of time before Cassandra arrives where a bunch of teenagers are hunting monsters that keep regenerating. Some of them die. Some of them are left behind. They’re all hurt and heartbroken and struggling. I’d love more about the worldbuilding before Cassandra arrives, the triumphs and the failures, the hardcore training, the way their talents strengthen them but make them more vulnerable at the same time.
Cassandra has a theory at one point that much like they’re fighting a parasite world, that at one point Muina and these people were a parasite world on Earth that eventually broke free enough to be on its own. The current parasite world sacrifices teenagers (one ages ago and then tries again with Cassandra) to power it. I’d love to see the dark take on Muina being a parasite world and what that does to Cassandra and her Muina family while she’s fighting so hard to save them. What does that do to Muina, period, and its monsters and its powers and its technology almost indistinguishable from magic?
Cassandra Devlin:
We get a ton about Cassandra in the series, because the three main books and the epilogue are from her point of view (in a journal she’s keeping), and then the fourth book is from her mother’s point of view. The entire series covers a very short amount of time, though, and I’d love to see what comes next for Cassandra and her family.
Cassandra is under heavy governmental monitoring, and she chafes under that a lot. There’s also a background threat of even heavier monitoring simmering throughout the books. As she gets older and her life continues to change, as her kids grow up, what kind of conflicts occur? Does she ever talk her way off monitoring?
She’s thrust into being a parent to some pre-teen kids, as well as a younger child, and eventually has a baby, too. How does this transition go? She’s parenting in a world filled with technology and information and changes, and the family situation is complicated anyway. I’d love to see how she changes and doesn’t change as the family grows up.
Cassandra will not be allowed to return to Earth because of all the things that make her special and leave her on high monitoring, but does she eventually make it, once they establish an easier contact than a portal that opens once a year? She reconnects with her Earth family and two of her friends during the epilogue, but what does she deal with back on Earth? She’s a celebrity in Munin, does that translate to Earth as well now that she’s the main point of alien contact?
I ship Cassandra with Kaoren, her canon partner, as well as Nils, Zan, and Zee from the tagset and pretty much all of the other Setari First and Second squad people we get to know throughout the series. (If I could have nominated more characters, I absolutely would have.) They each have interesting powers, complicated romances, and are risking their lives to save their world again and again and again. Fraught, power-driven sex? Emotional breakdowns? Hurt/comfort? All sorts of tropes more than welcome.
United States of Asgard Series by Tessa Gratton: any (Astrid Glyn, Glory | Fenris Wolf, Signy Valborn, Soren Bearskin)
Source Material:
A three novel and three novella series about a world where the Norse gods are real and present in modern-day life. It is mostly the story of three teenagers who change their world, and the characters, gods and mortals alike, who surround them. Dot Hutchison once described the three books in an absolutely perfect way: If Soren’s journey was about accepting himself, and Signy’s about anchoring herself, then Astrid’s journey is about making herself.
I love the world Gratton built. I love the ways the gods are and are not involved with the human world, I love how they can and can’t be trusted, all at the same time, I love the details of how the world has changed because the gods are real and active and what that means for the USA. (One thing I hate is the treatment of the indigenous people and [lack of] characters; though there are a handful of references to what happened when the Norse gods and their followers came over, mostly they are erased from the narrative, with the exception of Soren’s Pacific Islander ancestry.)
Mostly, though, I love the characters. They are young and strong and weak and fierce, afraid and brave and driven, loved and loving, and, always, hungry to make the world better in whatever way that means to them. I love all of these characters, and would love to see their adventures, together and apart.
Prompts:
General:
This is another fandom ripe for crossovers and alternate universes. The easy crossovers are with other fandoms that have werewolves (Glory + all other werewolves ever, please and thank you) or that have Norse mythology somewhere in them, but all sorts of crossovers would work. Alternate universes, too: monsters and magic and gods in weird west? Spaceship adventures? Gothic monsters and romances? Everything sounds great.
