dear Yuletide author:
Hello, hello! Happy pre-Yuletide! As you can probably tell, I barely use livejournal anymore, and have moved on, for the most part, to tumblr and AO3. Please, please consider this letter firmly in the ODAO camp: getting a fic for any of these fandoms is an absolute treat. The indications given here are only meant to help you define whatever you want to write if you need 'em. Go wild.
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dnws ☛ I don't have any big triggers. I'm not a fan of infidelity, I detest character-bashing, and I generally like to be warned if the fic contains major character death or non-con, but that's about it.
overall likes ☛ I do love dub-con, unhealthy dynamics, and/or codependent, ambiguous relationships. Give me fucked-up people being fucked-up and obsessed and all over each other and I will be happy. Just puttin' that out there.
I love characters who are terrifyingly passionate about things, who want and want and want and want, who would die for something. I like reading about people who are morally ambiguous or difficult to live with, who barely understand themselves-or who perfectly understand themselves, which is just a different kind of scary-as well as people who are really, really good at whatever they do, who do the job because the job needs doing, who are scarily competent and ascetically dedicated.
I also love kind characters: not characters who are nice for the sake of niceness, but genuinely, down to the core, bone-deep kind people; I actively seek out stories where softness isn't ~revolutionized and the characters within it are allowed to be scared, and vulnerable, and to need comfort. On the flip side of that, I also love characters who are so selflessly stoic it skirts the unhealthy.
On the flip flip side, I'm very fond of people (and stories) who can laugh at themselves. Self-deprecation undercuts that intensity in a way that makes it, IMO, more real. (Lookin' at you, Mark Watney.)
types o' fic ☛ I love porn! I also love non-porn! I like action writing and plotty stories and introspective pieces and meta fic, I enjoy character studies as much as I do PWPs, and really I tend to seek out anything that portrays emotion intensely, be it angst or comedy or hope or betrayal or grief or joy. I do have a personal preference for character-oriented stories, but action stories with strong character interactions fit that bill perfectly as well. Therefore, please feel free to make it as shippy or as gen as you prefer: so long as the characters feel stuff strongly I will 100% be into them.
If you do want to include sex: a+++++ for the kind of making-out that makes people forget about actually having sex. I'm also very fond of sex that's really an excuse for closeness, switching, intercrural, eating out, frottage, frantic sex, desperate 'we're about to get caught but I want you so much' sex, cock-warming (♥ ♥ ♥), angsty blowjobs, sex that goes wrong or gets derailed or just plain isn't perfect, slash, femslash, het, ot3s & more.
+ various tropes & narrative kinks I adore☛ people desperately pining for each other
☛ friends torn apart, who believe the other to be dead, who become enemies; alternatively: enemies who become friends & the gaining of trust; alternatively: both
☛ trope subversions, re-adaptations, well-thought modern updates (reincarnation AUs!), canon divergences, outsider POVs, metafic, anything that reinvents the canon on a deep level
☛ stoic characters breaking the fuck down
☛ bed-sharing, huddling for warmth, people being naked around each other and either 1. being completely and utterly overwhelmed by this or 2. being thoroughly comfortable with this, in a familiar 'I've known you all my life' kind of way
☛ revelations, people coming to terms with who they are, people realizing they've been lied to all along, people realizing the world around them isn't what they thought it was-related to this: identity porn
☛ young characters growing old-think Sherlock Holmes-style retirement stories; there is something very appealing to me about characters who have lived full, action-filled lives retiring to someplace quiet and learning to live differently
☛ found families, and more generally stories about difficult characters learning to trust each other
☛ Came Back Wrong narratives, Belly of the Whale narratives, 'I went to the Other Side and then came back' narratives
☛ apocalypses, floods, 'here at the end of all things'-scenarios
☛ war-time anything. The danger of it, the violence, the routine of it, together-against-the-word dynamics, communities coming together and fighting together, waiting for the sky to start falling down
☛ religious deconstructions, especially if you mix sex in: worship kink! oh my god!
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Coriolanus
what it is ☛ a Shakespeare play written sometime between 1605 and 1608. There's a lot in it about politics and the value of public opinion and the relationship between the population and government at a time when a story about a famine would have resonated very deeply with a Renaissance audience, but at its heart it's a war story about people who live, breathe, eat, and shit fighting. Caius Martius roars his way through the play, trying to balance his allegiances to Rome (his wife, his mother, his city, his loyalty, a population he despises and who despises him in turn) and his simpler, clearer, purer relationship to war, battle, and Tullus Aufidius who symbolises both, who is the heart of every violent impulse Martius seems to have, who he betrays Rome for and then betrays for Rome.
characters ☛ Caius Martius, Tullus Aufidius, Volumnia
what I love about it ☛ war stories! War stories about people who loathe / desire each other in equal measure! Sworn allegiances! Conflicted loyalties! People so bent to a single purpose that they can't lead normal lives! People who literally cannot live without violence! I'll say it: Martius and Aufidius's relationship hits every single button my id has.
prompts!
