(no subject)
Dear Yuletide writer,
First, I'm so, so glad that you'll be writing my Yuletide fic this year. I've asked for fics in rare, often labyrinthine or annoying or confusing sources--and I've asked for them because I love these sources, madly and irrationally, and I hope you've agreed to write for them because you love them, too.
Some general notes on what I like: most of the time, the answer is everything. I like slash, het, gen, poly, plot, crack, alternate universes, meditative character pieces, pastiches, stylistic experiments. I like stories about siblings or rivals or enemies or friends, stories about loss and connection and love and hope and failure. I love to laugh, but it's just as good sometimes to be made to cry. What I mean by all of this is--you're a writer who knows your own strengths, likes, and interests. When I give you specific suggestions for what you could write me in each fandom, I'm doing it because some writers (like me) want guidance and inspiration. If none of my suggestions grab you and shake you, then write what does.
Some general notes on what I dislike: coerced consent. It triggers me, full stop. Unless I know you and trust you as a writer, I'm not going to have faith that you'll address sexual coercion in a serious and respectful manner--and because of the nature of the Yuletide exchange, even if I do know you and trust you as a writer, I'm not going to be able to recognize it until the reveal. Please, please don't write me coerced consent.
Now, some fandom-specific, prompt-specific notes.
Brat'ya Karamazovy | Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov/Mikhail Rakitin. I'd be happy with slash or gen, set during the novel or after it or in an AU; I'd be especially happy with a fic that addresses questions of intellectual insufficiency and petty vengeance for imagined slights.
I adore this novel so much, and every year, I request fic for it. It has such a massive, sprawling, digressive scope--the characters will pause for fifty or seventy pages to discuss philosophy or to review one another's backstories, and the narrator will pause to be sure that the reader is well-acquainted with the politics of Skotoprigonyevsk, and even the legal defenses will briefly turn into metafictional comparisons between The Brothers Karamazov and Hamlet. I was completely unsurprised when I learned that Dostoevsky had been strongly influenced by Fielding, because this is exactly that kind of almost-anachronistic, nigh-picaresque portrait of a place as well as a group of people--but with a nineteenth-century sensibility coloring its characterization. This is, almost perversely, what I love about the book. Nothing is irrelevant, and everything is important, and every tale straddles that dangerous line between laughter and ache.
I say all of this because Brothers Karamazov is one of those few, lovely fandoms in which you can just write characters talking to each other, or a long narrative about backstory, or a random drunken carouse, or a snappy bit of metafiction--and have it be pastiche. Anything goes, because frankly, in the original canon, anything went.
As to the 'intellectual insufficiency and petty vengeance for imagined slights' part of the prompt, these are components that I see as potentially interesting and useful in Rakitin's character, particularly in how he or Ivan might think of one another--but if you can't think of anything to do with that, or if you see the characters differently, don't worry about it. I value your interpretation of the characters and trust you to do what's best for them.
This is a fairly open prompt, and honestly, that's because there's nothing I desperately want and will be sad not to have. I love AUs; if you want to put the characters in space, or in another era (post-Revolutionary Russia, or Gorbachev's era, or the present), or make them women, or make Ivan the real murderer, GO FOR IT. If you want to draw in more characters, do so, because I love them all! I am completely down with anything from straight-up porn to wacky journalistic hijinks.
Hamlet - Shakespeare
Laertes (Hamlet). Anything! Really, anything. If you want to write about his relationship with Ophelia or Polonius, or how he views the politicking at court, or his adventures in France, or whether he knows Reynaldo--I'd like to read all or any of those. If you want to write an AU where Laertes survives, or set in the present, or where he's an airship pirate, all of those would please me, too!
Laertes is my absolute favorite character in all of Shakespeare, which is sort of embarrassing to say because he's really a bit of a jerk. If you're on my friendslist, you've probably seen my post about why I love him so much, but if you haven't, I've unlocked it for you. I'll quote the bit that's most pertinent, though: Like Hamlet, Laertes is concerned with the ramifications of vengeance, of unavenged death, of murder, of regicide--it isn't that these matters don't occur to him; it's that he has considered them, and chosen Hell over dishonor. For me, it's his sense of honor and how that sense gets twisted and opposed and subverted throughout the latter half of the play that makes his story really wrenching. He's trying to do right, but there are no right choices available to him--and frankly, that haunts me.