Astrid Glyn:
The thing I love most about Astrid is that she weaves herself back into the strands of fate after she’s been pulled from them to become Idun. She makes her own fate, and gives herself adventures, and finds a way to be both a goddess and a girl.
I love her seething and her roadtrips with her mother before the start of the series, and would love to see more of that, the adventures they had, the futures they foretold. Astrid having romances in the Lokiskin camps where they stayed, Astrid dancing and spinning out into that great void between stars to see the future. I love her seething after she weaves herself back into the world, visceral and dangerous and amazing.
I’d love to see more of how she makes life work, being both a goddess and a girl. She finds a way for Idun to publicly love the Sun’s Berserk, the same way that Astrid loves Soren, but that changes a lot of things for them. How do their lives, together and apart, look now? Astrid is interested in making Idun more available to the public; does she ever manage that? What sort of adventures does she get up to now that she is maybe not quite so tied to her orchard but also accepts that she wants to be there with her trees?
I ship Astrid and Soren hard, and would love to see more of them together during any of the books or after, the way they build their lives together, a girl goddess and a very public berserker who would rather not be public at all. I also ship the two of them with Baldur, both during the first book, when he is mortal and gentled without his memories, but also after, when he’s back to being his glorious, flirtatious, overwhelming self. While I love any two of them together as well as all three, the core of this for me is how Astrid and Soren love each other, and I prefer that reflected no matter what else is going on.
I think that Astrid and Soren have the freedom to take lovers apart from each other (though, again, their love is the core of everything), and while I’m not sure Soren ever will, I think Astrid does, particularly of the gods and goddesses who come to her as friends. I love the hints in the canon that Astrid is maybe queer (there’s a scene in particular where Loki becomes a girl and they two of them spend the night together, possibly with sex -- I would love to see that part, actually), and I want to see that reflected elsewhere. (I particularly love Astrid and Signy, because they are so, so different, and the ways they each love Soren are different, and I think the two of them would clash in glorious ways. Same for Astrid and Glory.)
I’d love to see the friendships/lovers Astrid builds now that she’s determined not to lock herself away from the world. What does it look like, for a goddess who is also a girl to be friends with the gods? She and Glory spark off each other, and Glory is, for a long time, forbidden from Astrid’s orchard because of her hunger. Astrid opens her orchard to all, including the elf-as-a-trollmother, and I would love to see more of that in the future, and Glory being welcomed, too.
Glory | Fenris Wolf:
Glory is basically a werewolf, and she’s fated to devour the sun and signal Ragnarok. She’s bound to teenage girl shape, and her hunger rages unchecked. She is amazing.
Glory’s been alive a long, long time, and I would love to see the different ways the world looks to her at different times. She’s seen the rise and fall of countries, the changes to the ways the valkyries get to be valkyries, Soren becoming the first berserker in New Asgard history to swear to a god other than Odin; she’s seen and she’s done and she’s become bored of so many things. What sparked her interest, historically? What will catch her eye in the future? What does it look like, when she finally breaks free of her chains and devours Baldur, the sun?
She’s viciously sexual and violent and only lets the people she’s going to fight or fuck call her Fenris. Her hunger rages in all things. Show me these moments, painful, hot, dangerous, fucking and fighting, violence in the sex. Who does she fuck or fight? What does it take for a human to draw her attention? Soren intrigues her, but who else and what else can (even if only temporarily) sate her hunger? In short: vicious, violent, sexual, basically-a-god werewolf.
Signy Valborn:
Signy is pretty much the most brutal human character in the series, and far more brutal than even a lot of the gods as they are. She fights hard to prove herself as a Valkyrie, and she writes her rage into battle and blood and poetry, and she loves and hates in equal measure.