- All the canon divergences, please. The most obvious is the one where Martius doesn't betray Aufidius and doesn't get murdered, but I'd also love anything that happens earlier: maybe one of them gets captured by the opposite army? maybe they're forced to join forces because of [magic 8-ball shake] an alien invasion? maybe they find themselves forced to huddle for warmth in a devastatingly apocalyptic situation? maybe Aufidius isn't so welcoming in Act III and locks Martius up in a cell until he can prove his good intentions? etc.
- Something about Volumnia would be fantastic. I love how different she is from her son-how keen and whip-smart and ultimately much more politics-inclined she is-and I'd like to know more about her life prior to the play or after it: her life as a young wife, her life as a grieving mother, how desperately she wants some form of power and how hungrily she teaches him to become a man he can't be. (That said, if you go in this direction, please don't go for the cheap, easy Oedipal/Freudian reading. It's the least interesting interpretation of their relationship there is; there are so many ways their dynamic can be handled that doesn't rely on a lazy 'family relationships are always about sex' plot device.)
- I will never mind updated Shakespeare plays, so feel free to play around with time periods-hell, set it in the near- or far-future, if you want to. Set it on a different planet! Reincarnation AUs are also all of my jam, forever.
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Oxford Time Travel Universe
what it is ☛ a series of short stories and novels by sci-fi author Connie Willis, set in the near future, wherein time travel has been 1) discovered, 2) summarily discarded by industrialists as soon as they found out they couldn't use it to raid the past, and 3) appropriated by historians as a way of studying it. The tone of the stories range from lighthearted screwball (To Say Nothing of the Dog) to serious historical drama (Fire Watch, Blackout/All Clear) to outright tragedy (Doomsday Book).
characters ☛ Kivrin Engle, Ned Henry, Verity Kindle, James Dunworthy
what I love about it ☛ To Say Nothing of the Dog was the very first book I ever read in English. I was fourteen. It remains in my top five to this day. I adore Ned's sleep-deprived ramblings, the way his relationship with Verity goes from *___________________* (they're so into each other, I love it so much) to realizing that they're also intellectually and emotionally very close, his friendship with Terence, the endless quotations and references, Princess Arjumand and Cyril's shenanigans, the beautiful 'the butler did it' resolution. On the flip side, Doomsday Book and Fire Watch took my heart and wrung it clear out of tears: I adore Kivrin, and her relationship with Dunworthy, and I'm very keen on stories that tackle her life after her trip: the PTSD she is doubtless suffering from, the difficulty of readjusting to modern life, how much she has changed and how much her relationships with people have been altered by her experience, how she remembers the dead.
prompts!
- I would love for Ned and Verity to meet up again with Tossie (and Baine?) and Terence in some kind of way, whether it's a few years after they've been separated or several decades in the future (from Tossie and/or Terence's perspective). Ned and Terence's instant friendship is one of my very favourite things in TSNOTD, and Ned's realization that he's going to miss him at the end of the book has always made me long for some kind of closure. If set from Terence's point of view (or Tossie's, for that matter), I'd love some kind of ~revelation that Ned and Verity are from the future, or something akin to it at least.
- I'd also very much like them to meet Kivrin, as well as the protagonist of Fire Watch. The experiences of TSNOTD and Doomsday Book are so different, and their consequences on the modern day are worlds apart, and I'd love to see that dichotomy addressed! Where were Verity and Ned during the Oxford quarantine? (I know, I know: possibly they were not students yet.) How did Kivrin react to the final discovery in TSNOTD? and so on.
- If you want to write a fic about characters I didn't ask for up there, that's fine too! I kind of really want a fic told from Cyril's and Princess Arjumand's point of view, for instance, or time travel shenanigans involving Penwiper-or the fallout of the return of cats (and possibly dogs?) to the 21st century. Or more about the Oxford quarantine, which we only really see through Dunworthy's eyes, and then he's out cold for a fair amount of it.
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Lord Peter Wimsey
what it is ☛ a series of detective novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, from the 1930s. I probably enjoy the later novels (the Harriet novels) more than I do the earlier ones, mostly because the characters are much better developed, much more three-dimensional, and the writing itself seems more settled and more capable of tackling complex themes and dynamics, but I do also love the lighthearted tone, and occasional serious moments, of the first few books. Gaudy Night is a perennial favourite.
characters ☛ Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane, Mervyn Bunter
what I love about it ☛ Oh, gosh. I adore Peter, but my heart belongs with Harriet-her detachment, her ruthlessness, her integrity get me somewhere deep. Very few love stories have touched me as profoundly as the way these two people turn around each other, work on themselves, hurt each other, walk away, walk back, and open up all slow and uneasy-how difficult the way is, for all that they can see how deeply they get each other. Harriet sticking by the job, sticking by herself, as the only way she knows how to live; and Peter having to work past his … easiness with women: having to recalibrate all of himself along the way. The fact that neither of them is quite so young anymore. How horrible they are to each other. - More generally, I love how full the series is, or rather how it becomes lusher and bigger and more intricate over time: the richness of its referential universe, the depth of character development, how hilarious it can be, how tenderit can be, and how it, slowly, starts to talk to the heart, as well to the brain. It twists you deep.
prompts!