This doesn't mean, however, that I need you to write The Great Tragedy of Laertes. I am open to crackfic, or Hamlet/Laertes rivalry fic, or thoughtful AUs, or pre-play family drama, or a comedy of evasion in which Laertes dodges Reynaldo across France. (I am also terribly partial to Laertes/Reynaldo, but this may be a personal failing.) In general, anything goes! I will ask, however, that you not write me Laertes/Ophelia. One of the major reasons why I empathize with Laertes is because I'm also an overprotective older sibling, and that empathy would make the incest more than ordinarily squicky for me.
Titus Andronicus - Shakespeare
Aaron (Titus Andronicus). I'd prefer backstory over anything else, but if you want to do an AU where he gets away, or some other kind of AU that changes the outcome of the play, or if you just want to write Aaron Does the Goths, go for it. I'll take whatever you're willing to write. I do ask, however, that you be respectful of the complexities of his racial identity--Shakespeare did not write a politically unexceptionable black character here; Aaron's villainy is rhetorically tied to his race more than once. However, neither did Shakespeare write a stock Moorish villain possessing only traits consonant with a racist portrayal. If you choose to write to this prompt, I ask that you write Aaron with a sensitivity to the relationship between his character and his context; he's a black man in a white cultural milieu, but also a villainous man in a villainous cultural milieu.
Aaron is a subject of constant fascination for me--he's so cunning and proud, so willing to sacrifice others for the sake of his son; he knows that his survival and success are linked to Tamora and seems genuinely to feel affection for her, but that affection is far outweighed by his desire to survive and succeed. Unlike Othello, he isn't ashamed of his blackness, and indeed, he draws a great part of his strength from his pride in it. He is a complex villain, enmeshed in schemes of vengeance for a people and a family not his own, learning to negotiate obligation and interest and responding in interesting ways when they conflict.
What I want to know, most of all, is how he got to where he is--not only psychologically, but also geographically. Why is he the only Moor in the play? What brought him to the Goths, and why did he stay? How did he come to be Tamora's lover, and what does she mean to him? How does he understand his position among this adopted people, and why does he cast his lot with them? How does he imagine they see him, and what influence does that imagined context have on his allegiance? How much of his villainy is situational, inspired by the real or perceived extremity of his circumstances, and how much is a product of his personality?
The Aeneid - Virgil
Euryalus (Aeneid)/Nisus (Aeneid). I would be happy with gen or slash, but I'd love to see some philosophical discussion and possibly some Trojan sporting events.
I fell in love with these poor, doomed boys because in deciding to go on an insanely reckless suicide mission, they paused for a second to ponder the relationship between sense, free will, and the nature of gods (Book IX). If there is anything in the WORLD that is better than this, I don't know what it is. They are dear and devoted comrades, bright minds with so much promise before them, giddy warriors who gleefully hack their enemies to bits--and they are so frightfully young and so frightfully proto-Roman that they think themselves immortal and haven't learned to value life over glory. And of course they're doomed, in their canon; no comrades so dear as they are can survive, in an epic ... but if you want to write them in an alternate universe where they survive, I would not mind. (It could also be space. Or a university. Or something. Just saying.)
These two are such minor characters in Aeneas's story that it's hard to find a story to tell about them; for this reason, I think it's important to let you know that you have a great deal of freedom with the canon. As I hope I have established by now, I love AUs! And meditative, thoughtful perspective pieces! Don't feel like you have to write me a missing scene if you genuinely don't feel like scenes are missing, and don't feel that you have to write well-researched period fiction simply because this is a Classical canon!
Most importantly, remember: whatever you write is going to rock my world. Thank you, thank you for writing it.
-- Gil
Side note: Love to my writer, whoever you are.