We get to see her quest to take the heart of troll mother to earn her place. This involves brutal training and terrible, vicious fights that nearly kill her more than once and leave many of the people she loves dead. She wants to bring back the brutal, bloody, death-filled ways of the Valkyries of old. What else does she do to fight that? With what she’s learned, does she find new ways to convince people to embrace this change?
What fights does she get up to after? What does she hunt? She fights with Soren, with him and with him by her side. She loves the Berserkers, their anger and their hunger and their rage the same as her own. What does she hunt with bands of them, particularly as the trolls come back after The Apple Throne?
I ship Signy and Glory, Signy and Soren, and Signy with other angry, hungry, fierce women, in the series or crossovers.
Soren Bearstar:
My love for Soren grows each time I reread the books (which is often). He’s so scared of his own power and rage, and he fights to control it and, when it breaks free, to focus it in a way that does the least amount of damage. I love that about him. He’s described a couple of times of holding to a path once he chooses it until fate itself bends to what he wants; he doesn’t choose between what fate has given him (and fate is very literally in this world), but makes his own strands (options) to choose. He changed the world by remembering Astrid and by becoming the Sun’s Berserk, and he is wonderful.
He has these grand adventures with the main characters, and they all end up loving him in one way or another. What other adventures does he get up to? He’s rescued a missing god, faced a powerful troll mother, fought a damn dragon: what don’t we get to see? Glory is terribly fond of him, and I’d love to see her drag him off onto more adventures. What sort of monsters does he fight? How else does he change the world?
He’s very different from all the other berserkers in a lot of ways, but at least one wants him to be his mentor. Signy once tells Soren that people push him away because he shuts them out first. Does he ever find any comfort with the berserkers? He is not the only “strange” one now, what with Vider not only being the only female berserker in generations, but eventually leaving her training to make her own life as a berserker. Do Soren and Vider start a trend of some berserkers finding their own way? (Soren’s father rebelled as well, for Soren and his mother, and was punished for it so harshly it triggered his berserker rage and ended badly. I hope Soren and Vider have happier endings.)
I ship Soren and Astrid with all the fire of a billion suns, and would love to see more of then. At the end of the third book, Astrid-as-Idun has fought for an even better way to have Soren in her life and to be public about it, has fought to make herself a place in the world after Astrid the girl has been ripped out of it to become Idun. Now that they are public, now that Soren is tied so strongly to the gods Baldur and Idun, what does that change for him? What does Astrid and Soren’s relationship look like as they get older? Now that they can be public, do they dance at the gods’ feasts? Do they date? Are they the subject of all the gossip rags?
I also ship the two of them with Baldur, both Baldur when he is both a god and a vulnerable mortal in the first book, but also as the series continues. Astrid loves the gods in wonderful, terrible ways, but Soren only learns to love them through Baldur, and I love the three of them together. Baldur is gentled when he is mortal in the first book, and I would love to see their deep friendship, their commit, explored further, but he’s glorious and flirtatious and overwhelming when he gets his memories back, and I would love to see how he, Soren, and Astrid figure out the new boundaries of their commit.
I think that though Astrid is the core of Soren’s heart, and he of hers, that they each have the freedom to take other lovers away from each other. I’m not entirely convinced Soren would actually act on this (except for Baldur, see above, and always with Astrid as their third, even if she’s not physically there), but I think the opportunity is there, and I’m curious as to whether he ever became comfortable enough in his own strength and rage and control to act on it.
Grease (1978): Betty Rizzo
Source Material: American musical comedy/romance. It’s silly and sweet and funny and some of the songs are way too memorable for their own good, particularly “Greased Lightnin,” “Summer Nights,” and “You’re the One That I Want.” I love this movie for how ridiculous it is, and how heartfelt, for how it is happy and funny one moment and fairly deep the next, and for how their friendships ebb and flow and, in the end, come together.
Note: I’ve never seen the 1971 musical or the sequel movie. I don’t mind if you use details from that, but I’m not familiar with them.