- Canon divergencessssssss. I adore the way they get together-the helplessness, their final acceptance of each other, all out-Harriet hesitating until the end, the gorgeous little motif of the traffic lights, and the final words they find to make it right-and making out in a punt all night. Man. But I'd love to know the other ways they could have made it work, as well. What if Harriet refuses him that night and then regrets it? What if they meet in a completely different manner? What if something entirely new in the midst of the events of Gaudy Night throws them together and they just Can't Help Themselves? What if there's a flood, or a zombie apocalypse?
- Sexy shenanigans! I love the few glimpses we get of Harriet and Peter's more intimate moments, and I want a million more words about them. Considering their adventurous personalities and their fondness for Classics, I can only imagine that their sex life would be filled with experiments and an endless stream of quotations and (possibly?) some amount of playful, half-serious role-acting ('My lord!'). This doesn't have to be a third-person narrative-imagine Lord Peter Wimsey's erotic correspondence with his wife! The kind of stuff he writes home to her when he's away on some Foreign Office diplomacy intrigue! The kind of words that burn the paper they're written on, and so on.
- Being as much of a sucker as I am for wartime narratives, I'd love a fic featuring Peter and Bunter in and/or around WWI. Something that's, if not based off of, at least resembling or calling back to the wonderful little scene in Whose Body?-you know the one: Wimsey has a nightmare, Bunter calms him down and gets him back to sleep, and then sits at his bedside with that incredible tenderness and protectiveness. It hints at depths in their relationship that we don't really get to see in canon, and I want all of it, whether you go for shippiness or not.
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The Martian (Andy Weir)
what it is ☛ a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir about an astronaut stranded on Mars; I think critics described it as Robinson Crusoe meets Apollo 13. I asked for the novel, but honestly I kind of consider it and the movie as a common canon, so feel free to draw from both if you feel like it, as well as from promotional material- the Neil deGrasse Tyson Our Greatest Adventure clip, the Ares 3 crew The Right Stuff or Farewell clips, the Ares 3 Mission Guide, etc. Actually, please do. I love this stuff.
characters ☛ Mark Watney, Melissa Lewis, Beth Johanssen, Chris Beck
what I love about it ☛ Mark, Mark, Mark. ♥ Mark and his bad jokes and his focus and his Science and his endless resourcefulness and his tendency to complain a lot! I love how hilarious he makes the novel, and that he ends it on a note that's both hopeful and self-deprecating means everything to me. I'm also extremely fond of the Ares 3 crew and their dynamics in general-I'm a sucker for found families, and for highly competent people, and for people who are able to make the hard decision and leave a most likely dead crewmate behind if it means salvaging the mission … but are so profoundly loyal that they don't hesitate for a second to turn back despite the mutiny and the court-martialing and the very real possibility of dying on the job, when it turns out he's still alive.
prompts!
- Everyone and their grandmothers has been asking for fic about the aftermath of the novel, or about what happens among the general public on Earth during it, and this is me adding to popular demand. I would kill for a good metafic about it. A little more out there: I kind of love stories about mundane people making it into legend, and I'd really like to know what happens to them in public consciousness, decades onwards. What do the next bunch of Ares astronauts find when they get to Mars? Do they, somehow, visit Mark's abandoned Hab? Did he leave messages behind for next-gen humanity? When Mars gets colonized-maybe hundreds of years in the future-does his base become some kind of archeological dig?
- Ares 3 Hermes shenanigans! The domesticity and routine of their life there! Holiday celebrations! A broad view of their dynamics from their meeting onward to their return to Earth? TEAM FEELINGS, essentially. (One thing I loved best about the movie was Lewis' desk in the Hab: absolutely covered in pictures of her crew.)
- As much as I love the hopeful, resourceful tone of the canon, some kind of Came Back Wrong narrative could be fascinating. You could make it realistic: I'm pretty sure Mark had despairing or freaking out moments on Mars that he didn't record, or that he deleted afterwards (I like the idea that we're reading a doctored document, and that the narrative is heavily subjective), but also: how does he deal with the pressure of the media that awaits him back on earth? What about the malnutrition, which is mostly glossed-over in the book but quite stark in the movie? -And then-you could make it non-realistic: something … odd … happened to him on Mars, and now he doesn't quite act the way he used to …
- re: ships: I know the fandom leans heavily in the direction of Watney/Beck, and Sebastian Stan is very pretty, but I can't say I'm really into it. I do find Beck/Johanssen very cute-that faceplate kiss!-but my truest ship here is Mark/science/terrible jokes. That being said, if you wanted to induce some kind of sex pollen situation on board the Hermes and decided to go full-out Ares 3crew orgy, I … would be super down with that.
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I think that's about it! Good luck, I hope this is helpful, and I can't wait to read your work. ♥