Prompts:
General:
Again with the alternate universes. How do the dynamics between Rizzo and Sandy (and possibly between them and the rest of the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds) translate into other settings? Weird west? Straight up western, with outlaw Rizzo and good girl sheriff Sandy? Modern day high school or college? Monster hunting? Ghost stories? Haunted carnivals? Circus AU? I love the way Rizzo and Sandy spark off each other, and I would be happy to see it anywhere.
Are the Pink Ladies a coven of witches trying to woo Sandy? Is Sandy a witch hunter?
Pink Lady and T-Bird adventures over the years, together or apart.
There are some big time skips in the movie. What happens in those places we don’t see? Who comes together or separates? What friendships are made and/or burned? What kind of trouble do they all make.
Rizzo:
How does Rizzo’s sharpness stay with her and/or change as she grows older? What does she do with her life? Does she stay in touch with the Pink Ladies? Does she escape to a city and the freedom it promises?
What’s the history of the Pink Ladies? Did Rizzo have to earn her way into it? How? Are there initiations and hazing rituals?
I just want more Rizzo doing anything at all, sharp and funny and raw and keeping her emotions hidden, or maybe learning that sometimes it’s safe to let them show.
I ship Rizzo and Sandy like burning. They have great chemistry together, and I’d love to see that played up more, either in canon divergence during the movie itself or in post-movie life as they grow up and into the women they’re becoming. Rizzo’s sharp edges and soft interior are one of my favorite combinations, and I love how Sandy tries to echo her so much, partly without even knowing it. I also ship Rizzo/Kenickie and Rizzo/Sandy/Danny/Kenickie and would love to see what happens to them as they grow up.
This entry was original posted at https://escritoireazul.dreamwidth.org/458432.html with
comments. Reply here or there.
Yuletide is my favorite fannish time of the year, and I can’t wait to see what you create. It brings me great joy to write stories for people for Yuletide, and I hope that you have a lot of fun and a wonderful experience this Yuletide.
Below, I’ve provided some general likes and Do Not Wants, as well as a few thoughts about why I like specific fandoms and characters. If there is a discrepancy between the general likes and DNWs and the fandom-specific information, go with the fandom-specific information.
My absolute favorite things: werewolves, crossovers and alternate universes, and monsters and magic.
You can find me on DW, LJ, and AO3 as escritoireazul.
Likes
+ stories about women, including f/f, gen, and het
+ werewolves, werewolf packs as families, and werewolf alternate universes in any canon
+ chosen families and adoption stories where adoption is treated as totally normal and adoption = real family and the adoption is not a BIG DRAMATIC SECRET
+ polyam families, threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes, in all configurations (Vs, triangles, dodecahedrons)
+ monsters of the week, casefic, adventure stories, mysteries
+ friends and family teaming up to save the world, especially on road trips
+ crossovers and fusions
+ kink (female top or dom only except for the biting and bloodplay): biting, light bondage, impact play, rough body play, bloodplay for supernatural characters, fireplay, marking, sensory overload, orgasm denial/controls, pegging
+ weird west AUs in any canon: I particularly like the outlaw feel of it, untamed and wild, big spaces with nowhere to hide, big woods claustrophobic around you, danger at every turn (as long as it avoids the magical Indian/savage Indian/white savior bullshit that can come along with weird west and westerns in general)
+ ghost hunting AUs of all types, including this state-mandated idea, in any canon
Do Not Want
+ characters dealing with racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, fat hate, or ableism within the story
+ character bashing
+ rape, non-con, and dub-con
+ embarrassment/humiliation
+ animal cruelty or death
+ character death (unless it is, for example, a character dying to become a vampire and therefore still being part of the story)
+ incest
+ big age difference in romantic relationships (except for supernatural characters), particularly an older man/younger woman
+ a/b/o or werewolf stories with Big Tough Alpha Male tropes
+ pregnancy, including mpreg
+ poetry
Requests
There are spoilers below for each of my requests, which are:
Touchstone Series by Andrea K Höst: Cassandra Devlin
United States of Asgard Series by Tessa Gratton: any (Astrid Glyn, Glory | Fenris Wolf, Signy Valborn, Soren Bearskin)
Grease (1978): Betty Rizzo
Touchstone Series by Andrea K Höst: Cassandra Devlin
Source Material:
A delightful portal fantasy/sci-fi romp across three main books, one epilogue, and one follow-up book from a different POV. The three main books, Stray, Lab Rat One, and Caszandra, are told from the perspective of Cassandra Devlin, an Australian teenager who accidentally walks through a portal into another world on her way home from exams one day. The adventures she has next start as wilderness survival and turn into a mix of future technology, superheroes, and the monsters that lurk just out of sight.
I love this series a ton and reread it about once a year. It is silly and sometimes needlessly wordy and often completely ridiculous, but it has a lot of heart at the core of it, and Cassandra’s journey from scared, lost girl to superhero is fun, and touching, and little frightening, and wonderful.
I love the worldbuilding in this series, particularly around the special talents some people have and how they recruited a bunch of teenagers to go fight monsters over and over and over again. I love how awkward Cassandra is, but how hard she works to adapt, the issues of privacy and autonomy and government that the story touches on more than once, and the way she really builds a chosen family in a world very unlike her own.
Prompts:
General:
They’ve just made official contact with Earth at the end of the fourth book. They bring tech that can cure cancer and most other illnesses, puts a computer into your head, basically lets you download a language (though it is still complicated to use), and people who can fly and read emotions and have telekinesis and on and on and on. People who have never dealt with racism (though a lot with classism), and who have been fighting an unending fight to keep their entire world alive, are now faced with the complications and hatred and lack of technological advances that comes with Earth. I would love to see how this goes. It’s set up that there will be a lot more back and forth between the worlds, exchanges of information and technology, of media and people. I’d love to see the twists and turns of this.
This is filled with tropes and iddy fun and I think it is ripe for crossovers or alternate universes. Ghost hunters? (...not actually all that AU, I suppose.) Weird west? Different kinds of monsters? Canon divergence at any point for more peril and hurt/comfort? Crossovers with other types of superheroes? Werewolves? It’s all good.
There’s a ton of time before Cassandra arrives where a bunch of teenagers are hunting monsters that keep regenerating. Some of them die. Some of them are left behind. They’re all hurt and heartbroken and struggling. I’d love more about the worldbuilding before Cassandra arrives, the triumphs and the failures, the hardcore training, the way their talents strengthen them but make them more vulnerable at the same time.
Cassandra has a theory at one point that much like they’re fighting a parasite world, that at one point Muina and these people were a parasite world on Earth that eventually broke free enough to be on its own. The current parasite world sacrifices teenagers (one ages ago and then tries again with Cassandra) to power it. I’d love to see the dark take on Muina being a parasite world and what that does to Cassandra and her Muina family while she’s fighting so hard to save them. What does that do to Muina, period, and its monsters and its powers and its technology almost indistinguishable from magic?
Cassandra Devlin:
We get a ton about Cassandra in the series, because the three main books and the epilogue are from her point of view (in a journal she’s keeping), and then the fourth book is from her mother’s point of view. The entire series covers a very short amount of time, though, and I’d love to see what comes next for Cassandra and her family.
Cassandra is under heavy governmental monitoring, and she chafes under that a lot. There’s also a background threat of even heavier monitoring simmering throughout the books. As she gets older and her life continues to change, as her kids grow up, what kind of conflicts occur? Does she ever talk her way off monitoring?
She’s thrust into being a parent to some pre-teen kids, as well as a younger child, and eventually has a baby, too. How does this transition go? She’s parenting in a world filled with technology and information and changes, and the family situation is complicated anyway. I’d love to see how she changes and doesn’t change as the family grows up.
Cassandra will not be allowed to return to Earth because of all the things that make her special and leave her on high monitoring, but does she eventually make it, once they establish an easier contact than a portal that opens once a year? She reconnects with her Earth family and two of her friends during the epilogue, but what does she deal with back on Earth? She’s a celebrity in Munin, does that translate to Earth as well now that she’s the main point of alien contact?
I ship Cassandra with Kaoren, her canon partner, as well as Nils, Zan, and Zee from the tagset and pretty much all of the other Setari First and Second squad people we get to know throughout the series. (If I could have nominated more characters, I absolutely would have.) They each have interesting powers, complicated romances, and are risking their lives to save their world again and again and again. Fraught, power-driven sex? Emotional breakdowns? Hurt/comfort? All sorts of tropes more than welcome.
United States of Asgard Series by Tessa Gratton: any (Astrid Glyn, Glory | Fenris Wolf, Signy Valborn, Soren Bearskin)
Source Material:
A three novel and three novella series about a world where the Norse gods are real and present in modern-day life. It is mostly the story of three teenagers who change their world, and the characters, gods and mortals alike, who surround them. Dot Hutchison once described the three books in an absolutely perfect way: If Soren’s journey was about accepting himself, and Signy’s about anchoring herself, then Astrid’s journey is about making herself.
I love the world Gratton built. I love the ways the gods are and are not involved with the human world, I love how they can and can’t be trusted, all at the same time, I love the details of how the world has changed because the gods are real and active and what that means for the USA. (One thing I hate is the treatment of the indigenous people and [lack of] characters; though there are a handful of references to what happened when the Norse gods and their followers came over, mostly they are erased from the narrative, with the exception of Soren’s Pacific Islander ancestry.)
Mostly, though, I love the characters. They are young and strong and weak and fierce, afraid and brave and driven, loved and loving, and, always, hungry to make the world better in whatever way that means to them. I love all of these characters, and would love to see their adventures, together and apart.
Prompts:
General:
This is another fandom ripe for crossovers and alternate universes. The easy crossovers are with other fandoms that have werewolves (Glory + all other werewolves ever, please and thank you) or that have Norse mythology somewhere in them, but all sorts of crossovers would work. Alternate universes, too: monsters and magic and gods in weird west? Spaceship adventures? Gothic monsters and romances? Everything sounds great.
Astrid Glyn:
The thing I love most about Astrid is that she weaves herself back into the strands of fate after she’s been pulled from them to become Idun. She makes her own fate, and gives herself adventures, and finds a way to be both a goddess and a girl.
I love her seething and her roadtrips with her mother before the start of the series, and would love to see more of that, the adventures they had, the futures they foretold. Astrid having romances in the Lokiskin camps where they stayed, Astrid dancing and spinning out into that great void between stars to see the future. I love her seething after she weaves herself back into the world, visceral and dangerous and amazing.
I’d love to see more of how she makes life work, being both a goddess and a girl. She finds a way for Idun to publicly love the Sun’s Berserk, the same way that Astrid loves Soren, but that changes a lot of things for them. How do their lives, together and apart, look now? Astrid is interested in making Idun more available to the public; does she ever manage that? What sort of adventures does she get up to now that she is maybe not quite so tied to her orchard but also accepts that she wants to be there with her trees?
I ship Astrid and Soren hard, and would love to see more of them together during any of the books or after, the way they build their lives together, a girl goddess and a very public berserker who would rather not be public at all. I also ship the two of them with Baldur, both during the first book, when he is mortal and gentled without his memories, but also after, when he’s back to being his glorious, flirtatious, overwhelming self. While I love any two of them together as well as all three, the core of this for me is how Astrid and Soren love each other, and I prefer that reflected no matter what else is going on.
I think that Astrid and Soren have the freedom to take lovers apart from each other (though, again, their love is the core of everything), and while I’m not sure Soren ever will, I think Astrid does, particularly of the gods and goddesses who come to her as friends. I love the hints in the canon that Astrid is maybe queer (there’s a scene in particular where Loki becomes a girl and they two of them spend the night together, possibly with sex -- I would love to see that part, actually), and I want to see that reflected elsewhere. (I particularly love Astrid and Signy, because they are so, so different, and the ways they each love Soren are different, and I think the two of them would clash in glorious ways. Same for Astrid and Glory.)
I’d love to see the friendships/lovers Astrid builds now that she’s determined not to lock herself away from the world. What does it look like, for a goddess who is also a girl to be friends with the gods? She and Glory spark off each other, and Glory is, for a long time, forbidden from Astrid’s orchard because of her hunger. Astrid opens her orchard to all, including the elf-as-a-trollmother, and I would love to see more of that in the future, and Glory being welcomed, too.
Glory | Fenris Wolf:
Glory is basically a werewolf, and she’s fated to devour the sun and signal Ragnarok. She’s bound to teenage girl shape, and her hunger rages unchecked. She is amazing.
Glory’s been alive a long, long time, and I would love to see the different ways the world looks to her at different times. She’s seen the rise and fall of countries, the changes to the ways the valkyries get to be valkyries, Soren becoming the first berserker in New Asgard history to swear to a god other than Odin; she’s seen and she’s done and she’s become bored of so many things. What sparked her interest, historically? What will catch her eye in the future? What does it look like, when she finally breaks free of her chains and devours Baldur, the sun?
She’s viciously sexual and violent and only lets the people she’s going to fight or fuck call her Fenris. Her hunger rages in all things. Show me these moments, painful, hot, dangerous, fucking and fighting, violence in the sex. Who does she fuck or fight? What does it take for a human to draw her attention? Soren intrigues her, but who else and what else can (even if only temporarily) sate her hunger? In short: vicious, violent, sexual, basically-a-god werewolf.
Signy Valborn:
Signy is pretty much the most brutal human character in the series, and far more brutal than even a lot of the gods as they are. She fights hard to prove herself as a Valkyrie, and she writes her rage into battle and blood and poetry, and she loves and hates in equal measure.
We get to see her quest to take the heart of troll mother to earn her place. This involves brutal training and terrible, vicious fights that nearly kill her more than once and leave many of the people she loves dead. She wants to bring back the brutal, bloody, death-filled ways of the Valkyries of old. What else does she do to fight that? With what she’s learned, does she find new ways to convince people to embrace this change?
What fights does she get up to after? What does she hunt? She fights with Soren, with him and with him by her side. She loves the Berserkers, their anger and their hunger and their rage the same as her own. What does she hunt with bands of them, particularly as the trolls come back after The Apple Throne?
I ship Signy and Glory, Signy and Soren, and Signy with other angry, hungry, fierce women, in the series or crossovers.
Soren Bearstar:
My love for Soren grows each time I reread the books (which is often). He’s so scared of his own power and rage, and he fights to control it and, when it breaks free, to focus it in a way that does the least amount of damage. I love that about him. He’s described a couple of times of holding to a path once he chooses it until fate itself bends to what he wants; he doesn’t choose between what fate has given him (and fate is very literally in this world), but makes his own strands (options) to choose. He changed the world by remembering Astrid and by becoming the Sun’s Berserk, and he is wonderful.
He has these grand adventures with the main characters, and they all end up loving him in one way or another. What other adventures does he get up to? He’s rescued a missing god, faced a powerful troll mother, fought a damn dragon: what don’t we get to see? Glory is terribly fond of him, and I’d love to see her drag him off onto more adventures. What sort of monsters does he fight? How else does he change the world?
He’s very different from all the other berserkers in a lot of ways, but at least one wants him to be his mentor. Signy once tells Soren that people push him away because he shuts them out first. Does he ever find any comfort with the berserkers? He is not the only “strange” one now, what with Vider not only being the only female berserker in generations, but eventually leaving her training to make her own life as a berserker. Do Soren and Vider start a trend of some berserkers finding their own way? (Soren’s father rebelled as well, for Soren and his mother, and was punished for it so harshly it triggered his berserker rage and ended badly. I hope Soren and Vider have happier endings.)
I ship Soren and Astrid with all the fire of a billion suns, and would love to see more of then. At the end of the third book, Astrid-as-Idun has fought for an even better way to have Soren in her life and to be public about it, has fought to make herself a place in the world after Astrid the girl has been ripped out of it to become Idun. Now that they are public, now that Soren is tied so strongly to the gods Baldur and Idun, what does that change for him? What does Astrid and Soren’s relationship look like as they get older? Now that they can be public, do they dance at the gods’ feasts? Do they date? Are they the subject of all the gossip rags?
I also ship the two of them with Baldur, both Baldur when he is both a god and a vulnerable mortal in the first book, but also as the series continues. Astrid loves the gods in wonderful, terrible ways, but Soren only learns to love them through Baldur, and I love the three of them together. Baldur is gentled when he is mortal in the first book, and I would love to see their deep friendship, their commit, explored further, but he’s glorious and flirtatious and overwhelming when he gets his memories back, and I would love to see how he, Soren, and Astrid figure out the new boundaries of their commit.
I think that though Astrid is the core of Soren’s heart, and he of hers, that they each have the freedom to take other lovers away from each other. I’m not entirely convinced Soren would actually act on this (except for Baldur, see above, and always with Astrid as their third, even if she’s not physically there), but I think the opportunity is there, and I’m curious as to whether he ever became comfortable enough in his own strength and rage and control to act on it.
Grease (1978): Betty Rizzo
Source Material: American musical comedy/romance. It’s silly and sweet and funny and some of the songs are way too memorable for their own good, particularly “Greased Lightnin,” “Summer Nights,” and “You’re the One That I Want.” I love this movie for how ridiculous it is, and how heartfelt, for how it is happy and funny one moment and fairly deep the next, and for how their friendships ebb and flow and, in the end, come together.
Note: I’ve never seen the 1971 musical or the sequel movie. I don’t mind if you use details from that, but I’m not familiar with them.
Prompts:
General:
Again with the alternate universes. How do the dynamics between Rizzo and Sandy (and possibly between them and the rest of the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds) translate into other settings? Weird west? Straight up western, with outlaw Rizzo and good girl sheriff Sandy? Modern day high school or college? Monster hunting? Ghost stories? Haunted carnivals? Circus AU? I love the way Rizzo and Sandy spark off each other, and I would be happy to see it anywhere.
Are the Pink Ladies a coven of witches trying to woo Sandy? Is Sandy a witch hunter?
Pink Lady and T-Bird adventures over the years, together or apart.
There are some big time skips in the movie. What happens in those places we don’t see? Who comes together or separates? What friendships are made and/or burned? What kind of trouble do they all make.
Rizzo:
How does Rizzo’s sharpness stay with her and/or change as she grows older? What does she do with her life? Does she stay in touch with the Pink Ladies? Does she escape to a city and the freedom it promises?
What’s the history of the Pink Ladies? Did Rizzo have to earn her way into it? How? Are there initiations and hazing rituals?
I just want more Rizzo doing anything at all, sharp and funny and raw and keeping her emotions hidden, or maybe learning that sometimes it’s safe to let them show.
I ship Rizzo and Sandy like burning. They have great chemistry together, and I’d love to see that played up more, either in canon divergence during the movie itself or in post-movie life as they grow up and into the women they’re becoming. Rizzo’s sharp edges and soft interior are one of my favorite combinations, and I love how Sandy tries to echo her so much, partly without even knowing it. I also ship Rizzo/Kenickie and Rizzo/Sandy/Danny/Kenickie and would love to see what happens to them as they grow up.
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